This refusal to believe without evidence, and the declaration that anything “behind phenomena” is unknowable to man as at present constituted—­these are the two chief planks of the Atheistic platform, as Atheism was held by Charles Bradlaugh and myself.  In 1876 this position was clearly reaffirmed.  “It is necessary to put briefly the Atheistic position, for no position is more continuously and more persistently misrepresented.  Atheism is without God.  It does not assert no God.  ’The Atheist does not say “There is no God,” but he says, “I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the word God is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation.  I do not deny God, because I cannot deny that of which I have no conception, and the conception of which, by its affirmer, is so imperfect that he is unable to define it to me."’ (Charles Bradlaugh, “Freethinker’s Text-book,” p. 118.) The Atheist neither affirms nor denies the possibility of phenomena differing from those recognised by human experience....  As his knowledge of the universe is extremely limited and very imperfect, the Atheist declines either to deny or to affirm anything with regard to modes of existence of which he knows nothing.  Further, he refuses to believe anything concerning that of which he knows nothing, and affirms that that which can never be the subject of knowledge ought never to be the object of belief.  While the Atheist, then, neither affirms nor denies the unknown, he does deny all which conflicts with the knowledge to which he has already attained.  For example, he knows that one is one, and that three times one are three; he denies that three times one are, or can be, one.  The position of the Atheist is a clear and a reasonable one:  I know nothing about ‘God,’ and therefore I do not believe in Him or in it; what you tell me about your God is self-contradictory, and is therefore incredible.  I do not deny ‘God,’ which is an unknown tongue to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility.  I am without God."[5] Up to 1887 I find myself writing on the same lines:  “No man can rationally affirm ‘There is no God,’ until the word ‘God’ has for him a definite meaning, and until everything that exists is known to him, and known with what Leibnitz calls ‘perfect knowledge.’  The Atheist’s denial of the Gods begins only when these Gods are defined or described.  Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human thought—­Nor is anything gained by the assertors of Deity when they allege that He is incomprehensible.  If ‘God’ exists and is incomprehensible, His incomprehensibility is an admirable reason for being silent about Him, but can never justify the affirmation of self-contradictory propositions, and the threatening of people with damnation if they do not accept them."[6] “The belief of