Charles Bradlaugh: a Record of His Life and Work, Volume 2 (of 2)

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.

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.