Charles Bradlaugh: a Record of His Life and Work, Volume 2 (of 2) / With an Account of his Parliamentary Struggle, Politics and Teachings. Seventh Edition

by Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner; J. M. Robertson

CHAPTER I.

PHILOSOPHY AND SECULARIST PROPAGANDA.

It may here be well to give a general view of Bradlaugh's teaching on the great open questions of opinion and action, taking separately the old provinces of religion and politics. When he came most prominently before his countrymen he had a very definite repute on both heads, having spoken on them in nearly every town of any size in the country; but neither then nor later could it be said that anything like the majority of the public had a just or accurate idea of his position. The obstacle was and is partly prejudice, partly incapacity.

§1

To begin with, even the distinct title of "Atheist" may mean any number of things for any number of persons. Ill-informed and even some well-informed people commonly describe an Atheist as one who says "There is no God," and that "Things happen by chance." To say to such persons—as has been said a thousand times—that for an Atheist both phrases are meaningless, seems to give no help: we must begin at the beginning, and show how the dispute arose. And it is useful to keep in view that Bradlaugh's Atheism, in the evolution of English Freethought, is only a generation removed from the Deism of Thomas Paine, which is much the same as the Deism of Voltaire. Deism or Theism is to-day reckoned a quite "religious" frame of mind; but it was the frame of mind of men who in their day were hated and vilified by Christians as much as Bradlaugh in his. Explicit Atheism is only in our own day become at all a common opinion. The men so described in former ages, so far as we know (if we set aside the remarkable developments of the Italian Renaissance), have nearly always been Deists or Pantheists, of whom the latter of course tend logically to coalesce with Atheism, but who have in their own names alike professed to repudiate Atheism. Thus Hobbes and Spinoza, who last century were constantly called Atheists by Christians, always professed to have a God-idea; and the Freethinkers who showed head in England in the first half of the eighteenth century were all professing Deists. Systematic Atheism began to arise among the more penetrating or more trained thinkers of the latter half of the century. Thus Hume, after professing Deism throughout his life, left for posthumous publication his "Dialogues concerning Natural Religion," which amount to the surrender of all forms of Theism. Of Voltaire in his latter years, when he strongly attacked the Atheism of Holbach, it was said by the more high-flying talkers of the Paris drawing-rooms: "Why, he is a bigot; he is a Deist." But even Voltaire, as Mr Morley has shown, was somewhat less of a Deist after the earthquake of Lisbon; and "Candide" is not a good Theistic tract.[70] Diderot, again, reached explicit Atheism; and his friend Holbach wrote, in the "Système de la Nature," the first systematic and straightforward Atheistic treatise of modern times.[71] In England the movement was less rapid. Bolingbroke went pretty far towards a Lucretian or Agnostic Theism; and the upper-class Deism which on his lines held out against the opportunist orthodoxy of Butler, necessarily tended to make its Deity a very remote and inaccessible Power. But Freethought, to get any hold on the general mind in the thickening populations of the latter half of last century and the first half of this, had to begin again, and more effectively, on the lines of the first Deists. The incredibility of the sacred books had to be made clear before more abstract issues could be settled. In this task Voltaire, the pupil of the English Deists, was the great performer for all Europe. It was Paine however who first, in the turmoil of the Revolution, brought home to thousands of English artizans and other plain men the incredibility of what had so long passed as divinely-revealed truth. He could do this the better because of the power and fame of his work in politics, and because of his constant profession of a devout belief in a beneficent God, on whom he declared the Bible narratives to be a libel. It probably needed this element of popular religion to keep up any continuous current of popular Free-thinking in England throughout the great reaction which followed on the French Revolution. But the argument of Butler held good against Paine as against the earlier Deists. If the Bible stories were irreconcilable with the idea of a "good," omnipotent God, equally so are the operations of Nature. And though there are many people who can be led by that argument to believe or make-believe in the Bible (though it makes no more for the Bible than for the Koran), there were others who felt bound to take the logical alternative, and decide that the "good God" of popular half-faith is a dream.

Such progress is a question of time. Atheism in a psychological sense began with the beginning of physical science. Pure Theism, in its early form of polytheism, saw in all natural movements and forces the expression of a personal power or powers, analogous to man; and its gods were and are simply magnified projections of humanity. Thus the sun, moon, and planets, the winds, the thunder, the lightning, the rivers, the fountains, the seas, were all figured as ruled and moved by personal deities. As soon, however, as astronomy made certain the perfectly regular movements of the sun and stars, Theism was to that extent logically limited, and Atheism to that extent logically possible. Astronomy was strictly godless in so far as it showed the universe to move by undeviating law. Of course this perception is but a small part of human consciousness and daily life; and the habit of theising, so to speak, easily overrode the habit of atheising. But every advance in exact knowledge of Nature, and in the capacity for exact thought, tended to encourage the atheistic view, and to discredit the theistic. Hence the spread of Atheism and Agnosticism among the Greeks in their progressive and scientific period. It needed the constant reform and modification of theistic doctrine, and later the complete arrest of all scientific thought, to keep the theistic view of things in power and place. And there had to be a revival of science and exact thinking before there could again be talk of Atheism.

It follows, however, that all early Atheism, so-called, was only the rejection of theistic ideas from some part of the business of life. The Christians were "Atheists" for the Pagan multitude, because they rejected the only God-ideas which the Pagan multitude harboured. In the same way the Christians who later scouted the worship of images of God (as Persians and Jews had done long before) were Atheists for those Christians who could only conceive of an imaged God. Prejudice has its own logic. When again medical men rested more and more on inductive method and rational (even if mistaken) procedure, and less and less on sorcery and invocation, they were naturally called Atheists, because they excluded "God" from an important and perilous province of action. Logically, the more a man is a Theist, the more of "God's" intervention he sees in life. No man is a Theist in all things; but in the ages of ignorance men were theistic in most matters. The kingdom of God, in a practical sense, is a sphere in which man is confessedly ignorant or impotent. "God's will" is the name for the forces which man cannot control, and does not understand. It covers a storm, a pestilence, a good or bad harvest, a stroke of luck, but not an indigestion, or the breaking of coal when struck by a hammer. Thus it is that every new advance of science, every new explanation of a body of facts in terms of law and innate tendency, is at first denounced as Atheistic. After the physicians came the physicists. The great Kepler, in keeping with his idealistic method, was so steeped in Theism as to fancy that the planets were kept up to time by guiding angels. Newton, however, was flatly accused of Atheism for explaining the universe in terms of the law of gravitation. He had driven God out of the world, it was said; and so far as his physics went, it was true. Yet he himself was an ardent Theist; and he even sought to make good his Theism by the theory that "matter" was first without gravitation, and that God added the attribute. With or without this safeguard, however, Newton's generalisation was sufficiently abstract to leave popular religion intact; and practical Theism even assimilated and gained by his science. It was not till geologists began to explain the formation of the earth in terms of law and tendency that the great shock came. God had hitherto been generally conceived as shaping the earth, were it only because there was no other explanation at hand; and, above all, geology clashed with Genesis. Hence a much more serious resistance, and a much more general imputation of Atheism; though the first geologists were mostly Deists, and believers in the special creation of animal life. The next and the most serious shock was that given by Darwinism, which removed "the divine idea" from biology. Over this came the loudest outcry of all; and the odium would have been overwhelming were it not for the number of naturalists who took up the new doctrine as a matter of special science. "God" is now for scientific people practically removed from the sphere of all the "natural" sciences; and the results attained in this connection by educated people are slowly being attained by the ill-educated; the mass of the clergy having gradually assimilated the conclusions of biology as their predecessors did those of geology and physics.

The inevitable next step is the reduction to scientific order of the lore of human affairs. This step was taken in a large part by Buckle, somewhat out of the due order of time, just before Darwin issued the "Origin of Species;" and Buckle has had on the whole more of religious enmity than even Darwin, though, significantly enough, he expressly insisted on Theism while Darwin kept it vaguely in the background. Buckle's Theism so plainly leaves his Deity nothing to do in human affairs that his belief, however fervid, could avail nothing to propitiate the class whose function is to explain history in terms of divine interference. Buckle, a professed Theist, is for all practical purposes in the position of an Atheist, save in respect of his personal and emotional belief in a future state. A God who in no way comes in contact with men, for good or for ill, is too thin a conception to count for much.

Atheism, then, is only a development of a process of thought that began ages ago under Polytheism. It has been reached in the past by isolated thinkers; there seem to have been Atheists at the time of composition of parts of the Vedas; and each one of the great steps of scientific generalisation has been anticipated by men who were not able to bring the idea home to their own age. It is the giving the step its name that creates the greatest shock. And when a reformer does not even wait to have his position named for him, does not merely undermine Theism by a new scientific treatment of a province of fact, but goes to the logical root of the matter and declares that the latest Theism is at bottom no more true than the oldest, though stripped of certain crudities—then it is that the maximum of odium is evoked. The Atheist, in reality, does but carry negation a step further than does the Theist himself. As Bradlaugh used to point out, the modern Theist denies the existence of any type of "God" save his own. Whatever he may see fit to argue about the folly of denying the possibilities of the unknown, he is quite confident that there is in the universe no Being even remotely resembling the fabled Zeus, or Moloch, or Osiris, or Venus, or Huitzlipochtli. He is sure that these are only imaginary existences. Similarly, he begins in these days to be sure that the conception of Jahweh is as purely a dream as that of Bacchus—the mere projection of man's own image (however magnified or even idealised) on the background of nescience. Nay, the latter-day Theist begins to repudiate the conceptions of the "Deists" of last century: he will have no "Great Artificer," no "Overruling Providence." The latest treatises expressly reject the arguments of the earlier for proving the "existence of God." Thus the Theist himself "denies the existence" of a thousand Gods.[72] The Atheist, as Mr Bradlaugh put it, merely denies a thousand and one.[73] He argues that the most advanced Theism (as distinguished from mere Pantheism) is only a modified form of the oldest; merely a civilised fancy instead of an uncivilised; it is always a male person in the image of man, with passions, emotions, limitations, qualities; loving, hating, planning, punishing, rewarding; always the "magnified non-natural man" of the primeval worshipper: a conception flatly and absurdly opposed to the first philosophic requirements of the very doctrine which embodies it. The God of Theism must always be the analogue of the Theist. Hume, passing out of Theism, concluded that the "Power" of the universe could only have a faint and remote analogy to human personality. Further reasoning forces the conclusion that it can have no conceivable analogy.

This very conclusion has actually been reached by many professed Theists and professed Christians. Professor Max Müller has collected instances in his lectures on "Anthropological Religion." But those thinkers, like Dr Müller himself, have always in practice relapsed into the personal conception which they philosophically affect to repudiate. As Dr Müller puts it, the abstract Theism which allows to Deity no human attributes whatever is too "cold" for popularity; and Dr Müller is not ashamed, after smoothing the way with a trivial fallacy, to recur to the doctrine and terminology of the multitude, giving the Deity male sex because "we" cannot think of "Him" otherwise than as male. The Atheist simply stands honestly to the conclusions which such Theists have avowedly come to and then feebly let go.

