The Religious Life of London

He has neither part nor body, and cannot hear and see;
But I’ve a God that lives above,
A God of power and love,
A God of Revelation, – Oh, that’s the God for me!
Oh! that’s the God for me; oh! that’s the God for me.

“A church without apostles is not the church for me,
It’s like a ship dismasted, afloat upon the sea,
But I’ve a church that’s always led
By the twelve stars around its head,
A church with good foundations – oh! that’s the church for me!
Oh! that’s the church for me! oh! that’s the church for me!

* * * * *

“The heaven of sectarians is not the heaven for me,
So doubtful its location, neither on land nor sea,
But I’ve a heaven on the earth,
The land that gave me birth,
A heaven of light and knowledge – oh! that’s the heaven for me!
Oh! that’s the heaven for me! oh! that’s the heaven for me!”

Such are the songs sung, with a fervour unknown in better attended and genteeler places of worship.

The Mormons speak of us as Gentiles, yet in reality they take our creed and add to it polygamy and communism. Their belief as regards Father, Son, and Holy Ghost is almost orthodox, and if they claim to be divinely ruled and to have the power of working miracles, do not other sects the same? Like the Quakers, they can dispense with religious forms. Like the ancient Israelites, they are a peculiar people, but what is peculiar to them, and that which constitutes the secret of their success, is this – that they preach to the poor, and wretched, and starving, that the kingdom of God has been founded upon earth, that it belongs to the saints, and that they are the saints. Man, they say, is part of the substance of God, and he will become God. He was not created by God, but existed from all eternity. He was not born in sin, and is only accountable for his own misdeeds. Angels, it seems, from what Young told Hepworth Dixon, “are the souls of bachelors and monogamists, being incapable of issue, unblessed with female companions, unfitted to reign and rule in the celestial spheres. They have failed,” said Young, “in not living the patriarchal life – in not marrying many wives. An unmarried Mormon fills but a low scale in the order of things.” Man being of the race of God becomes eligible for a celestial throne: his household of wives and children being his kingdom, not on earth only, but in heaven, polygamy is thus his highest duty, and most glorious privilege. In the East, polygamy does not answer. The races with one wife there breed faster than the Turks. In the city of the Mormons, under polygamy, births are very numerous. The actual wives of Young are twelve! the twelve apostles own from three to four each. Young has forty-eight children, and all have their quivers full. The women, according to Mr. Dixon, dislike polygamy nevertheless.

In this country and among the Mormons the doctrine of polygamy is not that on which much stress is laid. Here the Mormon preaches temperance, sobriety, honesty, industry, the need of saving up money, and the advantages of emigration to Utah. In the Millennial Star, the organ of the community, one brother writes from Wales: —

“The Word of Wisdom is quite a text with us of late, and is producing very good effects. We see its fruits manifested among the Saints, several of the brethren leaving off tobacco and other things that are injurious to the constitution. The tea is a matter that bothers the sisters considerably, but in the face of this difficulty many are leaving it off, and pronouncing it of no beneficial effect in any way whatever. I think that much will be done by abstaining from those things towards clothing those children that are very thinly clad.”

It is in this way that Mormonism has spread. It has come to the poorest of the poor, and used their own language. Its phraseology is that dear to the natural heart. We are all too prone to throw our responsibility on others: It is the Lord who saves me. It is the devil who makes me bad; and it is a great help to the ignorant and uneducated, not merely to have spiritual states shadowed forth in earthly language, but to feel that, after all, heaven is here in the shape of comfortable dwellings, wives and children, raiment to wear, and a bellyfull. “This is great encouragement to the saints in their pilgrimages here in old Babylon, and stimulates them to more diligence in building up the kingdom of God, and delivering themselves from the yoke of tyranny and oppression, to enjoy the liberty of the people of God in the valleys of the mountains.” Thus writes one of the elders with reference to certain manifestations of the gift of tongues; but I quote the passage here as applicable in an eminent degree, and as illustrating the religious phraseology, affected no doubt for certain ends by the Mormons. The kingdom of God, for instance, of the theologians may be difficult of apprehension to the illiterate and the rude; but if it means to me a good house and good living in Utah, it at once assumes an attractive form. If to live in England is to live in Babylon, of course it is my duty to emigrate; and if Brigham Young is the Lord’s deputy on earth, then to disobey his call is an act of sin. So degraded are many of our brethren and sisters in this Christian land, where we have one parson at the least in every parish, that they are utterly unable to contemplate anything apart from its accidental forms. Their God is a God of parts and passions; their religion is one of sensation; their heaven a loss of physical pains and the presence of physical delights; they become at once an easy prey to the Mormonite preacher when for ten pounds he offers them the realization of their hopes, not at the end of life, but now, and tells them that in the Land of the Saints they shall hunger no more, nor thirst any more.

