Of all the evils from which the lovers of religion do well to pray that their faith may be delivered, the worst is that it should ever come to be discussed across the floor of the House of Commons.  The self-elected champions of the Christian faith who then ride into the lists are of a kind well calculated to make Piety hide her head for very shame.  Rowdy noblemen, intemperate country gentlemen, sterile lawyers, cynical but wealthy sceptics who maintain religion as another fence round their property, hereditary Nonconformists whose God is respectability and whose goal a baronetcy, contrive, with a score or two of bigots thrown in, to make a carnival of folly, a veritable devil’s dance of blasphemy.  The debates on Bradlaugh’s oath-taking extended over four years, and will make melancholy reading for posterity.  Two figures, and two figures only, stand out in solitary grandeur, those of a Quaker and an Anglican—­Bright and Gladstone.

The conclusion which an attentive reading of Mr. Bradlaugh’s biography forces upon me is that in all probability he was the last freethinker who will be exposed, for many a long day (it would be more than usually rash to write ’ever’), to pains and penalties for uttering his unbelief.  It is true the Blasphemy Laws are not yet repealed; it may be true for all I know that Christianity is still part and parcel of the common law; it is possibly an indictable offence to lend Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible to a friend; but, however these things may be, Mr. Bradlaugh’s stock-in-trade is now free of the market-place, where just at present, at all events, its price is low.  It has become pretty plain that neither the Fortress of Holy Scripture nor the Rock of Church Authority is likely to be taken by storm.  The Mystery of Creation, the unsolvable problem of matter, continue to press upon us more heavily than ever.  Neither by Paleys nor by Bradlaughs will religion be either bolstered up or pulled down.  Sceptics and Sacramentarians must be content to put up with one another’s vagaries for some time to come.  Indeed, the new socialists, though at present but poor theologians (one hasty reading of Lux Mundi does not make a theologian), are casting favourable eyes upon Sacramentarianism, deeming it to have a distinct flavour of Collectivism.  Calvinism, on the other hand, is considered repulsively individualistic, being based upon the notion that it is the duty of each man to secure his own salvation.

But whether Bradlaugh was the last of his race or not, he was a brave man whose life well deserves an honourable place amongst the biographies of those Radicals who have suffered in the cause of Free-thought, and into the fruits of whose labours others have entered.

DISRAELI EX RELATIONE SIR WILLIAM FRASER

The late Sir William Fraser was not, I have been told, a popular person in that society about which he thought so much, and his book, Disraeli and His Day, did not succeed in attracting much of the notice of the general reader, and failed, so I, at least, have been made to understand, to win a verdict of approval from the really well informed.