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NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
TIIE
CRUSADES:
Gbeir IRealitp and IRomance.
BY
SALADIN
Author of “ God and His Book" “Lays of Romance
and Chivalry” “ Roses and Rue" etc.
LONDON:
W. STEWART & CO., 41 FARRINGDON ST., E.C.
�By SALADIN.
Price 1d., Post Free 1^d., unless otherwise specified.
HISTORICAL PAMPHLETS.
THE DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE.
A Reply to Cardinal Manning.
THE CRUSADES. Their Reality and Romance.
CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION.
THE FLAGELLANTS.
THE ICONOCLASTS.
THE INQUISITION. Parti.
THE INQUISITION. Part II.
THE DANCERS, SHAKERS AND JUMPERS. Part I.
THE DANCERS, SHAKERS AND JUMPERS. Part II.
THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS. Part I.
THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS. Part II.
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. A Letter to Cardinal Manning.
Part I.
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. A Letter to Cardinal Manning.
Part II.
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.
Part III.
A Letter to Cardinal Manning.
ST MUNGO.
The Saint who Founded Glasgow. Price 3d.,
post free 4d.
Or in one vol., handsomely bound in cloth, gilt lettered, 2s., post
free 2s. 2d.
MISCELLANEOUS PAMPHLETS.
THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS. Price id., post free i|d.
A VISIT TO MR SPURGEON’S TABERNACLE.
With Portrait.
A VISIT TO THE GRAVE OF THOMAS CARLYLE.
With Portrait.
ROBERT BURNS: WAS HE A FREETHINKER?
With Portrait. Appendix :—The Prize Poem in Connection
with the Dumfries Statue to Burns.
HELL : W^HERE IS IT? Price id., post free ijd.
BEETLES AND BATHERS: Coffins and Cantrips.
CONCERNING THE DEVIL.
A FEARFUL FLOGGING. Price 3d., post free 4d.
THE AGONIES OF HANGING. Price 3d., post free 4d.
The above, in one vol., cloth, gold lettered, price ir. 6d., post
free ir. 8<7.
LONDON: W. STEWART & CO., 41 FARRINGDON STREET, E.C.
�REALITY.
Th e maddest and bloodiest picture in the history of the
world is a Christian picture. As the picture is wound
off the reel of Time it is two centuries in length,* and
is everywhere hideous with swords and skeletons and
cinders. Like everything else in sacerdotal history, such
a refulgent halo of sanctity and romance has been flung
over it as to render its true and horrible lineaments
almost imperceptible. It has been urged that the
Crusades opened up and developed the resources of
commerce, and conferred sundry other blessings upon
the occidental nations. Perhaps so they did. But, if
hell were to be established on Salisbury Plain, and burn
all England to ten feet below the level of the Atlantic,
theologians would tax their ingenuity to prove that the
globe had benefited by the fiery destruction and ever
lasting immersion of England. Say what you may about
the opening-up of commerce and the introduction of
oriental culture, every footprint of the Crusades is
marked with blood, every step is profaned with lust, every
impulse is tainted with madness.
How was it that, for centuries before the first Crusade,
under the polite permission of the caliphs of Bagdad,
Christian pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre had visited
Jerusalem with impunity? How was it, if the Moham
medans were such perfidious and detested monsters, that
the renowned Haroun al Raschid, with all the delicacy
of oriental courtesy, sent the keys of Jerusalem as a
friendly present to the Christian Charlemagne ?
It was not till the incursions from the madhouses and
* The Crusades were carried on from the end of the eleventh
till the end of the thirteenth century.
�4
THE CRUSADES :
piggeries of Europe became intolerable, that caliph
Hakem felt induced to put a curb upon the fanatical
nuisance. If a polite and tolerant Mohammedan had
still been caliph, the pilgrims might still have gone un
scathed ; but they had now to do with one of their own
persecuting and intolerant breed. Caliph Hakem was
the son of a Christian woman. Besides, the pilgrim
nuisance had never been so abominable as now. The
Rev. xx. 2-3 canard respecting the fast-approaching end
of the world,* had poured into Europe a religious rabblement without precedent in the previous ages. Numbers
of devout wastrels managed to return from their pious
peddling Jerusalemward, and to represent how they had
been snubbed and kicked by the subjects of the Fatamite caliphs. Nobody seemed to mind whether the
pilgrims had been snubbed and kicked or not—perhaps
thinking that, even if they had been, they had got only
their deserts—till a clapper-tongued religious lunatic,
Monk Peter of Amiens, known as Peter the Hermit,
magnified his kicking into an outrage upon Christen
dom, and thereby unscrewed the sluices which poured
forth rivers of human blood, heaped Asia Minor with
human skeletons, and made history march for two
hundred years up and down a hideous Golgotha.
“ Is,” bawled Peter, “ the land which was trodden by
the feet of the blessed Redeemer to be soiled and
insulted by the sandals of the followers of the CamelDriver of Islam ? Is it possible that over Tabor, the
scene of the Transfiguration—over Olivet, from which
the Saviour ascended into heaven—the Crescent banner
of an alien faith shall be permitted to wave ? Shall the
Infidel be allowed to perform his revolting rites over the
site of the manger at Bethlehem ? Shall a race that
knows not the Lord jabber its pagan litanies in the
Garden of Gethsemane, and by the Pool of Siloam ?
Shall the muezzin sound where sounded the voice of
Jesus ? Shall the spot be blasted with desecration whence
the cross flung its shadow down the brow of Calvary,
and shall heathen scimitars guard the Holy Grave where
the body of the Lord was laid, the spices and the myrrh
* See Saladin’s “The Divine Interpretation of Scripture: A
Reply to Cardinal Manning.”
�THEIR REALITY AND ROMANCE.
5
of his entombment mingling with the blood from his
hands and feet and wounded side and thorn-pierced
brow—the blood of God himself, designed to redeem a
lost world from the eternal torments of the damned?
Is this, and the insult and murder of the pilgrims to the
tomb of God, to be endured ? By the arm of Omnipo
tence, No ! Are there no hearts in Europe, no swords
in Christendom—is there no blood in France that is ready
to be shed to avenge the sacrilege to the blood that
darkened the rough bark of the tree at Calvary at the
hour when Death and Hell were conquered; when the
sun grew dark in the heavens, when the veil of the
Temple was rent and the graves of Salem gave up their
dead ? For the blood of the Son of God are ye pre
pared to give the blood of the sons of Men ? In this
case, he who would save his life shall lose it. May
torment unutterable be his who would for a moment
think of his safety or his life, when the God who gave
them demands that they be laid down in his cause !
