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DEBATES 1862–1866.

In September 1862 Mr. Bradlaugh held a six nights' discussion with the Rev. W. Barker, a gentleman who had been lecturing against Atheism to a Christian Society in Clerkenwell. The debate was held in the Cowper Street School Rooms, City Road. The report I have by me was published by Ward & Co., and was taken from the notes of a shorthand writer, and approved by both disputants. The first two evenings were controlled by a chairman for each speaker, with Mr. James Harvey for umpire; but Mr. Harvey's impartial judgments gave so much satisfaction that the last four meetings were left entirely under his charge. The attendance—on some nights so great that people were turned away—averaged twelve hundred persons, and it was estimated that a thousand heard the whole of the debate. Some enthusiastic people journeyed long distances, such as from Yorkshire, Lancashire, Devonshire, and Norfolk, to be present. After all expenses were defrayed the surplus of £20 was sent to the Lord Mayor for the Lancashire Relief Fund. The subjects under discussion were:—

"I. Are the representations of Deity in the Bible irrational and derogatory?

"II. Is Secularism, which inculcates the practical sufficiency of morality, independent of Biblical religion, calculated to lead to the highest development of the physical, moral, and intellectual nature of man?

"III. Is the doctrine of Original Sin, as taught in the Bible, theoretically unjust and practically pernicious?

"IV. Does Secularism, which admits the authority of nature alone, and which appeals to reason as the best means of arriving at truth, offer a surer basis for human conduct than Christianity, which rests its claims on a presumed Divine revelation?

"V. Is the plan of Salvation through the Atonement repulsive in its details, immoral in its tendency, and unworthy of the acceptance of the human race?

"VI. Is the doctrine of personal existence after death, and of eternal happiness or misery for mankind, fraught with error and injurious to humanity?"

My father, writing during the progress of this debate, described Mr. Barker as a speaker not calculated, so far as he had yet seen, to excite his audience. "He is," said he, "a robust, happy-looking man, slightly inclined to go to sleep during his speeches, and hardly lively enough in his sallies. He appears to wish to strike occasionally, but fears the result of his own blow. Perhaps as the debate proceeds he will be more vigorous in his replies, and more piquant in his affirmations."

Mr. John Watts spoke of the reverend gentleman in much the same terms,[75] paying special tribute to Mr. Barker's evident desire to fairly represent his opponent's views.

The report of this debate, carried on for six nights, and dealing with six separate questions in eighteen speeches a side, makes quite a formidable volume of more than two hundred pages. It has in it much that is interesting and much that is dull, a little that is witty, and more that is weak. It would weary the reader, and serve no useful purpose, were I to attempt a representation of the arguments used. I will only note that on the sixth and last evening Mr. Bradlaugh opened with an impeachment of the morality of the doctrine of a future existence in happiness or in torment, the bribe and the penalty of the Christian religion; and in his final speech, after briefly reviewing the whole debate, he stated his position. Mr. Barker, he tells his listening audience, "comes as an exponent of God's will to man. I come as a student of rising thought, of the endeavour to know—as a student of the great problem of life. I have no revelation; I have no bitter excommunications—no anathemas to hurl upon you; but I have this to say: the wide book of humanity lies open before you. Turn its pages over. I can offer you no inducements to come here. I admit that to be a Freethinker is to be an outlaw, according to the laws of England. I admit that to profess your disbelief renders you liable at the present moment to fine and imprisonment and penal servitude. I admit that that is the statute law of England. I admit that if you are free enough to say you are an infidel, your evidence may in a court of justice be rejected, and that so you may be robbed.[76] I admit we have not wealth and power on our side—power which the Christian Church, through eighteen centuries of extortion, has managed to get together. But I tell you what we have. We have the pleasant consciousness that we make the public conscience and public opinion step by step with each thought we give out and each good deed we do. Our church is not a narrow church, nor narrow chapel, nor Bible sect, but the wide church of humanity, covered by no steeple, with texts preached from no pulpit, but with each man as his own priest, working out his own salvation, and that of his fellows too—not on his knees, but on his feet, with clenched hand and nervous brain, fighting wrong and asserting right, and striving to make humanity freer."

On Monday and Wednesday, the 1st and 3rd of February 1864, Mr. Bradlaugh met Thomas Cooper, the sometime Freethinker, author of the "Purgatory of Suicides," and now "Lecturer on Christianity," in debate. This debate had been talked of for nearly eight years, but although Mr. Bradlaugh was eager for the fray Mr. Cooper was more reluctant; he affected to despise his junior for his lack of learning, and several times publicly derided his "ignorance"; he himself was reputed a scholar, and boasted a knowledge of fourteen languages. As it was, Mr. Cooper himself worded the subjects to be discussed, and refused to meet my father under his nom de guerre of "Iconoclast." On the first evening Mr Cooper was to affirm "the Being of God as the Maker of the Universe," and on the second "the Being of God as the Moral Governor of the Universe." As the affirmer he had the advantage of leading the discussion each night.

