The Potteries Examiner : — 1877-04-14 (Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England)

BUSINESS ADDRESSES.  SATURDAY. APRIL 14. 1477.  THE GOVERNMENT BURIALS BILL Uncle Toby declared with an oath that the dying Lieutenant, Le Fevre, should march. Corporal Trim firmly but deferentially replied to his petulant and excited master—" He will your I honour, march to the grave." The Conservative Cabinet, with the House of Peers, and the bench I of Bishops to their back, way—if it so please I them—swear with Oaths as foul and as black as the hideous curses of the Athanasian creed, but their insulting and illiberal Bill will not be able to pass. No amount of Episcopal hocna-pocus, and Jewish craftiness, combined with the arrogancy of a Salisbury, the simulated: candour of a Richmond, the bullying of a Gathorne Hardy, the tact of a Cross, or the insinuating complaisance of a Sir Stafford Northeote, will be able to palm off this cool trick upon the country. Like the attempt at the Endowed Schools, the Regimental Exchanges, and the Slave Circular measures, our political card-sharpers will have to pull in their horns, and either withdraw their illadvised and bogus measure, or accept of Mr. Osborne Morgan's honest and equitable proposal, for the settlement of this grave question.  _ As we look around us we see ecclesiastics and clerical guilds everywhere making desperate and daring attempts at recovering lost ground, and reimposing the old shackles and fetters of the dark ages, upon the minds and hearts of the multitude. From the Eternal City to the obscurest parish in England, or the remotest village in France, the successes of Hildebrand and the libidinous Medici. in profouLdly hidden accord with the followers of Archbishops Laud and Bancroft are leaving no stone unturned, and no dark device unattempted, but are straining every nerve, and working with might and main so as to bring us once more into bondage to the Priesthood, and the unquestioning supremacy, the arbitrary authority, the despotic will, and the irresponsible power of the Beast and the False Prohpet, prefigured in the visions of the exiled Seer of Patmos  Intellect, reason, conscience, free-enquiry, scientific research, honest investigation, and Holy Scripture, are to be laid a one side as perilous to , their unfounded claims and inimical to their self' seeking, sinister, and soul and body enslaving I systems. On the banks of the Seine and the Thames, as well as upon those of the Tiber, the I sacerdotal locusts are buzzing, scheming, and confabulating. Allocutions, pilgrimages, Church ceremonials, floral decorations of churches and church altars, coats and petticoats of many colours, lighted caneles and illuminated chapels by daylight, theatrical and pantomimic gestures, operatic music, swinging censers with their sickening perfumes, melancholic chants, lugubrious Litanies, and senseless, soulless, silly, and unedifying sermons,—these are the order of the day. One of Sankey and Moody's services, despite all their drawbacks and imperfections, is worth a hundred of such sensuous, superficial, and onspiritual services. Shall we go back to Egypt? Shah we, like Lot's earthy, grovelling wife, look back to Sodom? Having begun in the spirit, shall we end in the flesh ? Having come within sight of the land of promise, shall we tread our way baakwards to he woe.gloomed land of frogs and lice Having escaped from slavery and I chains, shall we willingly re-enter beneath the I tyrant's yoke, and place oar bowing backs beneath the flesh-flaying lash ones more? With selfimposed blindness, and perverse and wilful insensibility to the suggestions of reason, the lessons of Providence, the warnings of an ' enlightened conscience, the teachings of experience, and the plain and distinct voice of almighty, omniscient wisdom itself, shall we commit the unpardonable sin of stifling our convictions, and commit thereby mental and moral suicide? The Church of tradition, with its fabled apostolical succession, and man and mammon worship, is what it always has been—cruel, intolerant, uncharitable, and exclusive. They are the men, and wisdom will die with them. With I !boastful scorn, and bigotted audacity, they exclaim, "The Temple of the Lord—the Temple of the Lord are we !" They assume to have bottled up the Holy Ghost, and to have a patent from Heaven's Chancery forbidding all but themselves to vend soul-medicine, or attempt to cure a wounded conscience-