act as Mr. Ierson has done.
He will lose nothing in the long run by honesty--not that I take it Mr.
Ierson has achieved any great success, but he gives no sign of any great
talent. He is not the man to achieve any great success. People who
believe his principles will stop at home unless there is in the pulpit a
man who can draw a crowd. Fox could scarcely do this. Such men as
Ronge, or Ierson, or Macall, who lectured to some forty people in the
Princess's Concert Booms, cannot do it at all. Mr. Brooke might, if he
could be spared from Drury Lane--so could Macready or Dickens, or
Thackeray; but in these matters everything depends upon the man.

Of course the first question is, thus emancipated--Why worship at all?
why rise betimes on a Sunday, shave at an early hour, put on your best
clothes, and, mindless of city fog and dirt, rush hurriedly to South
Place, Finsbury Square? If I take the New Testament literally, I take
with it the command relative to the assembling of ourselves together, and
have a scriptural precedent for a course sometimes very wearisome and
very much against the grain; but with free reason, an emancipated man,
the case is altered. I am in a different position altogether. Custom is
all very well to the holders of customary views. I expect a secret
feeling lies at the bottom, that, after all, church and chapel going is
good--that worship in public is a service acceptable to Deity.

It may be, and this I believe is the great secret of the success of
churches and chapels, that people don't know how to spend their Sundays,
especially in country towns, without going to a place of worship. You
cannot dine directly you have had your breakfast; you must allow an
interval. Now, you cannot, especially if it looks as if it would rain,
and your best hat might be damaged, fill up that time better than in a
place of worship. So, even Mr. Ierson gets a congregation, although it
is made up of people who see in him a man not a whit more qualified to
teach religious truth than themselves, and who maintain the right of
individual reason, in matters of religion, to its fullest extent. He has
no claim to being heard; yet they go to hear him. They claim the right
of private judgment; yet they take his. Worship, in its ordinary sense,
they deem unnecessary; yet they approach to it as nearly as they can.
Such is the incongruity between the religious instinct on the one side,
and the logical faculty on the oth