Horse and stirrup, sword and lance, the spear, the gipon,
and the shirt of mail! Rush on their battalia like a boiling
torrent, and hurl the Infidel to Death and Hell, or may
Tophet and agony eternal wait upon you and yours, even
to the end of the world ! To Jerusalem ! to Jerusalem !
Rescue the Holy Sepulchre ! Hear in my voice the
voice of Doom, and see in the heavens the arm of the
Almighty waving you on to the East to rescue the tomb
where his Son was laid ! ”
The response was a roar of voices and a clash of swords.
“ Deus vult” quoth the monks ; and the laity murmured,
“ It is the will of God.” So much for the oratory of
Peter, puny, ragged, and dirty, bareheaded, barefooted,
riding on an ass, and driven crazy by the naggings of a
vixenish wife much older than himself.
Thus, or somehow thus, were the orations of the
Hermit, and accompanied by forceful and vehement
gesticulations, and hissed and thundered and gasped with
all the intensity and fury of fanatical rhetoric; and their
effect may easily be imagined upon an age that was
romantic or nothing, and a people strongly disposed to
religious emotion and martial enterprise. The oratory
of the Hermit set France on fire. The land seethed and
�6
THE CRUSADES :
boiled and reeled under the lava and detonations of an
oratorical volcano. Wild dreams usurped the place of
sober, waking life. A mad medley rushed to Peter to
offer their services to him or to whoever would lead them
to Judea to rescue the Holy Sepulchre.
Provisions and modes of transport were overlooked.
All classes and conditions of men flew to arms and
insisted upon being led at once to Jerusalem. The sick
rose from the bed of disease or death ; the lame and
crippled came with their staves and crutches ; the noble
brought his riches, and the beggar his wallet. Women
left their spindles and their cows, their embroidery and
their tapestry, to don helmet and gauntlets and carry
sword and flame into the Holy Land. And, rapidly,
helter-skelter, from all quarters, came the miscreant and
the scoundrel, the liar, the thief, the ravisher, and the
murderer, for had not Pope Urban II. and his priests
promised absolution from all sin to whomsoever should
take up arms to win back to Christendom the Tomb of
Jesus? Christendom put weapons in the hands of all
its scoundrelism and harness on the backs of all its
villainy, and hounded them on frantically to slaughter in
the name of him who has been called the Prince of Peace !
A Goose and a Goat were borne in front of the excited
rabblement, the one well symbolising its folly and the
other its lechery. Its horrible cruelty was above symbolisation; it was written with sword and torch in a
long trail of over 600 miles, proceeding from the centre
of France till lost in the wilds of Syria.
The great multitude which no man could number
surged about in its hundreds of thousands, leaving all
to God, but somehow breaking itself up into three huge
armies, the first led by Gaultier Habenichts, known in
France as “Sans Avoir,” and in England as “Walter
the Penniless.” The second army was under the com
mand of Peter the Hermit, in person; and the third
was led by Gottschalk, a monk, raving mad with religious
fanaticism.
Away rolled these armies Palestineward, a surging,
muddy, and boiling river of the social scum and refuse
of Europe. The very sort of rabble that the Roman
historians tell us first embraced the Christian faith now,
�THEIR REALITY AND ROMANCE.
7
eleven centuries later, laid on the Christian shrine the
offering of their filthy hearts and dirty swords. And
now, some six centuries later still, the scum of England
lays its rowdy hymn and horrid tambourine on the shrine
of the same faith—ever the same rabid rabble through
all the centuries, whether it follow General Booth or
Walter the Penniless ! I mourn the fact, and, with all
the valour of despair, set myself to the task of Sisyphus.
“ Is that Jerusalem?” was the cry of the ignorant host
whenever on their march a town came in sight. If the
leaders, many of whom were nearly as ignorant as their
followers, had led their hosts to Rome, Paris, or London,
and cried, “There is Jerusalem!” these European
capitals would have been razed to the ground, and the
first stone pig-sty discovered in any of them would
probably have been hailed as the Holy Sepulchre, and
any hog’s bristles collected therein would likely have been
adored as the hairs of Jesus. On, dying by hundreds
■and thousands, the motley multitude pursued its way,
and the wolf followed for the carnival of human flesh,
and great coveys of ravens and vultures darkened the
sky overhead. On, in front, went the Goat and the
Goose, and on, behind, followed every fool (and worse)
with the sign of the cross upon his shoulder, symbolical
of the two transverse sticks to which his deity was alleged
to have been nailed. But carpenter or tom-cat, god or
cockroach, would have served equally well as a peg upon
which to hang the antics of ignorant fanaticism.
Slaughter, rapine, and ravishment were the order of
the day wherever the hosts of the Crusaders rolled.
Having made no provisions for their march, leaving that
to “ Providence,” they ate up and devoured everything
that lay within reach. Those who resisted their rapine
were run through the body with spears, or cleft to the
chin with axes, as enemies of God, and their wives and
daughters were violated, and then butchered by the
soldiers of Jesus on their march to thrust back the Infidel
from the stone sepulchre that had belonged to Joseph
of Arimathea. The Crusading camp itself—containing
thousands of she-fanatics from Christendom—was a
saturnalia of barbarous licentiousness. Loose rein was
given to almost unheard-of and unprecedented iniquities,
�8
THE CRUSADES :
for had not the Church impressed upon the mob the
assurance that taking up arms against the Infidel was an
atonement for every possible transgression, and that all
who now set out for the Old Jerusalem on earth had
thereby secured an incontestible right to enter the New
Jerusalem in heaven ?
What disease and debauchery and famine had left of
the holy rabble trailed along through Hungary. The
Hungarians hailed them as brother Christians bound
upon a sacred errand, and wished them God-speed. But
they soon discovered that the pious Crusaders were only
a horde of impious fiends, who repaid hospitality with
cruelty, rapine, and lust. This was too much for the
Hungarians. Stung to retaliation by deeds of wrong,
outrage and base ingratitude, they flew to arms, and
falling upon the disordered rear of the Crusaders, saved
some thousands of them the trouble of proceeding any
further towards the Holy Land by leaving their corpses
to rot on the plains of Hungary. On the still numerous
remnant swarmed into Bulgaria. The Bulgarians flew to
arms to guard the mountain passes against the murdering
and ravishing demons of the Red Cross; and hundreds
and thousands, instead of being privileged to set foot on
the Holy Land or cross swords with the Infidel, under
the weapons of brother Christians, left their bodies to feed
the eagles of the Thracian hills.