CHAPTER XVIII.

advanced religionists

The Church of Progress.

At length, if I am to believe what I hear and see, the religious problem of the age has been solved, and I am presented with a form of worship which is in accordance with the discoveries of science and the dignity of man. In St. George’s Hall, Langham Place, this new association meets; its president is Baxter Langley, Esq. It dispenses with prayer, and with the reading of the Bible, but instead there is a performance of sacred music by a choir of a hundred voices, with solos sung by professional ladies and gentlemen specially engaged, and then the President himself, smiling and buoyant as if it were an election meeting, as chairman, performs many solos on his own account. In short, as a paper lying before me says, “Everything will be done to make the service delightful, whilst instruction will be secured by a popular lecture each evening from some gentleman eminent in science, literature, or art.”

It seems to be a speciality of this Church of Progress that it disappears in summer altogether. It is only in the winter time that its doors are thrown open – not at all to the poor and needy, but to those who can pay. Is not this a little hard? Life is short, and the disciple of progress may well mourn that for him half the year exists in vain. Then, again, this Church of Progress, as much as the oldest and most-abused Churches of Christendom, makes very rigorous requirements on the pocket. Sixpence is the minimum paid. If you would hear comfortably you must pay a shilling. If you would have a seat where you can see and hear still more comfortably you must shell out half-a-crown. Now, if a man goes with his wife and family, it is obvious that the sum he will have to pay will be, if he have but a scanty income, no small consideration. It is true that a reduction is made if you take tickets for the course, but what I find fault with is that the casual poor have no chance of being benefited by this new gospel – that it does not appeal to them – that it ignores them altogether. I may hear the greatest of Dissenting preachers, I may sit under deans and bishops – nay, I may listen to the finished accents of an archbishop – without putting my hand in my pocket, but for the lecture at St. George’s Hall, and the sacred minstrelsy there, I must at the least pay sixpence. The sum is a small one, but it has a tendency to narrow the Church and to limit its influence – it must keep outside many who otherwise would worship there. Why should the Church of Progress only appeal to the man with sixpence in his pocket? Is it only the capitalist whose soul is worth looking after? For common people will any old-wife’s fable do?

A more serious fault may be found with the Church of Progress. “We are not animated by any spirit of antagonism,” they say; “and as we propose to occupy a new field of utility, we see no reason why our assemblies should be regarded with hostility by other bodies.” “Our religion is positive and constructive, not negative and aggressive.” “Our Church is founded upon the recognition of the primary importance of human welfare; and its purpose will be to develop the power of philanthropy by education in the truths of science and philosophy, and by the elevating influence of the highest and purest art.” What Protestant Church cannot say the same? As to art, whence does the Church of Progress get its music, which perhaps is its chief attraction, but from the Churches which it tells us are losing their hold upon the minds of the people? It rears philanthropy: what was Peabody? It talks of philosophy: what were such philosophers as Sir David Brewster or Professor Faraday? Equally delusive is its denial of antagonism. It is founded for those “whose religious ideas find no suitable exponent in any of the existing Churches.” The existing Churches more or less appeal to the Bible, and to Christ as Master, and place before the mind as consolation, or warning, or allurement, the splendours and the terrors of a world to come. In the new Church all this is set on one side. Science, not dogma, is to be the teacher, and they sing —

“Reason and love! thy kingdom come,
Oh, Church of endless ages rise!
Till fairer shines our mortal home
Than heavens we sought beyond the skies.”

