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V,
Tlut^Js k^w?i> tX-| tvJ<Si>,
“IS IT REASONABLE
TO
WORSHIP GO D?”
VERBATIM REPORT
OF
TWO NIGHTS’ DEBATE AT NOTTINGHAM
BETWEEN
THE REV. R. A. ARMSTRONG
AND
CHARLES BRADLAUGH.
LONDON:
FREETHOUGHT PUBLISHING COMPANY,.
28, Stonecutter Street, E.C.
1878.
I
�LONDON :
PRINTED BY ANNIE BESANT AND CHARLES BRADLAUGH
28, STONECUTTER STREET.
�PREFACE.
I have been invited to prefix a few sentences to this
debate in its published form, and I am glad to avail myself
of the opportunity so courteously accorded.
Many have criticised my conduct in consenting to meet
in public debate one whose teachings, both theological
(or anti-theological) and social, they and I alike regard as.
in many respects of pernicious tendency. My reply is, that
those teachings are influencing large numbers of men and
women; that to denounce them, is simply to intensify their
influence in some quarters; and that they must be met
face to face if their force is to be diminished. I regard oral
public discussion as one of the least efficient methods for
the discovery of truth; but I cannot blind myself to the
fact that it is almost the only method by which what I hold
to be true, can get the ear and the attention of some classes
of the community; and I perceive that if a man can trust
his temper and is also interested in his cause and not in
himself, he may in this way do some good which he can do
in no other. If it be given him to touch one heart or
enlighten one soul, it is a cheap price to pay, that a laugh
may go against him, or even that some good and sincere
persons may think he has acted wrongly.
The debate itself can only touch the edge of subjects so
stupendous as Theism and Worship. But some may be
�IV
PREFACE.
led by it to thought or to study, on which they would not
otherwise have entered.
I select three points in this debate for a further word or
two :
(i.) I said Mr. Bradlaugh could not “ conceive a better
world.” The expression is ambiguous. He and I both con
ceive and strive to promote a better state of things than that
now existing. But we can conceive no better constitution
for a world than that of a world so constituted as to evoke
the effort of mankind to advance its progress and improve
ment. The evil is not in itself good; it is only the
necessary condition of good. The moment you conceive
a world existing from first to last without evil, you conceive
a world destitute of the necessary conditions for the
evolution of noble character; and so, in eliminating the evil,
you eliminate a good which a thousand times outweighs
the evil.
(2.) “ Either,” argues Mr. Bradlaugh, in effect, “ God could
make a world without suffering, or he could not. If he could
and did not, he is not all-good. It he could not, he is not
all-powerful.” The reply is, What do you mean by allpowerful? If you mean having power to reconcile things
in themselves contradictory, we do not hold that God is
all-powerful. But a humanity, from the first enjoying
immunity from suffering, and yet possessed of nobility of
character, is a self-contradictory conception.
(3.) I have ventured upon alleging an Intelligent Cause
of the phenomena of the universe; in spite of the fact that
in several of his writings Mr. Bradlaugh has described
intelligence as implying limitations. But though intelli
gence, as known to us in man, is always hedged within
limits, there is no difficulty in conceiving each and every
limit as removed. In that case the essential conception of
�V
PREFACE.
intelligence remains the same precisely, although the change
of conditions revolutionises its mode of working.
The metaphysical argument for Theism, though I hold
it in the last resort to be unanswerable, can never be the
real basis of personal religion. That must rest on the facts
of consciousness verified by the results in character flowing
from the candid recognition of those facts. It is useless, as
well as unscientific, for the Atheist either to deny or to
ignore those facts. The hopeless task that lies before him,
ere Theism can be overturned, is to prove that experiences
which to many a Theist are more real and more unquestion
able than the deliverances of sight, of hearing, or of touch,
are mere phantasies of the brain.
I addressed the following letter to the Editor of the
National Reformer after the debate.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE “ NATIONAL REFORMER.”
Sir,—Some of those who heard or may read the recent discussion
between Mr. Bradlaugh, and myself may be willing to pursue the
positive argument for Theism and Worship which I adopted—-as distin
guished from and supplementary to the ordinary metaphysical argument
—at greater length than the limits of time permitted me to expound it in
the debate. Will you allow me to recommend to such persons three
works which will specially serve their purpose ? These are—Theodore
Parker’s “Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion” (eighteenpence, British and Foreign Unitarian Association, 37, Norfolk Street,
Strand) ; F. W. Newman’s “ Hebrew Theism ” (half-a-crown, Triibner);
and the Rev. Charles Voysey’s “Mystery of Pain, Death, and Sin”
(Williams & Norgate, 1878). I would gladly add to these Professor
Blackie’s “ Natural History of Atheism ”—a book of much intellectual
force—were it not that he indulges too often in a strain of superior
contempt with which I have no sympathy.—I am, &c.,
Richard A. Armstrong.
Nottingham,
Sept, <pth, 1878.
�vi
PREFACE.
I only now further desire to refer the reader to Mr. Brown
low Maitland’s “Theismor Agnosticism” (eighteen-pencer
Christian Knowledge Society, 1878).
Tennyson shall utter. for me my last plea with the
doubter to throw himself upon the bosom of God in
prayer:—
“Speak to him, thou, for he hears, and spirit with spirit can.
meet,—
Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.”
R. A. Armstrong.
Nottingham,
Sept. 23rd, 1878.
�Is it Reasonable to Worship God?”
The first of two nights’ debate in the Co-operative Hall,
Nottingham, between the Rev. R. A. Armstrong and Mr.
Charles Bradlaugh; G. B. Rothera, Esq., in the chair.
The Chairman : Ladies and Gentlemen,—I have had
the pleasure, during the last few weeks, of spending a very
pleasant holiday on the heather-covered mountains of
Scotland. On reaching Edinburgh on my way homeward,
I received a letter from my friend, Mr. Armstrong, inform
ing me of the arrangements for to-night’s debate, and
of the wish that was felt that I should preside. Though a
private communication, yet as it contains the grounds
upon which the request was made, and in part also
those upon which I was induced to comply, I shall
be glad if Mr. Armstrong will kindly give me per
mission to read that letter to you. It is as follows :—“ My Dear Sir,—I have obtained your address from your
son, and you must blame him for enabling me to molest you
with my importunities in the midst of your holiday.
“ Circumstances have led to my receiving an invitation from
the local branch of the National Secular Society, and from Mr.
Bradlaugh, to debate with the latter on the reasonableness of
religious worship. At first strongly disposed to decline, I have
been led, together with the friends whom I have consulted, to
believe that it was my duty to accept the task, and, however
distasteful, I am now in for it.
“ It is to take place at the Co-operative Hall, on two consecu
tive nights, Thursday and Friday, September 5 and 6, and we
are most anxious to secure the services—which I hope will be
chiefly formal—of a competent chairman who will possess the
respect of both parties. My own friends and the Secularists
independently suggested your name, and we all feel that we
should be deeply indebted to you if you would preside over us
on the two nights. My earnest desire is to throw such a tone
into the meetings as shall make them really helpful to genuine
�8
truth-seekers, and I have good ground for believing that manysuch will be present.
■ “ I sincerely hope you will do us all this favour. I do not
know where else to turn for a chairman that will be so acceptable
to all concerned. Your speedy and favourable reply will be very
welcome to yours truly,
R. A. Armstrong.
“Burns Street, Nottingham, Aug. 24, 1878.
“ G. B. Rothera, Esq.”
Now, ladies and gentlemen, on receiving that letter my
first impulse was, I think naturally, to decline, and that
for two reasons—first, I find that as one gets on in life there
is a stronger and stronger disposition to avoid the excite
ment of public meetings, to seek more and more the ease
of one’s own arm-chair, and to enjoy that best of all society,
our books (hear). Beyond this I had real misgivings as to
my ability to fill, as I ought, the duties sought to be put upon
me. Nevertheless, on slight reflection, these difficulties
vanished. I felt that there were occasions, of which this,
probably, was one, when it becomes us to lay aside con
siderations of personal ease and convenience in the hope to
meet the wishes of, and to be useful to, one’s neighbours
and friends. Now, in occupying this position I must not
be considered to identify myself with either the one party
or the other (hear). I may agree with either, or with
neither. I am here, as I believe you are here, interested in
a question of the gravest concern to all of us, as an earnest
inquirer, anxious to learn and not afraid to hear (applause).
My position, I take it, is very much akin to that of the
Speaker of the House of Commons. I have simply to
regulate the order of debate, and to ask at your hands
—what I am sure I shall receive—such orderly and consis
tent behaviour as will become an assembly of English gentle
men. Now,in those who have charged themselves with the
responsibility of this debate we have men of acknowledged
ability and high culture (applause)—men who, I am sure
will know well how to reconcile the duties of courtesy with
the earnestness of debate. In addressing themselves to the
present question, it must, I think, be clearly understood
that the question, as it appears upon the paper, is not to be
narrowed to a simple inquiry whether it is reasonable that
we should worship God. A much wider issue must be
covered by the debate, if it is to satisfy the expectations
of this audience. The question is one, I take, it between
�9
Theism and Atheism. It is not enough to postulate a Deity,
and then ask whether it is reasonable or not to worship him.
What I think we have a right to ask is, tfyat the gentle
man charged with the affirmative of the proposition
shall adduce such evidence as will establish satisfactorily
the conclusion that there is a Deity to worship.
The
position of the Atheist, I take it, is not one of disbelief,
but of simple unbelief.
He does not say that God
is not, but he affirms the lack of evidence for the
position that God is (hear). He does not even say
that there may not be a God. What he does say is that
if there is a God he has failed to manifest himself, either by
the utterance of his voice, in audible revelation, or by the
impression of his hand upon visible nature. I take it, there
fore, and think Mr. Armstrong will be prepared to
accept the position, that it will be incumbent upon him, at
the outset of the discussion, to address himself to a con
sideration of the proofs in favour of the position that there
is a God to worship. If he succeed in this, then, I
think, there will be a very difficult and trying ordeal before
Mr. Bradlaugh to prove that, God, being existent, is not
entitled to the reasonable worship of his creatures (applause).
Pardon me these remarks by way of introduction. Before
calling on Mr. Armstrong to open the debate, I may just say
that, by arrangement between them, Mr. Armstrong, upon
whom the affirmative rests, is to be allowed half-an-hour
to open the discussion; Mr. Bradlaugh half-an-hour in
reply ; that then the next hour will be divided into quarters,
each speaker having a quarter of an hour alternately
(applause). The result of this arrangement will be that
Mr. Armstrong will open the debate to-night, which will
be closed by Mr. Bradlaugh, while to-morrow night Mr.
Bradlaugh will open the debate and Mr. Armstrong will
■close it. This, I think, you will regard as a satisfactory
arrangement, and a liberal one, inasmuch as Mr. Bradlaugh
concedes to Mr. Armstrong the advantage of the last word
(applause).
Mr. Armstrong, who was cordially received, said : Mr.
Chairman and friends—I wish to say two or three words at
the outset of this debate as to its origin. You are many of
you aware that a short time ago Mr. Bradlaugh visited this
town, and gave a lecture in defence of Atheism, from this plat
form, in answer to Professor Max Muller’s Hibbert lectures.
I was led to be present then, and I offered some remarks
�IO
at the close. Mr. Bradlaugh rejoined, and in the course of
his rejoinder threw out, in a courteous manner, a challenge
for me to meet him and discuss these weighty matters at fur
ther length. I thought no more of it then, not conceiving it
to be my duty to take up that challenge. A few days after
wards, however, I received a letter from the Secretary of
the Nottingham branch of the National Secular Society
stating that many persons had been much interested in the
words that fell from me, and that they would consider it an
obligation conferred upon them, and others earnestly in pur
suit of truth, if I consented to meet Mr. Bradlaugh in this
manner. I replied, that for my own part, I was but little
sanguine of any good effects, or a balance of good effects,
resulting from such a meeting; but that the invitation being
couched in such courteous and earnest terms, I would con
sult with friends on whose judgment I placed reliance, before
finally replying. I consulted these friends, and at the same time
thought the matter over further; and I came to the conclusion
that, though it has undoubtedly happened that on too many
occasions theological debates have been the root of bitter
ness and strife, yet, nevertheless, two men really in earnest
about what they have to say, and speaking to persons also
in earnest, who have come neither for amusement nor ex
citement—-I came to the conclusion that a debate, con
ducted with tact and temper on both sides, might (may I
say by the blessing of God ?) conduce rather to good than
to evil (applause). Under these circumstances, I accepted
the challenge. I did so, though, as I said in my letter to
the chairman, it is distasteful to me, because if I make any
thing of this occasion it can only be by exhibiting to you
my inmost heart. We are not going to talk in a superficial
manner—we are not going to bandy compliments, nor, I
hope, exchange rebukes; but, each of us is going to search
his inner consciousness, and try to express to the audience
that which he finds therein. It is, perhaps, more distasteful
to me on this occasion than to Mr. Bradlaugh, since I find,
or believe myself to find, in my inner consciousness certain
facts which Mr. Bradlaugh will no doubt tell you he does
not find in his inner consciousness. These facts are to me
of the most solemn and sacred nature conceivable, and to
expose them before a large and public audience is a thing
very like a sort of martyrdom. If I were not confident
that, however little you may sympathise with what I say,
you will treat it with respect or consideration, I woul
�11
never consent to drag the sacred thoughts of my soul before
you to hold them up as an exhibition (hear). I am to
maintain to-night—not to demonstrate (as you will see
if you look at the bills)—the proposition that it is
reasonable to worship God. Mr. Bradlaugh has not
necessarily to disprove, but to impugn, that proposition.
Now, all I have any hope of doing to-night is this—to
show that it is reasonable for me and for others conscious of
mental phenomena in themselves more or less akin to those
of which I am conscious, to worship God. Would that I
could touch you with the beauty and the sweetness
of this belief—would that I could hold up before you, in all
its glory and sublimity, in all its strength and holiness, the
beauty and the sweetness of the worship of God. Could
I succeed in doing so, I should take your imaginations
captive. I think I should get the suffrage of your reason.
It is as though, sir, to-night, I had been called upon to
prove that my dearest friend is worthy to be loved—ay,
•even that my dearest friend exists; for, if God is aught to
us, he is our dearest, nearest friend—present when all
others are taken from us, a sure refuge in every moment of
temptation and of woe ; the very highest and most intimate
reality of which the mind can conceive—the sum and sub
stance of all existence. Well, now, how do I know this
God ? Who is this God of whom I speak ? Let me try to
tell you how it seems to me that I have made acquaintance
with him. I find that at certain moments of my life there
is that which I can best describe aS a voice—though it is a
metaphor—addressed to me, influencing largely my conduct.
I find that there are in me, as in all men, strong instincts,
strong desires, strong self-interests—some lower, some
higher, some less worthy, some more worthy, than others.
I find that but for this voice of which I speak I should be
entirely swayed thereby, as, so far as I can see, the brutes
of the field and the forest are swayed thereby. But I find
that sometimes, at moments when these instincts are the
very strongest within me, and when I am about to throw
myself into their realisation and give them expression in
■fact—I find, sometimes, at these moments that there comes
to me somewhat which, so far as my consciousness delivers,
is not myself. There comes to me somewhat stopping me
from indulging these instincts and bidding me to curb them.
Ifindatothertimesthatmyinstinctsof self-preservation, of self
regard, of pleasure-loving, and so forth—my appetites—
�12
would lead me to hold back from a certain course of action.
So far as I can judge, looking into my own mind, myself is
against that course of action. It appears to my reasoning
powers and inclinations that I had better keep out of it.
But there comes now somewhat which comes from outside,,
and which is no part of myself, which says, “ Go and do it.”
That was so when I received the invitation to this debate.
Again, I find that on certain occasions—alas! that I should
have to say it—I have defied this monitor, I have done that
which it told me not to do, or not done that which it bade
me to do. I find then that there enter into me from some
where—I know not from whence—pangs of remorse keener
than ever came from any personal sorrow, more biting than
ever came from any physical pain. There have been times,
however—let me thank God I can say so !—when I have
obeyed this voice, followed its dictates in spite of all myself
seeming to drag me from it; and my experience is that on
these occasions there has entered my soul, from whence I
cannot tell you, a peace surpassing that given us in any
other circumstances—a peace in the light of which the
sorrows that at other times might cut me to the heart seem
light and small, a peace in the beauty and holiness of which
these'sorrows seem wonderfully diminished. I will tell you what
I call the source of that voice which I fancy speaks to me
in that fourfold manner. I call the source of that voice
“ God,” and that is the first thing I mean by God. I call the
source of all these monitions and admonitions, these ex
hortations and rebukes, this voice of reproval and of
approval, the voice of God; because I must give it some
name, and that seems to me the simplest and the truest name
I can give it. I might, perhaps, be inclined to doubt
whether all this was not fancy (though I hardly think I
should) if, so far as I could gather, it were an unique experi
ence of my own; but I find that it is not so. I find that
this voice is recognised by every true man and woman I
meet. They may obey it or not, but they recognise it, and
allow that it is there. I behold the picture by Millais
of the day before the awful massacre of St. Bartho
lomew. I see the maiden leaning on her lover’s bosom
whilst he looks down upon her with looks of love and
tenderness, and she strives to tie around his arm a scarf.
She knows of the impending massacre, that all Protestants
are to be slaughtered, and she would fain put this badge
upon his arm as a secret signal to preserve him from the
�13
sword. Does he accept this method of escape ? Although
his inclination is to remain with his beloved, the strength of
his right hand is given to tear the badge from his arm, and
he faces death, not with joy, but with an exceeding bitter
sorrow for the moment—he faces death in simple loyalty
and obedience to the voice which has spoken to his heart.