At last, about one-third of the horde that left France,
footsore and worn, haggard and gaunt, hungry, ragged,
and naked, malodorous from putrid wounds, wild with
hardship, mad with fanaticism, and festering with vermin,
staggered into Constantinople, the unquenchable fire of
theological frenzy still blazing within them, and urging
them on to Jerusalem and the tomb, where their carpenter
and world-maker was alleged to have lain.
The experiences of the multitude under the Hermit
were much the same as those of the multitude that
followed Walter the Penniless. Of them too, a miserable
remnant reached Constantinople. The third army, under
Gottschalk, never got so far. It was treacherously fallen
upon by the Hungarians and put to the sword, no man
or woman being allowed to escape to tell the tale. And
yet their fate was, perhaps, less tragic than that of their
�THEIR REALITY AND ROMANCE.
9
brethren, who, by dint of strong constitution and in
domitable hardihood, had reached Constantinople. They
crossed over into Syria, only to be mowed down like grass
under the sharp and crooked scimitars of the very Infidel
Turks they, under the auspices of their deity, had
set out so confidently to vanquish. And all this in thy
blessed memory, O Jesus ! Here were ravages of fire
and sword, to which the destruction of the army of
Xerxes is almost insignificant, and the retreat of Napoleon
from blazing Moscow to
“ Berescina’s icy flood, .
Riven with shot and thawed with blood.”
Still mad with priestcraft, indomitable and undaunted,
Christendom poured out her treasure and her life to
drive the Infidel from the Holy Land. But all in vain.
The votaries of the Camel-Driver had still the best of it
against the followers of the Carpenter. The excesses and
crimes of the Christians had been such that, at length, it
occurred to them that their non-success might be heaven’s
retaliation upon them for their wickedness. Damascus,
they became convinced, could not be taken by the guilty ;
so they determined to try the effect of a siege by the
innocent. Accordingly, an army of children was the
craze of the year 1212. A contemporary monkish
chronicler writes : “ There came together, from different
countries, I know not how, so many children that they
made a formidable army. These little ones had standards
carried before them, setting forth that they were going
to cross the sea, and that the Holy Land had been
assigned to them as an inheritance, as it had been to
the children of Israel. In whatever town they arrived,
the inhabitants received them in the name of God.”
This army of child Crusaders was led by a boy named
Nicolas, a native of Cologne. Two ship - loads of
Crusading children were embarked at Genoa; but they
never reached Palestine. The boys were sold as
slaves and the girls to the oriental harems of the
Infidel. The children had been taught to expect that
the Mediterranean would divide, as the Red Sea had
done before the Israelites, and let them pass over to
�IO
THE CRUSADES :
Syria on dry land. But when the poor little dupes found
that the Mediterranean would not oblige in the manner
they had been led to expect it would, as many as could
find room were crowded into the two ships, and of the
thousands left behind, the greater number died of
starvation, and all for the traditional grave of this priestinvented Jew I
More than one army of children took the cross and
were equipped for the Holy Land; but only to the
advantage of the slave-owner and the master of the
harem. And the Christian chroniclers are compelled
to admit that certain monks and traders were active in
getting up child-crusades in order that they might enrich
themselves by shipping off the boys to be sold for
slavery, and the girls for prostitution. And all this in
thy name and for thy glory, O Jesus ; and here, nearly
nineteen centuries after thy alleged crucifixion, I am
called an “Infidel,” because I yearn to waken Man from
the nightmare of Priestcraft, and lead him forth into the
bracing morning of a more rational and a happier world 1
The Christians teach that man was made in the image
of God, and that his body is “ the temple of the Holy
Ghost;” and yet they voraciously ate “the temple of
the Holy Ghost ”—roast infant, and occasionally roast
adult, appeared on the tables or turned on the spits of
the Crusaders. Moreover, in the plain of Nice alone, the
Infidel piled up a mountain* of Christian bones; and at
a subsequent siege the crusaders themselves made use of
cartloads of human corpses to construct a military ram
part. So much for the use to which they put the ruins
of certain temples of the Holy Ghost!
“Not fair to visit all this upon the Church—only the
barbarism of the times,” urges the Christian apologist.
“ You, sir, distort and travesty history to suit your
purposes as a special pleader.” Not so, Stiggins of
Bethel, as regards the barbarous excesses of the Christians
and their thirst for retaliation, blood and savagery. We
go to the “ Infidel ” for magnanimity and mercy, and to the
“ Faithful ” for pusillanimity and cruelty. We have room
for one contrast only between the followers of him who
Anna Comnena describes the pile as oaricv k o Xo v o s and as
lj^rjXov k c l l /3a0os Kai irXaros a^ioXoywTarov.
�THEIR REALITY AND ROMANCE.
TI
drove a camel and the votaries of him who rode upon an
ass.
When, in 637, Jerusalem surrendered at discretion
after a four months’ siege, Ali, the general of the Arabian
forces, sent, in accordance with one of the terms of
capitulation, to request that the caliph should come in
person to ratify the articles and take possession. The
master of Persia and Syria rode, in the most simple and
unostentatious manner, from Medina to Jerusalem on a
red camel, carrying a bag of corn and one of dates, a
wooden dish, and a leathern water-bottle. On his arrival
he issued the following proclamation :—
In
t he
Na m e o f
t he
Mo s t Me r c if u l Go d .
From Omar Ebno’l Alchit&b to the inhabitants of CElia. They
shall be protected and secured, both in their lives and their fortunes,
and their churches shall neither be pulled down nor made use of by
any but themselves.
The caliph rode into the city by the side of Sophronius
the patriarch, conversing on the antiquities of the place.
When the hour of prayer struck they were in the Church
of the Resurrection. The patriarch bade the caliph pray
where he was (that was in a Christian church); but he
would not. He then took him into the Church of
Constantine (another Christian church), and laid a mat
for him to pray there; but he still refused. At last, he
went out alone, and knelt on the steps outside. He
afterwards told the patriarch that he had refused to pray
in any Christian church because, had he done so, his
followers might have seized it, and thereby broken his
promise to the Christians to respect their places of
religious worship. He further enjoined that even on the
steps they should pray only singly, nor should they meet
there to go to prayers, nor should the muezzin stand
there to call the people to prayer, lest thereby the Mos
lems might annoy the conquered Christians. 1 his
knightly faith and magnanimous toleration was natural to
a cultivated and learned race, among whom were ever
circulating such maxims as: “The ink of the doctor is
equally valuable with the blood of the martyr ; ” “ Para
dise is as much for him who has rightly used the pen as
for him who has fallen by the sword;” “The world is
�12
THE CRUSADES :
sustained by four things only—the learning of the wise,
the justice of the great, the prayers of the good, and the
valour of the brave.”
