of black cloth and white linen announce their coming by the creaking of their boots, quenched in the padded carpeting.  It cannot be said of these churches, as Mr. Carlyle remarked of certain London ones, that a pistol could be fired into a window across the church without much danger of hitting a Christian.  The attendance is not generally very large; but as the audience is evenly distributed over the whole surface, it looks larger than it is.  In a commercial city everything is apt to be measured by the commercial standard, and accordingly a church numerically weak, but financially strong, ranks, in the estimation of the town, not according to its number of souls, but its number of dollars.  We heard a fine young fellow, last summer, full of zeal for everything high and good, conclude a glowing account of a sermon by saying that it was the direct means of adding to the church a capital of one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.  He meant nothing low or mercenary; he honestly exulted in the fact that the power and influence attached to the possession of one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars were thenceforward to be exerted on behalf of objects which he esteemed the highest.  If therefore the church before our view cannot boast of a numerous attendance, it more than consoles itself by the reflection, that there are a dozen names of talismanic power in Wall Street on its list of members.

“But suppose the Doctor should leave you?” objected a friend of ours to a trustee, who had been urging him to buy a pew in a fashionable church.

“Well, my dear sir,” was the business-like reply; “suppose he should.  We should immediately engage the very first talent which money can command.”

We can hardly help taking this simple view of things in rich commercial cities.  Our worthy trustee merely put the thing on the correct basis.  He frankly said what every church does, ought to do, and must do.  He stated a universal fact in the plain and sensible language to which he was accustomed.  In the same way these business-like Christians have borrowed the language of the Church, and speak of men who are “good” for a million.

The congregation is assembled.  The low mumble of the organ ceases.  A female voice rises melodiously above the rustle of dry-goods and the whispers of those who wear them.  So sweet and powerful is it, that a stranger might almost suppose it borrowed from the choir of heaven; but the inhabitants of the town recognize it as one they have often heard at concerts or at the opera; and they listen critically, as to a professional performance, which it is.  It is well that highly artificial singing prevents the hearer from catching the words of the song; for it would have rather an odd effect to hear rendered, in the modern Italian style, such plain straightforward words as these:—­

     “Can sinners hope for heaven
     Who love this world so well? 
     Or dream of future happiness
     While on the road to hell?”