That is an experience which you will all recognise—one
which, in less or in greater force, we have all had. What
ever explanation may be given—and, doubtless, Mr. Brad’
laugh has an explanation of his own—this voice of con
science is to me one of the primary evidences of the exist
ence of God. Nay, I will not call it an evidence; it
is God speaking to me (applause). This conscience
has been described by Mr. Voysey, in his recentlypublished sermons in refutation of Atheism, as fol
lows : “ The collision is so complete between the higher
voice and the impelling instinct, that one can only feel that
the two are radically different in nature, and. must have had
a different source. . . .To have the power of doing
intentionally what one shrinks from doing, and to
deny one’s self the pleasure which is so fascinating,
and which one longs to do, is to prove the immense superi
ority of our inner selves over the visible universe.”
To have the power, as that man, that Huguenot, must have
had it, to deny one’s self the pleasure which is so fascinating,
and for which one longs, is to prove the immense superiority
of our inner selves when hearing the voice of God over the
visible universe. Again, speaking of conscience, Voysey says :
“The conscience which makes us mortify our flesh with its
affections and lusts, and which often mars our happiness and
embitters our pleasure, upbraids us with reproaches and
stings us with remorse, that voice which hushes our cry for
happiness, which will not endure a single selfish plea, but
demands unquestioning obedience, and bids us fall down in
the very dust before the Majesty of Duty—we all, in our
secret hearts, revere this power, whether or not we obey it
as we should. At least, we pay to it the homage of our inmost
souls, and feel how great and grand it is to be its slave.”
Now, sir, I desire to pass on to another method, by which it
seems to me that I apprehend this being. Having made the
acquaintance with this awful voice—and the philosopher
Kant said two things filled him with awe, the starry
heavens and the moral nature in man—I pass on to another
matter. Behold the starry heaven itself. I know not how
�14
it is with you, but I will tell you my experience—and we are
told by scientific men that we must bring everything to the test
of experience. Sometimes when I have been out oftemper—as I
am sometimes, like other people—sometimes, when I have been
much distracted with cares, when troubles and pains have
been thick upon me, it falls to my lot to go out beneath the
starry heaven. What is it that I experience in my soul ? I
go through no process of metaphysical reasoning, I do not
argue with myself, but I simply feel that there is a Divine
presence there, in whose hand are all these stars and all
these worlds—a great voice singing, “ I am strong and I am
good, and you are safe nestling in my hand.” I know not
if that corresponds with the experience of all here,
but that it corresponds with the experience of many, I
feel sure ; and let me ask such not to drive away these
holy feelings, but to trust them as the assurance which
God gives of his presence. It may be that in those lakes
and mountains which you, sir, have seen of late, you
may have heard a message whispering to your soul of a
peace beyond the peace of earth—of a presence before
which all things are well. In others, not so sensitive per
haps to the beauties of natural scenery, such experience
comes in the tones of music—in some grand symphony or
some sweet song; and they feel lifted away from the things
of earth,' and they feel lifted into some presence in which it
is a joy to be, and which fills their soul with peace. That
presence I call, having no other name for it, the presence of
God. Observe, that in this I am not philosophising about
the cause—I am not saying that God is the cause and so
on; I am only relating the experience of my consciousness,
reported to you as faithfully and truly as I can read it. Let
me read what Professor Blackie wrote the other day:
“ Many things can be known only by being felt, all vital
forces are fundamentally unknowable.” And, says Francis
Newman, that arch-heretic : “ The astronomer is ever aware
of the presence of gravitation and the electrician sees all
things pervaded by electricity—powers descried by the mind,
unwitnessed by any sense, long unknown to the wise, still
unknown or undiscerned by the vulgar j yet this percep
tion of things hidden is not esteemed cloudy.” Now,
having made some acquaintance with this awful, inscrutable
something, to which I venture to give the name of God, I
venture to lift up to it the voice of my soul, and strive
to throw myself towards that Being. And what is my
�i5
experience ? Let us go to experience again: I find
when my mind is bewildered and in doubt, when it
is all involved with difficulties, that somehow, when I
address that Being, there comes to my soul . “ clear
shining,” and I see things plainer and more beautiful than
before. I appeal to him in pain and sorrow—not with the
coward’s prayer, but simply asking that I may feel his pre
sence, to endure it j and the pain and sorrow have become
light on the instant assurance that God is there to comfort
and console. I pray to him in weakness, when my strength
fails, and what is the result? That a new manhood
comes to me, and I feel that wondrous power which
over-arches all the worlds, and I feel that I have in me
also somewhat of his strength. I appeal to him, last of all,
in temptation, when the wrong deed presses closely on my
inclinations, and what do I find ? That strength is given
me to stand up against temptation, and he answers
according to the immemorial prayer of Christendom:
deliver us from temptation, This is experience, or I fancy
it is. It is not theory. Again, I am in gladness. When
is my gladness greatest, and when is it richest? Why,
when it flows up and out, in thankfulness and adoration, to
the source to which I trace it. Then my gladness seems to
receive an influence which lifts it up above. No gladness
is the true gladness without that. Let me conclude this
half-hour by reading a very short extract from Professor
Newman. Speaking of the instincts of mankind, he says:—
And the instinct of Religion is the noblest of them all,
The bravest, the most enduring, the most fruitful in mighty
deeds,
The source of earliest grandeur, unitress of scattered tribes ;
Even in the crudeness of its infancy,when unpurified by science,
Yet teeming with civilisation, with statesmanship, with letters.
Mistress of all high art, and parent of glorious martyrs.
And if from it have come wars, and bigotries, and cruelties,
Through infantine hot-headedness and unripeness of mind,
We take your aid, O Sceptics ! to purge it from all such evils,
And kindly honour we pay to you for your battles against super
stition ;
Yet the very evils ye deplore, prove Religion’s mighty energy,
And the grasp deeply seated which she has within human
hearts.”
(Loud applause.)
Mr. Bradlaugh : Thanking you, sir, for acceding to the
request which I would have gladly joined in had I had any
�right of acquaintance to entitle me to make it; thanking you
for undertaking what is always a troublesome duty, however
well a debate may be conducted, of presiding over a dis
cussion, permit me to say one word only as to the opening
which fell from your lips. There is only one phrase in that
which I desire to note, so as to save myself from the possi
bility of misapprehension. I quite agree with the view you
put of the position the Atheist takes, except that if Dualism
be affirmed, if more than Monism be affirmed, if more than
one existence be affirmed, and if it be the beyond of that one
existence which is called God, then the Atheist does not
say there may be one, but says there cannot be one; and
that is the only distinction I wish to put as against the very
kind words with which you introduced the speakers this
evening The question for our debate is : “ Is it reasonable
to worship God ?” and to determine this question it is
necessary to define the words “worship” and “God,”and next
to decide whether belief in God is reasonable or unreason
able ; and, secondly, whether worship is, under any, and
if any, what,. circumstances, reasonable or unreasonable.
And I am afraid I must here except that, in the speech to
which I have just listened, and which, from its tone and
kindly style, is perfectly unexceptionable, there is not one
word at present—it may possibly come later on—which may
fairly be taken as approaching a definition either of the word
“ God ” or the word “ worship. ” By worship I mean act of rever
ence, respect, adoration, homage, offered to some person.
According to this definition, worship cannot be offered to the
impersonal, and according to this definition it would be
unreasonable to advocate worship to be offered to the im
personal. Under the term “worship” I include prayer—which
is, evidently, from the opening, also included in the term
“worship” by the rev. gentleman who maintains the opposite
position to myself—praise, sacrifice, offerings, solemn ser
vices, adoration, personal prostration. For the word “God,”
not having a definition of my own, I take—not having yet
gathered, in what has fallen from Mr. Armstrong, enough to
enable me to say that I understand what he means by it—I
take the definition of “ God” given in Professor Flint’s Baird
lectures ; not meaning by that that Mr. Armstrong is bound
by that definition, but asking him to be kind enough to note
where he thinks that definition is incorrect, and to kindly tell
me so, for my guidance in the latter portions of the debate.
By “ God,” for the purpose of this debate, I shall mean a self-
�i7
existent, eternal being, infinite in power and in wisdom, and
perfect in holiness and goodness ; the maker of heaven
and earth. And by “self-existent" I mean, that, the con
ception of which does not require the conception of
antecedent to it. For example, this glass is phenomenal,
conceived, as all phenomena must be conceived, by the
characteristics or qualities which enable you to think
and identify it in your mind, but which cannot be con
ceived except as that of which there is possible ante
cedent and consequent, and which, therefore, cannot be
considered as self-existent according to my definition. By
“eternal”and by “infinite” I only mean illimitable, indefinite,
tome—applying the term “eternal ” to duration, and the word
“ infinite ” to extension. I take Professor Flint, or whoever
may hold the definition I have given of God, by “ maker ”
to mean originator; and then I am in the difficulty that the
word “ creator,” in the sense of origin, is, to me, a word
without meaning. I only know creation as change ; origin
of phenomena, not of existence; origin of condition, not
origin of substance. The words “ creation ” and “ de
struction ” are both words which have no other
meaning to my mind than the meaning of change.
I will now try to address myself to some of the argu
ments that were put forward by Mr. Armstrong. He
said that to him the notion of entering into this debate was
distasteful to him, and he addressed somewhat of an in
quiry as to my own feeling on the matter. No ! the dis
cussion of no one subject more than any other is distasteful
to me, unless it be of a personal character, in which it might
involve my having to say things upon which I should not like
to mislead and upon which it would be painful to me to
state the facts. Then a discussion would be distasteful to
me; but such a discussion as this is not any more distaste
ful to me than the discussion of an astronomical or geolo
gical problem; and I will urge to those who go even further
and say, that not only is such a matter distasteful, but that the
discussion of Theism is really immoral, to such I would read
from a recent volume entitled “ A Candid Examination of
Theism”:—“If there is no God, where can be the harm
in our examining the spurious evidence of his existence ?
If there is a God,- surely our first duty towards him must
be to exert to our utmost, in our attempts to find him, the
most noble faculty with which he has endowed us—as care
fully to investigate the evidence which he has seen fit to
�furnish of his own existence, as we investigate the evidence
of inferior things in his dependent creation. To say that
there is one rule or method for ascertaining truth in the
latter case which it is not legitimate to apply in the former
case, is merely a covert way of saying that the Deity—if
he exists—has not supplied us with rational evidence of
his existence.” Now, that is the position I am going to
put to you; and there ought to be nothing distasteful
to anyone in proving most thoroughly the whole of the
evidence upon which his supposed belief in God’s existence
rests. The grounds of his belief ought to be clear to him
self, or they are no sufficient grounds for his belief, even to
himself. If they are clear to himself they ought to be
clearly stateable to others; because, if not, they lie under
the suspicion of not being clear to himself. That which is
sufficient to him to convince him, is either capable of being
clearly stated—although it may not carry conviction to
another—or it is not. If it is not capable of being clearly
stated, I would suggest it is because it does not clearly exist
in his own mind. Now Mr. Armstrong says that he feels as if
called upon to prove that his dearest friend ought to be
loved, as if called upon to prove that his dearest friend
exists. He spoke of God as being to him his dearest
friend, and he followed that with some words as to which I am
not quite sure whether he intended to use them in the sense in
which they fell upon my ears. He described God as “ the
sum and substance of all existence.” I do not want to
make any verbal trick, and if I am putting more on Mr.
Armstrong than he meant to convey I should like to be put
right when he rises again, and I will ask him if he considers
God to be the sum and substance of all existing; and, if
he does not, I will ask him in what respect he distinguishes
between God, in his mind, and the sum and substance of
all existence ; because clearly, when he used those words he
had some meaning in his mind, and I should like to know
these two things : First, do you identify God in your mind
with the sum and substance of all existence ? If not, in
what respects do you distinguish God in your mind from
the sum and substance of all existence ? If you say that
you identify God with the sum and substance of all exist
ence, then I ask, are we included in that, sum and substance
of all existence ? And if we are included in that sum and
substance of all existence, is it reasonable for one phe
nomenon or for a number of phenomena, to offer worship
�T9
to any of, and to how much of, what remains ? Then he
addressed himself to the very old argument, which he put
so beautifully, when he said : “How do I know God?” and
launched into what is known as the argument from conscience,
an argument very fully stated by Professor Flint in the
Baird lectures to which I have referred. Mr. Armstrong
said, and here I will take a little exception; he said : “ In
me, as in all men here, are strong instincts; in me, as in all
men, there are strong desires; in me, as in all men, there is
a voice.” That is just the blunder; that is not true. I do
not mean that in any sort of disrespectful sense. If you
take a volume like Topinard’s “ Anthropology ” you find
that men’s desires, men’s emotions, and men’s instincts all
vary with race, all vary with locality, with type, all vary with
what Buckle called “Food, climate, soil, and life surround
ings and I ask, if there be this variance in individuals of
different races, nay, more, if there be this variance in in
dividuals of the same race at the same moment, and if the
members of the same race vary in different places and ages,
as to their instincts, desires, and emotions, I ask you whether
there has been the same variation in the source of it? You
say the source is God, and if so, how can a variable source
be a reliable object of worship ? Then let us see a little
more. “ I do not desire to do something, but my monitor
says ‘ Do ” or the reverse; and thus voice is the evidence
of Deity. I should have been obliged if Mr. Armstrong
had defined exactly what it was he meant by conscience,
because here we are going terribly to disagree. I am going
to deny the existence of conscience altogether, except as a
result of development upon organisation, including in that,
transmitted predisposition of ability to possible thought or
action. But if that be so, what becomes of this “ still small
voice,” of those desires and instincts? The mere fact
that the mother may have worked in a cotton-mill while
childbearing and have had bad food, or that the father may
have beaten her—his brutality may result in the awakening
of a desire and instinct exactly the opposite of that which Mr.
Armstrong has, and the organisation fitted for repeating
which may be handed down through generations. I stood
this morning for other purposes at the doors of Coldbath
fields Prison. One man who came out gave a sort of shrill
whistle and plunged into the crowd with a defiant and a
mocking air, showing that his conscience, his monitor, said
nothing to him except that he was glad he was outside, and
�20
ready to war with the world again (applause). I am not
wishing to press this view in any fashion unkindly or unfairly; '
I am only wanting to put the thing as it appears to me. I
want to.know: “ Does Mr. Armstrong contend that there is a
faculty identical in every human being which he calls con
science, which does decide for each human being, and
always decides, in the same manner, what is right and what
is wrong ? Or does he mean that this ‘ monitor,’ as he calls
it, decides differently in different men and in different
countries ? And if ‘ yes,’ is the source different in each case
where there is a different expression ? And if ‘ yes,’ is it
justifiable and reasonable to offer worship to an uncertain
source, or to a source which speaks with a different voice, or
to a source which is only one of a number, and of which you
do not know how far its limit extends, and where its juris
diction begins or ends ? ” Let us follow this out a little
more. We have not only to define conscience, but we have
also to define right and wrong, and I did not hear Mr. Arm
strong do that. I did hear him say that when he had done
something in opposition to his monitor he felt remorse. I
did hear him say there was struggling between himself and
his monitor, and here I had another difficulty. What is the
himself that struggles, as distinguished in his mind from the
monitor that he struggles against ? If the struggle is a
mental one, what is mind struggling against ? and if it is not,
how does Mr. Armstrong explain it ? Let us, if you please,
go to right and wrong. By moral I mean useful. I mean
that that is right which tends to the greatest happiness of the
greatest number, with the least injury to any. I am only
following Jeremy Bentham. That is my definition of right.
Many matters which have been held to come within that
definition in one age have been found in another age not to
come within it, and the great march of civilisation is that
from day to day it instructs us in what is useful. I submit
that instead of adoring the source of contradictory verdicts
it is more reasonable to find out for ourselves some rule we
can apply. For example, here Mr. Armstrong’s conscience
would not raise any particular objection to his taking animal
food, unless he happens to be a vegetarian, and then, I am
sure, he would conscientiously carry it out; but the majority
of people’s consciences in England would raise no great
objection to taking animal food. Yet in China and in
Hindustan hundreds of thousands of human beings have
died because vegetable food was not there for them, and
«
�21
their consciences made them prefer death to tasting
animal food' I want to know whether the conscience is
from the same source here as in Hindustan, and I want to
know, if that is so, which people are justified in worshipping
the source ? Take the case of murder. Mr. Armstrong’s
conscience would clearly tell him that it was wrong to murder
me. And yet there are many people in this country who
would not go to that extent. But I am going to take a
stronger illustration. There are a number of people who
think it perfectly right to bless the flags of a regiment, and to
pray to the God whom Mr. Armstrong asks me to worship,
that a particular regiment, whose flags are blessed, may kill
the people of some other particular regiment as rapidly as
possible. This shows that there are confusions of mind as
to what is meant by murder, and a like confusion exists on
a number of other matters on which the monitor is
misrepresenting.
And then Mr. Armstrong has said^
“ I mean by God the source of admonition, rebukes,
remorse, trouble,” and he says: “ It is a conscience-voice
which is recognised by every true man and woman.”
I am sure he would not wish to put any position
stronger than it should be put, and he put it, too, that this
was the feature in which man differed from the brutes. I
am inclined to tell him that not only there is not that recog
nition to-day amongst the physiological and psychological
teachers, but that we have a number of. men whose re
searches have been collected for us, who show us that what
you call the “ still small voice,” this monitor, these desires,
instincts, emotions, are to be found—varied, it is true
—right through the whole scale of animal life. Whereever there is a nervous encephalic apparatus sufficient
you have—except in the fact of language—wider distinc
tion between the highest order of human race and the
lowest, than you have between the lowest order of human
beings and those whom you are pleased to call brutes. I
will now only take the illustration of the eve of St. Bartho
lomew, which is fatal to the argument of Mr. Armstrong.
He gave the Protestant lover—a very fine character—reject
ing the symbolic bandage, and preferring to die for his faithy
or, .as Mr. Armstrong put it, “ to face death in simple
loyalty rather than play the hypocrite, and the source of that
feeling was God.” Was that the source of the feeling
which led Bruno to be burnt at the stake as if for Atheism,
or for Vanini, burnt for Atheism ; or for Lescynski, burnt
�for Atheism; or for Mrs. Besant, robbed of her child because
of her avowal of Atheism (hisses) ? You are hissing ; wait
whilst I answer. Is the source of your hissing, God ? Then
what a cowardly and weak thing, and little fitted for worship
must be that source (applause). I desire to deal with this
subject in all gravity, in all sincerity, in all kindness, but I
plead for a cause—weakly, it is true—for which great and
brave men and women have died, and I will permit no insult
to it in my presence—(cheers)—knowingly I will pass none.