This is so obvious to steady-minded people that in all philosophic ages there have been some who, shunning the name rather than the reality of Atheism, have formulated the doctrine and name of Pantheism. Between logical Pantheism and Atheism, however, it cannot be too strongly affirmed, there is no difference save in name. An Atheist believes in a "going" and infinite universe, the totality of which he cannot pretend to understand; and which he flatly refuses to pretend to explain by the primitive hypothesis of a personal "Spirit." He calls the universe "infinite" by way of avowing that he cannot conceive of its coming to an end, in extension or in duration. This recognition of endlessness represents for him the limit of thought: and he declines to proceed to give further attributes to that, the very naming of which leads him to the verge of the capacities of rational speech. He declines to give to the going universe the name of "God," because that name has always been associated by nearly all men with the primitive conception of a Personal Being, and it is a mere verbal stratagem to make it identical with Universe. So irresistible is the effect of the immemorial association of the name that it serves to carry nearly every professing Pantheist back chronically into mere Theism and Deism, even if he so formulates his Pantheism to begin with as to make it answer to the name. A logically consistent Pantheist, using the name, would be hard to find. Hence the necessity, on all grounds, of repudiating Pantheism as distinctly as Theism. The only consistent course is to use the privative "a," and stand to the term which means "without Theos, without God-idea."

§2.

This preamble, it is to be hoped, may make it easier to appreciate the technicalities of Bradlaugh's doctrine. He was not the untrained Atheist of the theistic imagination, who may be confounded with a quotation from Kant by one of the personages of Mrs Ward's religious vaudevilles. He knew that Kant, reduced to plain language, gives the whole answer to Kant. Beginning as a boy to defend his Theism in debate, he saw it demolished by one of those born debaters who are found every now and then among the working class, men far superior in native power and intellectual sincerity to those cultured acceptors of other men obscurities who look down on them.[74] But he did not trust to "mother-wit," his own or another's. He read all the philosophic literature he could lay hands on; in particular he became a close student of Spinoza. A clergyman of my acquaintance maintains that to the end he was a Spinozist. It would be less misleading to say that he employed much of the method of Spinoza to establish the Atheism to which Spinoza's doctrine practically leads,[75] while always scrupulously recognising that Spinoza formulated Pantheism and professed only to modify the God-idea. Here are Bradlaugh's own words:—

"The logic of Spinoza was directed to the demonstration of one substance with infinite attributes, for which one substance with infinite attributes he had as equivalent the name of 'God.' Some who have since followed Spinoza, have agreed in his one substance, but have denied the possibility of infinite attributes. Attributes or qualities, they urge, are attributes of the finite or conditioned, and you cannot have attributes of substance except as attributes of its modes. You have in this distinction the division line between Spinozism and Atheism. Spinoza recognises infinite intelligence; but Atheism cannot conceive intelligence except in relation, as quality of the conditioned, and not as the essence of the absolute. Spinoza, however, denied the doctrine of freewill, as with him all phenomena are of God; so he rejects the ordinary notions of good and evil."[76]

The position here taken up is frequently met by an outcry against the "denial of intelligence" to the highest power in the universe. The protest is pure irrelevance. Atheism "denies intelligence" to an infinite existence simply as it denies it whiskers and dyspepsia. The point is that intelligence cannot be conceived save as a finite attribute; every process of intelligence implying limitation and ignorance.[77] Infinitude must transcend the state of "intelligence." The "intelligence" of "omniscience" is a chimæra. And when the Atheist is accused of making himself the highest thing in the universe, the plain answer is that it is precisely the Theist, and nobody else, who does so. That is to say, the Theist makes his own mind and personality the type and analogue of an Infinite and Eternal Power. The Atheist admits that he can form no conception whatever of Infinite and Eternal Power. The Theist rushes in where the Atheist declines to tread. And nothing is more remarkable in the modern history of religion than the retreat of all theistic argument to some form of the sub-rational position so laboriously formulated by Kant—that the God-idea is established, not by any form of reasonable inference from knowledge, but by the moral needs and constitution of human nature. That doctrine is not only the formal bankruptcy of all philosophy, logical and psychological, but is the stultification of every religious system which adopts it, inasmuch as it is equally valid for each against all the rest, besides being finally annihilated by the simple fact of persistent scientific Atheism, which proves that human nature does not need the sustenance of a God-idea, whether in ethics, in politics, or in natural science. The only resource of neo-Kantism against the Atheist is the argumentum ad hominem of imputing to him "atrophy" of the "spiritual" sense; an argument which—not to employ a simple tu quoque—may be sufficiently met either by the answer that the "spiritual sense" which maintains Theism is merely the carnal and self-excited appetite for mental opium, and that the Hindu and the devout Catholic have it in a much higher degree than the mere Theist; or by the reminder that even if there were special intellectual defect behind Atheism, it is, on the Theistic hypothesis, a defect foreordained by Theos, and is as much part of human nature as the docility of the Theist.

All the psychological line of argument, as put by Kant and his adaptors, is fully and patiently met by Bradlaugh in his section of the "Freethinker's Text-Book," which deals in turn with all the main pleas of orthodoxy. At the close of the examination of Kant he writes, with great caution and moderation:—

"We do not feel sure that we have either fairly stated Kant's position or efficiently replied to as much as we have stated. In condensing within the limits of this Text-Book the views of a writer so involved in his expressions as is Immanuel Kant, we may have failed both in exposition and answer, but have the consolation that we at any rate place before our readers the sources of completer knowledge."

But the modest deprecation was unnecessary, the main theses of Kant having really been sufficiently stated and met; and the Text-Book goes on to cite and answer the arguments of an able neo-Kantian Theist, who had confessedly found Kant unsatisfying, but who offered in his turn only the vague emotional plea as against Kant's moral plea, backing it up with the old paralogism of the "spiritual sense." That is the best that modern Theism can say for itself; and the argument will never convince anybody who had needed convincing.[78] It is further repudiated by the orthodox Theism which claims to stand on revelation, and which in turn is dismissed as ill-founded by more philosophic Theism.

The orthodox Theism is in this country represented by Professor Flint, who when challenged by Bradlaugh to defend his position philosophically, took the line of answering that, "for a person possessed of a typically English intellect, Mr Bradlaugh shows, in dealing with Theism, a curious predilection for metaphysical conundrums,"[79] and proceeded to meet the said "conundrums" in the spirit of a joker dealing with a joke. The argument, "Unless it be nonsense to affirm infinity and Mr Bradlaugh added to it, why should it be nonsense to affirm infinity and the universe added to it?" is a sample of the reasoning with which Dr Flint satisfies the pious, in answer to the Atheistic doctrine that human beings are only forms of the infinite existence. Another of the Professor's expedients is to say that God has reason but does not reason. "No intelligent man thinks or speaks of God as reasoning;" which is a severe attack, from a Scotch Professor of Divinity, on the author of Isaiah i. 18. But more than passing notice is here due to one of the Professor's remarks[80]:—

"There is an impression in some quarters that Atheism is advocated in a weak and unskilful manner by the chiefs of Secularism. It is an impression which I do not share. Most of the writers who are striving to diffuse Atheism in literary circles are not to be compared in intellectual strength with either Mr Holyoake or Mr Bradlaugh."

Such a testimony, from such a source, counts for rather more than the arguments emanating thence.

As to the assertion, again, that Atheists say "there is no God"—an assertion made with surprising frequency by professed Agnostics—it was constantly met by Bradlaugh with the answer that the phrase has no meaning.

"The initial difficulty is in defining the word 'God.' It is equally impossible to intelligently affirm or deny any proposition unless there is at least an understanding, on the part of the affirmer or denier, of the meaning of every word used in the proposition. To me the word 'God' standing alone is a word without meaning."[81]

It would have been more exact to say that it has too many meanings to stand for any one in particular. Once defined, the alleged existence can be rationally denied, as may the existence of a race of centaurs, half men half horses, or of dragons who breathe fire, or of a being answering to the description of Neptune, driving a chariot on the sea, or of Apollo, driving the sun. All definitions of God which affirm personality or human attributes are open to immediate stultification by argument. "I have never yet heard," wrote Bradlaugh, "a definition of God from any living man, nor have I read a definition by dead or living man, that was not self-contradictory.... But the moment you tell me you mean the God of the Bible, or the God of the Koran, or the God of any particular Church, I am prepared to tell you that I deny that God."[82] The person who says we have no right to deny the existence of his imagined God until we have been all through the universe, has on his own showing no right to deny the existence of such Gods as are described in the stories of Saturn and Thor. The most paralytic Agnosticism, however, like the most devout Theism, seems content to be as sure that these are imaginary existences, as that Julius Cæesar was never in America.

The relation of Atheism to Agnosticism is thus wholly misconceived by most people who differentiate them. That is to say, the logical form of Agnosticism—by which is not meant the self-styled Agnosticism which resorts to the use of the name "God"—comes to the same thing as Atheism, since it argues that the current God-idea is a mere reflex of humanity, like those which preceded it. Bradlaugh sometimes grew impatient (and small wonder) with people who wrote to him to point out that Atheism was wrong, and Agnosticism right. They never took the trouble to try to understand what he meant by Atheism; and it must with regret be said that more competent Agnostics often make the same omission. The simple-minded Agnostic who candidly remarks, "I do not say there is no God, but I haven't seen any evidence for one," is kept in countenance by the more learned Agnosticism which excludes from its learning the literature of modern Atheism. Bradlaugh had seen the new name readily adopted by men who not only shunned the old but helped to heap on it an ignorant odium. He had seen Atheism strangely misrepresented by Mr Spencer in "First Principles;"[83] he pointed out that a mere avowal of ignorance is not worth making, and that Agnosticism is not a philosophy at all, unless it says, not merely, "I do not know of the thing you assert," but "you do not know either"—which are just the statements of Atheism. He might have added that while "Atheist," though a term much abused by Theists, is a good word, and a real doctrine-name, "Agnostic" is a bad word, and in itself no doctrine-name at all, since it says "Don't know," without hinting what it is that is not known. The present writer has heard a Christian Evidence lecturer, a Master of Arts, delight a Christian audience by saying that the nearest English equivalent to "Agnostic" is "Ignoramus." His strategy was characteristic of his cause, but he was dialectically within his rights.

The best argument for the use of the name Agnostic is simply that the word Atheist has been so long covered with all manner of ignorant calumny that it is expedient to use a new term which, though in some respects faulty, has a fair start, and will in time have a recognised meaning. The case, so stated, is reasonable; but there is the per contra that, whatever the motive with which the name is used, it is now tacked to half a dozen conflicting forms of doctrine, varying loosely between Theism and Pantheism. The name of Atheist escapes that drawback. Its unpopularity has saved it from half-hearted and half-minded patronage.

§3.

