KINGSLEY AND MARX
SIR,—Prof. Bonamy Dohree, in his review of Dame Una Pope-Hennessy's Canon Charles Kingsley, states that Kingsley (as Parson Lot) struck out "a phrase another was to popularise, namely when he deplored the use of the Bible as an opiuni dose for keeping beasts of burden patient." It has become common in recent years to find the origin of the famous phrase "religion is the opium of the people" in this line from Kingsley. The Canon is given the " credit " in the Encyclopedia Britannica, in Miller's The Christian Significance of Karl Marx, and elsewhere. Kingsley used the phrase quoted above in Politics for the People on May 27, 1848. Marx wrote in February, 1844, in the Deutsch-Franzosische yahrbUcher and in that section which serves as an introduction to a critique of the Hegelian philosophy: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual condi- tions. It is the opium of the people." If there is any borrowing in this,
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