I believe my antagonist to meet me loyally, honourably, and
honestly, and I believe him to meet me earnestly and
sincerely. I believe he has no desire to wound my feel
ings, and I 'do not wish to wound his ; and I ask you, the
jury here, to try to follow the same example set by him
in this debate (cheers).
Mr. Armstrong, being received with cheers, said:
It is very difficult indeed to think on these deep
problems under consideration with excitement amongst
the audience present, therefore I hope that you will be as
quiet as you can. I will begin at once with a confession
—and this, at any rate, will be a testimony of my candour—
by saying that the moment I had spoken certain words in
my opening speech I thought: “'Mr. Bradlaugh will have
me there;” and he had me (laughter). The words
were those in which I spoke of God as the sum and
substance of all existence. Now, to me, God is a much
simpler word than the phrase, “ sum and substance of all
existence.” Whether God be the “ sum and substance of
all existence ” I know not, for those words convey to me
less clear meaning than the word “God” conveys to me. The
source, moreover, of my immediate knowledge of God is
such that it can make no asseverations whatever upon deep
questions of metaphysics, as to what the “ sum and sub
stance of all existence” may consist. Mr. Bradlaugh has taken
a definition of God from Professor Flint. He is a Scotchman,
and Scotchmen are very fond of definitions (a laugh). Very
often, too, their definitions obscure their subject-matter, and
it is far harder to get any proper significance from them than
in the thing which they intended to define. I am
utterly incapable of saying whether that definition of Pro
fessor Flint’s is an accurate definition of God or not. What I
mean by “God,” and perhaps Mr. Bradlaugh will take it as the
best definition I can here give, is the source, whatever it be, of
this metaphorical voice—of these intimations or monitions,
�23
that come to me in certain experiences which I have. Mr.
Bradlaugh, of course, devoted much time to answering Pro
fessor Flint. He asked whether God was the source of that
loyalty with which the Atheists he mentioned went to the
stake, and’I say from the bottom of my heart, that he was. God
knows the Atheist though the Atheist knows not him. God
is the source of loyalty of heart, in whomsoever it may be.
If others are led to propound propositions which I believe
to be false, and if they dispute other propositions which I
believe to be true, do you think that God is going to judge
them for that, so long as they have been true and faithful to
their own reasoning powers (applause) ? Mr. Bradlaugh
noticed the phrase which fell from me, about a discussion
like this being distasteful to me. I did not say that the
matter under discussion was distasteful to me. I did not say
that a discussion under other conditions would be distasteful
to me. I did not say that it was at all distasteful to me to
search the grounds of my own belief, for my own belief
would be poor indeed were not such search my constant
practice (hear, hear). Mr. Bradlaugh laid great stress,
during the greater part of his speech, upon what
appear to be, in different races and in different
climes, the different and contradictory deliverances of
conscience. That difficulty is one which has been
felt by many persons, and dealt with, well and ill, by
various writers. The difficulty is one of importance, and it
arises, perhaps, from the word “ conscience ” being used in
various different senses. My use of the word “ conscience ” is
simply as being that voice of God (as I still call it) which says,
“Do the right; don’t do the wrong.” It does not in anyway say
what is right or what is wrong. That which I call the right,
like so much of our manhood, is the gradual development
and evolution of history, and it is largely dependent, as
Mr. Bradlaugh, says, upon climate and other external sur
roundings. We have to reason about what is right and wrong.
We must have gradual education of the individual and
of the race to get a clearer and more worthy conception of
the right and wrong ; and all I claim for conscience is that
the man, having resolved in his own mind what is right and
what is wrong,this conscience says, “Do the right,and do not
the wrong.” Therefore, instates of barbarous society, where
misled reason has induced persons to think certain things
were right which we look upon as crimes, still the voice of
conscience must necessarily tell them to do the right. The
�24
thing is right to the individual if he thinks it right. It may
be a terrible mistake of his—it may be a terrible mistake to
believe or teach certain things; nevertheless, the voice of
conscience says, “ Do the rightit does not define what
the right is. That is one of the things which God leaves to
be developed in humanity by slow degrees. Thank God, we
see that the idea of the right and the wrong is purifying—is
clarifying in the course of history. The conception of what
is right and what is wrong is better now than it was a
hundred years ago; the conception of what is right
and what is wrong is better still than it was a thou
sand years ago.
Many of the things then considered
laudable are now considered base; and many of the things
then considered base are now considered laudable. This
voice of which I speak, however, like all other voices, may
not be equally perceived at all times. Supposing that you
were at school, and a certain bell rang at six o’clock every
morning. If you accustom yourself to rising when the bell
rings, you will naturally enough go on hearing it; but if you
get into the habit of disregarding it, and turning over on the
other side for another nap, the bell may sound loudly but
you will cease to hear it. So it is, I take it, with the voice
of God, which ever speaks—which ever pleads—but against
which man may deafen himself. He may make himself so
dull of understanding that he may not hear it clearly. Not
only the individual man’s own obstinacy may make
him dull of hearing, but it must be conceded that this
dulness of hearing may descend to him from long
generations of those from whom he proceeds. It may
be a part of his inheritance. But it does not follow that
this voice does not exist, and that it does not still plead with
him if he had the ear to hear it. No man is so lost but that
if he strives to hear, that voice will become to him clearer and
more clear. I ask you here whether you find any difficulty
in deciding what, to you, is right or wrong? Mr. Bradlaugh
is very fond of definitions. The words “right’’and “wrong’’are
so simple that any definition of them would only obscure
them. I know, andyou know, what you m ean by right and wrong.
If I say of a thing, “ That is not right, don’t do it,” you know
what I mean. Can I speak in any plainer way than to say
of a thing, “ That is not right ” ? If there is no better way
of explaining what you mean than this—if there is no plainer
way—it is best not to attempt to define the word, because
the definition would only tend to obscure it. Not being
4
>
�25
much accustomed to debates of this description, much of
what I desired to say in the first half-hour was not said. I
am told that all this experience which I have been trying
to relate to you is fancy, and I am asked to prove that there
is some being who can be imagined to be this God whom I
believe I hear speaking to me. I might ask : “ Is it not
enough that not only do I think I hear this voice, but that
so many hundreds and thousands of the great and good
have also thought so ? Is it not enough that many of the
great reformers, many of the great leaders in the paths of
righteousness and mercy, in this England of ours, tell us that
they hear this voice ? You must, if you deny it, either think
they lie or that they are deluded. When Newman, Voysey,
Theodore Parker—the glorious abolitionist of America—
say that it is their most intimate experience, it is somewhat
shallow to assert that there is nothing in it. I am not one
of those who think that the existence of a God can be
proved to the understanding of every one in a large audience
on a priori grounds. At the same time the balance of
probability on a priori grounds seems to be, to me, strongly
in favour of Theism. I find that there is, in my own.
mental constitution, a demand for cause of some kind for
every phenomenon. I want to know what has led to thephenomenon, and I find a good many other people are apt to
inquire in the like direction. Even very little children,
before they are sophisticated by us teachers and parsons,
want to be informed as to the causes of things. Another
point — I cannot help believing that all cause must beintelligent. Yes, I knew that would go down in Mr. Brad
laugh’s notes; but I say again, I cannot conceive of any
cause which is not intelligent in some sort of way (applause).
Mr. Brad laugh : There are two things which are evidently
quite certain so far as my opponent is concerned; one is that
we shall have a good-tempered debate, and the other that we
shall have a candid debate. Mr. Armstrong has said frankly,
with reference to the definition of God, that he is perfectly in
capable of saying whether the definition of Professor Flint is
correct or not, and he has, I think I may say, complained that
I am too fond of definitions. Will he permit me on this to read
him an extract from Professor Max Muller’s recent lecture :
“ It was, I think, a very good old custom never to enter
upon the discussion of any scientific problem without giving,
beforehand definitions of the principal terms that had to be
employed. A book on logic or grammar generally opened
�with the question, What is logic? What is grammar ? No
one would write on minerals without first explaining what he
meant by a mineral, or on art, without defining, as well as
he might, his idea of art. No doubt it was often as trouble
some for the author to give such preliminary definitions as
it seemed useless to the reader, who was generally quite
incapable in the beginning of appreciating their full value.
Thus it happened that the rule of giving verbal definitions
came to be looked upon after a time as useless and obsolete.
Some authors actually took credit for no longer giving these
definitions, and it soon became the fashion to say that the
only true and complete definition of what was meant by
logic or grammar, by law or religion, was contained in the
books themselves which treated of these subjects. But
what has been the result ? Endless misunderstandings and
controversies which might have been avoided in many cases
if both sides had clearly defined what they did and what
they did not understand by certain words.” I will show you
presently where this need of accurate definition comes so
very strongly. Mr. Armstrong is quite clear that he knows
what right means ; he is also quite clear that you know
what he means. That may be true, but it also may not, and
I will show you the difficulty.
Suppose there were a
thorough disciple, say of some bishop or church, who thought
it right to put to death a man holding my opinions. That
man would think the capital punishment for heresy right,
Mr. Armstrong would not. That man’s conscience would
decide that it was right, Mr. Armstrong’s would decide that
it was not. What is the use of saying you both know what
is right ? The word right is a word by which you label
certain things, thoughts, and actions, the rightness of which
you have decided on some grounds known only to yourselves.
It may be they are pleasant to you or disagreeable to your
antagonist. I, in defining morality, gave you my reason for
labelling the thing with the name “right.” Mr. Armstrong has
given you no reason whatever. Mr. Armstrong says that
conscience is the voice of God which says : “ Do that which
is right, don’t do that which is wrong.” Yet the divine voice
does not tell you what is right and what is wrong. Hence
that conscience talking to the cannibal: “ It is right to eat
that man, he’s tender; it’s wrong to eat that man, he’s
tough ”—(laughter)—and the voice of God says : “eat the
tender men because it is right; don’t eat the tough men
because it is wrong.” I ask how that illustration is to be
�27
dealt with? If the voice does not in any way enable you to
determine the character of the act, then it simply means
that what you call the voice of God asks you to continue
committing every error which has been bequeathed you
from past times as right, and to avoid every good thing
because in past times it has been condemned and is yet con
demned as wrong. If that is to be the conclusion, then
I say that the voice of God is not a voice to be worshipped,
and that it is not reasonable to worship such a voice
and taking that to be the definition I submit that upon
that a negative answer must be given in this debate.
Mr. Armstrong very frankly and candidly says that the
conception of what is right and wrong is being cleared
and purified ‘ day by day. That is, the conception now is
different to what it was one hundred years ago, and better
still than it was a thousand years ago; but the voice of
God, a thousand years ago, told the Armstrong and Brad
laugh then living, to do that which conscience said to them
was right, and which the conscience to-day says is wrong.
Was God governed by the mis-education, the mis-informa
tion, and the mis-apprehension of the time ? If the God
was outside the ignorance of the day, why did he not set the
people right ? Was he powerless to do it ? In which case,
how do you make out that he is God ? Or had he never the
willingness to do it ? In which case how do you make out
that he was God good ? And if he preferred to leave them
in blindness, how do you reconcile that? Then we are told
the voice is not always clear, but that you may make it more
clear by a habit of obedience. That is so I suppose. And you
may transmit the predisposition to the habit of galloping tohorses on this side the ocean, the predisposition to the
habit of trotting to horses on the other side the ocean;' tothinking MahommedanisminTurkey,and to thinking another
“ ism ” in England, and some other “ism” in Hindustan.
You do not transmit the actual thought any more than you
transmit the actual gallop or trot, but you transmit the pre
disposition, given the appropriate surroundings to reproduce
any action physical or mental. And the source of this is
God, is it ? I vow I do not understand how the Theist is to
meet the contradiction thus involved. Then, Mr. Arm
strong says that when he uses the word “ right,” he defies
anyone to make it plainer. Let us see what that means :
I forge a cheque; Mr. Armstrong says that’s wrong. Why?
Oh ! it is a dishonest and dishonourable thing, it tends to
�28
injure, and so on. But let us see whether you are always
quite clear about these things ? When you are annexing a
country, for example; praying to your God that you may
annex successfully, and that he will protect you when you
have annexed, does not your conscience run away with you,
or does not God mislead you in some of these things ? Is
it not true that the moment you get outside the definition
of the word “ right,” and the moment you say : “ I have a
standard of right which I will not tell you, because nothing
I tell you will make it clear ” you are launched at once into
a heap of absurdities and contradictions ? You think it is
right to have one wife, the Turk thinks it right to have two.
How are you to determine between them ? It only means,
that one of you has labelled bigamy “ right ” and the other
has labelled it “ wrong.” You must have some kind of ex
planation to justify what you are talking about it. We had
an argument offered by Mr. Armstrong which, if it meant
anything, meant that the voice of the majority should pre
vail. Mr. Armstrong said, that it was not only his experience
but that of thousands of others. Does he mean to tell me
that problems of this kind are to be determined by an un
trained majority, or by the verdict of a skilled minority ?
If by a majority, I have something to say to him, and if by
the skilled minority, how are you to select them ? In his
first speech, which I did not quite finish replying to, we
were told that God’s peace and beauty were apprehended in
lakes and mountains. But I have seen one lake—-Michigan—
the reverse of peace and beauty; I have seen little vessels
knocked about by the waves, and dashed to pieces ; and I
have seen Mount Vesuvius when it has been the
very opposite of calm and beautiful, and I have
heard of the houses at Torre del Grecco—though I
have never seen it—being burned in the night by the fiery
lava stream. Where is the peace and beauty of that scene ?
You can take peace. Given a lake, and I can show you a
tornado. Given a mountain and I can give you Vesuvius
with the fiery stream burning the huts of the fishers on the
slope of Torre del Grecco. Did God do this ? Did God
run the two vessels into one another on the Thames and
have those hundreds of people drowned? If you take
credit for the beauty you must also take debit for the
pain and misery (applause). Well, then, I am told that re
ligion is the noblest of all instincts. Max Muller tells us—
whether that be true or not, as Francis Newman puts it—that
�29
religion is a word about which people never have agreed in
any age of the world; about which there have been more
quarrels than about any other word, and about which people
have done more mischief than about any other word; and
I will ask our friend to explain, if it be the noblest of all
instincts, how is it that people have racked each other, and
beheaded each other, and tortured each other by, or in the
name of, this religion ? We are told, and I am thankful to
hear it, that we sceptics have purged it of a great deal of
mischief, and we hope to do more in that way as we go on
(applause). And here—and I want to speak with as much
reverence as I can on the subject of prayer, and it is ex
tremely difficult to touch upon it without giving my oppo
nent pain—so I will deal with it as a general, and not a
personal question. Mr. Armstrong said, after speaking of
how he prayed against temptation : “ He answered me as he
has answered the immemorial prayer of Christendom and
delivered me from temptation.” Why does he not deliver
from the temptation that misery, poverty, and ignorance
bring to the little one who did not choose that he should be
born in a narrow lane, or a back street, in an atmosphere
redolent of squalor and filth ? This little one, whom God
can lift out of temptation, but whom he lets still be cold and
miserable, whom he sees famishing for food, him whom he
sees go famishing to the baker’s, watching to steal the
loaf to relieve his hunger—why won’t he deliver this little
one ? Does Mr. Armstrong say: “ Oh, the little one must
know how to pray before God will answer him ” ? Oh, but
what a mockery to us that the source of all power places
within the reach of the temptation—nay, puts as though
surrounded by a mighty temptation trap, so that there should
be no possible escape—that little one, and then gives way to the
skilled entreaty, high tone, habit-cultured voice which Mr.
Armstrong uses, while he is deaf to the rough pleading of the
little one, and allows him to sink down, making no effort
for his recovery ! I have only one or two words more to
say to you before I again finish, and I would use these to
ask Mr. Armstrong to tell me what he meant by the word
“ cause,” and what he meant by saying “ cause must be
intelligent ” ? By cause, I mean, all that without which an
event cannot happen—the means towards an end, and by
intelligence I mean the totality of mental ability—its activity
and its results in each animal capable of it.
Mr. Armstrong: Mr. Bradlaugh has just been re-
�3°
buking me for my laxness with respect to defini
tions, and has come down upon me with a great autho
rity. Now, it is a habit of mine not to think much
of authorities as authorities, but rather of the value
of what they say. Mr. Bradlaugh came down upon
me with Max Muller, and read a sentence in reference to the
value of definitions, to the effect that they were wonderful
things for preventing and avoiding controversies and dis
putes. Is it, I ask, Mr. Bradlaugh’s experience that the
number of definitions given from public platforms in his
presence has tended to less controversy or to more ? Has
there been more or less talk with all these definitions, than
there would have been without them ? I fancied that Mr.
Bradlaugh’s career had been one very much connected with
controversies, and that the definitions which he has been ac
customed to give have not had the effect of leaving him in peace
from controversy. I am perfectly amazed at Mr. Brad
laugh’s memory, at the wonderful manner in which he
manages to remember, with tolerable accuracy, what I have
said, and to get down as he does the chief points of my
speeches.
I have, unfortunately, a miserable memory,
although I have an excellent shorthand which I can write,
and I cannot generally read it (laughter). Trusting, however,
to those two guides, I must endeavour to reply. Mr. Brad
laugh unintentionally misrepresented me when he alleged
that I had said that the voice of God, called conscience, was
not always clear. I did not say that that voice was not always
clear -—- what I said was that it was not always clearly
heard. I illustrated this by the simile of the bell, the sound
of which was perfectly clear of itself, but which was not
heard by those who would not heed.
