The antagonism that grew out of ignorance regarded Atheism as implying degraded morality and bestial life, and they assailed my conduct not on evidence that it was evil, but on the presumption that an Atheist must be immoral.  Thus a Christian opponent at Leicester assailed me as a teacher of free love, fathering on me views which were maintained in a book that I had not read, but which, before I had ever seen the National Reformer, had been reviewed in its columns—­as it was reviewed in other London papers—­and had been commended for its clear statement of the Malthusian position, but not for its contention as to free love, a theory to which Mr. Bradlaugh was very strongly opposed.  Nor were the attacks confined to the ascription to me of theories which I did not hold, but agents of the Christian Evidence Society, in their street preaching, made the foulest accusations against me of personal immorality.  Remonstrances addressed to the Rev. Mr. Engstroem, the secretary of the society, brought voluble protestations of disavowal and disapproval; but as the peccant agents were continued in their employment, the apologies were of small value.  No accusation was too coarse, no slander too baseless, for circulation by these men; and for a long time these indignities caused me bitter suffering, outraging my pride, and soiling my good name.  The time was to come when I should throw that good name to the winds for the sake of the miserable, but in those early days I had done nothing to merit, even ostensibly, such attacks.  Even by educated writers, who should have known better, the most wanton accusations of violence and would-be destructiveness were brought against Atheists; thus Miss Frances Power Cobbe wrote in the Contemporary Review that loss of faith in God would bring about the secularisation or destruction of all cathedrals, churches, and chapels.  “Why,” I wrote in answer, “should cathedrals, churches, and chapels be destroyed?  Atheism will utilise, not destroy, the beautiful edifices which, once wasted on God, shall hereafter be consecrated for man.  Destroy Westminster Abbey, with its exquisite arches, its glorious tones of soft, rich colour, its stonework light as if of cloud, its dreamy, subdued twilight, soothing as the ‘shadow of a great rock in a weary land’?  Nay, but reconsecrate it to humanity.  The fat cherubs who tumble over guns and banners on soldiers’ graves will fitly be removed to some spot where their clumsy forms will no longer mar the upward-springing grace of lines of pillar and of arch; but the glorious building wherein now barbaric psalms are chanted and droning canons preach of Eastern follies, shall hereafter echo the majestic music of Wagner and Beethoven, and the teachers of the future shall there unveil to thronging multitudes the beauties and the wonders of the world.  The ‘towers and spires’ will not be effaced, but they will no longer be symbols of a religion which sacrifices earth to heaven and Man to God."[25] Between the cultured and the uncultured burlesques of Atheism we came off pretty badly, being for the most part regarded, as the late Cardinal Manning termed us, as mere “cattle.”