We have seen the Infidel picture of the capture of
Jerusalem ; now let us see the Christian one. When, at
last, the ramparts and towers of the Holy City yielded to
the battering-engines of Godfrey, the Christian victory
was signalised not by courteous and magnanimous
restraint, but by sanguinary and relentless massacre.
Three mortal days the Crusaders gave up to the work of
carnage. Far from their, like Omar, respecting the
religious convictions of the vanquished, they burned the
Jews to death in their synagogues, and mixed with the
ruins of the captured city the bodies of 70,000 Moslems
whom they had slain with the sword. Down blazed the
sun upon fire-blackened and siege-shattered masonry,
upon stones, and rafters, and mud caked deep with gore,
and the stench grew insupportable. A plague ensued,
and many of the Christian victors mingled their plaguestricken corpses with those of the 7°,000 Moslems who
had escaped the fever that followed by having previously
perished by the sword.
Drenched with the blood of 70,000 of the defenceless
vanquished, the Christians ascended the hill of Calvary
with all the paraphernalia of monks and crucifixes,
candles, banners, incense, and anthems, and performed
their incantations on the mount upon which their baleful
Galilean was said to have perished. They kissed the
stone (or some stone or other) which had covered the
mouth of his grave, and perpetrated religious antics in
honour of the “redeemer” who has blighted the world.
True, certain of the later of the Seven Crusades were
better managed than the first; but they "were all alike
mad and detestable and bloody. The most romantic
of them all was the third, in which that big, steel-shirted
swashbuckler and adulterer, and something else unspeak
able, Richard Coeur de Lion, bore such a prominent part.
'"Help us the Holy Grave, O God!” was the battle-cry
under which he and his Knights Templar and Hospitallers
rushed, in heavy Teuton lustihood, among the slim and
comparatively unarmed felaheen, and mowed them down
like grass before the scythe. When before Ascalon it
�THEIR REALITY AND ROMANCE.
13
was his boast, that every day he brought back to his tent
ten, twelve, or twenty heads of Infidels he had slain—
slain for the difference between Tweedledum and
Tweedledee, the difference between the Camel-Driver of
Mecca and the Carpenter of Bethlehem.
Killing an Infidel was to him much the same as
shooting a partridge is to a modern sportsman. There
had been abundance shed for Jesus during the preceding
centuries; but now every drop of blood said to have
reddened the cross at Calvary demanded a river of human
gore. He who said, “ I came not to bring peace, but a
sword,” redeemed his promise, and the land of his birth
was drunk with massacre. On the surrender of Acre to
his followers, they bargained that a piece of the true cross
which had been captured from them should be restored,
and that the sum of 200,000 talents should be paid to
them. For the payment of this sum Coeur de Lion held
the prisoners taken at Acre as hostages. Saladin, the
one glorious name connected with the Crusades, failed
to raise the money from his financially-exhausted people,
and Richard deliberately led 2,700 hostages outside the
city walls and gave his soldiers holiday sport in behead
ing them. The pastime was intensely enjoyed, and
participated in with joke and jest, and laughter and oath,
2,700 heads lay there in ghastly heaps, and 2,700 head
less corpses reeked in the hot Syrian sun. The followers
of the son of Mary had stripped to their work. Their
blades were red from point to hilt; their faces were
bespattered with, and their clothes were soaked with
blood. They stood in blood to the ankles, and stumbled
and reeled over corpses, bandying their slang and chant
ing their songs of bawd and revel. Glorious amusement 1
they had butchered the defenceless prisoners in the name
of the Nazarene! The sun went down upon that
Aceldama, and in the groves and vineyards of Palestine
died away the Crusader’s vesper cry : “ Help us the Holy
Grave, O God!'1'
1
�ROMANCE
At Ascalon, Richard I. was seized with fever.
But even severe
illness could not abate the warlike ardour of his temperament;
and when he could no longer stand upon his feet, he ordered that
he should be carried in front of the walls on a litter, that he might
superintend operations, and incite the Christians to a vigorous
prosecution of the siege.
Ha ! ha ! my veins are raging hot,
My hectic senses reel!
Pshaw, fever! Bring my harness, squire,
My morion of steel.
I cannot live supine like this,
And die like coward slave ;
Ho, reeling front of battle be
The death-bed of the brave !
No, no, my Berengaria !
Take that bandage from my head;
And bring me, gentle wife of mine,
The iron helm instead :
And put thy snow-white favour
In my plume, so dark and high;
Steel harness be my winding-sheet,
A soldier let me die !
Know, in this sainted Palestine,
The Saviour died for me ;
And my good sword and strong right arm,
Shall strike for Him, and thee.
�THE CRUSADES: THEIR REALITY AND ROMANCE.
And ne’er shall heathen sandals tread,
And heathen banners wave ;
O’er the garden of His agony,
The glory of His grave !
No 1 o’er the Moslem turban,
And the flashing scimitar ;
We’ll pour the hosts of England,
In the thunder-crash of war.
On, warriors of the high crusade,
Bended bow and swinging sword ;
And wave o’er pagan Ascalon
The banner of the Lord !
Gird on my heavy armour,
Bring my war-horse from the stall;
Sound the trumpet, shout Jehovah 1
Forward, onward to the wall!
Come, gentle Berengaria,
Through the vizor bars a kiss ;
And I’ll leave to weak old women,
A dying bed like this.
Let Leopold of Austria
Die thus, when die he may ;
Let craven Philip breathe his last,
Far from the battle fray.
The couch of Richard Lion-heart,
Must be the crimson sod,
Where, ’neath the bannered cross, he fought
For glory and for God.
See, holy Carmel’s dark with shame,
Red blushes Jordan’s tide ;
That Saladin should hold a day,
The land where Jesus died.
Ho ! where the dead lie thickest,
Upon earth’s groaning breast,
At eve, search for King Richard,
And lay him to his rest!
15
�16
THE CRUSADES: THEIR REALITY AND ROMANCE.
And not in dear old England,
Lay you your leader dead;
But deep within this holy land,
Lay you his helmed head.