Is it true to say that between this new light and the old there is no antagonism? Is it honest to say, as they do in the address already referred to, “we ask no one to adopt or deny any of the creeds of the Churches. We shall endeavour to promulgate truth, and truth is always Divine”? Is it not clear that no one can join the Church of Progress unless he has ceased to believe in the creeds of the Churches? that it is impossible to believe in Christ and Baxter Langley as well? When Pilate said unto the Jews, “Whom will ye that I release unto you, Barabbas, or Jesus which is called Christ?” none but an idiot would have said there was no antagonism between the two. Again, it may be asked, by what right do these “earnest, conscientious men and women” in Langham Place call themselves a Church? Is it for the sake of deceiving the public? To teach art, or science, or literature, is not religion. Why, then, define as a Church people who meet on a Sunday to hear lectures on science, literature, and art? Undoubtedly, people may do worse on a Sunday night, but in listening to such lectures they have no right to say they are at church.

Mr. George Jacob Holyoake is also one of their lecturers; and if he be not antagonistic, what is he? Of all irrepressible men Mr. Holyoake is undoubtedly the most so. You meet him everywhere. Not a social science meeting, nor a political gathering, nor a philosophical discussion exists within reach of London but he is present at it, to take part in its discussions as the exponent of the views, and feelings, and desires of the British working man. If London is demonstrative, as when a Garibaldi appears upon the stage, foremost of those who meet to do him honour is Mr. Holyoake. In the House of Commons he is similarly prominent. In the Speaker’s gallery or in the lobby you may see him all night long, here speaking to a member, there listening to one as if the care of all the country rested on his shoulders. I don’t fancy Mr. Holyoake is the great man he takes himself to be. I deny his right to be the exponent of the class of whom he condescends to be the ornament and shield. I admit his boundless activity, his wonderful talent for intrusion, the cleverness of his talk. I admit, too, the energy with which in the course of a now extended career he has travelled the land, with a view to convince his fellow-men that there is no future, that he who says there is but repeats the old worn-out fiction of the priests, and that it is for this world rather than the next that we must labour and strive. Undoubtedly for Mr. Holyoake some extenuation must be made. A man may well doubt the Christianity which instead of removing his religious doubts throws him into gaol for the crime of expressing them. Nevertheless, I may doubt, if not the sincerity, – for about that there can be no question – at any rate the truth and wisdom of his creed; and may, after all, prefer the light of the Gospel to that which he asks me to admire. I may admit that there have been quacks, and impostors, and charlatans in the religious world – that the Church has fearfully failed in its mission – that, armed with the sword of the State, it has been often a curse and a blight – but it does not follow that the truth, of which the Church should be the living organization, has no existence, that it has no mission in this world, that the Bible is to be trampled under foot, that the Saviour is to be abolished, and that for man, instead of the narrow path and the heavenly crown, nothing is left but that he should eat, and drink, and die. Such, however, I believe, is Mr. Holyoake’s Gospel. As to his utterances on Sunday when I heard him, they were of the poorest character possible. The subject was the common people; and after describing three or four classes of them, he finished with the inculcation of the by no means original idea – that they were not so bad as they seem, that we had to respect in them the humanity which, under favourable circumstances, might be developed into something better. I never heard Mr. Holyoake preach before, and I shall take care never to hear him again. As a speaker, one of Mr. Spurgeon’s rawest students would beat him hollow.

THE INDEPENDENT RELIGIOUS REFORMERS

The Theists in London are, we are told, very numerous, and yet, till about ten years since, no steps had been taken by them to provide public buildings in which to assemble for instruction and conversation, and no church had been opened in which they could invite their friends to hear the principles of Theism explained and defended. In order to supply that want, Dr. Perfitt, a layman, resolved upon renting South Place Chapel, Finsbury Square, for the purpose of delivering lectures and discourses upon various religious topics. In 1858 the Society of Independent Religious Reformers was organized out of the hearers he had thus gathered around him. A committee was elected, rules were passed, and the following were declared to be the objects of the Society: —

1. To secure the association and co-operation of all persons who are desirous of cultivating the religious sentiment in a manner essentially free from the evil spirit of creed, from the intolerance of sectarianism, and the leaven of priestcraft; of those persons who respect the authority of reason, and reverentially accept the decrees of conscience.

2. To discover and methodize truths connected either with the laws of nature, the progress of thought, or the lives of good men in all ages and countries, so that they may be rendered of practical value as guides to a healthy, moral, and manly life.

