get drunk they must drop it off, that if they stuff and gormandise they will be a long while before reaching the kingdom of heaven; that they must avoid dishonesty, falsehood, impurity, and other delinquencies; and, furthermore, intimates that they won’t get to any of the saints they have a particular liking for by a round of simple religious formality—­that they must be good, do good, and behave themselves decently, individually and collectively.  We have never heard a more practical preacher:  he will tell young women what sort of husbands to get, young men what kind of wives to choose, married folk how to conduct themselves, and old maids and bachelors how to reconcile themselves virtuously to their fate.  There is no half-and-half ring in the metal he moulds:  it comes out clear, sounds well, and goes right home.  In delivery he is eloquent; in action rather brisk; and he weighs—­one may as well come down from the sublime to the ridiculous—­about thirteen stones.  He is a jolly, hearty, earnest, devoted priest; is cogent in argument; homely in illustration; tireless in work; determined to do his duty; and, if we were a Catholic, we should be inclined to fight for him if any one stepped upon his toes, or said a foul word about him.  Here endeth our “epistle to the Romans.”

No.  III.

CANNON-STREET INDEPENDENT CHAPEL.

Forty-four years ago the Ebenezer of a few believers in the “Bird-of-Freedom” school, with a spice of breezy religious courage in their composition, was raised at the bottom of Cannon-street, in Preston; and to this day it abideth there.  Why it was elevated at that particular period of the world’s history we cannot say.  Neither does it signify.  It may have been that the spirit of an irrepressible Brown, older than the Harper’s Ferry gentleman, was “marching on” at an extra speed just then; for let it be known to all and singular that it was one of the universal Brown family who founded the general sect.  Or it may have been that certain Prestonians, with a lingering touch of the “Scot’s wha ha’e” material in their blood, gave a solemn twist to the line in Burns’s epistle, and decided to go in

—­for the glorious privilege Of being Independent.

Be that as it may, it is clear that in 1825 the Independents planted a chapel in Cannon-street.  Places of worship like everything else, good or evil, grow in these latter days, and so has Cannon-street chapel.  In 1852 its supporters set at naught the laws of Banting, and made the place bigger.  It was approaching a state of solemn tightness, and for the consolation of the saints, the ease of the fidgety, and the general blissfulness of the neighbourhood it was expanded.  Cannon-street Chapel has neither a bell, nor a steeple, nor an outside clock, and it has never yet said that it was any worse off for their absence.  But it may do, for chapels like churches are getting proud things now-a-days, and they believe in both lacker