Not English oak, but Syrian palm,
Shall guard his soldier’s grave ;
In the sainted land he lived to love,
The land he died to save !
Oh, Salem, for thy Holy Tomb,
Oh, England for thy throne,
King Death shall find King Richard,
With his armour girded on :
He’ll greet thee, King of Terrors,
O’er Jordan’s mortal flood,
With a forehead wreathed in laurel,
And a hand imbrued in blood!
Come, laggard knights, I charge you,
Haste, ere the sun go down;
And bear me on your shoulders,
To the ramparts of the town !
Plunge him amid the battle shock,
The grapple, yell, and groan ;
That Death may find King Richard,
With his armour girded on 1
�
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The Crusades : their reality and romance
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Ross, William Stewart [1844-1906]
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Place of publication: London
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Notes: Reality (p. [3]-13).--Romance (a poem by Ross, p.[14]-16. Publisher's advertisements on p.[2]. "by Saladin" [title page], the pseudonym of William Stewart Ross. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
THE
CRUSADES.
BY
SALADIN.
[r e t r in t e d
fr om
“t
he
secu l a r
r e v ie w .”]
Lo n d o n :
AV. STEWART & Co., 41, FARRINGDON St ., E.C.
��B50fAhJS7^
THE CRUSADES.
Th e maddest and bloodiest picture in the history of the
world is a Christian picture. As the picture is wound
off the reel of Time it is two centuries in length, and
*
is everywhere hideous with swords and skeletons and
cinders. Like everything else in Christian history, such
a refulgent halo of sanctity and romance has been flung
over it as to render its true and horrible lineaments
almost imperceptible. It has been urged that the
Crusades opened up and developed the resources of
commerce and conferred sundry other blessings upon
the occidental nations. Perhaps so they did. But, if
hell were to be established on Salisbury Plain, and burn
all England to ten feet below the level of the Atlantic,
historians would tax their ingenuity to prove that the
globe had benefitted by the fiery destruction and ever
lasting immersion of England, Say what you may about
the opening-up of commerce and the introduction of
oriental culture, every footprint of the Crusades is
marked with blood, every step is profaned with lust, every
impulse is tainted with madness.
Those who would seize history by the backbone and
shake out of it all that is in it must give it their days and
their nights, and not be satisfied with the lazy and
interested manuals that fall into the hands of the people.
You have to study the annals of the world by laying that
and that together, for, depend upon it, no priest will do
it for you, neither will any archon or basileus, for priest
and prince alike find profit in your ignorance rather than
your intelligence; and, up till now, they have, virtually,
had the terrestrial globe all to themselves, to kick it
* The Crusades were carried on from the end of the eleventh
till the end of the thirteenth century.
�4
THE CRUSADES.
wherever they liked, and they have succeeded pretty well
in kicking it to Tartarus. History has, for the most
part, been written in their interest and by their creatures.
How was it that, for centuries before the first Crusade,
under the polite permission of the caliphs of Bagdad,
Christian pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre had visited
Jerusalem with impunity ? How was it, if the Moham
medans were such perfidious and detested monsters, that
the renowned Haroun al Raschid, with all the delicacy
of oriental courtesy, sent the keys of Jerusalem as a
friendly present to the Christian Charlemagne ?
It was not till the incursions from the madhouses and
piggeries of Europe became intolerable that caliph
Hakem felt induced to put a curb upon the fanatical
nuisance. If a polite and tolerant Mohammedan had
still been caliph, the pilgrims might still have gone un
scathed ; but they had now to do with one of their own
persecuting and intolerant breed. Caliph Hakem was
the son of a Christian woman. Besides, the pilgrim
nuisance had never been so abominable as now. The
Rev. xx. 2-3 canard respecting the fast-approaching end
of the world had poured into Europe a religious rabble*
ment without precedent in the previous ages. Numbers
of holy wastrels managed to return from their devout
peddling Jerusalemward, and to represent how they had
been snubbed and kicked by the subjects of the Fatamite caliphs. Nobody seemed to mind whether the
pilgrims had been snubbed and kicked or not—perhaps
thinking that, even if they were, they had got only their
deserts—till a clapper-tongued religious lunatic, Monk
Peter of Amiens, known as Peter the Hermit, magnified
his kicked foundations into an outrage upon Christendom,
and thereby unscrewed the sluices which poured forth
rivers of human blood, heaped Asia Minor with human
skeletons, and made history march for two hundred years
up and down a hideous Golgotha.
“ Is,” bawled Peter, “ the land which was trodden by
the feet of the blessed Redeemer to be soiled and
insulted by the sandals of the followers of the Camel
* See Saladin’s “The Divine Interpretation of Scripture: A
.Reply to Cardinal Manning.”
�THE CRUSADES.
5
Driver of Islam ? Is it possible that over Tabor, the
scene of the Transfiguration—over Olivet, from which
the Saviour ascended into heaven—the Crescent banner
of an alien faith shall be permitted to wave ? Shall the
Infidel be allowed to perform his revolting rites over the
site of the manger at Bethlehem? Shall a race that
knows not the Lord jabber its Pagan litanies in the
Garden of Gethsemane and by the Pool of Siloam ?
Shall the muezzin sound where sounded the voice of
Jesus ? Shall the spot be blasted with desecration whence
the Cross flung its shadow down the brow of Calvary,
and shall heathen scimitars guard the Holy Grave where
the body of the Lord was laid, the spices and the myrrh
of his entombment mingling with the blood from his
hands and feet and wounded side and thorn-pierced
brow—the blood of God himself, designed to redeem a
lost world from the eternal torments of the damned ?
Is this, and the insult and murder of the pilgrims to the
tomb of God, to be endured ? By the arm of Omnipo
tence, No! Are there no hearts in Europe, no swords
in Christendom—is there no blood in France that is ready
to be shed to avenge the sacrilege to the blood that
darkened the rough bark of the tree at Calvary at the
hour when Death and Hell were conquered ; when the
sun grew dark in the heavens, when the veil of the
Temple was rent and the graves of Salem gave up their
dead ? For the blood of the Son of God are ye pre
pared to give the blood of the sons of Men ? In this
case, he who would save his life shall lose it. May
torment unutterable be his who would for a moment
think of his safety or his life when the God who gave
them demands that they be laid down in his cause 1
Horse and stirrup, sword and lance, the spear, the gipon,
and the shirt of mail! Rush on their battalia like a boiling
torrent, and hurl the Infidel to Death and Hell, or may
Tophet and agony eternal wait upon you and yours, even
to the end of the world ! To Jerusalem ! to Jerusa
lem ! Rescue the Holy Sepulchre 1 Hear in my voice
the voice of Doom, and see in the heavens the arm of
the Almighty waving you on to the East to rescue the
tomb where his Son was laid
The response was a
roar of voices and a clash of swords. “ Deus vult]'
�6
THE CRUSADES.
quoth the monks ; and the laity murmured, “ It is the
will of God.” So much for the oratory of Peter, puny,
ragged, and dirty, bareheaded, barefooted, riding on an
ass, and driven crazy by the naggings of a vixenish wife
much older than himself.