3. To assist, as in the performance of a religious duty, in the regeneration of society by co-operating with every organized body whose aim is to abolish superstition, ignorance, drunkenness, political injustice, or any other of the numerous evils which now afflict the community.

To carry out these ideas the noble painting gallery, built by the late Sir Benjamin West, in Newman Street, Oxford Street, was procured and fitted up. This large hall seats 1500 persons. A good organ was erected, and schools and a library were talked of. At this place, on Sunday mornings, the public are treated to what is called a free religious service, based upon the great facts and principles of intellectual Theism. In the evenings popular lectures are delivered bearing upon science, history, or religious free thought. In both cases Dr. Perfitt is the orator. On many occasions the Doctor has appeared in public. Under not very pleasant circumstances – for he had little support – he appealed to Finsbury, but in vain, to send him into Parliament. It is clear, then, what of success the man has accomplished, or of good the man has done, has been chiefly in connexion with the Society of Independent Reformers. We were told in 1863 “the church in Newman Street is but the forerunner of hundreds which will rest upon the same foundation.” Dr. Perfitt has been more than seven years in Newman Street, and quite twenty at his work. A man can do a great deal in such a space of time if he has a fluent tongue, as is abundantly illustrated, not to go beyond our age, in the careers of Father Mathew, Father Ignatius, John B. Gough, or Mr. Spurgeon. Irving did not last so long, yet, metaphorically speaking, he managed to set the Thames on fire. It is clear Dr. Perfitt has peculiarly advantageous conditions under which to work. In the first place, as his aim is —

“To serve the truth where’er ’tis found,
On Christian or on heathen ground” —

he has a wide field over which his oratory may range. It cannot all be barren from Dan to Beersheba. In the second place, according to the Independent Religious Reformers, the great want of our times is such as they are. “It is well known,” they tell us, “that although the orthodox religious establishments are earnestly supported, they cannot gain the hearts of the people. The intelligence of England has outgrown the old creeds and formulas. Theism is secretly approved by thousands.” The time, then, is ripe for such a mission as Dr. Perfitt proposes. The hour has come, and he is the man. It is not in his negative and critical aspect that he is to be judged. In the position in that respect he has assumed there is no novelty. Unfortunately, the Church of England, like all established churches, more or less lays itself open to the most irreverent criticism. The new wine cannot be put in the old bottles. We can quite agree with him that “the majority of the clergy have no just conception of what, according to the nature of things, they are called upon to do;” that St. Paul would find himself sadly out of place were he called upon to preach to the congregation of a fashionable suburban church; and that there would indeed be a flutter and commotion raised were “the Archbishop of Canterbury, cutting himself adrift from the level of Belgravia, to stand out before men denouncing woe upon the butterflies of fashion and the Dundrearies of Parliament as Jesus denounced the Scribes and Pharisees of old.” But the saying these things does not constitute a man the founder of a new and better sect. Mr. Froude tells us “the clergyman of the nineteenth century subscribes the Thirty-nine Articles with a smile as might have been worn by Samson when his Philistine mistress bound his arms with the cords and withs.” It is scarcely possible to write a bitterer thing of the clergy, yet Mr. Froude is not, so far as we are aware, an Independent Religious Reformer. Even of the Church of which such hard things may be said, and justly said, we may argue that its theory of the identity of Church and State is a noble one, and that the dream of such men as “the judicious Hooker,” of Coleridge, of Dr. Arnold, is that of all who, in stately cathedral or humble conventicle, pray Sunday after Sunday to the common Father, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done upon earth as it is in heaven.” Man is a religious animal; the heart is true to its old instincts. There is no peace for his soul, no rest for the sole of the foot, no shelter for him in the storm, no brightness in the cloud, no glory in the sun, no hope in life, no life in death, unless he can believe, adore, and love. But we have forgotten Dr. Perfitt. Well, we need be in no hurry. If you go to Newman Street you will find very few people there by eleven. The exclusively religious service, as one of the hearers informed us it was, generally commences at a quarter past, where in the large hall about a hundred may be collected together, the majority, of course, males, chiefly of the lower section, I should imagine, of the middle class. There is music; then the Doctor reads a chapter of the Bible, and takes it to pieces; then there is more music; then a prayer, and a half-hour’s sermon, from a regular text, according to the fashion of the orthodox, but generally coming to a very unorthodox conclusion. Indeed, the former come off hardly at the Doctor’s hands. He demolished them as easily as if they were so many men of straw; President Edwards, Richard Baxter, Mr. Spurgeon, the apostles, and their great Teacher, all look very small by the side of the clear, logical, learned, fluent, sarcastic, infallible Doctor, who is the heir of all the ages under the sun; who talks of Zoroaster, and Vedas, and Shasters; who is as familiar with Brahma and Buddha as if he had assisted at their birth, and who knows what’s o’clock in Sanscrit better than you or I, my good sir, in ordinary English. After the sermon comes the collection, and the congregational dinner-hour, for the sale of the beer for which, the neighbouring publics open just as the Independent Religious Reformers, exhausted by the Doctor’s omniscience, require the refreshing fluid.

