Charles Bradlaugh

“ Your boasted precept, to him that strikes thee on thy right cheek turn the other also, is not only contrary to the feelings of man, but a flagrant violation of every principle of justice; it emboldens the wicked by impunity, degrades the virtuous by the servility to which it subjects them; delivers up the world to disorder and tyranny, and dissolves the bands of society—such is the true spirit of your doctrine. The precepts and parables of your Gospel also never represent God other than as a despot, acting by no rule of equity ”

“ Having thus placed all science on a philosophical basis, no matter what, he freed philosophy herself from her long servitude, and proclaimed her queen of the intellect. Hence every one who has wished to account to himself for his existence, every one who has desired to know himself to know nature, and to rise to its author; in a word, all who have wished to make a wise use of their intellectual faculties, to apply them, not to hollow speculations which border on nonentity, but to sensible and practical inquiries, have taken and followed some direction from Descartes. ”

“ We have repeatedly driven you away through avarice; we have recalled you through avarice and stupidity; we still, in more towns than one, make you pay for liberty to breathe the air; we have, in more kingdoms than one, sacrificed you to God; we have burned you as holocausts—for I will not follow your example, and dissemble that we have offered up sacrifices of human blood; all the difference is, that our priests, content with applying your money to their own use, have had you burned by laymen; while your priests always immolated their human victims with their own sacred hands. ”

“ What is heresy that it should be so heavily punished? Why is it that society will condone many offences, pardon many vicious practices, and yet have such scant mercy for the open heretic, who is treated as though he were some horrid monster to be feared and hated? ”

“ In the latter half of this century, giants in literature grew out, giants who wrote for the people. William Shakespeare wrote even for those who could not read, but who might learn while looking and listening. His comedies and tragedies are at the same time pictures for the people of diverse phases of English life and character, with a thereunto added universality of pourtrayal and breadth in philosophy, which it is hardly too much to say, that no other dramatist has ever equalled. ”

“ The seeds of inquiry sown in the sixteenth century resulted in a fruitful display of advanced opinions during the next age. In the page of seventeenth century history, more names of men, either avowedly heretics, or charged by the orthodox with heresy, or whose labours can be shown to have tended to the growth of heresy, may probably be recorded than can be found during the whole of the previously long period during which the Christian Church assumed to dominate and control European thought. The seventeenth century muster-roll of heresy is indeed a grand one, and gloriously filled. ”

“ Men are good and true of every nation and of every faith; but there are more good and true men in nations where civilisation has made progress, and amongst faiths which have been modified by high humanising influences. Men are good not because of their orthodoxy, but in spite of it; their goodness is the outgrowth of their humanity, not of their orthodoxy. Heresy is necessary to progress; heresy in religion always precedes an endeavour for political freedom. You cannot have effectual political progress without wide-spread heretical thought. ”

“ It is here that heresy has its great advantage. Christianity says, "the powers that be are ordained of God, he that resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of God." Heresy challenges the divine right of the governor, and declares that government should be the best contrivance of national wisdom to promote the national weal, to provide against national want, and alleviate-national suffering—that government which is only a costly machinery for conserving class privileges, and preventing popular freedom, is a tyrannical usurpation of power,which it is the duty of true men to destroy. ”

“ She can no longer plead the infallible and irresistible instinct of nature, for that led us to quite a different system, which is acknowledged fallible, and even erroneous, and to justify this pretended philosophical system by a chain of clear and convincing argument, or even any appearance of argument, exceeds the power of all human capacity. Do you follow the instinct and propensities of nature in assenting to the veracity of the senses? ”

“ Orthodoxy is well exemplified in the dark middle ages, when the mass of men and women believed much and knew little, when miracles were common and schools were rare, and when the monasteries on the hill tops held the literature of Europe. Heresy speaks for itself in this nineteenth century, with the gas and electric light, with cheap newspapers, with a thousand lecture rooms, with innumerable libraries, and at least a majority of the people able to read the thoughts the dead have left, as well as to listen to the words the living utter. ”

