18 JUNE 1864, Page 2

Lord Gage has introduced a Bill empowering, but not compel-

ling, clergymen, when the Church's first lesson is taken from the Apocrypha, to read instead thereof a portion of one of the Canoni- cal books of the Old Testament. It might be a useful measure, for certainly one does not want to hear, in Church, dull fairy stories about Tobit and the fish with the medicinal liver,—perhaps an anticipation, by the way, of cod's liver oil,—but assuredly there is one book in the Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus, that has more divine wisdom and inspiration in it than some of those now included in the Canon,—Proverbs, for instance, or Ecclesiastes.