“Hae, sirs!” said an elderly female in a remote part of Scotland, as for the first time she saw a black man; “hae, sirs, what canna be done for the penny!” Assuredly some such feeling must be entertained by the listener who for the first time hears Dr. Perfitt in his rostrum in Cambridge Hall. For a pound a year you may have this pleasure every Sunday, and become one of the Independent Reformers. What more can man desire?

SOUTH PLACE, FINSBURY SQUARE

The religion of humanity has been for a time dominant in South Place, Finsbury Square. Its oldest and original teacher in connexion with the place was the late W. Johnson Fox, M.P., a popular writer and eloquent orator, who did much in his day and generation on behalf of freedom in trade, in politics, and religion, and did it well. Nor did he labour in vain as regards himself. Born in an humble position, he became a student at Homerton College and an orthodox Dissenter. In a little while he joined the Unitarians, and then left them for a freer and fuller religious creed and form of worship. He had many friends. His letters, signed “Publicola,” in the Weekly Dispatch, were the delight of the working classes; and his Anti-Corn-law orations charmed all, and there were tens of thousands who had the privilege of listening to them. He was returned to Parliament by the electors of Oldham, and a monument erected to his memory there still perpetuates his name. He died at a ripe old age, ever having preserved the character of an independent and honourable man. As a religious teacher he was no extraordinary success. It was rarely indeed that South Place was very full. Of course, the hearers were the very élite of the human race. Wherever you go – especially among sects not particularly orthodox or popular – the men and women with whom you come in contact are no ordinary men and women. By a happy dispensation of Providence they fail to see themselves as others see them, and are as firmly convinced of their own intellectual superiority over a benighted British public as they are of the truth of their principles and of their ultimate success.

“There is a religion of humanity,” said Mr. Fox, “though not enshrined in articles and creeds, though it is not to be read merely in sacred books, and yet it may be read in all wherever they have anything in them of truth and moral beauty, – a religion of humanity which goes deeper than all because it belongs to the essentials of our moral and intellectual constitution, and not to mere external accidents, the proof of which is not in historical agreement or metaphysical deduction, but in our own conscience and consciousness, – a religion of humanity which unites and blends all other religions, and makes one the men whose hearts are sincere, and whose characters are true, and good, and harmonious, whatever may be the deductions of their minds or their external profession, – a religion of humanity which cannot perish in the overthrow of altars or the fall of temples, which survives them all, and which, were every derived form of religion obliterated from the face of the earth, would recreate religion as the spring recreates the fruits and flowers of the soul, bidding it bloom again in beauty, bear again its rich fruits of utility, and fashion for itself such forms and modes of expression as may best agree with the progressive condition of mankind.”

It was in accordance with these ideas that the Sunday morning services in South Place were carried on.