Another obstinate misunderstanding arises over the word "Materialism." Bradlaugh did not willingly or often resort to that name. He seems to have preferred the more philosophic term "Monist," or the useful word "Naturist," which latter, however, he did not seek to force into common use.[84] But he was of course a "Materialist" in the sense in which alone the word is used by those who so name themselves—a sense sufficiently different from those put upon it by most of the writers who assail them, rationalists and supernaturalists alike. The former assailants, of course, do the more harm. Philosophy has in England suffered peculiarly from the tendency of professed thinkers to dissociate themselves anxiously from certain doctrine-names that are ill spoken of, and to join in the vulgar outcry against them, rather than try judicially to estimate their significance and value. Of such bourgeois prudence we have examples in some of our leading modern philosophers. And there is the other trouble that some men with great powers of a certain sort lack the capacity to see or grasp all the parts of a broad problem at once or in relation, and must needs cramply lift and handle only one at a time. Rationalists of this kind do immense harm to the cause of rationalism, as pietists of the same stamp do to the cause of their creed, by elevating a small or verbal difference into a sectarian issue, and representing other rationalists as opposed to them when there is no fundamental difference in the case. When this want of sense of proportion in an able man goes with intellectual vacillation or discontinuity, it works the maximum of frustration. We have a prominent instance in Professor Huxley, who has given countenance to contradictory conclusions on half-a-dozen main questions. He has gratuitously encouraged the enforced use of the Bible in public schools, and he has wearied Freethinkers by tediously strategic combats on worn-out topics with those who hold the very beliefs that the Bible sets up in minds which reverence it. On the question of Materialism he has reinforced reaction by contemptuous language towards men whose teaching is identical with his own so far as that is sound; and on the other hand he has obstructed the spread of logical Materialism by stating crudely and without verbal circumspection a strictly materialistic doctrine.[85] What is worse, he has written on Materialism as did Lewes—without treating the term historically; and he has at times condemned Materialists in general without specifying any one man's teaching in detail. Another writer in the same category, of whom better things might be expected, is Professor Karl Pearson. That gentleman, after the fashion of Professor Huxley, has at one time pooh-poohed the criticism of theology as an attack on a ruin, and at another has furiously cannonaded the bones of a dead theologian. And recently he has gone out of his way, in his "Grammar of Science" so-called, to asperse Materialism, while teaching practically nothing else of a positive nature. Mr Pearson's account of the Materialism of Büchner and Bradlaugh, superciliously given in a footnote, is in the circumstances the worst misrepresentation of the matter now before the public. He speaks of "the Materialist" and "modern Materialists" as substituting force for the will or spirit of the Spiritists as a "cause" of motion, and goes on to confuse the already much-confused question of "necessity" by playing the bull in that philosophic china-shop.

"The idea of enforcement," he writes, "of some necessity in the order of a sequence, remains deeply rooted in men's minds, as a fossil from the spiritualistic explanation of will as the cause of motion. This idea is preserved in association with the scientific description of motion; and in the Materialist's notion of force as that which necessitates certain changes or sequences of motion, we have the ghost of the old Spiritualism. The force of the Materialist is the will of the old Spiritualist separated from consciousness. Both carry us into the region beyond our sense-impressions; both are therefore metaphysical; but perhaps the inference of the old Spiritualist was, if illegitimate, less absurdly so than that of the modern Materialist, for the Spiritualist did not infer will to exist beyond the sphere of consciousness with which he had always found will associated."

This passage, fallacious from its first clause—being but an empirical attack on empiricism—becomes in the last, with its "for," a mere misstatement. The Spiritualist did most emphatically infer will outside the sphere of consciousness with which he had always found will associated, since he expressly assumed a consciousness without organisation—a thing he never met with. It is further quite unjustifiable to assert that "modern Materialists" carry outside the sphere of consciousness ideas either of "will" or of "enforcement," which they have always found associated with consciousness. Professor Pearson is confused by words, which are apt to be even for wise men at times what Hobbes said they were for fools. The task of philosophy is a perpetual struggle with the mazes of language; and it is worse than idle to discuss such problems as Mr Pearson here gratuitously raises, without analysing the terms which commonly contain them. He uses the word "necessitates" as if there were no ambiguity or obscurity about its sense; just as he constantly speaks of our not knowing the "why" of things, without making a single philosophical attempt to analyse the psychological force of that profoundly important syllable. What do we mean by "why," apart from matters of volition? It is the old story of regarding the leaf as "a flat green object which we know all about already." Professor Pearson goes about to analyse the leaves of physics, but too often takes for granted the leaves of language. He has needlessly approached his task in such a fashion that it becomes much more a matter of psychology and logic than of physical science; yet his psychology is little better than a hand-to-mouth criticism, the mere business psychology of a physicist. His distinction between philosophical and physicist doctrine (pp. 93, 94), to the effect that one appeals to temperament but the other not, is a sample of amateur psychology grievous to consider. And while discrediting certain doctrines in physics, real or imaginary, on the bare ground that they are metaphysical, he yet rounds the whole of his own doctrine to an expressly metaphysical account of the nature of scientific knowledge. There is, of course, no real dividing-line between metaphysics and sense-knowledge; what the physicists rightly protest against is just bad metaphysic, spiritist metaphysic. But when a physicist himself plunges at every page of his book into more or less gratuitous metaphysic, and yet assumes to dispose of other men's doctrine (falsified at that) by calling it metaphysical, he goes beyond fallacy into what has been considerately described, in a factious politician, as "moral paradox."

As to the charge against the Materialists—whom Mr Pearson in another passage typifies by Büchner and Bradlaugh—it is practically untrue on one head, that of force being the "cause" of motion; and quite inconclusive on another, that of "enforcement" and "necessity." Mr Pearson is uncandid enough to cite no passage on either head, and I know not whether the latter is not as inaccurate as the other. Even if, however, a Materialist should talk of motion as a "necessity" of matter, it would amount to nothing to impugn him without showing what he conceives "necessity" to be. The word is a plexus of connotations; and to identify it out-of-hand with the conceptions of spiritists is a course more worthy of a theologian than of a man of science. Mr Pearson's way of talking of "enforcement," as if the word conveyed any fixed scientific sense whatever, is a commission of the very offence he unjustly charges on the school of Büchner. But as to the statement that Büchner and Bradlaugh are wont to speak of force as the "cause" of motion, it is really not true. Büchner in his typical work, "Force and Matter," does in one passage write somewhat unguardedly of the "force inherent in matter"—i.e. in the "something" empirically known "which we call matter"—as being the cause (Ursache) of the activities which are the phenomena of the said matter;[86] but this momentary verbal laxity is not at all the burden of his treatise. It is in any case much more pardonable than the gross contradictions which Mr Pearson quotes from the writings of Professors Thomson and Tait, collaborators in special physics; it is paralleled by phrases which he cites from Huxley, Nägeli, Spencer, and Weismann; and it is much less serious than the inconsistencies and fallacies into which Mr Pearson himself repeatedly falls. Even while repudiating the notion above cited as to "cause" (which he does without reference to the well-known discussions, from Hume onward, as to the force of the term), he writes (p. 352): "... We still shall not find in 'force,' as either the cause of motion, or the cause of change in motion, anything more than that routine of perceptions which ... is the scientific definition of causation." With this account of causation Büchner and Bradlaugh, and everybody else who has appreciated the effect of Hume's reasoning, would agree, save in so far as the phrasing falls into the very crudities of expression which mar Hume's pioneer argument. Mr Pearson writes that we "sadly need separate terms for the routine of sense-impressions," yet he never hesitates either to use a general term loosely or to disparage an unpopular man for doing the same thing. He says of material particles (p. 327): "All we can scientifically say is, that the cause of their motion is their relative position; but this is no explanation of why they move in that position." This use of "cause" is really looser than Büchner's, and is not "scientific" at all. The use of "why"—as if we had a clear conception of physical "why" as distinct from that of "cause"—is mere verbal bungling.

Again, in finally formulating the first general law of motion, Mr Pearson writes (p. 342): "Every corpuscle, whether of ether or gross 'matter,' influences the motion of the adjacent ether corpuscles." Here the word "influences" raises (as he elsewhere admits by implication) the same problem as the word "causes," so that his own most deliberate phraseology incurs the objection he makes to another man's incidental expression.

As to essentials, Mr Pearson says what Büchner does. He ostensibly regards matter as "that which moves," confusing the definition, however, by saying that we can conceive "forms of motion" as also moving. This is really going far to set up a dualistic notion analogous to that which he imputes to Materialists; and he will probably see on reflection that his idea needs careful re-statement. The essential thing is that the scientific conception of matter excludes the idea of a primary dissociation between force (or life) and matter, and their union at a point of time by a "spiritual" Creator's volition. The old dualistic doctrine of inertia, which is so re-stated by Mr Pearson (p. 344) as to entirely alter its meaning, is still commonly cited as establishing the dualistic or spiritualistic position. The dualistic doctrine as to matter is put and maintained by the Rev. Mr Westerby in his debate with Bradlaugh (p. 27) thus: "Force is always external to the matter that is moved." The effect of Mr Pearson's account of Materialism is to assert that that is virtually the teaching of Materialists so-called. But it certainly is not. The slipperiness and elasticity of language are such that a single word may set up a fallacious implication; and the word "cause" is as slippery and elastic as any. But the obvious and avowed purpose of Büchner's book is to repudiate and overthrow the dualistic notion of the universe. He expressly and repeatedly affirms that matter and motion, matter and force, are inseparable in thought. "The conception of dead matter," he writes, "is a mere abstraction." "The investigation of motion is the peculiar task of modern science, and her province embraces everything that can be traced back to motion. Matter in motion or capable of motion is or must be her first and last word."[87] Further, Büchner neither prefers to call himself a Materialist nor represents science as propagandist. "Science," he writes, "is not idealistic, nor spiritualistic, nor materialistic, but simply natural."[88] As to the term "Materialist," he remarks that "since the first publication of this book, the term has become to some extent current, and at every fitting and unfitting opportunity the designation has been dragged in neck and heels, unsuited though it is to the defenders of a philosophy which regards matter, force, and mind, not as separate entities, but only as different sides or various phenomenal modes of the same primal or basic principle."[89] Similarly Bradlaugh invariably spoke of "one existence, of which all phenomena are modes," expressly declaring that we can only know phenomena; which was his way of saying that we can never "know why" in the sense in which theologians claim to do so. At no time did he speak of "force" as a separate entity "causing motion."

