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not without bias. O'Neill was an opponent of insurrectionary methods, so that the Bible did not in his hands become the explosive force which Stephens had made it. He was, however, prominent in all local industrial movements; in the strike of colliers in 1842 he was one of the men's spokesmen, thus carrying out his own precepts even to the dungeon itself.

O'Neill was not the only Christian Chartist preacher. There was a similar church at Bath where Henry Vincent was a regular preacher. Vincent had forsworn his earlier insurrectionary views and was now a devoted preacher of temperance. In fact "temperance Chartism" was in the way of becoming a regular cult until, along with Christian Chartism and "Knowledge Chartism," it came under the ban of O'Connor, to whom knowledge and temperance were alike alien. Scotland was also the seat of Christian Chartism; Paisley and Partick were flourishing centres of it. But the strength of Christian Chartism at Paisley rested not so much on the Chartist Church itself as on the ardent partisanship of one of the parish ministers of the Abbey Church. Patrick Brewster, a strenuous opponent of O'Connor and a member of the Anti-Corn-Law League, held his charge at Paisley from 1818 to 1859, and to the horror both of the Presbytery of Glasgow and of the heritors, who had appointed him, preached Chartist sermons of astonishing vehemence. Here is a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes iv. 1:

There is then one master grievance, one all-reaching, all-blasting evil: one enormous, atrocious, monstrous iniquity: one soul-blighting, heart-breaking, man-destroying, heaven-defying sin, which fills the earth with bondage and with blood, which aids the powerful and strikes the helpless, which punishes the innocent and rewards the guilty, which aggrandises the rich and robs the poor, which exalts the proud and beats down the humble, which decries truth and pleads for falsehood, which honours infamy and defames virtue, which pampers idleness and famishes industry: one GIGANTIC VILLAINY, the root and cause, the parent and protector of a thousand crimes … committing wrong and miscalling it right, committing robbery and calling it LAW, nay, in the sight of heaven, committing foul murder and calling it JUSTICE.^[1]

Many men felt like Brewster in those days. Think of the poor religious stockinger's "Let us be patient a little longer,

1. P. Brewster, The Seven Chartist and Other Military Discourses libelled by the Marquis of Abercorn and Other Heritors of the Abbey Parish, Sermon I. (Paisley, 1842.) Brewster was a younger brother of Sir David Brewster, the famous physicist.