Mr. Bradlaugh
also accused me of going in for the authority of majori
ties, because I quoted a number of names and said
that I might quote many more who concurred in the
belief in Deity grounded upon the sort of experi
ence which I said that I had myself enjoyed. Now, the
opinions of the majority have no authority—at least they go
for what they are worth, but are not a binding or an absolute
authority. But the experience of a majority, or of a minority,
or of a single individual, has authority. The experience
of a single man is a fact, and all the rest of the world not
having had that experience, or thinking that they have not
had it, does not make it less the fact. Therefore, if you
have half-a-dozen men upon whose words you can rely, who
�3i
say that they have had a certain experience, because Mr.
Bradlaugh says he has not had such experience, that makes
it none the less the fact. Now I approach that awful question
which stares in the face of the Theist—and which
ioften seems to stare most cruelly—this question of the evil
in the world. It is a question upon which the greatest
intellects of mankind have broken themselves, one which
has never been really explained or made clear, either by
the Theist or the Atheist, but which is probably beyond the
solution of the human faculties. All that we can do is to
fringe the edge of the mystery, and to see whether the best
feelings within us seem to guide us to anything approaching
a solution. Do you think that these things of which Mr.
Bradlaugh has spoken do not touch me as they touch
him ? Look, say, at the poor child born in misery, and
living in suffering; it would absolutely break my heart if I
thought that this could be the end of all. I believe that it
would weigh me down so that I could not stand upon a
public platform, or perform the ordinary business of life, if I
believed that there were beings in the world of whom misery
and sin were the beginning and the end. But I thank God that
I am enabled to maintain my reason upon its seat, and my
trust intact. I know, or I think I know, God as a friend. If he
be a friend to me, shall he not be a friend to all ? If I know
by my own experience his wondrous loving kindness, can I
not trust him for all the rest of the world, through all the
ages of eternity ? You may see a son who shall be familiar
with his father’s kindness, who shall always be kindly treated
by his father ; and there shall be a great warm love between
them. But the child sees certain actions on the part of his
father which he cannot explain. He beholds suffering
apparently brought by his father upon others, and is,
perhaps, inclined to rebel against his father’s authority. But
which is the truest child—the child who, having himself
experienced his father’s love, says : “ Well, this is strange, it
is a mystery; I would it were not so, but I know that my father
is good, and will bring some good out of this which could
not have been obtained otherwiseor the child who says :
“All my experience of my father’s goodness shall go to the
winds. I see a problem which I cannot explain, and I will,
therefore, throw up my trust, rebel against the paternal
goodness, and believe in my father’s love no more ! ” It
would be base in such of you as may be Atheisst
to rest in such a trust, since vou do not know the
�32
love of God; but were you touched with that love
this trust would come to you. It would come to you in
your best and truest moments, the moments when you feel
that you are most akin with all that is good and holy, and
when you feel, as it were, lifted above what is base. ’ This
problem of the evil in the world, I have said, surpasses the
faculties of humanity to solve, either from the platform of
the Theist, the Atheist, or the Pantheist. . I ask you what
you conceive to be the highest good to humanity ? Is not
the highest good, virtue ? You say, it may be, happiness is
better. Take the Huguenot. One way, with him, led to
happiness, the other to destruction. Was the choice he made
the better or the worse ? You say the better ? Then you
hold that virtueis betterthan happiness. Withregardto virtue
imagine, if you can, a world free from every sort of suffer
ing, from every sort of temptation, every sort of trial, what
a very nice world to live in, but what very poor creatures we
should all be ! Where would be virtue, where valour, where
greatness, where nobility, where would be all thos’e high
functions which call forth our reverence, and make
us look up from men to the God of man ? The world
is not made of sugar-plums. I, for my own part, can
not conceive how virtue, the highest good which we can
conceive, could possibly come about in human character
unless human character had evil against which it had to
contend (applause). If you can tell me how we could have
a world in which men should be great, and good, and
chivalrous, and possess all such qualities as raise feelings of
reverence in our bosoms, where nevertheless all should be
smooth and easy, you will have told me of something which,
I think, has never been told to any human being (applause).
Mr. Bradlaugh : A large number of definitions lead to
more controversy or to less. If the definitions are offered
to the minds of people well educated, and thoroughly
understanding them—to much less controversy and to more
accuracy; and when they are offered to people who are yet
ignorant, and have yet to understand them, then they lead
to more controversy, but even there, also, to more accuracy.
I am asked: Can you tell me how to make a world ? I
cannot. Do you intend to base your conclusions on my
ignorance ? If there be an onus, it lies on you, not on me.
It is your business to show that the maker you say ought to
be adored, has made the world as good as it can be. It is
not my business at all to enter upon world-making. Then
�33
I am not sure—while I am quite ready to be set right upon
a verbal inaccuracy—I am not sure there is very much dis
tinction between the voice not being heard, and not being
clearly heard. It is said to be the voice of God that speaks;
but he made the deafness or otherwise of the person to
whom he speaks, or he is not the creator, preserver, “ the
dearest friend in whom I trust, on whom I rely”—these
are Mr. Armstrong’s words. If God cannot prevent the
deafness, then the reliance is misplaced; if he made rhe
deafness, it is of no use that he is talking plainly; if he
has made the person too deaf to hear his voice, then the
voice is a mockery. Then I had it put to me, that the
opinions of majorities were not binding as authority; they
only had their value as expressions of opinion ; but that i
the experiences of individuals are binding. What does
that mean? Is there such a certitude in consciousness
that there can be no mistake in experience ? What do
you mean? When you have a notion you have had an
experience, and I have a notion you have not had it?
Supposing, for example, a man says : “ I have ex
perience of a room which raced with the Great Northern
train to London ; it was an ordinary room, with chairs and
tables in it, and none of them were upset, and it managed
to run a dead heat with the Great Northern express.” You
would say : “ My good man, if you are speaking seriously,
you are a lunatic.” “ No,” he would say, “ that is my ex
perience.” Mr. Armstrong says that that experience de
serves weight. I submit not unless you have this : that the
experience must be of facts coming within the possible range
of other people’s experience; and mustbe experience which is
testable by other people’s experience, with an ability on the
part of the person relating to clearly explain his ex
perience, and that each phenomenon he vouches to you, to
be the subject possible of criticism on examination by your
self, and that no experience which is perfectly abnormal,
and which is against yours, has any weight whatever with
you, or ought to have, except, perhaps, as deserving ex
amination. When it possibly can be made part of your
experience, yes; when it admittedly cannot be made part
of your experience, no. A man with several glasses of
whisky sees six chandeliers in this room ; that is his ex
perience—not mine. I do not refuse to see; I cannot see
more than three. Mr. Armstrong says the problem of evil
never has been made clear by Atheist or Theist. There is
D
�34
no burden on us to make it clear. The burden is upon
the person who considers that he has an all-powerful friend
of loving kindness, to show how that evil exists in con
nection with his statement that that friend could prevent
it. If he will not prevent it, he is not of that loving
kindness which is pretended. Mr. Armstrong says: “My
dear friend is kind to me, shall I not believe that he is
kind to the little lad who is starving?” What, kind
to the lad whom he leaves unsheltered and ill-clad
in winter, whose mother is drunken because the place
is foul, whose father has been committed to gaol ?
Where is the evidence to that lad of God’s loving kind
ness to him ? God, who stands by whilst the little child
steals something; God, who sets the policeman to catch
him, knowing he will go amongst other criminals, where he
will become daily the more corrupted; God, who tells him
from the Bench through the mouth of the justice, that he
has given way to the temptation of the devil, when it is the
very God has been the almighty devil (applause). That
may be a reason for Mr. Armstrong adoring his friend, but
it is no reason for this poor boy to adore. “ Ah,” Mr.
Armstrong says, “ my reason for homage is this. I should
be dissatisfied if this were going to last for ever, or if this
were to be the whole of it; that is so bad I should be in
anguish were there no recompense.” You condemn it if it
is to continue. How can you worship the being who allows
that even temporarily which your reason condemns ? Has
he marked his right to be adored as God by the
little girl who is born of a shame-marked mother in the
shadow of the workhouse walls, who did not select the
womb from which she should come, and whose career, con
sequent on her birth, is one of shame and perhaps crime
too. Ah ! that friend you love, how his love is evidenced
to that little girl is yet to be made clear to me. Then
comes another problem of thought which I am not sure I
shall deal fairly with. Is the highest good virtue or happi
ness ? But the highest happiness is virtue. That act is
virtuous which tends to the greatest happiness of the greatest
number, and which inflicts the least injury on any—that
which does not so result in this is vice. When you put happi
ness and virtue as being utterly distinguished, in your mind
they may be so, but not in my mind. You have confused
the definition of morality which I gave on the first opening;
you have, without explaining it, substituted another in lieu
�35
•of it. You would be right to say my definition is wrong,
■and give another definition, but you have no right to ignore
my definition and use my word in precisely the opposite
sense to that in which I used it. A very few words now will
determine this question for this evening, and I will ask you
to remember the position in which we are here. I am
Atheist, our friend is Theist. He has told you practically
that the word “ God ” is incapable of exact definition,
and if this is so, then it is incapable of exact belief. If it is
incapable of exact definition, it is incapable of exact
thought. If thought is confused you may have prostration of
the intellect, and this is all you can have. Our friend says
that he prays and that his prayer is answered daily, but he
forgot the millions of prayers to whom God is deaf. In his
peaceful mountains and lakes—Vesuvius and Lake Michi
gan escaped him. The fishers in Torre del Grecco, they on
whom the lava stream came down in the night, had their
lips framed no cry for mercy ? Did not some of those
hundreds who were carried to death on the tide of the muddy
Thames, did not they call out in their despair ? and yet he
was deaf to them. He listened to you, but it is of those
to whom he did not listen of whom I have to speak. If
he listens to you and not to them he is a respecter of
persons. He may be one for you to render homage to, but
not for me. First, then, the question is : “ Is it reasonable
to worship God?” and the word “worship” has been left
indistinctly defined. I defy anyone who has listened to
Mr. Armstrong to understand how much or how little he
would exclude or include in worship. I made it clear how
much I would include. Our friend has said nothing
whatever relating to the subject with which we have had to
deal.. His word “God” has been left utterly undefined;
the words “ virtue ” and “ happiness,” and the words “ right”
and “ wrong,” are left equally unexplained; the questions I
put to him of cause and intelligence have been left as
though they were not spoken. I do not make this a re
proach to him, because I know it is the difficulty of the
subject with which he has to deal. The moment you tell
people what you mean, that moment you shiver the Vene
tian glass which contains the liquor that is not to be touched.
I plead under great difficulty.
I plead for opinions that
have been made unpopular; I appeal for persons who, in
the mouths of their antagonists, often have associated with
them all that is vicious. It is true that Mr. Armstrong has
B 2
�36
no such reproach. He says that God will only try me
by that judgment of my own reason, and he makes my
standard higher than God’s on the judgment day. God
made Bruno; do you mean that Bruno’s heresy ranks as
high as faith, and that Bruno at the judgment will stand
amongst the saints ? This may be high humanity, but it is
no part of theology. Our friend can only put it that because
in his own goodness he makes an altar where he can worship,
and a church where he would make a God kind and loving
as himself, and that as he is ready to bless his fellows, so
must his God be; but he has shown no God for me to
worship, and he has made out no reasonableness to wor
ship God except for himself, to whom, he says, God is kind.
Alas ! that so many know nothing of his kindness (applause).
I beg to move the thanks of this meeting to Mr. Rothera
for presiding this evening.
Mr. Armstrong : I wish to second that.
Carried unanimously.
The Chairman : Permit me just to express the obliga
tions I feel under to you for having made my duty so
simple and pleasant. My position as chairman necessarily
and properly excludes me from making any judgment what
ever upon the character and quality of what has been
addressed to you. Notwithstanding that, I may say this i
that it is, I believe, a healthy sign of the times when a num
ber of men and women, such as have met together in this
room, can listen to such addresses as have been made to
night, for it will help on our civilisation. And if you want
a definition of what is right, I say that our business is to
learn what is true, then we shall do what is right (applause).
�37
SECOND
NIGHT.
The Chairman, who was much applauded, said : Ladies
and Gentlemen—It is with much satisfaction that I re
sume my duties as chairman this evening. No one occupy
ing this position could fail to be gratified with the high tone
and excellent temper of the debate which we listened to
last night (hear, hear), or, in noting as I did, the earnest,
sustained, and intelligent attention of a large and much
over-crowded audience (applause). I regard this as a health
ful sign of the times. There are those who look upon such
a discussion as this as dangerous and irreverent. I do not
share in that opinion (hear, hear). There is an intelligence
abroad that no longer permits men to cast the burden of
their beliefs upon mere authority, but which compels them
to seek for reasons for the faith that is in them (hear, hear).
To those, I think, such discussion as this, maintained in the
spirit of last evening, cannot fail to be useful. It is obvious
that the first requisite of religion is, that it be true. Fear of
the results of investigation, therefore, should deter no one
from inquiry. That which is true in religion, cannot be
shaken, and that which is false no one should desire to pre
serve (applause). Now, as you are aware, Mr. Armstrong in
this discussion is charged with the duty of maintaining the
proposition that it is reasonable in us to worship God. The
negative of that proposition is supported by Mr. Bradlaugh.
Under the arrangement for the debate, Mr. Bradlaugh is to
night entitled to half-an-hour for his opening, Mr. Arm
strong to half-an-hour for his reply. After that a quarterhour will be given to each alternately, until Mr. Armstrong
will conclude the debate at ten o’clock. I have now great
pleasure in asking Mr. Bradlaugh to open the discussion
(applause).
Mr. Bradlaugh, who was very warmly received, said :
In contending that it is not reasonable to worship God, it
seemed to me that I ought to make clear to you, at any
�38
rate, the words I used, and the sense in which I used them,
and to do that I laid before you last night several definitions,
not meaning that my definitions should necessarily bind
Mr. Armstrong, but meaning that, unless he supplied some
other and better explanations for the words, the meaning
I gave should be, in each case, taken to be my meaning all
through. I did not mean that he was to be concluded by
the form of my definition if he were able to correct it, or if
he were able to give a better instead ; but I think I am now
entitled to say that he ought to be concluded by my defini
tions, and this, from the answer he has given (hear, hear).
The answer was frank—very frank—(hear) and I feel
reluctant to base more upon it than I ought to do in a dis
cussion conducted as this has been. If I were meeting an
antagonist who strove to take every verbal advantage, I
might be tempted to pursue only the same course; but
when I find a man speaking with evident earnestness, using
language which seems to be the utter abandonment of his
cause, I would rather ask him whether some amendment
of the language he used might not put his case in a
better position. His declaration was that he was perfectly
incapable of saying whether the definition, which I had taken
from Professsor Flint, of God, was correct or not (hear,
hear). Now, I will ask him, and you, too, to consider the
consequence of that admission. No definition whatever is
given by him of the word “ God.” There was not even the
semblance, or attempt of it. The only words we got which
were akin to a definition, except some words which, it
appears, I took down hastily, and which Mr. Armstrong
abandoned in his next speech, the only words bearing even
the semblance of a definition, are “ an awful inscrutable
somewhat” (laughter and hear, hear). Except these words,
there have been no words in the arguments and in the
speeches of Mr. Armstrong which enabled me, in any
fashion, to identify any meaning which he may have of it,
except phrases which contradict each other as soon as you
examine them (applause). Now, what is the definition of which
Mr. Armstrong says that he is incapable of saying whether or
not it is correct? “ That God is a self-existent, eternal being,
infinite in power and wisdom, and perfect in holiness and
goodness, the maker of heaven and earth.” Now, does
Mr. Armstrong mean that each division of the definition
comes within his answer ? Does he mean that in relation to
no part of that which is predicated in this definition is he
�39
capable of saying whether it is correct or not ? Because, if
he does, he is answered by his own speech, as a portion of
this defines God as being perfect in holiness and goodness,
in power and wisdom; and it defines him as eternal in
duration and infinite in his existence; and also defines him
as being the creator of the universe. Now, if Mr. Armstrong
means that “ as a whole, I can’t say whether it is correct or
not,” or if, in defending his position, he means that, haying
divided the definition in its parts, he cannot say whether it is,
in any one part, correct or not, then I must remind him that,
in this debate, the onus lies upon him of saying what it is he
worships, and what it is he contends it is reasonable of us
to worship (hear, hear). If he cannot give us a clear and
concise notion of what he worships, and of what he says it
is reasonable for us to worship, I say that his case has fallen
to the ground. It must be unreasonable to worship that of
which you, in thought, cannot predicate anything in any way
—accurately or inaccurately (applause). Mr. Armstrong
evidently felt—I hope that you will not think that the feel
ing was justified—that there was a tendency on my part to
make too much of, and to be too precise as to, the meaning
of words used. Permit me to say it is impossible to be too
precise; it is impossible to be too clear ; it is impossible to
be too distinct—(hear, hear)—especially when you are dis
cussing a subject in terms which are not used by everybody
in the same sense, and which are sometimes not used by the
mass of those to whom you are addressing yourself at all
(applause). It is still more necessary to be precise when
many of those terms have been appropriated by the teachers
of different theologies and mythologies, such teachers having
alleged that the use of the words meant something which, on
the face of it, contradicted itself, and by other teachers who,
if they have not been self-contradictory, have attached meanings
widely different to those given by their fellows (hear, hear).
I will ask you, then, to insist with me that what is meant by
God should be given us in such words that we can clearly
and easily identify it (hear, hear). If you cannot even in
thought identify God, it is unreasonable—absolutely un
reasonable—to talk of worshipping “ it ” (applause). What
is “ it ” you are going to worship ? Can you think clearly
what it is you are going to worship ? If you can think clearly
for yourself what it is, tell me in what words you think it.
It may be that my brain may not be skilled enough to fully
comprehend that, but, at any rate, we shall then have an
�4°
opportunity of testing for ourselves how little or how much
clear thought you may have on the subject (laughter and ap
plause). If you are obliged to state that it is impossible to
put your thoughts in words so clear and so distinct that I may
understand the meaning of it as clearly as you do, or that
a person of ordinary capacity cannot comprehend the words
in which you describe it—if that is impossible, then it is un
reasonable to ask me to worship it (loud applause). I say it
is unreasonable to ask me to worship an unknown quantity
—an unrecognisable symbol expressing nothing whatever.