“ The eighteenth century deserves that the penman who touches its records shall have some virility; for these records contain, not only the narrative of the rapid growth of the new philosophy in France, England, and Germany, where its roots had been firmly struck in the previous century, but they also give the history of a glorious endeavour on the part of a down-trodden and long-suffering people, weakened and degraded by generations of starvation and oppression, to break the yoke of tyranny and superstition. ”

“ Lewes says, "Bacon and Descartes are generally recognised as the Fathers of Modern Philosophy, although they themselves were carried along by the rapidly-swelling current of their age, then decisively setting in the direction of science. It is their glory to have seen visions of the coming greatness, to have expressed in terms of splendid power, the thoughts which were dimly stirring the age, and to have sanctioned the new movement by their authoritative genius." ”

“ Why is it that society is so severe on heresy? Three hundred years ago it burned heretics, till thirty years ago it sent them to jail; even in England and America to-day it is content to harass, annoy, and slander them. ”

“ It will hardly be untrue to say that the famous "rebellious needleman" has been the most popular writer in Great Britain and America against revealed religion, and that his works, from their plain, clear language, have in those countries had, and still have, a far wider circulation than those of any other modern sceptical author. His anti-theology was allied to his republicanism; he warred alike against church and throne, and his impeachment of each was couched in the plainest Anglo-Saxon. His name became at the same time a word of terror to the aristocracy and to the clergy. ”

“ The weakness of Berkeley's system as a mere question of logic is, that while he requires the most rigorous demonstration of the existence of what he defines as matter, he assumes an eternal spirit with various attributes, and also creates spirits of various sorts. He creates the states of mind resulting from the sensation of surrounding phenomena into ideas, existing independent of the ego, when in truth, man's ideas are not in addition to man's mind ”

“ In France the end of the eighteenth century was marked by a frightful convulsion. A people starved and degraded for generations, rose in the very desperation of despair, and with a mighty force broke the yoke of traditional feudalism and habitual monarchic reverence; but in the case of France, the revolution was too sudden to be immediately beneficial or enduring, the people were as a mass too poor, and therefore too ignorant to wield the power so rapidly wrested from the class who had so long monopolised it. ”

“ By the continual action of external bodies on the senses of man, results the most remarkable part of his existence. But is it true that the nervous centres only receive and combine the impressions which reach them from the bodies? Is it true that no image or idea is formed in the brain, and that no determination of the sensitive organ takes place, other than by virtue of these same impressions on the senses strictly so-called? The faculty of feeling and of spontaneous movement forms the character of animal nature. ”

“ We may fairly allege, that amongst thinking clergymen of the Church of England, heresy is the rule and not the exception. So soon as a minister begins to preach sermons which he does not buy ready lithographed—sermons which are the work of his brain—so soon heresy more or less buds out, now in the rejection of some church doctrine or article of minor importance, now in some bold declaration at variance with major and more essential tenets. Even Bishop Watson's so famous for his Bible Apology, declared that the church articles and creeds were not binding on any man. ”

“ All those sublime thoughts which tower above the clouds, and reach as high as heaven itself, take their rise and footing here: in all that good extent wherein the mind wanders, in those remote speculations, it may seem to be elevated with, it stirs not one jot beyond those ideas which sense or reflection have offered for its contemplation. ”

“ The wretched forms under which Christianity has long been generally exhibited, and its degrading alliance with, or rather its subjection to a power wholly heterogeneous to it, and which has employed it for the most unworthy purposes, has made it contemptible and odious in the eyes of all sensible men, who are now everywhere casting off the very profession and every badge of it. Enlightened Christians must themselves, in some measure, join with unbelievers in exposing whatever will not bear examination in or about religion. ”

“ Yet an infinite and perfect being must exist, because infinity and perfection are implied as correlatives in my ideas of imperfection and finitude. God therefore exists: his existence is clearly proclaimed in my consciousness, and can no more be a matter of doubt, when fairly considered, than my own existence. The conception of an infinite being proves his real existence; for if there is not really such a being, I must have made the conception ”

“ To-day science admits in animals, more or less according to their organisation, perception, memory, judgment, and even some sort of reason. Yet orthodoxy still claims a soul for man even if he be a madman from his birth, and denies it to the sagacious elephant, the intelligent horse, the faithful dog, and the cunning monkey. His proof of the existence of Deity is thus stated by Lewes:—"Interrogating his consciousness, he found that he had the idea of God, understanding by God, a substance infinite, eternal, immutable, independent, omniscient, omnipotent. ”

