Excerpt from England as It Is, Vol. 2 of 2: Political, Social, and Industrial, in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century Amongst pious Anglican pastors it is common to hear strong and even violent denunciations of Popery, which requires no courage, because the thunderer launches his bolts against a despised minority, and is echoed by admiring multitudes. But the ten thousand practical abuses within the Establishment wake no such indignant thunders: the nomination of worldly prelates the exclusion of the Gospel from thousands of parishes in which (by the union of Church and State) ungodly minis ters have the monopoly of spiritual instruction - the easy introduction of irreligious youths into the ministry - the awful desecration of baptism, especially in large civic parishes - the more awful fact that six teen thousand Anglican pastors leave some millions of the poor, out of a population of only sixteen millions, utterly untaught the baleful bigotry of the Canons, which excommunicate all who recognise any other Churches of Christ in Eng land except our own - the complete confusion of the Church and the world at the Lord's Table - the obliga tion upon every parish minister publicly to thank God for taking to himself the soul of every wicked person in the parish who dies without being excommunicated - the almost total neglect of temporal Church discipline the tyranny of the licence system - the sporting, dancing, and card-playing of many clergymen - the Government orders to the Churches of Christ, to preach on what topics, and to pray in what terms, the State prescribes the loud and frequent denunciation of our brethren of other denominations as schismatics the errors of the Articles and of the prayer-book, and the invasion of the regal prerogatives of Christ by the State supremacy the total absence of self-government, and therefore of all self-reformation in the Establishment, &c. &c. All these enormous evils are tolerated and concealed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.