If you know what it is you worship—if you think you know
what it is you worship—I say it is your duty to put into
words what you think you know (hear, hear). We have had
in this debate some pleas put forward, which, if they had
remained unchallenged, might have been some sort of pleas
for the existence of a. Deity, but each of those pleas has in
turn failed. I do not want to use too strong a phrase, so I
will say that each in turn has been abandoned. Take, for
instance, the plea of beauty, harmony, and calmness of
the world, as illustrated by lakes and mountains, to
which I contrasted storms and volcanoes. Mr. Arm
strong’s reply to that was: “ But this involves problems
which are alike insoluble by Theist and Atheist.” If it is
so, why do you worship what is non-capable of solution ?
If there be no solution, why do you put that word “ God ”
as representative of the solution which you say is unattain
able, and ask me to prostrate myself before it and adore it ?
(applause).
We must have consistency of phraseology.
Either the problem is soluble—then the onus is upon you
to state it in reasonable terms; or it is insoluble, and then
you have abandoned the point you set out to prove, because
it must be unreasonable to worship an insoluble proposition
(applause). Howdoyou know anything of that God you askus
to worship ? I must avow that, after listening carefully to what
has fallen from Mr. Armstrong, I have been unable to glean
what he knows of God or how he knows it (hear, hear). I
remember he has said something about a “ voice of God,”
but he has frankly admitted that the voice in question has
spoken differently and in contradictory senses in different
ages (loud cries of “no, no,”)—and those who say “no,”
will do better to leave Mr. Armstrong to answer for him
self as to the accuracy of what I state (hear, hear). I say
he frankly admitted that the voice he alluded to had spoken
differently and contradictorily in different ages. (Renewed
�4i
cries of “ no ”). I say yes, and I will give the evidence of
my yes. (Cries of “ no, no,” “ order,” and “ hear, hear.”)
I say yes, and I will give the evidence of my yes (hear,
hear, and applause).
Mr. Armstrong said that in one
hundred years there had been a purification, and an
amelioration, and a clearing away; and that that change
had been vaster still since one thousand years ago (ap
plause). He is responsible for admitting what I said
about the definition of morality being different in one
age and amongst one people, to what it is in another
age and amongst another people; and if that does not mean
exactly what I put substantially to you, it has no meaning
at all (loud applause).
I strive not to misrepresent
that which I have to answer; I will do my best to under
stand what it is that is urged against me. Those who hold
a different judgment should try, at least, to suspend it until I
have finished (hear, hear, and applause). In the Baird
Lectures, to which I referred last night—and let me here
say that I don’t think that any complaint can be fairly made
of my quoting from them—something was said last night
about my using great men as an authority. Now I do not do
that; but if I find that a man, whose position and learning
gave him advantages with regard to a subject upon which
I am speaking, and he has expressed what I wished to say
better than I can do—if I use his language it is right
I should say from where I have taken my words (hear, hear)
And if I remember right, we had, last night, quotations from
Charles Voysey, Professor Newman, Professor Blackie, and
a host of similar writers on the other side. I take it they
were given in the same fashion that I intended in giving the
names of the writers of the quotations I have cited—not for
the purpose of overwhelming me with their authority, but
simply to inform me and you from whence were got the
words used (hear, hear). Now, Professor Flint, in his book
on Atheism, directed against the position taken up by men
like myself, says : “ The child is born, not into the religion
of nature but into blank ignorance; and, if left entirely to
itself, would probably never find out as much religious truth
as the most ignorant of parents can teach it.” Again, on page
23 he says : “The belief that there is one God, infinite in
power, wisdom, and goodness, has certainly not been
wrought out by each one of us for himself, but has been
passed on from man to man, from parent to child: tradi
tion, education, common consent, the social medium, have
�42
exerted great influence in determining its acceptance and
prevalence.” Now, what I want to put to you from this is
that, just as Max Muller and others have done, you must try
to find out whether what is to be understood by the word
“ God ” is to be worshipped or not, by tracing backwards
the origin and growth of what is to-day called religion. You
will have to search out the traditions of the world, should
there fail to be any comprehensible meaning come from the
other side. Now, what God is it that we are to worship ?
Is it the Jewish God? Is it the Mahometan God? Is it
the God of the Trinitarian Christian ? Is it one of the
gods of the Hindus ? Or is it one of the gods of the old
Greeks or Italians, and, if so, which of them ? And in each
case from what source are we to get an accurate definition
of either of those gods ? Perhaps Mr. Armstrong will say
that it is none of these. He will probably decline to
have any of these Gods fastened upon him as the proper
God to worship ; but the very fact that there are so many
different gods—different with every variety of people—contra
dictory in their attributes and qualities—the very fact that
there is a wide difference in believers in a God makes it but
right that I should require that the God we are asked to
worship should be accurately defined (applause). In
the current number of the /Jonteinporary Review, Professor
Monier Williams, dealing with the development of Indian
religious thought, has a paragraph which is most appro
priate to this debate. He says, on page 246 : “ The early
religion of the Indo-Aryans was a development of a still earlier
belief in man’s subjection to the powers of nature and his
need of conciliating them. It was an unsettled system,
which at one time assigned all the phenomena of the uni
verse to one first Cause; at another, attributed them to
several Causes operating independently; at another, sup
posed the whole visible creation to be a simple evolution
from an eternal creative germ. It was a belief which,
according to the character and inclination of the
worshipper was now monotheism, now tritheism, now
polytheism, now pantheism.
But it was not yet
idolatry. Though the forces of nature were thought of as
controlled by divine persons, such persons were not yet
idolised. There is no evidence from the Vedic hymns that
images were employed. The mode of divine worship con
tinued to be determined from a consideration of human
liking and dislikings. Every worshipper praised the gods
'
�43
because he liked to be praised himself. He honoured them
with offerings because he liked to receive presents himself.
This appears to have been the simple origin of the sacrificial
system, afterwards closely interwoven with the whole re
ligious system. And here comes the difficult question—
What were the various ideas expressed by the term sacrifice?
In its purest and simplest form it denoted a dedication of
some simple gift as an expression of gratitude for blessings
received. Soon the act of sacrifice became an act of pro
pitiation for purely selfish ends. The favour of celestial
beings who were capable of conferring good or inflicting
harm on crops, flocks, and herds, was conciliated by offerings
and oblations of all kinds. First, the gods were invited to
join their worshippers at the every-day meal. Then they
were invoked at festive gatherings, and offered a share of
the food consumed. Their bodies were believed to be com
posed of ethereal particles, dependent for nourishment on
the indivisible elementary essence of the substances presented
to them, and to be furnished with senses capable of being
gratified by the aroma of butter and grain offered in fire
(homa); and especially by the fumes arising from libations
of the exhilarating juice extracted from the Soma plant.”
I will allege that .you cannot give me a definition of
God that does not originate in the ignorance of man as to
the causes of phenomena which are abnormal to him, and
which he cannot explain. The wonderful, the extraordinary,
the terrific, the mysterious, the mighty, the grand, the
furious, the good, the highly beneficent—all these
that he did not understand became to him God. He
might have understood them on careful investigation
had his mind then been capable for the search,
but instead of that he attributed them to huge per
sonifications of the Unknown—the word behind which
to-day is God, and it is the equivalent for all he observed,
but did not comprehend, for all that happened of which he
knew not the meaning (applause). It was not education but
ignorance which gave birth to the so-called idea of a God
(hear, hear). And I will submit to you that, in truth, all
forms of worship have arisen from exaggeration and mis
application of what men have seen in their fellow-men and
fellow-women. A man found that a big furious man might
be pacified and calmed by soothing words; that a big
avaricious man might be satisfied and pleased with plenteous
gifts ; that this one might be compelled to do something by
�44
angry words or harsh treatment; and that this one could be
won by supplications to comply with his wishes—and what
he imagined or observed as to his fellows he applied to the
unknown, thinking, no doubt, that that which he had found
efficacious in the known experience, might also be efficacious
in that in which he had no experience. And what did you
find ? You found the sailor at sea, who’did not understand
navigation, offering candles to his Deity, or special saint,
and promising more offerings of a similar character if the
Deity brought him safe into port. I say it is more reason
able to teach him how to steer than how to worship, and also
more reasonable to know something about the science of
navigation. That would prove much more serviceable than
worship, for when he relied upon candles, he ran upon rocks
and reefs, but as soon as he understood navigation, he
could bring his own ship safely into port (applause).
Prayer is spoken of by Mr. Armstrong as an act of wor
ship. What does it imply ? It implies a belief held on the
part of the person who prays, that he may be noticed by the
being to whom he prays; and it also implies that he is
asking that being to do something which he would have left
undone but for that prayer. Then does he think that he can
influence the person whom he addresses by his rank or by his
position ? Does he think he can influence his Deity by his
emotion ? Does he think that as he would win a woman’s
love, so he would gain God, by passionate devotion ?
Does he think that, as he would frighten a man,
so he would influence God through fear ? Does he appeal
to God’s logic, or to his pity? Does he appeal to his
mercy or to his justice ? or does he hope to tell God one
thing he could not know without the prayer ? (loud applause.)
I want an answer, here, clear and thorough, from one
who says that prayer is a reasonable worship to be offered to
God (renewed applause). Something was said last night
about a cause being necessarily intelligent, and I think, in
my speech afterwards, I challenged the assertion. Nothing
was said to explain what was meant, nothing was done to
further explain the matter, and although I defined what I
meant by cause, and defined what I meant by intelligence,
no objection was taken. Now, I have seen a hut crushed
by an avalanche falling on it, as I have been crossing the
Alps.
Does Mr. Armstrong mean to tell me that the
avalanche which crushed the hut was intelligent, or that it
had an intelligent wielder? If the avalanche is intelligent,
�45
why does he think so ? If the avalanche has an intelli
gent wielder, please explain to me the goodness of that
intelligent wielder who dashes the avalanche on the cottage ?
(applause). If you tell me that it is a mystery which you
cannot explain, I say it is unreasonable to ask me to worship
such a mystery—(renewed applause)—and as long as you
call it a mystery, and treat it as that which you cannot explain,
so long you have no right to ask me to adore it. There was
a time when man worshipped the lightning and thunder,
and looked upon them as Deity. But now he has grown
wiser, and, having investigated the subject, instead of
worshipping the lightning as a Deity, he erects lightningconductors and electric wires, and chains the lightning and
thunder God; knowledge is more potent than prayer (ap
plause). As long as they were worshipped • science could
do nothing, but now we see to what uses electricity has been
brought. When they knew that the lightning-conductor
was more powerful than the God they worshipped, then
science was recognised the mighty master and ruler, instead
of ignorant faith (applause). I have already submitted that
there has not been the semblance of proof or authority for
the existence of any being identifiable in words to whom it
would be reasonable to offer worship, and I will show you
the need for pressing that upon you. A strong statement
was made last night which amounted to an admission that
there was wrong here which should not be, and that, but for
the hope on the part of the speaker that that wrong would
be remedied at some future time, he would be in a state of
terrible despair. He gave no reason for the hope, and no
evidence why he held the hope. He only contended that
things were so bad here that they would be indefensible
except for the hope that they woutd be remedied. This
admission is fatal to the affirmation of God to be worshipped
in the way here mentioned.
Then we had something said
about experience. All experience must be experience of the
senses : you can have no other experience whatever. To
quote again from Max Muller: “ All consciousness begins
with sensuous perception, with what we feel, and hear, and
see. Out of this we construct what may be called con
ceptual knowledge, consisting of collective and abstract
concepts. What we call thinking consists simply in addi
tion and subtraction of precepts and concepts. Conceptual
knowledge differs from sensuous knowledge, not in sub
stance, but in form only. As far as the material is con
�46
cerned, nothing exists in the intellect except what existed
before in the senses.” It is the old proposition put in
different, forms , by Locke, Spinoza, and others, over and
over again, but it has to be taken with this qualification that
you have innumerable instances of hallucinations of the
senses. Delusions on religious matters are open to the re
mark that of all hallucinations of the senses—as Dr H
Maudsley shows in the Fortnightly Review—all halluci
nations of the senses those on religious matters only keep
current with the religious teachings of the day. Sight, touch
smell, hearing, feeling—all are the subject of illusion as is
shown over and over again. Any man bringing as evidence
to us the report of experience which is only of an abnor
mal character, is bound to submit it to a test which is some
thing beyond in severity that which we should apply to
normal events. . The more abnormal it is the more par
ticularity in detail do I wish, in order to examine it, so that
I may be able to identify it; and the more curious the state
ment the more carefully do I wish to test it. Loose words in
theology will not do, and here I submit that at present
we stand, with, at any rate, on one side, nothing whatever
affirmed against me. I gathered last night—I hope incor
rectly—I gathered last night—I hope the words were spoken
incautiously—that Mr. Armstrong held it to be natural that
a man should have to struggle against wrong, vice, and folly,
for the purpose of bringing out the higher qualities, and that
it was alleged that it was to that struggle we were indebted
for our virtue. If that were a real thought on the part of
Mr. Armstrong it is but a sorry encouragement to any
attempts, at reformation and civilisation. Why strive to re
move misery and wrong if the struggle against them is con
ducive to.virtue ? It would take a long time to bring about
any ameliorating change in society if such doctrine were
widely held (loud applause).
The Rev. R. A. Armstrong, who was applauded on rising,,
said : Mr. Chairman and Friends—I wish, in justice to
myself, to say that I freely offered Mr. Bradlaugh the choice
of parts as to the order of speaking. I know not which way
the balance of advantage lies; but after the speech we
have listened to, I think you will agree with me that he who
speaks, first the second night has a considerable pull (laughter).
Last night as I passed down that awful flight of stairs, which
they must climb who, in this town, would soar from the nether
world to the celestial realms of Secularism, I heard many
�47
•comments, and among others one man just behind me said:
“Oh ! Armstrong is nowhere in Bradlaugh’s hands. Bradlaugh
can do just what he likes with him ” (laughter). Now, my
friend said the very truth in a certain sense. As a debater
I am nowhere compared with Mr. Bradlaugh. He has
fluency-—I compute that in thirty minutes I can string
together some 4,000 words, while, I fancy, Mr. Bradlaugh’s
score would be just about 6,000—so that to equalise our
mere mechanical advantages I ought really to have three
minutes to every two of his. If I have omitted many things
which I ought to have said, it is due to this reason (laughter
and hear, hear)—for I have not been silent during the time
assigned to me. Of course, I do not complain of this.
Then, to say nothing of Mr.'Bradlaugh’s powerful intellect, to
which I do not pretend, and his wide reading, he is in
constant practice at this work so new to me, so much so that
I find almost every thought he expressed last night, and in
almost—sometimes precisely—identical language, printed in
his pamphlets, and much of it even spoken in one or other o
his numerous debates. Take this, along with his prodigious
memory, and you will see that the doctrine of Atheism has,
indeed, in him, the very ablest defender that its friends could
wish. And if what he says is not enough to demolish
Theism, then you may be sure that Theism cannot be
demolished (applause). But then, friends, I do want you not to
look on this as a personal struggle between Mr. Bradlaugh
and myself at all. I no more accept it in that light than I would
accept a challenge from him to a boxing match, and I think
you will all agree with me that in that case, in discretion I should
show the better part of valour (hear, hear, and laughter).
We are both speaking in all earnestness of what we hold to be the
truth. Neither of us, I presume, in the least, expects to make
converts on the spot: converts so quickly made would be
like enough to be swayed back the other way next week.
But we do desire that the seed of our words should sink
into your minds; that you should give them your reverent
attention, that, in due season, so far as they are good
and true, they may ripen into matured convictions of
the. truth (applause). And now let me look back at the
position in which this conference was left last night. I am
the more at liberty to do so, as to-night Mr. Bradlaugh has
only—or chiefly—done two things, namely, repeated some
things whichhe saidlast night, andanswered certain arguments
of Professor Flint. That is perfectly fair, but it is equally fair
�48
for me to leave Professor Flint to answer for himself (hear
hear, and applause). And I complain that Mr. Bradlaugh
either did not listen to, or did not understand, what I
endeavoured to put in plainest words about the function of
that voice of God which we call conscience (hear, hear).
Observe, that while in different climesand ages, ay, in the same
manat different times, the conceptions of the particular deeds
that come under the head of right differ, the idea of rightness
itself, of rectitude, is always and invariably the same, from its
first faint glimmer in the savage little removed comparatively
from the lower animal, from which he is said to be
developed, to the season of its clear shining, luminous and
glorious, in hero, prophet, martyr, saint—in Elizabeth Fry,
in Mary. Carpenter, in Florence Nightingale. To speak
metaphysically, the abstract subjective idea of right is the
same and one, but our ideas of the concrete and objective
right develop and progress ever towards a purer and more
beautiful ideal. We have by our own powers to satisfy our
selves as best we can what is right. But when we have
made up our minds, the voice of God sounds clear as a
bell upon the soul and bids us do it (applause). This I
stated again and again last night, yet to-night again Mr.
Bradlaugh has confounded the two things. Mr. Bradlaugh
raised a laugh with his story of the cannibal objecting to the
tough, and choosing the tender meal. That cannibal, in so
far, does but illustrate how a man is swayed by those lower
instincts and desires which I rigorously and definitely'dis
tinguished and separated from conscience. Why Mr. Brad
laugh confounded this with a case of the deliverance of
conscience I cannot think, because I am so sure it wasneither to make you grin nor to confuse your minds (hear,
hear). The latter part of the first night’s debate turned on
the mystery of evil. But Mr. Bradlaugh did not then ven
ture to allege the possibility of a world in which noble character
could be developed without the contact with suffering and
pain (hear, hear). He said he was not called upon to make
a world ; happily not; but at any rate he should not question
the excellence of the world in which he lives unless he can at
least conceive abetter—(loud applause)—and I say that where
evil had never been, or what we call evil, manliness, bravery,
generosity, sympathy, tenderness, could never be (applause).
