ficially
black, knock about their little ones or cover them with kisses, as they
themselves are alcoholically stimulated into maudlin tenderness or
demoniac rage! If you want to see what an endowment can do for religion,
go to Mill Yard. No doubt those who left money for the place thought
they were doing God service. In reality, an endowment can but preserve a
corpse which had better be put away. We bury our dead out of our sight.
As it is in the material world so it is in the spiritual world. We love
to look on life; we shrink with abhorrence from the sight of death, when
Time's decaying fingers have dimmed the lustre of eyes once bright as
stars, and plucked from beauty's cheek the blushing rose.

A more curious spot in all London is not than Mill Yard Meeting-house.
The day I was there, after a service of nearly two hours, it was
established by the learned minister, who is an F.S.A., and calls himself
elder of the congregation (he must often stand a good chance of being
junior as well), that the title of the Book of Proverbs was only to be
applied to the first part, that it consisted of divers distinct sections,
and that generally the book was found in the Bible after the Psalms.
Evidently the preacher is a learned, painstaking student of the Dryasdust
school--full of crotchets; but the biggest crotchet of all is that he
should go on preaching year after year in Mill Yard.

* * * * *

Mr. Spurgeon's works and essays are so constantly before the public that
the briefest notice of them is all that is necessary here. In his great
Tabernacle near the Elephant and Castle, which is one of the sights of
London, he has a church alone consisting of 4700 members, and such is the
orderly arrangement that, as he said, if one of his members were to get
tipsy he should know of it before the week was out--a statement perhaps
true in reality if not literally. Enormous as his place of worship is,
it is always filled; but it represents, not so much a Christian Church as
a Christian community on a gigantic scale. In his Orphanage at Stockwell
some 135 boys are boarded, clothed, and taught. Then at Newington he has
established an Orphanage and School, and under his great Tabernacle is a
Pastors' College, which in a couple of years takes the raw student from
the shop or the counting-house and sends him forth into the world a
ready-made divine, occasionally not a little to the dismay of those who