After speaking of Materialists as habitually calling force the "cause of motion," Mr Pearson loosely represents Büchner and the followers of Bradlaugh as finding "mechanical laws inherent in the things themselves;" and he declares that this materialism "collapses under the slightest pressure of logical criticism." He has in reality passed upon it no logical criticism whatever, his frequent lack of lucidity becoming at this place sheer darkness. What he has said on the point has been wholly metaphysical; but his metaphysic, ill done as it is, perfectly justifies the doctrine he finally and irrelevantly contemns. "In the necessarily limited verifiable correspondence of our perceptual experience with our conceptual model," he writes (p. 353), "lies the basis of our mechanical description of the universe." "A shorthand résumé of our conceptual experience" is repeatedly specified by him as the gist or purpose of science; but when he wants to discredit anybody else's doctrine, it suffices him to call it just such a shorthand résumé or dismiss it as metaphysical. And the arbitrariness of his verdicts becomes apparent once for all when he writes: "It is perhaps needless to add that the gifted lady who speaks of secularists as holding the 'creed of Clifford and Charles Bradlaugh' has failed to see the irreconcilable divergence between the inventor of 'mind-stuff' and the follower of Büchner." That is to say, Mr Pearson applauds or distinguishes Clifford for perhaps the loosest formula ever put forward in the name of Materialism, but still a formula not contradictory of Büchner's and Bradlaugh's monism, while disparaging Büchner and Bradlaugh for their Materialism. It will be clear to a logical reader that the conception of "mind-stuff" ("shorthand" with a vengeance!) is only a random materialistic suggestion—not an infrequent thing with Clifford—but still a suggestion quite reconcilable with materialistic monism. Büchner writes that "all yet future forms, including reasoning beings, potentially or in capacity, must have been contained in that primal world-mist out of which our solar system was gradually evolved."[90] Bradlaugh always defined his "one existence" as including "all that is necessary for the happening of all phenomena." Mr Huxley—whom Mr Pearson does not asperse as a "Materialist"—has expressed himself in terms almost identical with Büchner's.[91] To speak of "mind-stuff" as being part of the "primal world-mist" is merely to suggest a hopeless "conceptual mode" of thought over and above the most exact "shorthand" to which words can well reduce the inferences of science as to cosmic history. That Clifford would have approved of either the tone or the judgment of his successor in the matter one may take leave to doubt. His "temperament" was different from that of Mr Pearson, who supplies in his own person the disproof of his own primitive doctrine that scientific opinions have nothing to do with temperament.

The unpleasing fact is that personal interest and prejudice have been the main factors in establishing the ill-repute of the term "Materialist." It arose very much as the term "Freethinker" arose, by way of broadly marking off a new tendency in active thought. The Freethinkers, so-called, simply claimed to follow their reason freely, where religious people were tied down to their traditional creed. The Materialists simply emphasized the new and spreading conception—at once Pantheistic and Atheistic—that the laws of things were to be looked for in the constitution of things, and not in any "spiritual" volition of a superior being or beings. They opposed the notion of a primal distinction between matter and the energies and activities thereof. Spiritism was for them the sum-total of all the guesses and hallucinations of ignorance; and their contrasted Materialism was imputed to them as a vileness by the types of mind which found elevation in the doctrine of blood sacrifice and ritual theophagy. Scientific disinterestedness was bracketed with grossness of life, and this often by pietists as gross in life as in thought. Every Spiritist who went a certain way in Materialism was libelled in turn; but the semi-Materialist could always indemnify himself by libelling those who went further.[92] Newton's theistic theory of matter is as absurd a one as any man of science ever framed; but he has earned by it the tenderness of later theists, while his fame secures the lenity of later physicists. Thus some guarded rationalists who pounce like weasels on every slip, real or fancied, of professed Freethinkers, honey their voices to speak of halfway thinkers whose slips are gross, open, palpable. They have their social reward. Bradlaugh and Büchner have taken a different course. Finding the term "Materialism" in itself unphilosophic, they have still looked to the essential point of its broad historic significance. It marks on the side of physical science, from La Mettrie onwards, the repudiation of theological methods; and though they would not have coined the name for themselves, they have not repudiated it, but have instead sought to free the doctrine behind it from the laxities and crudities which belong to all new departures of thought, and which abound in the writings alike of Idealists and of some critical pragmatists in a greater degree than in those of the pioneers they attack. Büchner and Bradlaugh knew that by accepting an unpopular name they incurred the hostility alike of blockheads, of zealots, and of the scientists who look anxiously to their status; but they took their risks. Bradlaugh had constantly to explain that by "matter"—if he used the term at all, which he preferred not to do—he meant simply total existence: all that is necessary for the happening of all phenomena. Yet men still speak of him as saying that "dead matter" gives rise to life and mind. It will become clear to a thoughtful reader, after a little reflection, that under Bradlaugh's definition there is no assertion of the cosmic priority of any one mode of existence. He merely insisted that there should be an end of the fantasy of "mind" or "spirit" or "will", calling a tangible universe into existence—a fantasy into which anti-Materialists are always relapsing. Philosophically speaking, out-and-out Spiritism[93] and strict Materialism come to exactly the same thing, since each predicates a going, infinite universe, with one pervading infinite energy; an energy which one side chooses to call by the primitive name of spirit. As Büchner writes: "The whole struggle yet proceeding between Materialism and Spiritualism, still more that between Materialism and Idealism, must appear futile and groundless to him who has once attained to the knowledge of the untenability of the dualistic theory which always underlies it." In the same way, as we have seen, strict Pantheism—which is the inevitable end of rational Theism—comes logically to the same thing as strict Atheism, the only difference being the verbal one set up by the Pantheist's adherence to the primitive name of Theos.

In this connection it is difficult to deal with the position taken up by Mrs Besant, the valued friend of Bradlaugh and of the present writer. Mrs Besant has greatly perplexed her old friends by professing to repudiate the Materialism she formerly taught, on the score that it gives "dead matter" as the source of life and mind. They can only conclude that she has undergone a psychological change which affects her knowledge of her former positions. We have seen that Bradlaugh's and Büchner's teaching was fundamentally different from what she represents materialism to be; and there is no other school of Materialism in question. The strange thing is that Mrs Besant herself translated from the German, carefully and well, Büchner's "Force and Matter" (as also his "Mind in Animals"), in which the doctrine is flatly contrary to her present account of it. Büchner even uses unguarded language—as it is very difficult to avoid doing—in insisting on the perpetual activity of matter. "Matter," he writes, "is not dead, inanimate, or lifeless, but is in motion everywhere, and is full of most active life." Bradlaugh more warily pointed to the danger of giving ambiguity to the term "life," which is properly the name for the broad classes of the phenomena of plants and animals. But he never taught or fancied that certain of the mere forms of existence in themselves originated other forms of existence. By "matter" he did not mean to specialise rocks any more than protoplasm or ether.

A more defensible argument has been used by Mrs Besant and others against Materialism: the argument, namely, that it is impossible to think of a transition from physical action to the phenomenon of thought. A number of physicists—among them Tyndall—can be quoted as declaring that there is a "great gulf fixed" between molecular motion and the state of consciousness. Tyndall once laid it down that the demand for "logical continuity between molecular forces and the phenomena of consciousness" is "a rock on which Materialism must inevitably split whenever it pretends to be a complete philosophy of the human mind." But this loud-sounding affirmation on analysis resolves itself into the popular rhetoric to which Tyndall was too much given. What is meant by a "complete philosophy of the human mind"? If Materialism asserts that certain constant correlations remain nevertheless "mysterious," it does not thereby cease to be a complete philosophy of the human mind. The statement that our whole knowledge of causation is just a knowledge of correlation is part of the complete philosophy of the human mind—that is, of the systematic and exact statement of our tested knowledge. To say that human faculty is strictly limited is not an avowal of incompleteness in the philosophy which says it. And as a matter of fact, the statement as to the "discontinuity" between "molecular forces" and the "phenomena of consciousness" is a statement which, so far as it has any meaning, stands to be made of all other correlations of phenomena. When I strike a match on the box, I evoke the phenomena of light and heat. In scientific terms, I set up by friction a chemical action quite "discontinuous" with motion in mass, and this in turn sets up a wave-motion in the hypothetical ether (of which I can form no conception) representing light. Materialism no more "splits" on the one "rock" than on the other.[94] The one special difficulty as to consciousness is a difficulty that affects all philosophies alike: the difficulty that it is consciousness that must analyse consciousness. Neither by predicating "mind-stuff" nor by alleging "soul" is that difficulty evaded. There still remains the admitted correlation between brain-and-nerve action and thought; and that correlation is on all-fours with those of physics so-called. As the case is put by Dr John Drysdale (after reasonings to an apparently different effect), "It may be held proved in physiology that for every feeling, every thought, every volition, a correlative change takes place in the nerve matter;" and it is scientific to say with him that the phenomena of mind as a function "require no further explanation" than the conditions of those changes. When Dr Ferrier writes that "no purely physiological explanation can explain the phenomena of consciousness," unless he simply means that there a psychological or logical element (not Spiritism) must enter into the explanation, he is merely stumbling in the old way over the word "explain." What is "explanation"? As Professor Pearson laboriously shows, and as Hume showed long ago, all that takes place in our explanations of physical phenomena is recognition of a routine of sense experience. The theological habit has given men a pseudo-conception of "explanation;" and though they have learned to dispense with that process in physics, they still confusedly demand it in biology and psychology. But the very men who at one time talk of "mystery" and "gulf" between matter and mind, at other times recognise that the mystery is no more and no less in one correlation than in another. Thus Tyndall, who elsewhere verbalises against "Materialism," after describing the development of the human organism from the egg, writes: "Matter I define as that mysterious thing by which all that is accomplished." Well, that is "modern Materialism" or nothing; the Materialism of Büchner and of Bradlaugh. The mere doctrinal or pragmatic expressions of single physicists count for nothing. As Bradlaugh put it in his debate with the Rev. Mr Westerby, it is the cases of Ferrier that count, not his opinions. The best observer is not the best formulator or thinker; and the art or science of logical speech is not gratuitously thrown in with either mathematical or artistic faculty. To turn the data of science into philosophy is a specialist's work.

Any one who desires to obtain in a short time by dint of close attention a notion of the difficulty and complexity of the argument as between monism and dualism cannot do better than read the report of the debate between Bradlaugh and the Rev. Mr Westerby on the notion of Soul. Mr Westerby, though he wrote some of his papers in advance instead of meeting his opponent's case, was decidedly the ablest of the clerics with whom Bradlaugh debated; and in his hands the orthodox cause suffered as little as might be. The reader may or may not in the end decide to stand with Bradlaugh, but he will certainly have learned to see the folly of the cheap journalistic dismissal of an undefined "Materialism" as "exploded," and the error of the notion that Bradlaugh was unqualified to handle philosophic and scientific issues, or that he was a mere public speaker, unskilled in dialectic.

Finally, as to the meaningless expression that "things happen by chance," he of course never used it. Of any person who puts this phrase in the mouths of Atheists, it may be said at once that he is unfit to discuss a philosophical question. He either does not understand what he discusses, or is wilfully untruthful. The phrase "happens by chance"—as was long ago recognised by Hume, after he had himself fallen into the ordinary meaningless use of the term—only means either "happens without our intending it," or "happens without our being able to trace the cause." It is significant only for everyday purposes, and in philosophy can only serve to set up a chimera. All events must be conceived as having a "cause," in the ordinary sense of the term. The Atheist certainly avows that he can only trace causation a small way in the universe; but he does not for a moment suppose that he would be giving an explanation of any event if he referred it to "Chance." His doctrine is that the universe and its total energy must be conceived as infinite and eternal; that in physics the question "Why?" resolves itself into the question "How?" and that the business of science is just to give the answer as fully as may be.

§4.

While Bradlaugh was thus an exact thinker and reasoner, he distinguished himself above all the rationalists of his time by the energy and persistence with which he sought to bring his philosophy home to the popular mind. He was fundamentally a reformer, and he could not consent, as so many do, to keep silence on errors of creed, so called, and resist merely errors of action. For him, creed was action, and action creed. He was so thoroughly a man of action that he must needs act on his conviction in matters of opinion, so called, as in anything else.