A world without temptation would be a world without
virtue (hear, hear). A world all pleasurable would be a
world without goodness, and even the pleasurable itself
�49
would cease by sheer monotony to give any pleasure at all. A
world not developed out of the conflict of good and evil,
or joy and pain, would necessarily be an absolutely neutral
world, without emotion of any sort. Unless the whole
tint is to be neutral, you must have light and shade; and the
only test by which to judge whether the power controlling the
world is good or evil—God or Devil, as Mr. Bradlaugh says—
(applause)—is to note whether light or darkness preponderates;
and not only that, but whether the movement, the tendency,
the development, the drift of things is towards the gradual
swallowing up of darkness by the light, or light by darkness;
w'hether freedom, happiness, virtue, are in the procession
of the ages losing their ground, or slowly, surely wanning
ever fresh accession (applause). I take it, then, that if we
are to have a final predominance of goodness—nay, even of
happiness, if you make that the highest good—it can only be
by these things winning their way by degrees out of the evil
which is their shadow. And I invite you once more to test
this from experience. My own experience, clear and sure,
and that of every other devout man, is simply this : that
whatever sorrow, whatever pain we suffer, though it wring
our very heart, the time is sure to come when, looking back
thereon, we thank God that it was given us, perceiving that
it was good, not evil, that befel us, being the means, in
some wray or other, of our further advance in happiness or
goodness, or nearness to our heavenly Father. You tell meit is
all very well for me; but you point to those whose lot is cast in
less pleasant places, and ask me what of them ? Is God
good to them? Well, I will take you to a dark and dismal
cellar beneath the reeking streets of a mighty city. And
this picture is not drawn from fancy, it is a photograph
from the life of one I know of. In that dark and poor abode you
shall enter, and you shall see an aged woman to whom that
spot is home. She is eaten up with disease, the inheritance,
doubtless, of her forefathers’ sin. For fifty years her simple
story has been of alternations between less pain and more.
Beside her are two orphan children, no kith or kin of hers,
but adopted by her out of the large love which she nurtures
in her heart, to share the pence she wins from the mangle,
every turn of which is, to her, physical pain. Well, surely,
she knows nought of God, has none of those “ experiences ”
which Mr. Bradlaugh treats as if they were luxuries confined
to the comfortable Theist in his easy-chair, or on his softlypillowed bed. Ay, but she is rising from her knees to
�5°
turn to the dry crust on the board, which is all she has to
share with the children. And what says she as you enter ?
“ Oh, sir, I was only thanking God for his good
ness, and teaching these poor children so.” Now,
if Mr. Bradlaugh is right in declaring we can know
nought of God, then that old woman ought never
to have eased her laden heart by the outburst of her prayer,
ought to have cast out of her as a freak of lunacy the peace
that stole upon her there as she rose from her knees, ought to
have shunned teaching those children, whose lot was like to be
as hard as hers, one word about the reliance that she had
on God (applause). Instead of that she taught the pros
perous man who stumbled down the broken stair into her
abode, a lesson of trust and faith in the goodness and pre
sence of God, which he never forgot as long as he lived
(hear, hear and applause). I sat the other day beside a
dying girl. Her body was in hideous pain, but her face was lit
with a light of beauty and of love which told a wondrous tale of
her spirit’s life. She died, and her mother and her sisters
weep to-day. But a new love, a new gentleness, a new
sense of the nearness of the spirit - world has already
blossomed in their home, and, I am not sure that they
would call her back even if their voices could avail. So it
is; this woe which we call evil is the sacred spring of all
that is beautiful and good (hear, hear). To the Atheist the
world’s sorrow must, indeed, be insupportable. If he be
sincere and have a heart, I do not know how he can ever
eat and drink and make merry, still less how he can make a
jest and raise a titter in the very same speech in which he
dwells with all the skill of practised eloquence upon that
woe (applause). If I were an Atheist I hardly think I could
ever throw off the darkness of this shadow. But, believing
in God, whom I personally know, and know as full of love,
I am constrained to trust that, though this evil be a mystery
the full significance of which I cannot understand, and
though relatively to the little sum of things here and now it
seem great, yet that relatively to the whole plan and sum of
the universe it is very small, and that that poor child, born
of sin and shame, who knew no better than to steal the loaf,
shall one day wear a diadem of celestial glory, and be by no
means least in the Kingdom of Heaven. And when I see
the Atheist smiling, laughing, having apparentlya lightheart in
him, I am bound to suppose that he too, somehow, trusts that
..goodness and happiness are going to win in the end—that
�is, that goodness is the ultimately overruling power. And.
if he believes that, he believes in the power which men
call God (applause). Now, Mr. Bradlaugh has casti
gated me with some severity for not obliging him
with definitions. It is impossible, he says, to be too
precise in the use of words, and I agree with him.
But by definitions I cannot make the simplest words
in the English language more plain to you (hear, hear).
He, himself, has given us some . specimens of defini
tions which I do not think have made things much clearer
than they were before. There are three words of import
ance in the title of this debate, and I will try, since Mr.
Bradlaugh has experienced difficulty in understanding me,
whether I can tell him more distinctly what I mean by them.
Those three words are “ reasonable,” “ worship,” “ God.”
When I say it is reasonable to do a thing, I do not mean
that I can demonstrate to you with the precision of, mathe
matics that every proposition, the truth of which is assumed
in that act, is true; but Ido mean that the propositions, on the
assumption of which the act proceeds, are, at least, sufficiently
probable to win the verdict of an unbiassed judgment, and
that the act itself is likely to be found to be a good. Mr.
Bradlaugh himself has defined “ worship ” as including
“ prayer, praise, sacrifice, offerings, solemn services, adora
tion, and personal prostration.” If Mr. Bradlaugh will kindly
occupy his next fifteen minutes by defining to me exactly
what he means by each of those terms, I may be better able
to tell him whether I include them all in worship, and
whether he has left anything out. But at present I do not
find that any one of them is simpler or more comprehensible
than the term worship, while “prayer, praise, sacrifice, and
offerings,’’each might mean at least two very different things
“ solemn services ” is hopelessly vague ; “ adoration,” as I
understand it, is included in some of the others; and before
we know what “personal prostration” means, we must
define “ person ”—no easy matter—and then explain what'
we mean by the “ prostration ” of that person (laughter and.
applause). Meanwhile, I have described, at the very outset,
that energy of my soul which I call worship, namely, that in
which I address myself to God as to one immeasurably sur
passing me in goodness, in wisdom, in power, in love (hear,
hear). I don’t think this is plainer than the good old Saxon
word “worship;” I think that word conveys a pretty clear
meaning to most men. But Mr. Bradlaugh finds it easier to
�52
understand long phrases than simple Saxon words; and my
. only fear now is that he will want me to define all the
words in my definition—(laughter)—and though I am ready
enough to do that, I fear it would take a week (renewed
laughter, and hear, hear). God:—You ask me to define God,
and you say I have not in any way done so. You quote
the metaphysical definition of Flint, and want me to enter
into metaphysics. What do you mean by defining ? Do
you mean to draw a circle round God, so as to separate him
from all else ? If you do, I reply, I can’t; because, as far as
I can see, or my imagination can extend, I discern no
boundaries to God. But if you mean to ask simply what I
mean by God, I mean—and I said this again and again
last night—the source of the command that comes to me
to do right, to abjure wrong ; the source of the peace
that comes to me even in pain, when I have done right,
and of the remorse that comes to me even in prosperity
when I have done ill. I mean also the source—which
I believe to be identical — of the wondrous sense of
a divine presence which seizes me in the midst of
nature’s sublimest scenes — ay, and even of nature’s
awful catastrophes. I mean also the source of the
moral and spiritual strength that comes to me in response to
the worship which my soul pours forth; and if you want to
know what I mean by my soul, I mean myself. What else
besides the source of these things God maybe, I cannot tell you.
It is only so—in his relation to me—that I directly know him.
Beyond that he is the subject of philosophy, but not of im
mediate knowledge. I believe him to be very much more;
but that does not affect the reasonableness of worshipping
him, and that is the subject of our debate (hear, hear). So
that I cannot define God in the way I can define Notting
ham, or Europe, or the earth (hear, hear). I cannot tell
how much is included in his being \ how much, if any, is
excluded. I can tell you what he is to me, in relation to me—
and that is the only way in which any entity can be defined—
and I can tell you what other men testify by word, by deed,
by martyrdom, he is to them (hear, hear). Beyond that I
have no instruments by which to measure; and therefore
I take up no pen with which to write down the measure
ments, or define (applause). But Mr. Bradlaugh says if
we cannot exactly define an object we are incapable of exact
thought or belief concerning it. Did Mr. Bradlaugh do al
gebra at school ? That most exact and prosaic science con-
�•sists largely in reasoning about unknown quantities ; that is,
about some x or_y, of which you only know that it has some
one or perhaps two definite relations to certain other things.
You don’t know what x or y is in itself—only some function
by which it is related to a and b and c. From that relation you
reason, and sometimes from it you get by subtle processes
to infer a vast deal more, and it will perhaps prove just from
that relation that x must be such and such a number, or that
it must be infinite. Does Mr. Bradlaugh say we can have
no exact thought about the x in the algebraic equation,
before we have worked out the whole sum ? Yes, we know
it in its relations or some of them. Yet the very essence
of algebra is that x is undefined. The human soul is the a, b,
•or q the well-known, the familiar; God is the x, related wondrously thereto, yet none has ever yet worked out that sum.
The supremestphilosophers, who hereare school-boys indeed,
have only displayed workings on their slates which, to
use again mathematical language, show that x approaches
towards a limit which is equal to infinity (hear, hear). But
Mr. Bradlaugh says there should be no belief in that which we
•cannot define. Now, I challenge Mr. Bradlaugh in all re
spect and sincerity to define himself (applause). If he de
clines or fails, I will not say we must cease to believe in Mr.
Bradlaugh, but that is the necessary inference from his
maxims. Mr. Bradlaugh says all experience must be the
experience of the senses. By which sense does he experience
love, indignation, or all the varied sentiments which bind him
to his fellow-men and women (applause) ? Mr. Bradlaugh
told us in his concluding speech last night that no ex
perience of another man’s can be anything at all to him
until tested by his own. Is, then, a man born blind un
reasonable if he believes that others have experience of
some wonderful sensation, making objects very vividly
present to them, which they call sight ? Shall the man born
■deaf say he does not believe there is such a thing as sound ?
I know not whether Mr. Bradlaugh has any personal ex
perience of the heat of the torrid zone. Does he believe
it ? Has he tested the height of Mont Blanc ? If not, does
he hold his belief in suspense as to whether it is 15,000 feet
high or not ? The fact is the enormous majority of the
beliefs on which we act every day of our lives with perfect
•confidence are founded either on sheer Faith, untested and by
us untestable, or on Testimony, that is the recorded experience
■of others which we have not tested. But Mr. Brad
�54
laugh says that if the alleged experience of another
is “ abnormal ” we must not believe it. He did
not define “abnormal,” and I want to know who is
to be judge whether my experience of the command that
comes to me in conscience is abnormal or not. Mr. Brad
laugh ? This audience ? With confidence I accept the ver
dict of any gathering of my fellow-men and women, knowing
that my experience herein has a sure echo in their own. But
Mr. Bradlaugh says, if someone said a room ran a race,
you would call him a lunatic. That argument means
nothing, or else it means that Martineau and Newman, and
all great and good who have recognised God—ay, and Voltaire
and Thomas Paine—Theistsboth—are to be counted lunatics
(hear, hear). Time has prevented—I hope it may not still
prevent—my stating clearly what I mean, when I proceed on
philosophical grounds to allege my belief that there is an
intelligent cause. “Intelligent ” I shall not stop to define,
unless I am challenged to it, because I presume intelligence
in you (applause). “ If there were no such supreme intelli
gence,” says Mr. Voysey, “ the universe, supposing it to be
self-evolved (and of course unconscious, since it is not intel
ligent) has only just come into self-consciousness through
one of its parts—viz., man. It had been, so to speak,
asleep all these cycles of ages till man was born and his
intellect dawned upon the world, and, for the first time, the
universe realised its own existence through the intelligent
consciousness of one of its products. I do not think
absurdity could go further than that. If there be no self
conscious intelligence but man, then the universe is only
just now, through man, becoming aware of its own exist
ence ” (hear, hear, and applause). “ Cause,” Mr. Brad
laugh, I think, has defined, in language which in
cluded the words, “ means towards an end.” A mean o:
means, however, is, by the very conception of the word, the
second term in a series of three of which the end is the
third, and “means” implies some power making use of
those means, and that power is the first term in the series.
Now, I claim that cause is that first term, whether there be
two more, or only one. By “ cause ” I mean—and you
mean, if you will search your thought—the initiating power,
that which begins to produce an effect. Now, my mind is so
constituted that to speak to me of a power which initiates
effects, yet is not conscious, intelligent, is sheer nonsense;
therefore I hold the power which displays itself as one in the
�55
%
uniformity of the laws of nature, and lies behind all phe
nomena—the growth of the grass, the rush of the cataract,
the breath of the air, the stately sailing of the stars through
their geometric paths, to be intelligent, conscious, to do it
all by distinct purpose; and I can in no way otherwise con
ceive. I conceive this source of the geometric motion of
all the spheres and of the minutest dance of protoplasm in the
nettle’s sting as always, everywhere, ofpurpose producing these
effects. And the worship which I gave God as I know him
in relationship to me is refined and glorified by the conception which thus dawns on me of his being. And in the
words of Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire, I commune thus
with myself: “ Where,” says he, “ is the eternal geometrician ?
Is he in one place, or in all places without occupying space ?
I know not. Has he arranged all things of his own sub
stance? I know not. Is he immense without quantity
and without quality ? I know not. All I know is, that we
must adore him and be just ” (loud applause).
Mr. Bradlaugh : It is perfectly true that what I have said
here I have said before, and very much of what I have said I
have printed before. I am quite sure that Mr. Armstrong
did not intend that as any blame upon me. [Mr. Arm
strong : Certainly not.] In fact, if any advantage accrued,
it would accrue to him, because, having what I had to say
on the subject to refer to, he would be better able to answer
it by previous preparation. Why I mention it is because
one person seemed to think that it was very reprehensible on
my part to say here anything that was not perfectly new.
I make no claim to originality, but try to say the truest
thing I can in the clearest way I can (hear, hear, and
applause). Then I am told that I did not pay attention
enough to what was said last night about the functions of
the voice of God. I have been told to-night that the idea of
righteousness and rectitude has always been one and the
same amongst all human beings, from the savage to the
highest intellect. If telling me so is evidence of it, then,
of course, I must be content. But, unfortunately, I am not
content, but say that the evidence is all the other way (hear,
hear, and a laugh). I have read carefully Wake’s latest book
on the evolutions of morality, tracing out the growth of
notions of morality amongst savages. I have read Tylor,
Broca, Lubbock, Agassiz, Gliddon, Pritchard, Lawrence,
and I think I am familiar with the best of ancient and
modern authors on the subject; and I say it is
�56
absolutely contrary to the fact that the notions of
morality are, and always have been identical from
the lowest savage to the highest intellect. It is abso
lutely contrary to the fact that one and the same idea of
right always and everywhere prevails (hear, hear). It is not
a question of my opinion ; it is a question of the conclusive
evidence laboriously collected on the subject, and I am
sorry to have to put it in that plain and distinct way (hear,
hear). Then I am told, and I am sure Mr. Armstrong
would not have said that unless he thought he did, that he care
fully separated last night the lower instincts which were not
included in conscience from the higher mental qualities.
But to my memory this was not so, and I have read the
whole of the speeches to-day in the reporter’s notes, and I
must say I found nothing of the kind. Now we have a.
greater difficulty. How much and how many—how much
of the mental instincts, and how many of the mental faculties
—are we to class as going to make up conscience, and how
much not ? I do not pretend to make the classification.
It rests upon the person who has the burden of proof here..
I deny there has been, as yet, even an attempt at classifica
tion, and I call for some statement which shall enable me
to understand that; without it is to be foregone. Then I
had it returned upon me that I had no right to criticise this
world unless I could conceive a better. The very act of
criticism involves the conception of the better. When I
point out something insufficient or wrong, that criticism
implies the conception of something conceivably better if’
that were changed. If you want, now, an illustration of
something possibly better, I would point to the famine in
China. There, actually, millions of people are dying for
want of food, and, for the purpose of sustaining life a little
longer in themselves, the members of families are eating
their own relations. If I were God I should not tolerate
that—(applause)—nor could I worship a God who does.
Mr. Armstrong, in his speech, pointed out what he terms an
intelligent purpose. It may be for an intelligent purpose that
millions of the Chinese should die of starvation, and actually
eat one another for want of food ; but if it is, I cannot
understand the goodness of the intelligent purposer. You
cannot take one illustration and say that it is the work of an
intelligent person, and then take another and say that it is.
not. If it is the intelligence of God displayed in one caseit must be in another, unless Mr. Armstrong contends that
�57
there are a number of Gods, amongst which number there
must be a good many devils (laughter and loud applause).
There are many things of a similar kind I could point out,
and ask the same question with regard to; where is the intelli
gence of God as displayed in permitting the Bulgarian
atrocities, the Russo-Turkish war, the Greek insurrection—
or in the world nearer home, its crime, misery, and want
(hear, hear, and applause). I do not draw the same moral
from the story of the starving woman that Mr. Armstrong
would draw. While you thank God for the crime, pauperism,
misery, and poverty, I say that you are degrading yourself.