Thus, or somehow thus, were the orations of the
Hermit, and accompanied by forceful and vehement
gesticulations, and hissed and thundered and gasped with
all the intensity and fury of fanatical rhetoric ; and their
effect may easily be imagined upon an age that was
romantic or nothing, and a people strongly disposed to
religious emotion and martial enterprise. The oratory
of the Hermit set France on fire. The land seethed and
boiled and reeled under the lava and detonations of an
oratorical volcano. Wild dreams usurped the place of
sober, waking life. A mad medley rushed to Peter to
offer their services to him or to whoever would lead them
to Judea to rescue the Holy Sepulchre. Provisions
and modes of transport were overlooked. All classes
and conditions of men flew to arms and insisted upon
being led at once to Jerusalem. The sick rose from the
bed of disease or death; the lame and crippled came
with their staves and crutches ; the noble came with his
riches, and the beggar with his wallet. Women left their
spindles and their cows, their embroidery and their
tapestry, to don helmet and gauntlets and carry sword
and flame into the Holy Land. And rapidly, helterskelter, from all quarters, came the miscreant and the
scoundrel, the liar, the thief, the ravisher, and the
murderer, for had not Pope Urban II. and his priests
promised absolution from all sin to whomsoever should
take up arms to win back to Christendom the Tomb of
Jesus ? Christendom put weapons in the hands of all
its scoundrelism and harness on the backs of all its
villainy, and hounded them on frantically to slaughter in
the name of him who has been called the Prince of Peace !
A Goose and a Goat were borne in front of the excited
rabblement, the one well symbolising its folly and the
other its lechery. Its horrible cruelty was above symbolisation ; it was written with sword and torch in a
long trail of over 600 miles, proceeding from the centre
of France till lost in the wilds of Syria.
�THE CRUSADES.
7
The great multitude which no man could number
surged about in its hundreds of thousands, leaving all
to God, but somehow breaking itself up into three huge
armies, the first led by Gaultier Habenichts, known in
France as “Sans Avoir,” and in England as “Walter
the Penniless.” The second army was under the
command of Peter the Hermit, in person; and the third
was led by Gottschalk, a monk raving mad with the
spirit of God. Away rolled these armies Palestineward,
a surging, muddy, and boiling river of the social scum
and refuse of Europe. The very sort of rabble that
the Roman historians tell us first embraced the Chris
tian faith now, eleven centuries later, laid on the Chris
tian shrine the offering of their filthy hearts and dirty
swords. And now, some six centuries later still, the scum
of England lays its rowdy hymn and horrid tambourine
on the shrine of the same carpenter of Nazareth—ever
the same rabid rabble through all the centuries, whether
it follow General Booth or Walter the Penniless ! I
mourn the accursed fact, and, with all the valour of
despair, set myself to the task of Sisyphus.
“ Is that Jerusalem?” was the cry of the ignorant host
whenever on their march a town came in sight. If the
leaders, many of whom were nearly as ignorant as their
followers, had led their hosts to Rome, Paris, or London,
and cried, “There is Jerusalem!” these European
capitals would have been razed to the ground, and the
first stone pig-sty discovered in any of them would
probably have been hailed as the Holy Sepulchre, and
any hog’s bristles collected therein would likely have been
adored as the hairs of Jesus. On, dying by hundreds
and thousands, the motley multitude pursued its way,
and the wolf followed for the carnival of human flesh,
and great coveys of ravens and vultures darkened the
sky overhead. On, in front, went the Goat and the Goose,,
and on, behind, followed every fool (and worse) with the
sign of the cross upon his shoulder, symbolical of the two
transverse sticks to which the carpenter was alleged to
have been nailed. But carpenter or tom-cat, god or
cockroach, wrould have served equally well as a peg upon
which to hang the antics of ignorant fanaticism.
Slaughter, rapine, and ravishment were the order of
�8
THE CRUSADES.
the day wherever the hosts of the Crusaders rolled.
Having made no provisions for their march, leaving that
to the Lord, they ate up and devoured everything that
lay within reach. Those who resisted their rapine were
run through the body with spears, or cleft to the chin
with axes, as enemies of God, and their wives and
daughters were violated and then butchered by the
soldiers of Jesus on their march to thrust back the Infidel
from the stone sepulchre that had belonged to Joseph
of Arimathea. The Crusading camp itself—containing
thousands of she-fanatics from Christendom—was a
saturnalia of barbarous licentiousness. Loose reign was
given to almost unheard-of and unprecedented iniquities,
for had not the Church impressed upon the mob the
assurance that taking up arms against the Infidel was an
atonement for every possible transgression, and that all
who now set out for the Old Jerusalem on earth had
thereby secured an incontestible right to enter the New
Jerusalem in heaven ?
What disease and debauchery and famine had left of
the holy rabble trailed along through Hungary. The
Hungarians hailed them as brother Christians bound
upon a sacred errand, and wished them God-sp&ed. But
they soon discovered that the pious Crusaders were only
a horde of impious fiends, who repaid hospitality with
cruelty, rapine, and lust. This was too much for the
Hungarians. Stung to retaliation by deeds of wrong
and outrage and base ingratitude, they flew to arms, and,
falling upon the disordered rear of the Crusaders, saved
some thousands of them the trouble of proceeding any
further towards the Holy Land by leaving their corpses
to rot on the plains of Hungary. On the still numerous
remnant swarmed into Bulgaria. The Bulgarians flew to
arms to guard the mountain passes against the murdering
and ravishing demons of the Red Cross ; and hundreds
and thousands, instead of being privileged to set foot in
the Holy Land or cross swords with the Infidel, under
the weapons of brother Christians, left their bodies to feed
the eagles of the Thracian hills. At last, about one-third
of the horde that left France, footsore and worn, haggard
and gaunt, hungry, ragged, and naked, malodorous from
putrid wounds, wild with hardship, mad with religion,
�THE CRUSADES.