It was no doubt the record and the result of the French Revolution that moved the majority of political reformers for two generations to keep their own counsel on religious matters. Paine has been expressly charged with hindering the cause of democratic politics by identifying himself also with the cause of Freethinking. To a man like Bradlaugh such an objection counted for nothing. It was not merely that he saw how profoundly religion reacts on life, how creed shapes conduct, and how the current religion must always tend to support old political doctrine as against new. He took his course instinctively as well as reasoningly. That a doctrine is false was to him a reason for exposing it as such; and though as a utilitarian he held that truth is the best policy, he did not wait for the demonstration before choosing his course. He had in fact that love of truth for its own sake which is the inspiration of all scientific progress; but he had it without restriction, or at least with as little restriction as can well be. No man can be equally interested in all inquiries; and none can help thinking some unprofitable; but Bradlaugh was limited only by his tastes, never by the common opinion that the spread of truth is inexpedient. He would give facilities for all conscientious truth-seeking whatever, barring only random disclosures of sensational facts with no better motive than sensation, or with no likelihood of edification to balance the likelihood of the reverse. As to the great themes of belief and discussion in all ages, he simply could not think that human welfare is promoted by maintaining beliefs known to be false. He was a democrat in religion as in politics. If truth was good for him, it must be equally good for the multitude, so far as it was possible to enlighten them. They must needs be enlightened by language within reach of their capacity; but while he would make matters plain for them, he would in no wise consent to garble and conceal what he held to be the truth. With the many people who either care nothing whether current beliefs are false or true, or think it desirable that they should be false, he had no sympathy. It seemed to him that if anything was worth investigating, the most serious beliefs of the mass of the human race must be; and the idea that the mass could be helped or raised by keeping them deluded was to him morally repugnant and sociologically false. "My object," he writes in his pamphlet on Heresy, "is to show that the civilisation of the mass is in proportion to the spread of heresy amongst them; that its effect is seen in an exhibition of manly dignity and self-reliant effort which is utterly unattainable amongst a superstitious people." And all acts of prayer and religious propitiation were to him survivals of superstition.

"My plea is," he went on, "that modern heresy, from Spinoza to Mill, has given brain-strength and dignity to every one it has permeated—that the popular propagandists of this heresy, from Bruno to Carlile, have been the true redeemers and saviours, the true educators of the people. The redemption is yet only at its commencement, the education only lately begun, but the change is traceable already; as witness the power to speak and write, and the ability to listen and read, which have grown amongst the masses during the last hundred years."

Against the popular thesis that "Christianity" has achieved these things, he brought to bear in debate and journalism not only his knowledge of Christian and Church history in general, but his constant experience of the influence of orthodoxy in checking betterment in England. The State Church has been an invaluable object-lesson for Freethinkers. As regards the claim for Christian Nonconformity, the answer might run: If a mainly ecclesiastical or sectarian Dissent has had so much good political result, what political, social, and intellectual results might not come of a thoroughgoing rationalist Dissent? It would take too long to set forth even the gist of Bradlaugh's polemic against the Christian claim that the Christian creed has been a force for progress; but those who care to know his method and his case may find it tersely set forth in the latter sections of his "Notes on Christian Evidences" in criticism of "The Oxford House Papers," his pamphlet on "Humanity's Gain from Unbelief," and his debate with the Rev. Marsden Gibson on that thesis. These are late statements of the case he put forward during the whole of his public life; and it was on the strength of such arguments, and of his theoretic Atheism, that he was able to create in England an energetic and intelligent party, the active adherents of which were and are mostly working-men.

"Secularism" is the not inappropriate name, for general purposes, of the general doctrine of Bradlaugh and his adherents. That name, however, is attended by the drawback that the man who first employed it, Mr George Jacob Holyoake, is wont so to define it as to deprive it of specific meaning for the propagandists of Freethought, while showing no reason why it should be adopted by anybody else. Mr Holyoake—himself an Atheist—argues, in effect, that Secularism properly consists in simply attending to secular things; and that it is not committed to any hostile attitude towards theology. On that view, every political club is a secular organisation and an exponent of Secularism. Bradlaugh always argued, and nearly all Secularists have always held with him, that this use of the term reduces it to nullity, since it makes every Christian a Secularist in so far as he attends to secular affairs on "business principles." There is, of course, an important truth implied in this way of speaking; but it is a truth irrelevant to the issue. If we are merely to discuss secular things, there is no need for any "Secularist" organisation. Secularists commonly act freely—or as freely as they are allowed to—with their religious neighbours in political and other public matters. But if a distinct doctrine of the uselessness of "sacred" machinery and theory is to be maintained; if it is to be shown that secular action is properly co-extensive with human affairs, then these views must be upheld by showing that all theology is delusive. A man who believes in the existence of a personal and governing God, broadly speaking, cannot be induced to keep theological procedure out of his life. There may be many Indifferentists who act as Secularists without caring at all to discuss the religious question; and there may even be a few of the "Lucretian Theists" assumed by Mr Holyoake; but none of the Indifferentists and not many of the Lucretian Theists will be induced to join in a Secularist propaganda, even on Mr Holyoake's lines. Bradlaugh fully recognised that the formulated principles of Secularism do not directly commit the subscriber to Atheism. "I think," he avowed, "that the consequence of Secularism is Atheism, and I have always said so"; but he added that "clearly all Secularists are not Atheists."[95] The tendency has inevitably been, however, to identify Secularism with Atheism. And as Mr Holyoake has himself all along lectured on anti-theological lines, his definition has commonly seemed to Secularists to be wholly in the air, though his personal merits and practical services to Freethought are felt to outweigh minor infirmities of reasoning and judgment. Whether the name, thus capriciously defined by its framer, will continue to be employed by those who repudiate that definition, remains to be seen. It is not unlikely that new Freethought organisations, finding the word "Secularism" defined in cyclopædias on the authority and in the language of Mr Holyoake, will seek some other label. But the label in itself was a good one; and the propaganda of Bradlaugh recommended it to many thousands of his countrymen.

That his open adherents were chiefly working-men, was a result of the economic situation, which determines so many of the phases of culture-history. It is notorious that among the upper and middle classes there is a great amount of disbelief in the current religion; but among the upper and middle classes there is almost no organised effort to discredit the creed of the Churches. The small societies which muster under the banner of "Ethical Culture," little as they are given to speaking out on matters of creed, receive little support. It is often said, with idle malice, that Bradlaugh's adherents were mostly working-men because he was not qualified to appeal to educated people; but even if that were true, it would not explain how it comes about that other and better-educated rationalists have not set up an organisation of middle-class and upper-class people. The explanation is mainly economic. As a matter of fact, Bradlaugh had hundreds of "educated" admirers among the middle and even some among the upper classes; and in France and elsewhere he was popular among the "classes," as at home among the masses. But the open avowal of "unbelief" in Great Britain has always meant, and will long mean, for one thing, a certainty of pecuniary loss, and a certain measure of ostracism to professional men and men of business. Let a merchant, or doctor, or shopkeeper, declare himself an active Atheist, and he will find it appreciably harder to get customers or clients. A man of established position and personal popularity may fairly hold his own while avowing scepticism in general intercourse; but even he will incur calumny and loss if he takes trouble to spread his opinions. Men in a small way of business are almost sure to suffer heavily; and it is still no uncommon thing for clerks and others to lose their situations on the simple ground of so-called "infidelity." In the more bigoted districts the risk is overwhelming. A shopkeeper in Belfast told the present writer that when he joined the Secularists there, his business, formerly brisk, fell off so rapidly and so ruinously that in a short time he had to give it up. Nothing, apparently, can make the majority of Christians, who claim that theirs is a "religion of love," realise that to seek to injure an Atheist for his opinions is an unworthy course. Mere Nonconformity has incurred, and still incurs, a certain measure of penalty. But Nonconformists seem none the less ready to inflict it in turn on others. Obviously, the number of middle-class people who can defy these risks is small. It is only among workmen, employed in large numbers by capitalists who do not take the trouble to inquire about their opinions, that the avowal of Secularism is safe. Even workmen, of course, are sometimes made to suffer in pocket, and often from slander in their own class; but they suffer less than the trading and professional classes. Hence it is that straightforwardness and sincerity abound more among them. It is not that "the poor" have from birth any occult virtues denied to the rich, but that the economic conditions make for sincerity and openness among wage-earners more than among earners of fees and profits. It is difficult to guess what John Mill meant when he said that the workers in this country, though they esteemed truthfulness, are not as a body truthful. If he meant that they are capable of garbling facts in their own interest in matters of industry, he was only charging them with what may be charged equally against shopkeepers, stockbrokers, commission agents, traders, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and clergymen. It belongs to the nature of the case that in the important matter of loyalty to conviction, the workers are by reason of circumstances superior to the other classes. The upper classes, though, like each of the others, they include candid and sincere men and women, are as much coerced by social as are the middle classes by commercial considerations. The fear of being charged with "bad form," and of being cold-shouldered, does among the rich what fear of money loss and calumny does elsewhere. Idle men and women, whose main occupation is an artificial social intercourse, are little likely to battle for heretical opinions, even if they have been thoughtful enough to form any. Dissimulation and conformity are too much in the way of their daily life.

The business of systematic Freethought propaganda has thus been mainly left to the class with least leisure and least money; and the newspaper press naturally reflects the balance of property and status. Newspapers are produced in the way of business, and only "paying" doctrine is put forward by them. It is notorious that the majority of journalists are unbelievers; but capital buys pens as it buys hands and goods; and many pressmen have disparaged Bradlaugh's opinions as "peculiar," or worse, who themselves held these opinions, and privately regarded the current orthodoxy as folly. Secularism in general has thus been boycotted, and a common repute of vulgarity and illiteracy has been cast upon it, often by people who ostentatiously applaud the Salvation Army, with its incredible buffooneries and its reliance on the most abject ignorance.