The Atheist deplores the misery, the poverty, and the crime,
and does all he can to prevent it by assisting the sufferers to
extricate themselves, instead of spending his time in blessing
and praising a God for sending the woe and attributing it to
his superior intelligence (applause). Then there was an
astounding statement which came more in the sermon part
of the speech than in the argumentative portion of it
(laughter). Perhaps that may account for the wealth of its
assumption, and also for deficiency of its basis. It was that
freedom, happiness, and virtue, through the power of God,
were continually winning their way. How is it that an intelli
gent and omnipotent God does not look after them more,
and see that they overcome opposition a little faster than
they have done ? Mr. Armstrong says that I fight shy of
experience. I don’t do anything of the kind. I fight shy of
experience which will not submit itself to any test; I fight
shy of experience which cannot bear examination and
investigation; I fight shy of such experience only. Our
friend gives us the experience of a dying girl. Now, I do
not mean to say that every religion in the world has not
been a consolation to dying people—that belief in a God
has not been a consolation to persons who have enjoyed the
full power of their mental faculties on their death-beds. Since
I was in America some time ago I saw a copy of a sermon
preached by a New York clergyman, who had attended,
what he believed to be the dying bed of an Atheist, and he
said that he hoped that Christians would learn to die as
bravely and as calmly as the Atheist seemed prepared to
die. Luckily that Atheist did not die. He is alive to
night to answer for himself (applause and hear, hear). I
don t think an illustration of personal experience in that way
can go for much. The man and woman who die in possession
of their faculties, with strong opinions, will generally die
�strong in those opinions. Men have been martyred for
false gods as well as for the one you would have me worship.
It is useless to make this kind of an appeal in a discussion,
in which there was room and need for much else. Heavenly
stars, a crown, and that kind of thing are not as certain as
they ought to be in order to be treated as material
in this discussion. And then Mr. Armstrong says what he
would do and how he would feel if he were an Atheist.
Charles Reade wrote a novel, which he entitled “ Put yourself
in his Place.” Mr. Armstrong has been trying to put him
self in the Atheist’s place, but he has not been very success
ful (hear, hear). The Atheist does not think that all the
evil which exists in this world is without remedyj he does
not think that there is no possible redemption from sorrow,
or that there is no salvation from misery (hear, hear). He
thinks and believes that the knowledge of to-day a little,
and to-morrow more, and the greater knowledge of the day
that will yet come, will help to redeem, will help to rescue
the inhabitants of this world from their miserable position ;
and further, that this is not to be in some world that is to
come, but in the world of the present, in which the salva
tion is self-worked out (loud applause). The Atheist will
not make promises of something in the future as a compen
sation for the present miseries of man. Instead of saying
that for prayers and worship the poor woman or man will
have the bread of life in future, he tries to give her and him
the strength to win bread here to sustain and preserve life as
long as it is possible to do so (applause). The diadems,
too—which our friend has to offer to the poor—which are to
be worn in heaven by those who have had no clothes here
—possess no attraction to the Atheist; therefore he does nor
offer them, but, instead, tries to develop such self-reliant
effort as may clothe and feed those who are naked and
hungry while they are here. He directs his efforts towards
human happiness in the present, and believes that in the
future humanity must be triumphant over misery, want, and
wrong (applause). A diadem of celestial glory may or may
not be a very good thing; of that I do not look upon my
self as a judge, so long as I have no belief in its possibility.
That there is much misery and suffering in the world I
know, and it rests with Mr. Armstrong to prove whether it
is better to try and remedy it here or to worship its author
in the doubtful endeavour to obtain as recompense a crown
of celestial glory (hear, hear, and applause). But which
�59
God is it that we are to worship ? Is it the Mahometan
God, or the Jewish God? Is it one of the Gods of the
Hindus ? Is it the Christian’s God ? If so, which sect of
Christians? You must not use phrases which mean
different things in different mouths (hear, hear). Then we
come to definitions, and, having objected that there was
no necessity for defining, or having objected that defining
would not make things more clear, with the skill and tact of
a practical debater, my friend goes through every word
(laughter). Prayer, we were told, has two distinct meanings.
Might I ask in which sense it was used in the first speech
made last night? You did not tell us then that prayer had
two senses. I ask why you did not tell us ? I might have
thought it was one fashion when you meant another. I ask
what meaning you meant when you used it ? What two
senses has prayer towards God ?—in which of the two senses
did you use prayer—and, knowing it had two meanings,
why did you not tell us in which sense you used it ? Then
praise, too, you said, is to thank God for his goodness; and
as you used the word many times last night you knew what
you meant by it, having relied upon it so firmly that it
seemed to be an evidence of God’s existence (applause).
By sacrifice I mean an act of real cowardice. The coward
does not dare to pay in his own person for the wrong which
he has done, so he offers something or somebody weaker in
his stead. He tries by offering a sacrifice to avert the ven
geance which would fall—and, according to his creed,
ought to fall—upon himself. Sacrifice is the act of a
coward (applause). Offerings are of flowers, of fruits;
offerings of young animals, lambs, kids; sometimes the
offerings are things which come the nearest to their hands;
sometimes the sacrifice consists of inanimate things which
had a special value to the worshipper; sometimes the
first fruits of their fields or flocks, which they offer
to the source, as they think, of the plenty in those
fields and flocks.
In later times, offerings have got
to be much more complex; but even now you will still find
them, in modified fashions, in the Churches of England
and Rome. The mutual system is that which operates in
every form of worship which makes any sort of claim to re
ligion. The word “ worship ” was only used as a general
word which covers the whole of those forms, leaving our
friends to select and repudiate, and in any case the burden
is on Mr. Armstrong to make the meaning clear (hear,
�6o
hear). I read the whole of the speeches of last night with
out finding any repudiation or question about the definitions
I presented ; and I submit it is scarcely fair, after what has
passed, to ask me to further define them at this late stage
of the debate. I should have had no objection had it been
invited at the earliest outset (applause). Well, now, we
have worship defined as “ the energy of my soul.” Well,
but you have not explained your soul. Why do you call it
soul ? Where is its place in your body ? Is there any
thing about soul you can notice so as to enable me to know
anything at all about it ? Will you take your definition of
soul from Voltaire, whom you have quoted against me?
When you reply, will you tell us what Voltaire, Professor
Newman, Paine, or Martineau say upon the subject of God,
and in which of their writings you will find that which all
the others would accept as a definition ? You must
remember the Theist of Paine’s time is not the Theist of
to-day, and I want you to tell us what are the specific
opinions of each of those you have quoted—of Francis
William Newman, of John William Newman, of Martineau,
of Thomas Paine, of Voltaire—as to the questions I have
asked (applause). Which of the Gods is it that I am to
understand Mr. Armstrong as defending and asking me to
worship (loud applause) ?
Mr. Armstrong : Mr. Chairman, Ladies, and Gentle
men,—I am somewhat at a loss as to which of the numerous
questions I am to answer first. I shall not take them in
any logical order, but simply pick out of my note-book
the most important of them. Mr. Bradlaugh has said
that the act of criticism of the world implied the conception
of a better world. Mr. Bradlaugh has tried to describe his
conception of the better world, and I have tried in my pre
vious speeches to show that he would not make it better.
And I again submit that, instead of being better, it would
be worse (hear, hear). He says he does not draw the same
conclusion from that poor woman in the cellar that I
do. He says that while you are content to suffer, you de
grade yourself. Now, there are two kinds of content.
You may be content like the sloth or the sluggard, or you
may be content like that poor woman, who while trying to
improve her position, still remained poor to the end of her
days, and yet at the same time felt the peace of God in
her heart.
Does the belief in a God, as a fact,
make men less energetic and vigorous in improving
�6i
their own condition, or trying to improve that of
others ? I don’t believe it does (applause). I believe you
have Theists as well as Atheists, who devote their kindly
sympathies to the good of their fellow creatures. They are
content in one sense and discontent in another sense.
They have that holy discontent which makes them anxious
to remedy the world’s evil, and that content which makes
them see God, who is working from evil to good (applause).
We have been told by Mr. Bradlaugh what the Atheist will
do ; how he will give the bread of this life to the hungry
child; the Theist will do the same (applause). The
Theist will—but no, I will not institute these comparisons ;
we are each, I feel sure, striving to do our best; so I won’t
enter into comparisons (rounds of applause). He says it
is unreasonable to worship an insoluble proposition. A
proposition is a grammatical term signifying a statement,
and I am not aware that I asked anyone to worship a
statement or proposition at all. I have called upon you
to worship God (applause). He says I did not separate
the lower instincts from the higher mental qualities in
man. I do not say I did. But I did separate the lower
instincts from the voice of God in conscience. I said that
it was entirely distinct from the lower instincts in man. I
said that the voice had a right to command and rule these
lower instincts (hear, hear). He asks me which God it is
that I am preaching. I will tell you what God I ask you to
worship—the best that you can conceive, whatsoever it is
(applause). I want you all to worship the best that you can
conceive (rounds of applause). If the Hindu’s idea is the
best he can conceive, let him, by all means, worship it
(hear, hear). If the Jew’s God is the best he can imagine,
let him pay homage to it. If the Christian’s idea of God
is the highest he can conceive, let him be true to it and
worship it, and it will make him a nobler man (applause).
It is not mere names which signify in a matter of this
kind. Though each sect may give him different names,
it is still the same God (hear, hear). Mr. Bradlaugh
wants to know which of them all I uphold as God ;
which of the different types I acknowledge, or ask you
to acknowledge.
Is it the God of Martineau, of New
man, of Parker, or of whom else ? I say it is that which is
common among them all—namely, the conception of good
ness and excellence which you will find in every one
of their definitions.
It is that God which they
�62
-all recognise, and concerning which they only go wrong
when they begin to try and define it metaphysically
{hear, hear). Mr. Bradlaugh wants me to define God;
further than I have done so, I cannot. In the words of
the Athanasian Creed an attempt is made to define the undefinable. The Athanasian Creed tries to explain the whole
of that which overrules the universe instead of describing
simply that which is in relationship to you. I have always
been under the supposition that that was a practice of the
theologian which had greatly retarded the progress of the
world. Mr. Bradlaugh spoke of prayer as implying a hope
—a hope to induce God to do what he would not do with
out prayer; and he wanted to know in what sense I used
the word “prayer” in my speeches. I have not used the
word “ prayer ” without describing what I meant. At least,
I have not done so to my knowledge ; if I have, I am
sorry for it (applause). Mr. Bradlaugh says that prayer im
plies a hope of inducing God to do what he would not do
without it. For my part, I doubt whether some things
that have been called prayers, such as the prayers for the
recovery of the Prince of Wales—(loud hisses and laughter)
—for wet weather, and for fine weather, have very much
influenced the divine counsels (hear, hear and applause).
But what do I mean by prayer ? As I have said before,
the addressing of my soul to this power which I feel and
recognise above me; and the law of the answer of prayer—
and it is as much a law as any law of nature—is that they
who do thus energise themselves towards Godbecomethereby
more susceptible to the energising of God towards them. The
law is that he who energises or addresses himself towards
God, consciously, reverently, and of set purpose, thereby sets
at motion a law by which he becomes more susceptible to
God’s addressing of himself to him, and so he gains to him
self the strength, moral and spiritual, which we find in prayer
(hear, hear). Mr. Bradlaugh picked out one of the words from
his own definition of worship. By sacrifice he said he meant
the act of a man who was too cowardly to bear the result of his
own actions. As far as that definition goes, I may say I do
not include it in my idea of worship (applause). Now, sir,
I have striven to the best of my power to be precise and
clear in my words. It is true I have not dealt with the
matter from a platform purely metaphysical. lama positivist
in most things, understanding by a positivist one who founds
his philosophy on observed phenomena. I have passed out
�63
of the stage in which men believe that theological theories
will solve all the problems of the universe. I have passed
out of the stage in which Mr. Bradlaugh now is, in which
metaphysics are looked upon as the best ground of reason
ing we can have. I have passed into the stage in which
positive thought, the recognition of phenomena, is recog
nised as the best starting-point we can have from which
to get at the truth. Auguste Comte traces the progress of
the thought of the world and of the individual from the
theological stage to the metaphysical stage, and from that
to the positive stage. I invite Mr. Bradlaugh to look
at things from that stage, and to see whether he cannot
make his thoughts clearer by the use of the positive method
than by the use of the metaphysical (loud applause).
Mr. Bradlaugh : The curious thing is that I have never
used the word metaphysics, and I have offered to affirm no
proposition that does not relate to phenomena. I am as
tounded to hear that I am a metaphysician (laughter and
applause). Is it because I only used language which I can
make clear that my opponent gave me that title ? It is
because he does not use language that is related to phe
nomena that he is obliged to commend his Theism by
speaking of it as a problem which is insoluble (applause).
I have not done anything, as far as my case is concerned,
except use language relating to phenomena. Now, I have
only a few moments, and this speech will be my last in this
debate. I would, therefore, like you to see the position in
which we stand. I am told that the improvement I would
suggest would in no sense tend to virtue. I must refer again
to the state of things in China, where the members of the
same family are eating each other for want of food. Would
it not tend to virtue if their condition was remedied (ap
plause) ? I wish my friend and myself to look at things
from this point of view, and, as he is in the positive way of
thinking, let him put himself in the same state as they are,
and then ask whether an amendment of the condition
would not tend to greater virtue (renewed applause). What
God is it that we are to worship ? Oh, the God it is reasonable
to worship is the best we can conceive—but no conception has
yet been put before us. You have been told a great deal
about stars, but the more important facts and arguments
still remain unchallenged (hear, hear). Now, I am asked,
does belief in God hinder philanthropy ? Yes, when it is
held as those do hold it in some parts of the world, who.
�64
think that God has designed, in his thought and intelligence,
and for good purposes, that a famine should take place, such
as the one in China (hear, hear). There are at least people
among the Mahometans and the Hindus whose virtue has
been clearly shown to have suffered much more from religion
than from civilisation (applause). The case put as to prayer is
one which I think has something peculiar about it. We are
told first of the law of prayer, which is said to be as much
a law of nature as any other law. Well, now, by law of
nature (Mr. Armstrong : Hear, hear)—I don’t know if I am
misrepresenting you—I only mean observed order of
happening (pouring water from glass); I do not mean
that there has been some direction given that this water shall
fall, but that, given the conditions, the event ensues. Law
of nature is order of sequence or concurrence, the observed
order of phenomena. What observed order of phenomena
is there in the order of prayer ? When the prayer prays
“ himself he sets a law in motion.” Is this so? We are
told that the prayer for the recovery of the Prince of
Wales did not much tend to alter the divine counsel. Mr.
Armstrong did not tell you how he knew that.
His
own admission here proves that prayer is sometimes
offered in vain, taking the observed order of its phenomena
(hear, hear). He spoke of the holy discontent in pious
men which set them to seek to remedy evil. Holy discon
tent against the state of things which God in his intelligent
purpose has caused ! Then the holy discontent is dissatis
faction with God’s doings. How can you worship the God
with whom you are dissatisfied (applause) ? But what is the
truth of the matter ? In the early ages of the world man
saw the river angry and prayed to the river-god; but science
has dispelled the river-god, and has substituted for prayer,
weirs, locks, dykes, levels, and flood-gates (hear, hear). You
see the same thing over the face of nature wherever you go.
What you have found is this : that in the early ages of the
world gods were frightful, gods were monstrous, gods were
numerous, because ignorance predominated in the minds of
men. The things they came in contact with were not under
stood, and no investigation then took place ; men wor
shipped. But gradually men learned first dimly, then more
clearly, and god after god has been demolished as science
has grown. The best attempt at conception of God is
always the last conception of him, and this because God
has to give way to science. The best conception of God is
�65
in substituting humanity for deity, the getting rid of, and
turning away from, the whole of those conceptions and
fancies which men called God in the past, and which they
have ceased to call God now (applause). Mr. Armstrong
thought that it was because men had given different names to
God that I tried to embarrass him by bidding him choose
between them. It was not so; it is the different characteristics
and not the different names that I pointed out as a difficulty.
We have gods of peace, gods of war, gods of love, a god of
this people, or of that tribe, a god of the Christians, a
god of misery, of terror, of beneficence—these are all
different suppositions held by men of the gods they have
created. It has well been said that the gods have not
created the men, but the men have created the gods, and
you can see the marks of human handicraft in each divine
lineament (applause). I cannot hope, pleading here to
night, to make many converts. I can and do hope that all
of you will believe that the subject treated wants examina
tion far beyond the limits of this short debate. I have a very
good hopeindeed,and reallybelieve thatsome good has been
done when it can be shown that two men of strong opinions,
and earnest in their expressions, can come together without
one disrespectful word to each other, or want of respect in
any way; without any want of due courtesy to the other;
and with a great desire to separate the truth and the false
hood (applause). If there has been unwittingly anything
disrespectful on my part, I am sorry for it. I have to thank
Mr. Armstrong for coming forward in the manner in which
he has done, and I can only ask all to use their services in
making the spread of virtue, truth, and justice easier than
it has been. I am aware that I have nominally a vast
majority against me, but I do not fear on that ground, and
still shall continue to point out falsehood wherever I may
find it. At any rate, the right of speech is all I ask, and
that you have conceded. I have only an earnest endeavour
to find out as much as I can that will be useful to my
fellows, and to tell them as truly as I can how much I
grasp. It is for you—-with the great harvest of the unreaped
before you—who can do more than I, to gather and show
what you have gathered; it is for you who have more truth
to tell it more efficiently; and when you answer me I put it
to you that so far as the world has redeemed itself at all, it
has only redeemed itself by shaking off in turn the Theistic
religions which have grown and decayed. So far, it seems
c
�to be a real and solid redemption (applause). When re
ligion was supreme through the ignorance of men, the people
were low down indeed, and a few devoted men had to
grapple with the hereafter theory and all the content with
present wrong which the belief in it maintained. Take a
few hundred years ago, when there was little or no scepticism
in the world. Only a very few able to be heretical—the mass
unable and too weak to doubt or endure doubt. Look at the
state of things then, and look at it now. Could a discussion
like this have taken place then ? No. But it can since the print
ing-press has helped us; it can since the right of speech has
been in good part won. Two hundred years ago it could not
have been. Two hundred years ago I could not have got the
mass of people together to listen as you have listened last night
and to-night, and had not men treated your religion as I treat it,
we should not have therightof meeting even now (applause)’
If you want to convince men like myself, hear us; answer
us if you can—say what you have to say without making it
more bitter than we can bear. We must believe it if it is
reasonable, and if not we must reject it. So long as there
is any wrong to redeem we shall try to redeem it our■selves (applause). We may be wrong in this, but at
least we do our part.
