to which I have just referred. I found the Protestants in considerable excitement, and just conducting the elections of Presbyteries, &c, required by the New Patent of April 8, 1861, which freed them from the old consistory at Vienna, presided over by a Roman Catholic, and granted them a free ecclesiastical constitution, and perfect freedom of action in religious matters. I found that one Reformed clergyman had received no less than 449 Romanists into his flock, and that the young Reformed congregation at Prague had increased in thirteen years from 800 to 1,600. And to the Biblical doctrine and preaching of the Bohemian clergy I can bear the fullest witness from the testimony of my own ears.
Two editions of Archbishop Whately’s Easy Lessons on Christian Evidences have been published in Bohemian by the Rev. Josef Prochazka, and I saw myself the proofsheets of the Second Epistle of St. Peter in an edition of the Scriptures with the Apocrypha which was being carried through the press by the Rev. Josef Ruzicka, a Lutheran clergyman at Prague. Everything betokens life and hope. There is a society well deserving of aid at Leschitz, for the assistance of the widows and orphans of clergymen and schoolmasters, without distinction of confession. And the same place is honourably distinguished by its lending library, which has transformed the congregation, mentally and morally, into quite a different class of people. This possesses above 600 volumes, and the peasants of the neighbourhood club together to purchase candles, take books out for a nominal sum-Catholics as well as Protestants—and read together by turns in each other’s cottages during the long winter evenings.
Will England remain uninterested and indifferent at this approaching jubilee? England, from whose Wycliffe came