Bradlaugh's artisan followers, as a matter of fact, have for the most part been the pick of their class for intelligence and energy. That their culture was not equal to their zeal and their sincerity was no reproach to them. They did their honest best; and from Bradlaugh they always had his. Himself a careful student of all the questions involved in the general issue between rationalism and orthodoxy, he constantly urged on his followers the necessity of keeping their minds open and their judgment active. Mrs Besant has told in her "Autobiography" how earnestly he impressed on her the need of the most thoroughgoing and ever-renewed preparation for the great work of instructing the people. But inasmuch as the people in the mass can only begin with the main or fundamental questions of religion—those of "revelation" and "inspiration," "God," "Providence," "prayer," "miracles," "morality," "atonement," and "immortality"—his platform work as a Freethinker dealt mainly with these topics. And inasmuch as the mass of the people are at once more sincere and more logical in their relation of opinion to conduct than most of the specialists who occupy themselves with the literary analysis of the Old and New Testaments, Bradlaugh's work struck at the roots of orthodoxy wherever he went. He argued that if the Old Testament be demonstrably false in its history and barbarous in its morals, the idea of "inspiration" in the theological sense disappears, and the Hebrew books become mere ancient literature, forged or otherwise, and wholly disentitled to be made a textbook for mankind. Though a good Hebrew scholar, he did not profess to rest his case on the textual analysis of the "higher criticism." For him the "sacred book" was discredited as such by its own contents, however composed; and he made it his business to attack them as an imposition on human ignorance and credulity. His standpoint was thus put by himself:—

"There is no great honour or pleasure, although there is much wearisome toil, in gathering the materials for proving that Genesis nearly always blunders in its attempts at statements of fact; that it is repeatedly chronologically incorrect, and in the chronologies of its principal versions utterly irreconcilable; that copyists, through ignorance, carelessness, or design, have in many places incorrectly transcribed the text; that the translators, according to their respective creeds, vary in their interpretations of different momentous passages; that the Hebrew language itself has been altered by the addition of vowel points, by means of which a sense is often given entirely different from the original intention; and that the majority of the ancient versions contain different and contradictory readings of various important verses. But it is absolutely necessary to do all this in a form accessible to the general reader so long as the Church persists, under statutory sanction and indorsement, in its teaching to the people from their early childhood, that this Bible is God's Word, free from blemish. Genesis is forced upon the child's brain as God's Word by nurse and pedagogue, and the mode of thinking of the scholar is in consequence utterly warped in favour of the divinity of the book before his reason has opportunity to mature for its examination. If the book only had claimed for it that which may be claimed for all books—namely, in part or whole to represent the genius, education, and manners of the people and the times from whom and which it issued, then it might fairly be objected by supporters of the Bible that the tone of criticism here adopted is not of the highest order, and that the petty cavillings about misplaced names, misspelled words, incorrect dates and numbers, and geographical errors, etc., are hardly worthy the attention of a serious student. But as the Bible is declared to be the revelation and representative of perfect intelligence to the whole human family; as it is placed by the whole of its preachers immeasurably above all other books, with a claim to dominate, and if necessary to overturn, the teachings of all other books; as it is alleged that the Bible is free from the errors of thought and fact more or less found in every other book; and as it is by Act of Parliament declared to be a criminal offence in this country for any person to deny this book to be God's Holy Word, it is not only a right, but it becomes an unavoidable duty on the part of a Freethinking critic to present as plainly as possible to the notice of the people every weakness of the text, however trivial, that may serve to show that the Bible, or any portion of it, is fallible, that it is imperfect, that so far from being above all books, it is often below them as a mere literary production."[96]

To such a declaration as this all protests against "Bible-smashing" are irrelevant, by whomsoever made. Made by literary humanists, they ignore the practical situation. It is one thing to recognise that the Bible is a profoundly interesting body of ancient literature, illustrating for all time the manner of growth of a cult; it is another thing to deal with the pretensions of that cult to retain to-day the status secured for it by all manner of sinister means in bygone ages. Coming from clergymen, the protest is worse than irrelevant. The most advanced of them are still, from the rationalist point of view, in the position of using the Bible as a fetish; and men who as public teachers regularly resort to a primitive priestly literature for sanctions and cues to current conduct have no right whatever to protest against those who show the people what the sacrosanct literature really is. Bible-smashing is the necessary checkmate to Bible-worship. When the literary humanists get the clergy to stop cultivating and trading on Bibliolatry, it will be time for them to object to the exposure of the Bible. But by that time there will be no occasion for the objection. Bradlaugh did not go about lecturing against witch-burning or the Koran. He attacked an aggressive and endowed superstition; and to asperse him as being himself aggressive is about as idle as to charge Mr Gladstone with aggressiveness against Beaconsfield's foreign policy, or to denounce Home Rulers for being aggressive against the Union. It speaks volumes for the state of average English opinion that the adjective "aggressive" is still held to be a damaging epithet against Freethought; as if zeal were a good and great thing on one side of a dispute, but wrong and vulgar on the other. Churchmen whose bells set up pandemonium every Sunday count it an aggression to other people to meet by summons of a handbill to discuss whether church-going is reasonable. And they are kept in countenance, unluckily, by the mass of easy-going or timid unbelievers, who, not caring or daring to act on their own convictions, keep up their self-esteem by speaking ill of those who do so.

In the mouths of some people, of course, "aggressive" means "rude" or "offensive;" and it is still common to say that Bradlaugh was a coarse assailant of other men's convictions. The charge was early brought against him. Lecturing on Malthusianism in 1862, after alluding to the abuse levelled at him in that connection by the Unitarian organ, he said:—

"I did not consider it necessary to make much justification when I was attacked some months ago by a person who is rather famous for the vehemence of his criticism than for the soundness of his logic; but ... it may be perhaps not out of place to notice the way in which that sort of criticism has been circulated throughout the country. I have taken up Irish journals; I have taken up Scotch journals; and I have found myself represented as the only advocate of this great party ... who uses in his oratory, who writes for his readers, disregarding all morality, coarse, brutal, and degrading phrases. Now I appeal to you who are here this morning, and there are some who have listened to me from my boyhood, whether in my attack on the theologies of the world I have permitted my tongue to utter any coarse phraseology, whether in attacking or destroying them? (Applause) ... I admit that I have been rough and rude in my attacks on what I consider to be wrong and injurious, but I have been always reverent and kindly to every one who has seemed to me to be striving for the benefit of humankind."

How true is this claim can be easily learned by reading his pamphlets, or his book on "Genesis." That volume may be objected to as a dry digest of much learning and discussion, but it certainly cannot be accused either of violence or of flippancy. Its history is worth noting here. In 1856 he issued a Freethinking commentary entitled, "The Bible, What it is," which went as far as Isaiah. This being sold out (it is now so scarce that the present writer has not been able to get a copy),[97] he issued in 1865 a rewritten edition, covering only the Pentateuch, but larger than the first; and this in turn was sold out. In 1881-82, while fighting his great battle against Parliament, he set himself the drudgery and discipline of beginning again with Genesis, enlarging his commentary from his later reading to such an extent that this, the largest volume of the three, only covers the first eleven chapters of the first book of the Pentateuch. Some of his followers humorously speculated as to what amount of ground would be covered by a fourth revision, should he undertake it. Whatever may be thought of the method, it is very evidently not that of a man aiming at a popular success of ridicule or rhetoric. Compiled at a time when he was the target for all the bigotry of the nation, the book is eminently dispassionate and judicial. Where most men would have grown more vehement, he grew more calm.

As a lecturer, of course, he was vigorous to the highest degree. Many of those who have heard him at the height of his powers will agree to the verdict that he was by far the most powerful English orator of his time. There was something overwhelming in his force of speech when impassioned; it lifted an audience from its feet like a storm, and raised their intellectual conviction to a white heat of enthusiasm for the truth it conveyed. Other speakers of his day may have been as thrillingly impressive at their best moments; but he had great passages in nearly every speech, and rarely faced an audience without electrifying it. The Rev. Mr Westerby, at the close of his debate with Bradlaugh, testified with some chagrin to the extraordinary effectiveness of his opponent's speaking, and this in a debate full of close and difficult argument, as the verbatim report shows. "I only wish," said the reverend gentleman, "that I, in power of speech, were as powerful as he. Then I might have done honour to my cause.... Only by the power of his speech, and by the marvellous energy with which he can endow it, can I understand the impression he has produced upon you." But the reader of the debate can understand it without hearing the delivery. At its highest stress the energy is controlled and intelligized; never is the argument confused or let slip; never does vigour lapse to coarseness. He was certainly not an abusive or even a harsh controversialist; he dealt much less in invective and imputation than most men in his place would have felt justified in doing. One of the strongest of his censures of antagonists in matters of argument is passed on the late Bishop of Peterborough, Dr Magee, who was a sufficiently reckless polemist. The passage occurs in the second of the three (unwritten) lectures he delivered in Norwich, in reply to three sermons by the Bishop:—

"I have now to complain of something still worse than that the Bishop should have forgotten his Bible, entirely ignored the Thirty-Nine Articles, and occasionally in the hurry of rapid speech contradicted his previous sentences. All these are matters at which, in even an extraordinary man burdened with a bishop's dignity, we need not wonder at all; but when we find him blundering in metaphysics, when we find him making mistakes which a man versed in the merest rudiments of Mill or the Scotch and German metaphysicians would not make—when we find the Bishop so blundering, either wilfully or ignorantly, it puts me in a position of extreme difficulty."

This on Butler is also, for Bradlaugh, exceptionally severe:—

"Bishop Butler's argument on the doctrine of necessity is that which one might expect from a hired nisi prius advocate, but which is read with regret coming from a gentleman who ought to be striving to convince his erring brethren by the words of truth alone."[98]

A writer, in whose anti-religious polemic such perfectly justifiable severities are exceptional, is certainly not to be charged with violence of speech on such matters. To his courtesy in debate there are many testimonies. In his controversy, e.g., with the authors of the "Oxford House Papers," one of them, Dr Paget, writes:—"I trust that you will let me first acknowledge with gratitude and respect the temperate and courteous character of your criticism. Believe me, I sincerely appreciate it." It may not be out of place to remark that the "Oxford House Papers" were in the opinion of some readers inexpressibly poor stuff, respectful comment on which, in a busy world, was an excess of consideration. And this careful courtesy was not at all, as some have supposed, a late development in him. It is a complete error to suppose that he began by being violent, and only acquired suavity after much experience. It has been suggested on this head that he was softened by the generosity with which some Christians, such as Bright, latterly stood by him against the attacks of the bigots. But while it is quite true that he greatly appreciated this, and while it is further true that he found some of his very basest enemies in professed Freethinkers of the "Agnostic" variety, it is not the fact that he had required these experiences to make him a temperate and courteous controversialist. That he was at all times; and he had early cause to know that a Christian may be a gentleman and a Freethinker otherwise, as well as vice versa.

