"Now that the fierce struggle is over, and that I am really in full enjoyment of the right and privilege which the people of Northampton gave me on the day of the poll, I beg my friends not to mar this triumph by any undue words of exultation or ungenerous boast. If bitter bigotry and Tory malice have been active against me personally, there has been also honest, earnest piety, in despite of the foulest and most persistent misrepresentations, enlisted in the grand array on behalf of right. If some clergymen have been cruel and unjust in language and conduct, there have also been preachers who have been most generous and kindly. Do not let our Freethinking friends remember so much what we as a party have done towards the result, as what has been done for us by religious men, notwithstanding the cry of heresy. If the heart of the great Nonconformist party had not been brave and just, the fight, instead of being so far over, would yet have to be fought. The speeches of religious men like William Ewart Gladstone, John Bright, Henry Richard, and Charles Stewart Parnell—each representing a varying shade of Christian belief, and each a most earnestly religious man—must more than outweigh, and cause our friends to pass by, the rabid, raving, fanatical outpourings and deliberate misrepresentations which have disfigured the Parliamentary discussions on this subject. When the reader remembers that the very vilest mis-statements and coarsest caricatures of my language and conduct have been circulated to every member of Parliament, ... it makes worthy of the strongest praise the high-minded conduct of those Nonconformists in the House of Commons who have declared for justice despite all."
But no good-feeling on his part or on that of the tolerant religious minority could stay the torrent of libel and vituperation; and a paragraph penned a month later shows how the majority bore themselves:—
"Many of my good friends have—during the progress of the bye-elections which have taken place at Oxford, Scarborough, Berwick, Wigton, and other boroughs—written indignantly as to the exceedingly wanton and coarse personal slanders which, chiefly for electioneering purposes, have been circulated against me by the Conservatives in order to induce votes against supporters of the Government. It is a little difficult to know how properly to deal with these most indefensible and cowardly attacks. By the law as it stands no action can be maintained for any spoken words unless an indictable offence is charged in the slander, or unless actual special pecuniary damage can be shown to have resulted, which latter is of course not in question.... Thus, Sir John D. Hay—who in the Wigton election has descended to a lower depth of coarseness and falsehood than any other Parliamentary candidate[146]—could not be sued for damages.... The journals may of course be sued; but even if this is a wise course, the case is not easy. I am now proceeding against the Yorkshire Post for one very gross libel, and in the proceedings, which will be very costly, am actually required to answer voluminous interrogatories, not only as to all the doctrines I have taught and works I have published or written during the whole of my life, but also to works I happen to have referred to.... In the indictment against the editor of the British Empire[147] I shall probably have to bring a large number of witnesses from various parts of England to speak as to what has happened at lectures as far back as 1860. The fearful cost in this case (in which, being a criminal procedure, counsel must be employed) can only be fairly estimated by professional men.... I refrain from commenting on the infamous, most cowardly, and utterly uncalled-for attacks made on Mrs Besant by Sir John Hay and the Glasgow News, as these will in all probability be submitted to another tribunal."
Some of these proceedings had to be abandoned, so enormous was the burden.
A leading part had been early taken in the outcry against the Atheist by the leading representative in England of the Church of Rome, Cardinal Manning. In a highly declamatory and malevolent article contributed to the Nineteenth Century, that ecclesiastic took the line of appealing to the spirit of traditional national religiosity, grounding his case not on any tolerable form of Christian doctrine, but on the ignorant instinct that he knew to underlie the orthodoxy of the Protestant Churches, as of his own. He lauded the English people, regardless of its attitude to his own Church:—
"It knows nothing," he declared, "of a race of sophists who, professing to know nothing about God, and law, and right and wrong, and conscience, and judgment to come, are incapable of giving to Christian or to reasonable men the pledges which bind their moral nature with the obligations necessary for the command of fleets and armies, and legislatures and commonwealths."
Of the historic fact that the English people had once brutally persecuted the Quakers, but had latterly allowed them to dispense with oath-taking, he disposed by saying that they were allowed to affirm because they were known to be deeply religious, and therefore trustworthy:—
"But let no man tell me that this respectful confidence is to be claimed by our Agnostics; much less by those, if such there be, who, sinking by the inevitable law of the human mind below the shallowness and timidity of Agnosticism, plunge into the great deep of human pride, where the light of reason goes out, and the outer darkness hides God, His perfection, and His laws....
"There still stands on our Statute book a law which says that to undermine the principles of moral obligation is punishable by forfeiture of all places of trust (9 and 10 Will. c. 32, Kerr's Blackstone, iv. 34, 35, note), but there is no law which says that a man who publicly denies the existence of God is a fit and proper person to sit in Parliament, or a man who denies the first laws of morals is eligible to make laws for the homes and domestic life of England, Scotland, and Ireland."