9
and festering with vermin, staggered into Constantinople,
the unquenchable fire of fanaticism still blazing within
them, and urging them on to Jerusalem and the tomb,
where their carpenter and world-maker had lain.
The experiences of the multitude under the Hermit
were much the same as those of the multitude that
followed Walter the Penniless. Of them, too, a miserable
remnant reached Constantinople. The third army, under
Gottschalk, never got so far. It was treacherously fallen
upon by the Hungarians and put to the sword, no man
or woman being allowed to escape to tell the tale. And
yet their fate was, perhaps, less tragic than that of their
brethren, who, by dint of strong constitution and in
domitable hardihood, had reached Constantinople. They
crossed over into Syria, only to be mowed down like grass
under the sharp and crooked scimitars of the very Infidel
Turks they, under the auspices of their carpenter, had
set out so confidently to vanquish. And all this in thy
blessed memory, O Jesus ! Here were ravages of fire
and sword, to which the destruction of the army of
Xerxes is almost insignificant, and the retreat of Napoleon
from blazing Moscow to
“ Borindino’s icy flood
Riven with shot and thawed with blood.”
Still mad with priestcraft, indomitable and undaunted,
Christendom poured out her treasure and her life to
drive the Infidel from the Holy Land. But all in vain.
The votaries of the Camel-Driver had still the best of it
against the followers of the Carpenter. The excesses and
crimes of the Christians had been such that, at length, it
occurred to them that their non-success might be heaven’s
retaliation upon them for their wickedness. Damascus,
they became convinced, could not be taken by the guilty;
so they determined to try the effect of a siege by the
innocent. Accordingly, an army of children was the
craze of the year 1212. A contemporary monkish
chronicler writes : “ There came together, from different
countries, I know not how, so many children that they
made a formidable army. These little ones had standards
carried before them, setting forth that they were going
to cross the sea, and that the Holy Land had been
�IO
THE CRUSADES.
assigned to them as an inheritance, as it had been to
the children of Israel. In whatever town they arrived
the inhabitants received them in the name of God.”
This army of child Crusaders was led by a boy named
Nicolas, a native of Cologne. Two ship-loads of
Crusading children were embarked at Genoa; but they
never reached Palestine. The boys were sold as
slaves and the girls to the oriental harems of the
Infidel. The children had been taught to expect that
the Mediterranean would divide, as the Red Sea had
done before the Israelites, and let them pass over to
Syria on dry land. But when the poor little dupes found
that the Mediterranean would not oblige in the manner
they had been led to expect it would, as many as could
find room were crowded into the two ships, and of the
thousands left behind, the greater number died of
starvation, and all for the traditional grave of this
mythical Jew ! More than one army of children took the
cross and were equipped for the Holy Land ; but only
to the advantage of the slave-owner and the master of
the harem. And the Christian chroniclers are compelled
to admit that certain monks and traders were active in
getting up child-crusaders in order that they might enrich
themselves by shipping off the boys to be sold for slavery,
and the girls for prostitution. And all this was done in
thy name and for thy glory, O pale Galilean ; and here,
nearly nineteen centuries after thy alleged crucifixion, I
am called an Infidel, and my journal is described as
blasphemous, because I yearn to waken Man from the
nightmare of the gods, and lead him forth into the bracing
morning of a more rational and a happier world.
The Christians teach that man was made in the image
of God, and that his body is “the temple of the Holy
Ghostand yet they voraciously ate “ the temple of
the Holy Ghost”—roast infant, and occasionally roast
adult, appeared on the tables or turned on the spits of
the Crusaders. In the plain of Nice alone the Infidel
piled up a mountain of Christian bones; and at a sub
*
sequent siege the Crusaders themselves made use of
* Anna Comnena describes the pile as o c t t mv k o Ao v o s and asvipyXov /?at ftaOo'i Rat 7rXaros a^toAoytoTarov.
�II
THE CRUSADES.
cartloads of human corpses to construct a military ram
part. So much for the use to which they put the rums
of certain temples of the Holy Ghost 1
“ Not fair to visit all this upon the Christians—only
the barbarism of the times,” urges the Christian apolo
gist. “ Saladin the Infidel distorts and travesties history
to suit his purposes as a special pleader.” Not so,
Stiggins of Bethel, as regards the barbarous excesses of
the Christians and their thirst for retaliation blood and
savagery. We go to the Infidel for magnanimity and
mercy, and to the Christian for pusillanimity and cruelty.
In a sketch like this we have room for one contrast only
between the followers of him who drove a camel and
the followers of him who rode upon an ass.
When, in 637, Jerusalem surrendered at discretion
after a four months’ siege, Ali, the general of the Arabian
forces, sent, in accordance with one of the terms of
capitulation, to request that the caliph should come in
person to ratify the articles and take possession. The
master of Persia and Syria rode, in the most simple and
unostentatious manner, from Medina to Jerusalem on a
red camel, carrying a bag of corn and one of dates, a
wooden dish, and a leathern water-bottle. On his arrival
he issued the following proclamation :—
In
t he
Na m e o f t h e Mo s t Me r
c if u l
Go d .
From Omar Ebno’l Alchitab to the inhabitants of CElia. They
shall be protected and secured, both in their lives and their for
tunes, and their churches shall neither be pulled down nor made
use of by any but themselves.
The caliph rode into the city by the side of Sophronius
the patriarch, conversing on the antiquities of the place.
When the hour of prayer struck they were in the Church
of the Resurrection. The patriarch bade the caliph
pray where he was (that was in a Christian church); but
he would not. He then took him into the Church of
Constantine (another Christian church), and laid a mat
for him to pray there; but he still refused. At last he
went out alone, and knelt on the steps outside. He
afterwards told the patriarch that he had refused to pray
in any Christian church because, had he done so, his
followers might have seized it, and thereby broken his
�12
THE CRUSADES.
promise to the Christians to respect their places of
religious worship. He further enjoined that even on the
steps they should pray only singly, nor should they meet
there to go to prayers, nor should the muezzin stand
there to call the people to prayer, lest thereby the Mos
lems might annoy the conquered Christians. This
knightly faith and magnanimous toleration was natural
to a cultivated and learned race, among whom were ever
circulating such maxims as : “The ink of the doctor is
equally valuable with the blood of the martyr/’ “Para
dise is as much for him who has rightly used the pen as
for him who has fallen by the sword/’ “The world is
sustained by four things only—the learning of the wise,
the justice of the great, the prayers of the good, and the
valour of the brave.”