After Mr. Fox came Mr. Ierson, and a nearer approximation to regular Unitarianism. But the place did not prosper; there were far too many empty benches. He was succeeded by a gentleman formerly a Baptist minister, but who had outgrown his sect, and for a little while there was harmony and progress. Again there was an interregnum. “Seekers are,” said old Oliver Cromwell, “next best to finders.” In London, especially in these unsettled days of free inquiry, are many such, and to such the pulpit of South Place was freely offered. I do not fancy as a rule seekers are good preachers. To say anything effectually you must have something to say. To make others weep you must weep yourself. With mere negations you can never sway the minds or influence the lives of men. In orthodox places of worship there is often much of dreariness. The clergyman whose heart is not in his work is a miserable spectacle for gods and men, but the dreariness of heterodoxy is infinitely greater; and of all things under the sun the most miserable in the clerical way is the sight of a would-be philosopher feebly diluting or expanding, as the case may be, windy platitudes or transcendental moonshine. Under such an infliction, as it may well be imagined, South Place did not flourish greatly. At length, in due course, a man appeared to continue the work which Mr. Fox had originated. His name is Mr. M. D. Conway. I believe he is of American origin, and evidently under him the cause is in a prosperous state. When I say prosperous, the term is not to be understood as it would be in orthodox circles. The latter class of religionists, when they say that a place is prosperous imply by the use of such language that a place of worship is well filled; that men are turned from sin to holiness, from serving the devil to serving God, that the place is a centre of religious life and activity, and that all, young and old, rich and poor, are to the best of their power and means co-operating in Christian work. Prosperity in this sense cannot be predicated of South Place. Its doors are only opened once a week. There is no religious, or educational, or philanthropical agency connected with the chapel; but there are more attendants than there were, and that encourages Mr. Conway and his friends. Indeed, there is a talk amongst them of establishing a Sunday-school. At the same time it seems to me that the class of people who go to South Place are not socially or intellectually what they were in Mr. Fox’s time – when the Cortaulds would come up all the way from Braintree to hear Mr. Fox, when City lawyers like the late Mr. Ashurst, and City magnates like the late Mr. Dillon, were amongst the audience; when on a Sunday morning might be seen there such men as Sir J. Bowring, or Macready, or Charles Dickens, and others equally well known to fame. They left when Mr. Fox left. I believe Mr. P. Taylor, M.P., still keeps up a connexion, more or less fitful and uncertain, with the place. Sir Sydney Waterlow also still retains a couple of sittings, but he is rarely there. Nevertheless, the congregation has greatly increased; the chapel is quite three parts full. Still they use the little book of hymns and anthems selected by Mr. Fox; and the musical part of the service, always a great matter at South Place, is as well conducted and as attractive as ever.

Mr. Conway is a very advanced thinker. The character of his preaching and praying is purely theistic. He wars with dogmas in every form. It may be a wing to-day, a fetter to-morrow. For him there are no sacred books, or rather he places them all on an equality. For his motto he goes to India, and quotes the Brahma Somaj. In this respect he is a true follower of the late Mr. Fox, whose fascinating oratory owed very little of its charm to that which orthodox Unitarians or orthodox Christians hold highest and holiest; whose aim was more to pull down than to build up, and who had a greater faculty for the exposition of Christian fallacies than for the enunciating of truths and principles needful to humanity in its hour of temptation, distress, danger, or death. Few have his exquisite humour, his power of sarcasm, his acquaintance with modern literature, his copious command of polished language, his expressive yet calm delivery, his gentleness almost as touching as that of woman; but that which was lacking in him often made men his inferiors in intellect, his superiors in the art of arousing the spiritually dead, or in giving to the moral wastes in our midst the vigour, the beauty, the fertility of life.

THE SECULARISTS

It is a sign of the times when Infidelity visits the workshop or the factory, and challenges the admiration of the men in fustian – the men whose hard labours and horny hands have helped to make England what it is, and who in an increasing ratio are making their influence felt on the Exchange where capital seeks investment, in the ancient halls where the teachers of the next generation are training, in the study of the political philosopher, in Parliaments where practical people assemble to legislate after their necessarily imperfect fashion for the general weal. It is said of Sir Godfrey Kneller that he was deeply shocked at hearing a common labourer invoking imprecations on his own head. Some such feeling must be entertained by the old-fashioned, scholarly sceptics at all times met with in highly intellectual communities. Religion was a good thing for the poor; it taught them to know their place, to be humble, industrious, and not to murmur when deprived by human agency of the rights to which all are born, or when by the same agency they were made to bear innumerable wrongs. For such religion was intended; and for such considerations it was right and proper that it should be accepted by society – sanctioned by the law – its ministers rewarded and salaried by the State. It was under the influence of some such feeling that Napoleon the Great is reported to have said, if there were no God, it would be necessary to invent one; and in a proportionate manner do the philosophers feel alarm and indignation when the working man, for whom such trouble has been taken, – for whom religion has, as it were, been discovered, – for whom an Establishment, the most richly endowed with this world’s goods in Christendom, rejoices to call itself the poor man’s Church, – turns round, and, in his coarse, rough way, says, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am much obliged to you. I see your little game. Pray don’t take any trouble on my account. Please to leave me to go to the bad in my own way. Give me the right to the free inquiry you claim for yourselves, and don’t quarrel with me on account of its results.” Really it seems to me the Secularist has the best of it. I may regret his conclusions. I cannot blame his independent spirit.

