In 1860 the National Reformer was started, and his warfare in the courts began.  In 1868 he first stood for Northampton, which he unsuccessfully contested three times.  In April, 1880, he was returned to Parliament, and then began the famous struggle with which the constitutional historian will have to deal.  After this date the facts are well known.  Bradlaugh died on January 30, 1891.

His life was a hard one from beginning to end.  He had no advantages.  Nobody really helped him or influenced him or mollified him.  He had never either money or repose; he had no time to travel, except as a propagandist, no time to acquire knowledge for its own sake; he was often abused but seldom criticised.  In a single sentence, he was never taught the extent of his own ignorance.

His attitude towards the Christian religion and the Bible was a perfectly fair one, and ought not to have brought down upon him any abuse whatever.  There are more ways than one of dealing with religion.  It may be approached as a mystery or as a series of events supported by testimony.  If the evidence is trustworthy, if the witnesses are irreproachable, if they submit successfully to examination and cross-examination, then, however remarkable or out of the way may be the facts to which they depose, they are entitled to be believed.  This is a mode of treatment with which we are all familiar, whether as applied to the Bible or to the authority of the Church.  Nobody is expected to believe in the authority of the Church until satisfied by the exercise of his reason that the Church in question possesses ‘the notes’ of a true Church.  This was the aspect of the question which engaged Bradlaugh’s attention.  He was critical, legal.  He took objections, insisted on discrepancies, cross-examined as to credibility, and came to the conclusion that the case for the supernatural was not made out.  And this he did not after the first-class fashion in the study or in octavo volumes, but in the street.  His audiences were not Mr. Mudie’s subscribers, but men and women earning weekly wages.  The coarseness of his language, the offensiveness of his imagery, have been greatly exaggerated.  It is now a good many years since I heard him lecture in a northern town on the Bible to an audience almost wholly composed of artisans.  He was bitter and aggressive, but the treatment he was then experiencing accounted for this.  As an avowed atheist he received no quarter, and he might fairly say with Wilfred Osbaldistone, ’It’s hard I should get raps over the costard, and only pay you back in make-believes.’

It was not what Bradlaugh said, but the people he said it to, that drew down upon him the censure of the magistrate, and (unkindest cut of all) the condemnation of the House of Commons.