It was inevitable that such thoughts should arise after the more palpably indefensible doctrines of Christianity had been discarded.  Once encourage the human mind to think, and bounds to the thinking can never again be set by authority.  Once challenge traditional beliefs, and the challenge will ring on every shield which is hanging in the intellectual arena.  Around me was the atmosphere of conflict, and, freed from its long repression, my mind leapt up to share in the strife with a joy in the intellectual tumult, the intellectual strain.

I often attended South Place Chapel, where Moncure D. Conway was then preaching, and discussion with him did something towards widening my views on the deeper religious problems; I re-read Dean Mansel’s “Bampton Lectures,” and they did much towards turning me in the direction of Atheism; I re-read Mill’s “Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy,” and studied carefully Comte’s “Philosophie Positive.”  Gradually I recognised the limitations of human intelligence and its incapacity for understanding the nature of God, presented as infinite and absolute; I had given up the use of prayer as a blasphemous absurdity, since an all-wise God could not need my suggestions, nor an all-good God require my promptings.  But God fades out of the daily life of those who never pray; a personal God who is not a Providence is a superfluity; when from the heaven does not smile a listening Father, it soon becomes an empty space, whence resounds no echo of man’s cry.  I could then reach no loftier conception of the Divine than that offered by the orthodox, and that broke hopelessly away as I analysed it.

At last I said to Mr. Scott, “Mr. Scott, may I write a tract on the nature and existence of God?”

He glanced at me keenly.  “Ah, little lady, you are facing, then, that problem at last?  I thought it must come.  Write away.”

While this pamphlet was in MS. an event occurred which coloured all my succeeding life.  I met Charles Bradlaugh.  One day in the late spring, talking with Mrs. Conway—­one of the sweetest and steadiest natures whom it has been my lot to meet, and to whom, as to her husband, I owe much for kindness generously shown when I was poor and had but few friends—­she asked me if I had been to the Hall of Science, Old Street.  I answered, with the stupid, ignorant reflection of other people’s prejudices so sadly common, “No, I have never been there.  Mr. Bradlaugh is rather a rough sort of speaker, is he not?”

“He is the finest speaker of Saxon-English that I have ever heard,” she answered, “except, perhaps, John Bright, and his power over a crowd is something marvellous.  Whether you agree with him or not, you should hear him.”