Even when of set purpose ridiculing Scripture narratives in his lighter lectures, Bradlaugh never descends from humour to coarseness; and his jests—in such tracts as the New Lives of Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, and Jonah—are as perfectly within the limits of rational good taste as those of Mr Spencer, Mr Arnold, and Mr Huxley on more august themes; not to cite Voltaire. An old slander has lately been very carelessly revived by the late Mr C. H. Pearson, who in his book on "National Character" speaks of Bradlaugh as having likened the Trinity to a monkey with three tails. Bradlaugh never did any such thing. A more elaborated figure of that sort appeared in a condensed account once contributed to his journal of an old lecture by a deceased Freethinker, who had satirised human anthropomorphism by making a monkey theologise for monkeys, as Heine makes the bear do in "Atta Troll." In the context the figure was fitting enough; but in any case it was not Bradlaugh's. And in reply to those persons who affect to see vulgarity, or worse, in every jest at Christian beliefs, it may be said once for all that Christians have from the first century onwards put themselves out of court on this head by jealously ridiculing the beliefs of all other believers, as well as of rationalists; that they have not stopped at ridicule, but have in all ages freely resorted to gross calumny; and that they in turn are not very badly used when their beliefs are merely subjected to the satire to which they are confessedly open. Even sheer coarseness is just as reprehensible, no more and no less, when directed against living persons, as when directed against dead or imaginary beings, or particular beliefs concerning them; but those who are readiest to impute the latter offence seem to make small account of the other, when the object of attack is an unbeliever. Bradlaugh was never coarse; yet he was abused with unspeakable scurrility by thousands of Christian people. And if coarseness ever arose in his movement, as it so easily may in a popular movement involving controversy, that movement was in any case a hundred times more sinned against than sinning. Mrs Humphrey Ward has been at pains in two of her novels to represent "crews" of Secularists as either resorting to physical violence against revivalists, or showing a disposition to resent angrily the appearance of a well-behaved clergyman at their meetings. Such slanders would call for very strong comment were they not so nakedly absurd. In no town in England would avowed Secularists dare as such to molest avowed pietists even if they were inclined to do so; and it has always been their express aim to encourage clerical opposition and debate in their meeting-places. This is a rule without exception. And Bradlaugh, in particular, at all times urged upon his followers—not to abstain from gratuitous violence towards revivalists or clergymen: he never needed to say anything on that head—but to be very careful to give opponents no reasonable pretext for making a disturbance against them.[99] He counselled not only orderliness but tact; and he sharply rebuked any of his followers who would not listen patiently to even a stupid opponent's speech. Mrs Ward's account of Secularist organisations is an unfortunate proof that the spirit of religiosity does not change with mere modifications of dogma. Even if it were really found that plain, unlettered men, facing a religion they feel to be absurd, spoke out their feeling without due courtesy or refinement, an instructed observer would see in their reaction the measure and correlative of the crudity of the doctrines assailed. But people of Mrs Ward's way of thinking look tenderly on the worst buffooneries of popular faith, and on the most brutal propaganda of hell and blood-redemption, while recoiling sentimentally from the perfectly sincere derision of these things by men on whom they are blatantly thrust. The right spirit, surely, is that which would enlighten the deluded as individuals, neither patronising them nor abusing them. That was the attitude of Bradlaugh as a publicist and as a man. He never talked, in public or in private, with malice, and seldom even with disgust, of fanatics as such. He explained them, and respected their honesty. Of certain employees of the Christian Evidence Society he would on occasion speak publicly in the strongest terms, as "vile things who, in fields and open spaces, where we are not to answer for ourselves, stab our reputation and our children's." But towards honest bigots, however imbecile, he was incapable of feeling the virulent animosity which Mrs Ward seems to feel for the Secularists of her imagination. To speak of him, as some journalists have done, as accounting for all religion by "priestcraft" in the early eighteenth century manner, is to exhibit the ignorance the statement imputes. He carefully studied the anthropological origins of religion, lectured specially on anthropology, and always related his teaching to the anthropological view. Towards priests, as such, he felt no malevolence. In fine, from first to last, the essential manliness and geniality of his nature gave his followers a lead to humanity and chivalry in their warfare with bigotry. If any of them, seeing the kind of reward he received for his self-restraint, have taken satisfaction in barbing their arrows, and in humiliating as well as defeating the enemy, they cannot cite his example.

Once in a long while a gross circumstantial lie would move him to strike with the handle of the dog-whip, so to speak. A case of the kind is set forth in his tract entitled "Lying for the Glory of God: a Letter to the Rev. Canon Fergie, B.D., Vicar of Ince, near Wigan." This dealt with one of the idiotic anecdotes by which the truth of Christianity and the wickedness of Atheism are proved for so many people—anecdotes of which the absurdity and the untruth seem equally apparent, but which find instant credence with thousands of pious persons. Such an anecdote is the "watch story" in its complete form, in which the blasphemer is struck dead, a detail which has to be regretfully withheld from the narrative when it is applied to living sceptics. Such are the endless "infidel deathbed" stories, which still do duty in religious tracts, among them being statements concerning the deaths of Voltaire and Paine, which have been a hundred times circumstantially refuted. Such is the venerable anecdote of the nurse who would never again attend an infidel's deathbed—a story which is told with religious impartiality of Rousseau, Voltaire, Paine, and Hume, and will doubtless be told in due course of Bradlaugh. In recent Christian propaganda, the growing humanity of the age is seen in a disposition to convert the atheist rather than to send him to hell shrieking. But all these anecdotes alike have one quality in common; they are rigorously untrue, though they are never told in the same way by two Christians running. One sample story of seventeen (more or less) "leading Secularists," of whom fourteen came to bad ends, after signing a blasphemous covenant with blood for ink, does not on investigation yield even a grain of fact. In another narrative, sixteen "leaders" are represented as having all re-embraced Christianity. Of the sixteen, over a dozen are unknown to Secularism, and one known convert had been reconverted to Freethought. It was partly the lawyer in Bradlaugh that made him treat these anecdotes with seriousness and severity, finding the lie circumstantial some degrees worse than the lie conventional or sophistical. He specially detested downright fabrication of facts. But he also had a chivalrous loathing of the tactic which stabbed a doctrine in the back instead of meeting it in face; and for his own part he never used the means he might to assail religion through the scandals of its daily record. He would not stoop to collect the stories of frightful "fidel" deathbeds, which surpass the contrary sort as much in force as in truth; and he never would collect in his journal the frequent stories of clerical misconduct which appear in the ordinary press, though all his life he was being libelled by clerics. He was indeed a dangerous enemy when provoked, but he had little vindictiveness. His interests were too broad, his relation to life too genial, to permit of his being satisfied with the triumphs of feud. He claimed for himself with perfect truth: "I have attacked the Bible, but never the letter alone; the Church, but never have I confined myself to a mere assault on its practices. I have deemed that I attacked theology best in asserting most the fulness of humanity. I have regarded iconoclasticism as a means, not as an end. The work is weary, but the end is well." And this may serve as a compendious answer to the kind of criticism which disposes of Atheism by calling it "cold." It would be much nearer to the truth to say that many Atheists have recoiled from religion because of its very heartlessness and gloom; and because the "warmth" of those who find joy in the evangelical doctrine of salvation strikes a healthy mind as hardly less repulsive than the "warmth" of alcoholism. The assumption that a man who puts aside the doctrine of a future life is cold-hearted, was never more absurd than when applied to the case of Bradlaugh. But its full absurdity is perhaps made most clear by comparing the doctrine of Lessing and Kant as to the nullity of Judaism as a religion, in respect of its lack of an authoritative doctrine of heaven, with the common run of rhetoric about the strength of the Semitic religious feeling.

§ 5.

It ought not to be necessary at this time of day to offer a justification for Bradlaugh's doctrine on the ethical side, his position being simply that of modern science. But just as the avowal of Atheism and Materialism gives rise to endless misrepresentation of those statements of opinion, so the avowal of Atheism and Utilitarianism in morals gives rise to all sorts of moral imputations. On the one hand there is the reasonable criticism which falls to be passed on imperfect or exaggerated expression of the utilitarian principle; on the other hand there are the imputations which ignorant, confused, and other persons cast on any statement of Utilitarianism whatever. Many orthodox people have in this matter the indestructible advantage of being unable to understand the rationalist argument—as may be very clearly seen in the debate between Mr Bradlaugh and the Rev. Dr M'Cann on the morality and philosophy of Secularism. Such opponents go on fervently affirming their consciousness of the obligation to do what they feel to be "right," "irrespective of consequences," and insisting that this is the negation of utilitarianism. It is of course no such thing. The real ground of strife between religious and rational morality lies, or lay, in the old doctrine that the standard of right is divinely "revealed," and that we do right in virtue of divine command. That doctrine once abandoned, supernaturalism in morals is a mere matter of words. To admit that we have no certain light or unvarying strength of feeling as to what is right in a given case, and merely to affirm that we have a "divine call" from conscience to do what we think right when our minds are made up, is to surrender the heart of the religious position. This is what was done by Dr M'Cann and the Rev. Mr Armstrong in their debates with Bradlaugh; both clergymen nevertheless supposing themselves to be rebutting utilitarianism. The utilitarian position is of course (1) that the instinct to do "what we feel to be right" is merely organic, and often goes with conduct that is on rational grounds demonstrably wrong; (2) that the business of ethics is to settle what conduct is reasonably to be held right or wrong; and (3) that though the sense of utility is not the primary or conscious motive of all actions, it is the test by which disputed action is to be controlled. Of course it will at times be fallaciously applied, as regarded from the point of view of developed sympathy; but it can never be misapplied as grossly as the religious standard has been, and it remains the final standard of ethical appeal. Even the religionists who argue that utilitarianism is a "pernicious" doctrine virtually admit this in their very choice of epithet. The good of society is even for them the final criterion. They never hesitate, further, to seek to influence the minds of the young by the primitively utilitarian warning, "Be sure your sin will find you out." Yet they constantly denounce the Secularist doctrine as encouraging men to make primary self-interest the beginning and end of moral principle, when on the face of the case it subjects self-interest to public interest by its working formula of "the greatest good of the greatest number." The religious argument against that formula always ends in putting the fancy case of the starving man with a starving family, who steals a loaf of bread from somebody who does not miss it. The religious implication is that the whole family had better starve than commit such a theft—a doctrine which may be left to the decision of common-sense. It is only to be wished that Christian politics even remotely approached the scrupulosity paraded in this controversy.

As for the point of disinterestedness, the history of Freethought in general, and the life of Bradlaugh in particular, will serve to show whether or not the recognition of utility as the final test of the right or wrong of actions has led men to put the low utility above the high, the near above the far. To do the former would be to abandon the very avowal of the principle, since it always brings odium and injury on the avowers. The very persistence of an unpopular movement is the decisive proof that its promoters have sought higher ends than money gain. What the utilitarian principle has done for Bradlaugh and those like-minded is not to give them the primary impulse to fight for truth and right as they see them, but to give them an enduring support in the battle. The first impulse springs from veracity of character plus knowledge; but it is sure to be opposed by bitter criticism, imputing to the straightforward course all manner of evil results. When the reformer is convinced that not only truth and justice but the highest utility itself is on his side, he is thrice armed. And if with some unbelievers the rejection of transcendental moral principles has meant the return to a timid or a base conformity, they are at least no worse guided than before, and the blame of their dissimulation must lie with the religious system which not only counsels but enforces it, not with the doctrine which classes social dissimulation as a vice. Certain it is that under the auspices of the Christian creed England has lived mainly for low and narrow utilities, and not for the high and broad; the transcendental creed availing only to worsen matters by adding to the forces of evil the element of persecuting bigotry. Rationalism once for all excludes the last factor; and if it ever lends itself to a popular disregard of the great utilities and a pursuit of the small, which are the undoing of the great, it will assuredly not be in virtue of following such a lead as Bradlaugh's.

Of his influence on his followers those can best speak who have mixed with them. Personal and magnetic as it was, it depended for its continuance on the unvarying nobility of his appeal to the best instincts—to courage, honour, justice, and the love of truth. Hundreds of men—men to whom the generality of pulpit sermons are either inane commonplaces or maudlin nonsense—can testify to the fashion in which he stirred them to high sympathies and generous determinations, making life for all of them, however narrow their sphere, a vista of worthy activities and abiding consolations.

It is part of the condemnation of modern orthodoxy that its warfare with Atheism has run mainly to libel—not merely libel on individual Atheists, but sweeping aspersion of the whole movement. The records are embarrassing in the sheer multitude of the samples; and one utterance may serve for a thousand. In the early part of Bradlaugh's Parliamentary struggle an orthodox periodical named Social Notes, of which the Marquis of Townshend was editorial director, made the typical assertion:—

"It is a well-known fact that there is no criminal so fearless in doing evil, so hopelessly bad and beyond chance of recovery, as the Atheist criminal is. Atheism and ignorance commonly create the first step to crime. As Atheism grows in the minds of the lower classes, so crime increases."

