The correspondence on the Burials Bill has been as active
this week as if it were announced that the Government intend to make it one of their leading measures. A Scotch Presbyterian describes in Monday's Times a funeral in a Presbyterian church-
yard in Edinburgh, when a Dean of the Episcopal Church of 'Scotland was allowed to meet the funeral procession at the gate, and go before it to the grave and there read the Church service ; .and he asks, very pertinently, whether it is fair, or manly, or -generous, for English Episcopalians to exclude Presbyterians— who in Scotland accord such privileges to our Episcopal Church --from the churchyards of the Establishment in England. Mr. Richard (M.P. for Merthyr-Tydvil) states in Tuesday's Times, as 4-the result of a most careful investigation, that in nine Welsh -counties only 522 Nonconformist chapels have graveyards of their -own, while 1,136 have none. Hence, in more than two out of every three cases, the Welsh Nonconformists must either be allowed -to bury their dead with their own rites in the national churchyards, or be prohibited from carrying the forms of worship dearest to -them to the last resting-places of their friends. It seems to us a -wonderful and marvellously inopportune obstinacy in the Clergy, which makes them take up this irritating, and indeed quite untenable, position in the graveyard, by way of preparation for a battle which must be fought soon, and ought to be fought on quite other principles, for the Churches of the land, and for their connection 'with the State.
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