“ The love of literature is the most remarkable and characteristic form of advancing civilisation. Instead of being the absorbing passion of the learned few, it becomes gradually the delight and occupation of increasing numbers. This cultivation of literary pursuits by the mass is only possible when enough of heresy has been obtained to render their scope of study wide enough to be useful. Rotterdam gave life to the polished Erasmus, Valentia to Ludovico Vivez, Picardy to Le Fevre, and France to Rabelais. ”

“ Why do you make the Supreme Being resemble an eastern tyrant? Why make him punish slight faults with eternal torment? Why thus put the name of the Divinity at the bottom of the portrait of the devil? Why oppress the soul with a load of fear, break its springs, and of a worshipper of Jesus make a vile, pusillanimous slave? ”

“ The existence of Deity was a point which Bacon left untouched by reason, yet with Descartes it was the first proposition he sought to prove. He says, "I have always thought that the two questions of the existence of God and the nature of the soul, were the chief of those which ought to be demonstrated rather by philosophy than by theology, for although it is sufficient for us, the faithful, to believe in God, and that the soul does not perish with the body, it does not seem possible ever to persuade the infidels to any religion unless we first prove to them these two things by natural reason." ”

“ There is one point of error held by Descartes sufficiently entertained even to-day—although most often without a distinct appreciation of the position—to justify a few words upon it. Descartes denied mental faculties to all the animal kingdom except mankind. All the brute kingdom he regarded as machines without intelligence. In this he was logical, even in error, for he accorded a soul to man which he denied to the brute. Soul and mind with him are identified, and thought is the fundamental attribute of mind. ”

“ Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man; and therefore, if a man write little, he need have a great memory; if he confer little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtle; natural philosophy deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend." He was the father of experimental philosophy. ”

“ He urged that religion is the accidental result of birth and education, and that therefore variety of creed should not be cause of quarrel between men, as such variety is the result of circumstances over which the men themselves have had no control; and he urges that as each sect claims to be the only true one, we ought to rise superior to all sects, and without being terrified by the fear of future punishment, or allured by the hope of future happiness, "be content with such practical religion as consists in performing the duties of life." ”

“ Peter Bayle, born at Carlat, in Foix, 1647, died in Holland, 1706, was a writer of great power and brilliancy and wide learning. Without standing avowedly on the side of scepticism, he did much to promote sceptical views amongst the rapidly growing class of men of letters. He declared that it was better to be an Atheist, than to have a false or unworthy idea of God; that a man can be at the same time an Atheist and an honest man, and that a people without a religion is capable of good order. ”

“ But this universal and primary opinion of all men is soon destroyed by the slightest philosophy, which teaches us that nothing can ever be present to the mind but an image or perception. So far, then, we are necessitated by reasoning to contradict the primary instincts of nature, and to embrace a new system with regard to the evidence of our senses. But here philosophy finds herself extremely embarrassed, when she would obviate the cavils and objections of the sceptics. ”

“ Thus the first capacity of human intellect is, that the mind is fitted to receive the impressions made on it, either through the senses, by outward objects, or by its own operations, when it reflects on them. This is the first step a man makes towards the discovery of anything, and the groundwork whereon to build all those notions which ever he shall have naturally in this world. ”

“ Geological science has a crowd of heretics amongst its professors, men who deny the sudden origin of fauna and flora; who trace the gradual development of the vegetable and animal kingdoms through vast periods of time; and who find no resting place in a beginning of existence, but are obliged to halt in face of a measureless past, inconceivable in its grandeur. Geology, to quote the words of Dr. Kalisch, declares "the utter impossibility of a creation of even the earth alone in six days." ”

“ Astronomy has in the ranks of its professors many of its most able minds who do not believe in the sun and moon as two great lights, who cannot accept the myriad stars as fixed in the firmament solely to give light upon the earth, who refuse to believe in the heaven as a fixed firmament to divide the waters above from the waters beneath, who cannot by their telescopes discover the local heaven above or the local hell beneath, although their science marks each faint nebulosity crossing, or crossed by the range of the watcher's vision. ”