The statement can only have come from a writer of a partially criminal type, since it states not merely a gross untruth, but one for which the writer cannot possibly have believed he had any evidence. So far from the fact being as he says, it is perfectly well established that there are almost no Atheist criminals. Readers can satisfy themselves on this head by reading the chapter on "Atheism in Prison" in the "Jottings from Jail" of the Rev. J. W. Horsley,[100] a writer not at all disposed to say any good of Atheism. But the folly of the statement cited will probably be recognised by most people on simply reflecting that crime was most abundant in the ages when Atheism was practically unknown; that it is common now in countries where there is no anti-religious propaganda whatever among the common people; that the professional brigands of Greece and Italy are faithful children of the Church; and that nearly every murderer executed in this country avows beforehand a confident assurance of being welcomed in Paradise. Only one Secularist, so far as the present writer is aware, has ever been convicted of murder; and he was no typical criminal, but a man congenitally liable to delirious fits of passion. When he knew of their approach he warned the people about him not to thwart him; and only in one of these fits, on intense provocation from a man who had wronged him, did he strike a deadly blow with a chance weapon. He expressly forbade petitions for commutation of his sentence, deliberately preferring to end a marred and maimed life.

Those who really suppose Atheism tends to promote crime know as little of the nature of criminals as of the logic of Atheism. The immense majority of criminals are unintelligent, and as such are immeasurably more likely to be superstitious than to be atheistic. A man of bad character may indeed be an Atheist in virtue of his reasoning powers; but the same powers will tend to withhold him from breach of the criminal law. The recent insinuations of the present Bishop of Manchester as to the effects of secular education in the colony of Victoria will impress no one who is conversant with criminal statistics;[101] and are repudiated by those qualified to speak in the colony itself. Of similar weight are the clerical assertions that the Anarchist mania in France is a result of the "godless" teaching of the public schools. It has been shown on the contrary that some of the most prominent Anarchist miscreants have had a careful clerical training; while the Anarchists themselves have never produced a criminal to compare with the priest Bruneau. The organised Libres-Penseurs of France have made a speciality of ethics, publishing more matter on that head than on any other.

It is not necessary to answer again, but it is edifying to cite, one of the many utterances in which Atheism has been held up to horror as tending to universal bloodshed. Such an utterance was this of Bishop Magee, delivered in his cathedral of Peterborough in June 1880, and thus specially made to bear on the claim of Bradlaugh to sit in Parliament:—

"A nation of Atheists must be a nation of revolutionists; their history must be a history of revolution marked by intervals of grinding, cruel, pitiless, and unreproved slaughter, because for weakness there would be no appeal to the supreme power against present tyranny."

In the rhetoric of religion, folly and frenzy are thus sometimes so mingled that together they make censure shade into derision, and derision into melancholy. Neither reason nor experience can hinder some men from putting the wildest figments in place of the plainest teachings of history. Dr Magee had before him the history of his own faith, which began in bitter and sanguinary schism, and within a few hundred years had raised deadly civil war throughout the civilised world; which has made more pretexts for war throughout its era than could possibly have arisen without it; and which in our own country was the inspiration of some of the worst strifes in our annals. He had before him the judgment of Bacon, unwillingly following on an unreasoned criticism, that "Atheism did never perturb states ...; but superstition hath been the confusion of many states." And the Bishop's rant, despicable in itself, was used to excite new Christian malice against a man who had again and again met the verbal violence of pro-revolutionaries with the strongest protests against revolutionary methods; who loved peace and hated war; and who had time and again resisted and denounced the unjust English wars to which the Bishop's Church had given its blessing. Thus is Atheism impugned by piety. At the very time when Dr Magee's rhetoric was being used to keep Bradlaugh out of Parliament, the National Secular Society was on his prompting petitioning strongly against the war waged by the English Government on the Boers in South Africa.[102]

The only form of the orthodox imputation which is even decently plausible is the suggestion that the loss of religious belief may leave some men more ready than before to venture on vice that is not legally punishable. This is no doubt theoretically possible; and in cases where boys have had such a religiously bad education that they know of no rational veto on misconduct, harm may sometimes arise on their finding that the religion taught them is incredible. But young men who reason so far are likely to reason further; and in any case a few plain considerations will serve to convince any candid mind that there is no causal connection between scepticism and vice; though it stands to reason that the habit of scepticism will promote the critical discussion on the institution of marriage. On the one hand, the sexual instinct has in all ages gone to the worst excess under the auspices of religions which expressly glorified asceticism; and the facts of the life of the ages of faith in Europe make it clear that, even on the orthodox definition of vice, there cannot possibly be more of it in the future than there has been in the past. On the other hand, the utilitarian arguments against vice, properly so called, are much better fitted to impress than the religious; and they leave no such loophole as the others inevitably do in respect of the Christian doctrine of pardon for sin, to say nothing of the iniquity of the Christian ethic which holds one and the same act ruinous in a woman and venial in a man. Of course, if the celibate life, and marriage without possibility of divorce, be made the standard of virtue, rationalism is likely to give piety plenty of occasion for outcry in matters of morals, as in matters of opinion.

However that may be, it has to be noted that Bradlaugh was not at all "advanced," as things go, on the subject of the marriage institution. Constantly accused of endorsing "Free Love" doctrines, he as constantly repudiated the charge. In 1881 we find him indignantly protesting that not only bad men, but men of whose honesty in other things he was sure, "constantly repeated, as though they were his, views on Socialism which he did not hold, views on marriage which never had an equivalent in his feelings, and declarations on prostitution which were abhorrent to his thought."[103] The "Free Love" charge was commonly founded on his alleged acceptance of the whole doctrine of the work entitled "The Elements of Social Science." No such acceptance ever occurred. He was the last man to vilify a benevolent and temperate writer for doctrines with which he could not agree; but in the reprint of his pamphlet on "Jesus, Shelley, and Malthus,"[104] he explicitly wrote of the author in question: "His work well deserves careful study; there are in it many matters of physiology on which I am incompetent to express an opinion, and some points of ethics from which I expressly and strongly dissent." Not only did he thus reject the "advanced" doctrine of sexual freedom: he never committed himself to any such proposition as that of Mill, that the institution of the family needs "more fundamental alterations than remain to be made in any other great social institution," or that of James Mill, cited without disapproval by his son, as to the probable development of freedom in the sexual relation.[105]

It was thus grossly unjust to cast upon the Secularist movement, as did Bishop Fraser of Manchester in the worst stress of Bradlaugh's parliamentary struggle, the imputation of promoting positive cruelty on the part of men towards women. That episode was for many a melancholy proof of the perverting power of bigotry in a naturally conscientious man. The Bishop publicly put it as a natural deduction from Secularist teaching that a man might put away his wife when she grew old and ugly, or "sick, or otherwise disagreeable to him," simply because she thus ceased to please him; and when a Secularist wrote him to point out the injustice of this assertion, and the nature of the ordinary rationalist view of marriage, his Grace disingenuously quoted the statement that Secularists repudiated the "sacredness" of marriage, without adding the explanation which his correspondent had given as to the proper force of that term. The whole outburst was an angry and unscrupulous attempt to put upon Secularist teaching the vice which admittedly flourished in the Bishop's diocese among non-Secularists. All the while, the doctrine he had put upon Secularism lay in his own Bible, and nowhere else:—

"When a man taketh a wife, and marrieth her, then shall it be, if she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some unseemly thing in her, that he shall write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house" (Deut. xxiv. 1).

These and other doctrines had been made by Bradlaugh part of his indictment of Bible morality. He saw that while women are dependent, power of self-divorce cannot justly be allowed to husbands. He was certainly in favour of greater facilities for divorce; but he took no part in the discussion as to whether marriage is a failure; and he always argued for a legal contract, in the interests of the woman and children, as against informal unions; though, of course, he passed no moral censure on women in a state of economic independence who chose the latter. His own sad experience never made him decry marriage; and he never would have subscribed to the doctrine of Professor Pearson, that "love should have the privilege of his wings," save in so far as he would give freedom of legal divorce. In short, he did not realise the fancy picture of "modern Materialism" painted by religious sentiment, any more than the fancy picture of the pragmatist. He was not even a lover of "realism" in fiction. Like Büchner (whose favourite author is Shakespeare), he could not enjoy Zola; and on Hugo's death he eulogised that poet in express contrast to the new school which had begun to write him down.

But he did not set up to be a literary critic, or an æsthetic person in any sense. His own art was oratory, and of that he was master by dint not of conscious study, but of sincerity, energy, and endless activity. He spoke to persuade, to convince, to crush; and he never spoke save on a conviction. It thus lay in his nature that he should be a politician as earnestly as he was a Freethinker. His Atheism, his logic, his utilitarianism, all combined to make him a strenuous reformer in the field of government, and a full half of his whole activity—more than half in the latter years—was turned to making life better and saner than it had been under the regimen of religion. The absurd pretence that Atheism makes men pessimistic and supine becomes peculiarly absurd when tested by his career. He was no optimist: he had no delusions about the speedy perfectibility of men, singly or in mass; but no man was less inclined to the new pessimism, which turns its philosophy to the account of commonplace conservatism all round. A clerical opponent, debating with him, protested that Atheists ought to be in a state of black despair at the evil of the world, which the reverend gentleman on his part viewed with serenity, holding that the God who wrought it must intend to put matters right hereafter. A lay study of the problem, however, reveals the fact that hopeful and despairing frames of mind are not as a rule determined by theoretic beliefs one way or the other. Bradlaugh had the good fortune to combine the keenest interest in ideas and the clearest insight into human character with a boundless enthusiasm for action; and he perfectly recognised that a similar temperament in the latter respect might go with what he held to be delusion in philosophy. It is the fashion of conformists without beliefs to speak of propagandist rationalism as "intolerant"—a use of the term which, though it may be at times permissible in common talk, is a complete perversion of its essential purport. Applied to action, the word has no proper force save as implying the wish or attempt to curtail freedom and inflict positive injury on the score of opinion. No such charge can justly be made against Freethinkers in general, or Bradlaugh in particular. The practice of boycotting for opinion's sake he detested and denounced, and never in any way resorted to. He even carried the spirit of "tolerance" to an extreme degree in his own affairs, being careful, as his daughter testifies, to avoid giving his children anything like specific anti-theological teaching, on the ground that the opinions of the young ought not to be stereotyped for them on points which they ought to reconsider for themselves when they grow up. In intercourse with those about him he was equally scrupulous; and all the contributors to his journal can tell how complete was the freedom he gave them to express in its pages opinions from which he dissented. In this he was far superior to many who have aspersed him as overbearing. It was a point of honour with him to give a hearing in his columns to all manner of opposition to his own views; and no man was ever less apt to let his philosophical convictions bias him in his practical or political relations with people of another way of thinking. Hence he was able not only to follow, but to follow with a chivalrous devotion, such a political leader as Mr Gladstone, of whose latter writings on religious matters he found it difficult to speak without a sense of humorous humiliation.[106] But his political teaching must be separately considered.

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