The Shropshire Examiner and all round the Wrekin advertiser. — 1875-05-14 (Wenlock, Shropshire, England)

DISSENT AND THE CHURCH.  Dealing with the proceedings of the Liberation Society's meetings, the Standorl says :—"The interests of Dissent are obvious; but Dissent proper is a very small matter. By Dissenting admission one-half—we, therefore, may safely say two-thirds —of the people are Churchmen. One-half the remaining third either prefer the Church to Dissent, or are indifferent between them. We have left one-sixth, Papists and Dissenters, who hate the Church for motives of their own. And every intelligent man knows that the loss of the Church would profit not the Dissenters but the Papists. Those who love the Church as a Church will stand by her, come what may. Those who love the respectability of the Establishment will take refuge in that Church which is most respectable by reason of antiquity, historic splendour, actual power, and dazzling pretensions—the Church of home. Everything that is stolen from the Anglican Church is so much gained to the only other Church that numbers a large body of wellborn, well-educated, and wealthy men among her adherents. The Church of England is at this day the great bulwark against Popery; and were it possible to break down her strength, dissent would find itself face to face with a power against whose art, knowledge, and wisdom it would contend in vain. On the other side if would be sapped by infidelity, against which it has neither the knowledge nor the high intellectual capacity to make a defence adequate to the needs of the present age, and which would gain a great hold on the educated classes from the day when they could no longer enjoy the blessings of religious ministrations as a legal right, in a Church the conditions of whose communion are fixed by law. Tens of thousands of the very flower of our educated classes 1-cield be driven out of any communion that was tree to impose tests and conditions, or to inquire into the state of their :ouls, either after the Roman •or the Puritan fashion; and the loss to English Christianity would be irreparable if not fatal. It is the Established Church of England that has given us the religious freedom we enjoy. Destroy that Church, and Dissent, which breathes only in the atmosphere of hatred and antagonism, will wither away, and the battle will be loft to be fought out between Romanism on the one side and scepticism on the other. And this risk we are to run that a Dissenting preacher may net he mortified by seeing ;n the pulpit of the parish church a man superigr to himself in legal starts, and in education."  CHILD Munrozn.—ht the Old Batley, on the 6th, Mary Elizabeth Coward was sentenced t 3 death for having murdered her infant child by throwing it into Regent's Canal. - - _ .  The Duke of Devonshire entertained at dinner on the sth, at Devonshire House, the following among other members of " Bates' " Club :—The Duke ot Manchester, the Marquis of Exeter, Earl Spencer, the Earl of Ellesmere, the Earl of Dunmore, the Earl of Feversham, the Earl of Bective, Lord Braybrooke, Lord Skelmersdale, Lord Penbryn, Lord Moreton, Hon. Chas. Fit;:william, Sir Wilfrid Lawson, Sir Rickard Musgrave, Six Joseph Whitworth, Sir Curtis Sampson. Colonel Eingscote, Colonel Loyd Lindsay, Colonel Gunter, Mr. Angerstein, Mr. Henry Brassey, Mr. Alex. lirogd,n, Mr. Samra, and Mr. Sartoris.  "mslllitmuirnw.