14 NOVEMBER 1868, Page 2

Mr. Bright, in the same speech, made the first direct

attack he has yet made on that frightful iniquity, the indelibility of orders, the law which binds a Protestant clergyman who has become a Catholic or a Deist to continue a Protestant clergyman or starve. It is actually the fact that if a vicar who has unhappily become an athiest honestly lays down his gown and tries to live by secular avocations, he is liable to imprisonment. One of the very first duties of the new Parliament will be to sweep away an oppression the only object of which is to feed young men " in orders" with the idea that they are superior to laymen; are " priests" in the Romish, Jewish, and Hindoo sense of the word, a caste divinely commissioned to perform sacrifices which other men may not perform ?