We have seen the Infidel picture of the capture of
Jerusalem; now let us see the Christian one. When, at
last, the ramparts and towers of the Holy City yielded to
the battering-engines of Godfrey, the Christian victory
was signalised by sanguinary and relentless massacre.
Three mortal days the Crusaders gave up to the work of
carnage. Far from their, like Omar, respecting the
religious convictions of the vanquished, they burned the
Jews to death in their synagogues, and mixed with the
ruins of the captured city the bodies of 70,000 Moslems
whom they had slain with the sword. Down blazed the
sun upon fire-blackened and siege-shattered masonry,
upon stones and rafters and mud caked deep with gore,
and the stench grew insupportable. A plague ensued,
and many of the Christian victors mingled their plaguestricken corpses with those of the 70,000 Moslems who
had escaped the fever that followed by having previously
perished by the sword.
Drenched with the blood of 70,000 of the defenceless
vanquished, the Christian Thugs ascended the hill of
Calvary with all the paraphernalia of monks and cruci
fixes, candles, banners, incense, and anthems, and per
formed their incantations on the mount upon which their
baleful Galilean had perished. They kissed the stone
(or some stone or other) which had covered the mouth
of his grave, and perpetrated religious antics in honour
of the “ redeemer ” who has damned the world.
�THE CRUSADES.
13
True, certain of the later of the Seven Crusades were
better managed than the first; but they were all alike
mad and detestable and bloody. The most romantic
of them all was the third, in which that big, steel-shirted
swashbuckler and adulterer, and something else un
speakable, Richard Coeur de Lion, bore such a pro
minent part. “ Help us the Holy Grave, O God !” ws
the battle-cry under which he and his Knights Templars
and Hospitallers rushed, in heavy Teuton lustihood,
among the slim and comparatively unarmed Felaheen,
and mowed them down like grass before the scythe.
When before Askelon it was his boast that every day
he brought back to his tent ten, twelve, or twenty heads
of Infidels he had slain—slain for the difference between
Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the difference between
the Camel-Driver of Mecca and the Carpenter of Beth
lehem. Killing an Infidel was to him much the same as
shooting a partridge is to a modern sportsman. There
had been abundance shed for Jesus during the preceding
centuries; but now every drop of blood which reddened
the cross at Calvary demanded a river of human gore.
He who said, “ I came not to bring peace, but a sword,”
redeemed his promise, and the land of his birth was drunk
with massacre. On the surrender of Acre to his followers,
they bargained that a piece of the true cross which had
been captured from them should be restored, and that
the sum of 200,000 talents should be paid to them. For
the payment of this sum Coeur de Lion held the prisoners
taken at Acre as hostages. Saladin, the only gloriousname connected with the Crusades, failed to raise the
money from his financially-exhausted people, and Richard
deliberately led 2,700 hostages outside the city walls and
gave his soldiers holiday sport in beheading them. The
pastime was intensely enjoyed, and participated in with
joke and jest and laughter and oath. 2,700 heads lay there
in ghastly heaps, and 2,700 headless corpses reeked in the
hot Syrian sun. The followers of the son of Mary had
stripped to their work. Their blades were red from
point to hilt; their faces were bespattered with, and their
clothes were soaked with, blood. They stood in blood
to the ankles, and stumbled and reeled over corpses,
bandying their slang and chanting their songs of bawd.
�14
THE CRUSADES.
and revel. Glorious amusement! they had butchered
the defenceless prisoners in the name of the Nazarene !
The sun went down upon that Aceldama, and in the
groves and vineyards of Palestine died away the Crusader’s
vesper cry: “ Help us the Holy Grave, O God!”
RECENT PAMPHLETS.
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o 1
London : W. St e w a r t & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
�Post Free Three-Halfpence.
Price One Penny.
FROM THE VALLEY
OF
THE SHADOW OF DEATH.
By SALADIN.
IN
BRUNO
MEMORIAM
STEWART
ROSS,
Died 19th November, 1882, aged two years and five weeks.
London: AV. St e w a r t & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C
Recently Published.
Post free Twopence-halfpenny.
WITCHCRAFT
IN CHRISTIAN COUNTRIES.
By SALADIN.
Being an Address delivered at the Inauguration of the Secular
Society at Stockport, November 19th, 1882—the Marquis of
Queensberry in the Chair.
London: W. St e w a r t & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C
Price 2s. post free.
Elegantly printed in colours.
SONGS BY THE WAYSIDE
OF AN AGNOSTIC'S LIFE.
By Him s e l f .
“It is not an irreverent Agnosticism that is uttered in these pages,
although, without doubt, it is terribly heterodox ; but the author evidently
feels and think, which is more than can be said of some of our versifiers.-’
—Scotsman, July 21st, 1883.
London: W. St e w a r t & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
�Ev e r y Th u r s d a y .
Pr ic e Tw o pe n c e .
THE SECULAR REVIEW:
A JOURNAL OF AGNOSTICISM.
EDITED BY SALADIN.
Th e Se c u l a r Re v ie w is the recognised organ of cultured
Freethought in England, and its contributors comprise some
of the leading scholars and foremost thinkers of the country.
Subscription
...
...
2s. bD/2d. per Quarter.
Pu b l is h in g Of f ic e : 41, Fa r r in g d o n St ., Lo n d o n , E.C.
In Lim p Cl o t h .
Pr ic e 2s. Po s t Fr e e
POEMS:
GENERAL, SEOUL ARIS TIC, AND
SATIRICAL.
By LARA.
Dedicated to Saladin.
“ Contains specimens of the most biting satire penned since
the days of Pope.”
London: W. St e w a r t & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
Re c e n t l y Pu b l is h e d .
Pr ic e
is .
6d. Po s t Fr e e .
AN EXAMINATION OF THE
HYLO-IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY
DEMONSTRATING THE TRUE BASIS OF
AGNOSTICISM.
By WILLIAM BELL McTAGGART.
London: W. St e w a r t & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The Crusades
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ross, William Stewart [1844-1906]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 14, [2] p. ; 17 cm.
Notes: Reprinted from the Secular Review. Publisher's advertisements on unnumbered pages at the end. "By Saladin"[title page], the pseudonym of William Stewart Ross. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
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W. Stewart & Co.
Date
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[1883?]
Identifier
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N579
Subject
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Christianity
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The Crusades), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Crusades
NSS