God. Some parts belong to houses, others are let to individuals, and were any considerable mass of the labouring poor to seek for admission, they would not even be offered the alternative reprobated by St. James, "stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool." They are excluded not only by their own circumstances, and by their natural feelings, but by law and by the rights of others.
It is difficult to estimate the true magnitude of this evil. Were the rich excluded from our parish churches, it would be in comparison a slight thing; they could and would provide others for themselves. But to the mass of the poorest class, exclusion from the existing churches is practically total exclusion from the house of God, from all the means of grace, and from all the privileges of Christianity. And to this condition it is (we cannot too often repeat it), that hundreds of thousands of our countrymen are now reduced. How their lives are spent, and what is the comfort of their dying beds, who shall say? It can hardly be, but that numbers among them are altogether in a condition more wretched than that of their heathen ancestors, or of the unsophisticated savages of the American forests. Knowing nothing of civilization, but the heavy pressure of its laws and restrictions; of property, nothing but the invidious fences which ward off their intrusions on that of others; of religion, nothing but a dark and gloomy