Of the men who talk in this way it may be said, at any rate as regards the metropolis, Robert Dale Owen was the teacher and apostle. Owen was the first to proclaim to the masses that there was no such thing as moral responsibility; that a man’s character was formed for him partly by nature at his birth, and partly by the external influences to which he was exposed. As man, there was for him no choice of right or wrong. Any religion, and emphatically that of Christ, which proceeds upon the supposition that man can lay hold of eternal life, can accept the offer of God’s mercy, can believe and live, is false and to be rejected with disdain. Owen was a man of blameless life – a man who made great sacrifices of wealth, and time, and labour, on account of his ideas. As his last apologist has well stated, “his condemnation of religion was not the result of libertine excesses, nor of a philosophical conceit, but followed honestly from the shallow theory he had adopted.” Amongst the poor, ignorant, superficial denizens of our crowded cities he was hailed as the regenerator of manhood, and made many converts. Nor are they to be blamed. Owen met with an attentive hearing from such as Brougham and Bentham, Earls Liverpool and Aberdeen, Jefferson and Van Buren, the Duke of Kent and the King of Prussia; actually, we believe, he was presented at Court. It is true in his old age he became a believer in spirits, after all, and was buried in the little churchyard of Newton, Montgomeryshire, in the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection to eternal life; but by that time the truth or falsehood he had proclaimed had sunk into many minds, had been re-uttered by many tongues, had been commended to the working classes by no less a master of language and argument than George Jacob Holyoake. Certainly, in the hands of the latter, Owenism, under its new name of Secularism, lost none of its power. The master was apt to be egotistic – dogmatic – much given to repetition – very diffuse. Mr. Holyoake’s enemies cannot conscientiously say he is that. His friends, many of them the cleverest of London men, claim for him talents of no common order. A shop in Fleet Street was opened – the Reasoner was established – and Mr. Holyoake went all over the land to emancipate the human mind, spell-bound by priestcraft, and to roll back the double night of ages and of ignorance. In a little while he retired from business, the shop in Fleet Street was shut up, the Reasoner reasoned no more – Mr. Holyoake ceased perambulating. Still we have a genuine Apostolical succession: Mr. Bradlaugh takes up the wondrous tale, and the National Reformer records the triumphs of his cause. According to him, all is prosperous. Hope paints a glorious future – when man’s

“Regenerate soul from crime
Shall yet be drawn,
And Reason on this mortal clime
Immortal dawn.”

Yet what is the fact? The National Reformer costs 10l. a week, and it does not pay. Its readers tell us their name is legion; yet it does not pay. At any rate, it is constantly appealing to its public for support. In every workshop or factory, in all our great hives of intelligence and life, the Secularists boast their thousands. All the intelligent operative manhood of England is, according to their own account, theirs; yet their organ – the child of a giant – is very weak on its legs, and very short of wind.

The headquarters of the Secularists is Cleveland Street, a street lying in that mass of pauperism at the rear of Tottenham Court Road Chapel. In that street there is a hall, originally erected, I believe, by Owen himself. At any rate, it is the resort of the illuminated to whom his philosophy has opened up a new moral world, – which, as regards appearances, is little better than the benighted Egypt out of which they have departed. Here you will find no free Gospel. The Secularists are determined to make the best of this world. If you wish to enter, you must pay; if you wish to show your gentility and sit near the lecturer, you must pay twopence more. Previous to the lecturer commencing, a boy goes up and down the room selling copies of the National Reformer, and a table at one end is devoted to the sale of publications of a similar character.

Cleveland Hall, every Sunday evening, then, is devoted to what are called Popular Free-thought Lectures. The doors open at seven, the lectures commence at half-past. The programme for the month of August, which I have now before me, will give the reader an idea of what is meant by free thought: —