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Excerpt from Comparative Importance of Faith and Polity: An Address Delivered in Brisbane-Street Chapel, Hobart, on Wednesday, 20th Dec., 1854 State is paying labourers to-erect an edifice of faith, and with the other, another set of labourers to pull it down. There have not been wanting indications of a desire to ex tend this principle of State endowment to every phase of religious opinion that may be professed in the community. In shaping that part of their policy which touches man in his spiritual capacities, they seem to look with comparative indifference at its probable effect upon men's views of God and Christianity. This marvellous Catholicity in regard to opinion and faith, however, is displayed only in reference to Spiritual things. What a man may think of God, and of His moral government, has, in their view, so little pr actical bearing upon his own character and destiny, that they are willing to provide out of public resources fo1 the teaching of any and every doctrine but what a man may think and believe touching this earth, that sun, or those stars, is by no means an unimportant matter in their estimation. The rude peasantis pitied for the deplorable ignorance that allows him to suppose-that the moon is a green cheese, that the sun is a ball of fire, that China is in Africa, and that the green rings which he sees in the meadows are caused by the midnight dance of fairies. These childish and erroneous beliefs are justly refer1ed to as dwarfing his stature, and seriously impeding his moral development. It would be curious to look into the face of that man who might be bold enough to propose that the public be rated to provide the teaching in some schools of such trash as this, whilst in others a different and much higher kind of instruction might be given. Why, this is the very thing of which the advo cates of National Education complain. What then? Is error so serious in relation to the ordina1y works of God, and so innocuous in relation to iizmse' an