I do not mean that in the same
ranks as my friend there are not men as sincere and as earnest,
men as devoted, men as human-redemption seeking as myself,
but I, or the best of those for whom I plead, urge that their
humanity is not the outcome of their theology (applause).
Then their experience of right, their hope of life, and their
experience of truth rest entirely on what they do here. And
I will ask you this : do you not think it is quite possible, as
Lessing says, that he who thinks he grasps the whole truth
may not even grasp it at all ? like the one deceived by the
juggler's trick, he may think he holds something in his hand,
but when it is opened it is empty (hear, hear). Take the
truth as you can—not from me, not from him, not from any
one man. There is none of the bad which is all bad, none of
the good all good, none of the truth all true: it is for you to
select, to weigh, to test for yourselves (hear, hear). Many
of us stumble in trying to carry the torch in dark places in
the search for truth, but even in our trembling steps the
sparks we scatter may enable some to find the grains of truth
we miss ourselves (loud and prolonged applause).
Mr. Armstrong : Mr. Bradlaugh, the body to which I
belong also have the majority against them; over that
�we can shake hands. Let us try, each in our own way, as
may best seem to us, to serve what we hold to be true (ap
plause). Depend upon it, whether there be a God or
not, we each shall do best so. If there be no God, then
you tell me I shall still do well to serve humanity. And
if there be a God, he will gather you also, my brother, to
his arms, so long as you are true—true and absolutely sincere
in those convictions which come to you from the reason
which he has given you (loud applause). You have
told us that while religion held sway men were down-trodden.
While superstition held sway it is true they were (applause) ;
while false ideas of a cruel and lustful God held sway, it is
true they were (applause); but just in proportion as men’s
thoughts of Godt have purified and clarified, just in pro
portion as they have restored to Christianity its sweet
meaning, just in that proportion religion has risen to be a
power in the world of all that is good and sweet and holy
(applause). Now, sir, to speak of what I said about the
prayers for the recovery of the Prince of Wales. I said I
thought they had been of little avail.
But the prayer for
spiritual purity from a Christian man does win its answer by
a law—a law of nature, I will now say, since you have defined .
a law of nature as the observed sequence of phenomena;
but I dared not so call it until I knew what your definition
■of nature might be. But let us come back from these philo.sophisings, in which it is so easy to go wrong, to the test of
experience. Mr. Bradlaugh says I do not submit the ex
periences of which I have spoken, to the test. I invite you to
test them, and see whether Mr. Bradlaugh has upset them
or not. If you test them fairly and then find them false,
then come and tell me so. They are neither uncommon
nor abnormal experiences, but the experiences of nearly every
man and woman. It may be that their hearing is dull, but
still they know the voice. You all know those in which the
initiative comes from God, the voice of conscience, of which
I spoke ; you all know the solemn feeling which comes over
you in the presence of the majesty of nature. You all may know
the other things in which you have to take the initiative.
Heed those things whether you believe they come from God
or not, and you all may know the other—that of worship
—and its answer. My contention solely is, that it would
be reasonable for you to seek for that experience, that it is
reasonable in us to practise it (hear, hear). And now I will
tell you a little story for the end of this debate, of a little
�68
family of children; and as I shall not found any argument upon
. it, I do not think it will be unfair. They sat one Christ
mas Eve in a chamber where the wintry gloom of early
twilight fell. The eldest son sat and talked of the good
ness of their father, and how, from the earliest days he
could recollect, his tenderness had sheltered him, and how
he seemed to have a heart to love every little child all
through the world, and how he was surely even now prepar
ing some sweet surprise for them every one But John, the
second boy, had lived all his life at a school on the far sea
coast, where he had been sent, that rough ocean breezes might
strengthen his weakly frame, and now, tanned and burly,
he had just come home for Christmas, and he had not even,
seen his father yet. And he said he did not believe they
had a father ; that Theophilus, declaring he had seen him,
was nothing to him, for if there was one thing he had learned
at school, it was not to trust the experience of other people
till tested by his own. But Edward said he, too, knew they
had a father; he, too, had seen him, but he was very stern,
and he thought they could all do as well without him, and
what could be more unkind than to leave them there in
. twilight solitude on Christmas Eve. And little Tom sat
apart in the very darkest corner of the room, with a tearstained face, crying as if his heart would break, over
the hard sums set him there to do, and thinking that
his brothers were a selfish lot of fellows, to talk and talk, and.
not care for him and his hard task. And Theophilus had
just come to steal his arm around little Tom’s waist, and dry
his tears, and try if he could not help him to do his sum,
when the door of the next room was thrown open and a
blaze of light flashed upon their faces, and one after the other
they all rushed in and beheld their father standing by such a
glorious Christmas-tree as boys never beheld before. And
for each and all there were gifts so rare and precious—the
very things they had longed for all the by-gone half. And for
John, who had been so far away and had not known his father,
there was a grasp of the father’s hand so strong and tender,
and a kiss from the father’s lips so sweet and loving, that he
felt as if he had known that dear father all his life ; and as
for little Tom, all his tears were dissolved in rippling
laughter, and he quite lorgot his sum, for on his brow was
set the brightest coronet on all the tree, and they told him
he should be king through all the long Christmasday to follow. And now, dear friends, may the peace of
�69
God which passeth all understanding, that peace which the
perishing things of the world can neither give nor take away,
that peace promised to the weary by our dear brother,
Jesus Christ, even in the midst of all his suffering and woe,
be with you for ever. Amen (applause).
Mr. Armstrong having sat down, rose again and said,
—And now, Mr. Chairman, I desire to move to you the
hearty thanks of this meeting for your conduct in the chair,
for your impartial manner of ruling over us, and the kind
words you have spoken. I thank you, Mr. Bradlaugh, for
the courtesy and fairness with which you have conducted
your part in this debate; and I thank you, sir, for presiding
over us (applause).
Mr. Bradlaugh : I second that motion. I cannot say
that we can thank you for your fairness, for, fortunately, you
have had no opportunity of showing it. But I thank you most
heartily for accepting a position which might have been one
of great difficulty and the taking of which may cause you
to be misrepresented. I also thank Mr. Armstrong for having
met me, and for the kindly manner in which he has spoken
(applause).
The vote of thanks was put and carried unanimously.
The Chairman : Ladies and Gentlemen,—the thanks
which have been given to me are due rather to the gentle
men who have spoken. I cannot but praise the admirable
way in which they have rendered my position almost a
sinecure. This debate has shown that a subject of such
great importance can be discussed fairly, liberally, honestly,
as this has been, and that no danger threatens him who
occupies the chair, or those who lay their honest and earnest
views before you. I feel that I have derived much know
ledge from the truth which has been laid before us ; and I
do feel that there is a growing interest in things of this
sort, which is itself a proof that discussions of this kind are
very useful (applause).
�•wk
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Victorian Blogging
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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>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Title
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Is it reasonable to worship God?
Creator
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Armstrong, R.A. [Rev.]
Bradlaugh, Charles
Description
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 69 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Verbatim report of two nights' debate at Nottingham between the Rev. R. A. Armstrong and Charles Bradlaugh. Inscription in ink: "Mr M.D. Conway, with RAA's kind regards." From the library of Dr Moncure Conway.
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Freethought Publishing Company
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1878
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CT78
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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 ("Is it reasonable to worship God?"), 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>
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Text
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English
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Atheism
Free Thought
Theism
Apologetics
Atheism
Conway Tracts
Free Thought-Controversial Literature
Religious Disputations
Theism
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Text
Cl
REPLY TO A LETTER
FROM
AN EVANGELICAL LAY PREACHER.
BY
PROFESSOR F. W. NEWMAN.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
NO. 11, THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD,
UPPER NORWOOD, LONDON, S.E.
Price Threepence.
�TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.
�REPLY TO A LETTER
FROM AN EVANGELICAL LAY PREACHER.
Dear Sir,—You apologize for trying to convert one
a quarter of a century your senior, by telling me that
you tremble for my state. You express fear, lest at
my age strength of will may resist your efforts ; in other
words, you suggest that wilfulness is the great obstacle
to my going back to opinions, which, I told you, were
the opinions of my youth; were those to which my
education and early connections biassed me ; which I
held in my early manhood, but long ago renounced, from
finding them untenable. Is not your suggestion of my
wilfulness somewhat insolent ? Knowledge and truth
have all my life been my earnest desire, and have never
encountered resistance from my will.
You earnestly desire to know whether I have
meditated on those words, “ When my flesh and my
heart fail me. . . .” What else can you mean, but
that you expect me to tremble at death ? How many
brave men, not religious, not even in ordinary esteem
moral, lay down their lives, without trembling, in the
cause of duty ! Whence comes your quiet assumption
that other men are cowards ? I leave that to your
reflection. For myself I have only to say, that I regard
premature death a great calamity, but death in ripe age
or full time a divine blessing. Death is God’s ordinance
and gift, as much as life ; each is good in its own time.
As to the common talk, that “ it is a fearful thing to
go into the immediate presence of God,” I reply,
�4
Reply to a Letter from
“ we are already, here and always, in His immediate
presence, and never can be more so.” God is not a
visible, tangible form, but an omnipresent Spirit; and
since He is purely good and wise, no man, be he better
or worse, can have sound reason for wishing not to be
in his immediate presence. Yet a guilty man, no doubt,
may wish it; and, it seems to me, you assume that one
who does not agree with you must have a bad con
science.
You frankly appeal to me, “ must we not all confess
that we are sinners ?” and you add needless protestations
of your own consciousness of being utterly vile. Who
denies that we are all sinners ? I never yet knew a
single fool to doubt it. Why impute such absurdity to
me 1 The tenour of your letters leads me to conjecture
that the necessity of “ atonement by blood ” for sin is
such an axiom with you, that you assume one who
rejects it to be so self-righteous, as not to know that
he is a sinner at all. Taking for granted that I am un
reconciled to God, you generously offer to show me the
way of reconciliation,—Christ 1 and you assure me that
my whole nature was corrupt from birth, and has lost
the image of God in which Adam was created.
I have already told you, that you seem to me to
confound frailty with corruption, but you have not
understood me. Since Adam (according to you) sinned,
his primitive nature was frail, yet you do not call it
corrupt, you say it was created upright. If so, neither
can natural corruption be justly inferred in you, from
the very great vileness which you ascribe to yourself.
If you are corrupt, it is your own doing, your personal
sin ■, your nature at birth was as upright and as frail as
Adam’s, but not corrupt. I admit it was frailer in one
sense than that of your Adam, for he was created, it seems,
a full grown man, we began existence as infants. If,
even with this advantage, he sinned on the first tempta
tion, nothing worse could be done by any of us. We
have not lost any of the image of God which a distant
�an Evangelical Lay Preacher.
5
ancestor of ours possessed. The very idea is dishonour
able to the creator, that he would construct a progenitor
endowed with the power of wrecking his whole posterity
by his own single act. We should bitterly censure a
shipwright, who sent to sea a ship laden with 500
emigrants, that foundered under the first feeble side
breeze. Can any one who means to be pious dare to
impute to Man’s Creator the making such a top-heavy
nature for him, that with one sin of one Adam we all
rolled, millions of millions, into an abyss of perdition,
and need a stupendous effort of divinity to save . . . .
a very few!
Moreover, if the creator responsible for my nature is
not God, but some Adam, and God is ashamed of it as
a bad piece of work, (nay, necessarily hates it, as I
understand you,) then God deals with me as a father
who repudiates an affiliated child, denying that it is
his. Hereby, disowning fatherhood, he forbids me to
call him Creator, or to be grateful for an existence
crippled, bastard, and impotent for good.
You are not satisfied with painting to me this world’s
miseries, but you assure me that—not' through God’s
fault! Oh, no ! but through Adam’s fault—an eternity
of sin lies before the vast mass of mankind. But when,
according to you, that mass is utterly helpless, and the
Creator knew they would be so, what, I repeat, are we
to think of his wisdom and goodness (to say nothing of
his Prescience) in so creating Adam ?
In short, I mark three cardinal and pernicious errors,
which you hold as cardinal truth. 1. That man’s
nature is not as God created or intended it ; but that
the Creator has been outwitted (by the Devil, I suppose)
and poor mankind has to suffer through God’s un
wisdom. 2. The horrible and incredible idea that God
will retain in eternal sensitive existence beings who can
do nothing but sin and suffer; whose sufferings are
compared to everlasting flame. 3. That God cannot
remit sin without shedding of blood, but is reconciled to
�6
Reply to a Letter from
us (or reconciles himself to us? or reconciles us to him
self ?—for I do not know which phrase you adopt) by
the blood of Jesus.
You have twice attempted to urge upon me belief in
the theology of the book of Genesis. I must repeat
more pointedly, what is not my discovery, but that of
Christian divines long ago, .that the theology of that
book is very barbaric. What avails it to offer me a
defence of “ God repented that he had made man”
(words which I have not attacked) when all the
thoughts are alike barbarously crude ? “ Sons of God”
beget “giants” out of daughters of men, and corrupt
the earth. God repents that he has made man, and
destroys him by a universal flood. He saves Noah
with seven others, and with all sorts of beasts, under
wholly impossible conditions, and with a result to the
■distribution of animals as certainly false as the deluge.
After it Noah offers a burnt sacrifice of clean beasts,
and Jehovah, like Homer’s Jupiter, smells a sweet savour;
and sets his rainbow in the cloud as a sign, again
like Homer’s notions. Jehovah also resolves never again
to curse the earth for man’s sake, for, says he, there is
no use in it, so wicked are men ! He might as well have
thought of that before the flood. All is of a piece in
these legends. Jehovah eats roast veal with Abraham,
and teaches him the disgusting rite of circumcision as
a religious duty. He honours Abraham, in the very
base conduct of twice passing off his wife as a sister.
So in Exodus, xxiv. 9-11, he shows himself personally
to the seventy elders and to the nobles of Israel.
Christianity professes higher and purer things than
these, but by pressing on us as alike valuable, alike
true, all parts of that very diverse collection of books
which you call the Bible, you damage all your own
better thoughts.
This Pagan notion of Atonement by Blood you make
cardinal in your Christian gospel. “ It is impossible
that the blood of bulls and goats should take away
�an Evangelical Lay Preacher.
7
sin,” says the writer to the Hebrews. True, and
equally impossible for a marls blood, or, if so you will
have it, a God's blood. To suppose moral sin trans
ferred from one being to another, is a barbarous
absurdity ; to transfer the penalty is immoral. It is
not endured in any approved legislation. Jews insist
that it was not endured in Judaism, only ceremonial
“errors” (Heb. ix. 7) had ceremonial atonement: crime
never had any. I believe this to be correct; but that is
to me a question of history, not of theology. If the
Hebrew law taught the immoral idea that blood could
atone for moral iniquity”, so much the worse for it : but
shall Christian hymns therefore smell of the slaughter
house? Alas ! they do. Far better said Paul, “ offer your
selves as living sacrifices.”—Again: “ Unto Israel, saith
God, I will take no bullock out of thy house ; if I
were hungry, I would not tell thee.” The psalmist
who wrote that, knew the vulgar idea of sacrifice to be
the Pagan one, that the gods needed to partake of the
sweet savour. The Psalms and Prophets have truly
little sympathy with bloodshed for sin. Head the 103rd
Psalm (it is but one out of many), you will find no idea
in it that God wants bloody atonement. This coarse
Paganism, as far as I understand, came in only as
metaphor into the earliest Christianity, and did not
attain its sharpest prosaic form until Archbishop
Anselm under our William Kufus. But, unhappily,
Luther and Calvin adopted Augustine’s doctrines as a
basis, and logically rushed into Anselm’s extreme;
thence it has come to vex and damage Protestantism,
and is now presented to us as the Gospel or Good News,
in connection with a corrupt humanity and an eternal
hell. If you will preach such things, you must truth
fully call them Bad News. Well, said David Hume,
that the Protestant Reformation was checked, when the
generation which followed Calvin found that they
had to choose between believing that God was a wafer
or that God was a cruel tyrant.
�8
Reply to a Letter.
The core of the mischief lies in your monstrous and
unproved assumption that hooks called Holy Scripture,
widely different in age, merit, and doctrine, are all
infallible. To me it is as certain as any fact in the
world, that they are often self-contradictory, foolish,
and barbaric; that they often show extreme credulity
in the narrators, and are convicted of error in every
branch,—moral, and theological, as well as literary and
scientific. The very excellences of their more devo
tional parts (to which I do honour on every fit occasion)
are mischievous, if they are allowed to stamp sanctity
on the baser books, and on the unavoidable errors of
the better. You profess yourself “ not to have patience ”
to read criticism on the Bible by men whom you call
“ enemies of the Bible?’ You must then, either be
careless whether books are spurious, or believe that
you have an inward divine gift to distinguish the
genuine. But as I abhor fictitious authorship, and
know the pernicious results of national credulity; as,
moreover, I have no belief that I or you or any man
can know literary facts of the past by an inward
teaching, you surely ought to see the impossibility of
my receiving divine lessons from you, while you
ground them on the Bible, and flatly decline to give
any reason why, against all my own perceptions and
the result of many years’ anxious study, I am to receive
the Bible as authoritative. It may be just worth while
to observe, that, in particular, the narrative books of
the New Testament seem to me to deserve little credit,
and often to misrepresent events and words grossly
and even recklessly. But I hold morality to be far
more important than theology,—earlier in knowledge
and more solid in foundation. Babes in science may
judge soundly of morality, and by it confute the high
pretensions of cursing theologies.
I am, truly yours,
F. W. Newman.
�
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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
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
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
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
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
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Reply to a letter from an evangelical lay preacher
Creator
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Newman, Francis William [1805-1897]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 8 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by Turnbull and Spears, Edinburgh. Date of publication from KVK.
Publisher
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Thomas Scott
Date
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[1873]
Identifier
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CT212
Subject
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Bible
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 (Reply to a letter from an evangelical lay preacher), 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
Bible-Criticism and Interpretation
Clergy
Conway Tracts
Religious Disputations