s with great fervour,
and repeat the Apostles' Creed, and bow at the name of Jesus quite as
decidedly and uncompromisingly as do any of the sane outside. As to the
singing, it may be briefly said that it is loud, and is all the better
and more harmonious for the organ, which, especially at the end of the
last verse, is prolonged unusually, and with a view to the drowning
sounds of an unnecessary character. Indeed, this tendency to individual
utterance is the chief danger of such a meeting as this. You can detect
notes occasionally very undeniably loud and defiant, and, as it is, one
female at the close of the sermon begins talking so loud as to require
that two female attendants should take her off as quickly as possible;
not that any one is disturbed--oh no! nothing of the kind. In a
Belgravian chapel or church such an interruption would have created a far
greater disturbance. Here no one is surprised, the preacher goes on just
the same, and not a lunatic takes the trouble to turn round and look at
the disorderly sister. Out she goes, and no one cares. With this one
exception the service was most decorous. One very plain young female
appeared to me to be too much taken up with her fruitless endeavour to
attract the eye of a very plain young person of the opposite sex, who did
not in any way seem to respond. Another also seemed to be smiling
joyfully many times, when in the sermon there was nothing to call forth
such an external manifestation. Many also seemed to hear with
intelligent attention, but as a rule the audience listened to the
preacher with that resigned and spiritless expression with which most
church-goers are but too familiar. Yet the preacher was short and
simple, and spoke of matters in which all could take an interest; and
which all could understand, of Him who hath borne our griefs, and carried
our sorrows, who was bruised for our iniquities, and with whose stripes
we are healed. It is cheering to think that even here some do not hear
of Him in vain.

LAY WORK IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

Dissenters have taught Churchmen a lesson, which they are, at any rate in
our time, not slow to learn. The theory of the Church has been up to our
own day almost exclusively sacerdotal. Its parochial system is, as Canon
Champneys termed it upon one occasion, "a great allotment system," and to
work that system there was the priest with his assistant deacon. That
time has gone. There was time also w