The wording of the question put Mr. Bradlaugh in a peculiar position: he was "to state the argument on the Negative side," and as any reasonable person will, I think, clearly see, he could only do this by showing the fallacy of the arguments used by the affirmer. He told his audience: "I do not stand here to prove that there is no God. If I should undertake to prove such a proposition I should deserve the ill words of the oft-quoted Psalmist applied to those who say there is no God. I do not say there is no God, but I am an Atheist without God. To me the word 'God' conveys no idea, and it is because the word 'God' to me never expressed a clear and definite conception … that I am Atheist. … The word 'God' does not, to my mind, express an eternal, infinite, omnipotent, intelligent, personal conscious being, but is a word without meaning and no effect other than it derives from the passions and prejudices of those who use it."

This debate should have been of more than ordinary interest, both disputants were lecturers and debaters of long standing, and as an exponent of the evidences of Christianity Mr. Thomas Cooper's reputation was, I believe, considerable. And since he had himself once spoken from the Freethought standpoint, he, more than another, should have been prepared to grapple with the difficulties which lay between the Atheist and a belief in God the Creator and Moral Governor of the Universe. Having read his speeches, I am surprised at the poorness of his arguments, and am driven to the conclusion that his reputation has been considerably overstated—that is to say, his reputation as an expounder of Christian doctrines: his language was sometimes absolutely childish; of his merits as a poet I know nothing. "B. V." wrote some amusing verses[77] descriptive of Mr. Cooper's position as laid down by him in his opening speech, and a writer in the Christian Times for February 3rd related the impression produced on him by Mr. Bradlaugh on the first night:

"Let me do this gentleman justice. He was neither vulgar nor arrogantly egotistical. He has a loud, harsh voice. He is thoroughly earnest in address. His thoughts come to him with admirable orderliness. His logical faculty is strong, and his speaking faculty is something to be amazed at. He combines precision with volubility. He makes argument rhetorically climacteric. In retort, by-play, and insinuation, he evinces very considerable skill. He is an adept in the use of satire. His style is sharp, clear, incisive. In short, he is evidently a young man of somewhat remarkable abilities, who with his present opinions must do much mischief, but under a holier inspiration would do immense good. In saying this about him, I am but speaking honest truth. I have already said with what a prejudice against him I went to the hall. I am frank enough to confess that I found that prejudice to be to a great extent based on ignorance of the man. It has been the custom of many Christian organs to hold the teachers of Atheism up to scorn for ignorance, conceit, incapacity, and a wanton indulgence in gross and vulgar blasphemies. Often enough the representation has been only too faithful; but it would be simply an absurd and self-refuting falsehood to charge any of these things on Mr. Bradlaugh, as far as his behaviour on Monday night would enable one to form an estimate of his character. He used sharp weapons, it is true, but he used them skilfully; he had a most repulsive task, granted, but he came up to it with a manly candour and went through it without resorting to a word, gesture, or glance that was indicative of the desire to be unnecessarily offensive."[78]

I have taken this somewhat lengthy extract from the article as giving a frank avowal of a prejudgment of my father, unwarranted by the real facts as realised by a Christian auditor. And yet it was in these early years that Mr. Bradlaugh is said to have been so "unnecessarily offensive" by those who during the last few years of his life were compelled to own that he was not so bad after all. These persons, lacking the generous candour of the writer in the Christian Times of 1864, endeavour to excuse their earlier injustice by saying that, if not coarse and offensive now, he had been at one time, and his manners had much improved. This quotation may serve, to those who still need it, as a hostile contemporary witness in Mr. Bradlaugh's favour.

On September 25th and 26th, 1865, Mr. Bradlaugh had yet another debate with his Swedenborgian antagonist, the Rev. Woodville Woodman. The debate was held in the theatre at Northampton, which was crowded, numbers of people being unable to obtain admission on the first night. He had arranged for a three nights' discussion six weeks later at Keighley with the Rev. Mr. Porteous of Glasgow. He was to lecture at Liverpool on Sunday, October 29th, and the debate was down for the following Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. On the Saturday the express train in which he was travelling to Liverpool ran into some luggage vans between Woodhouse and Sheffield, and he was very severely shaken. How severely he did not at once realise, and with his usual disregard of himself he insisted upon fulfilling his engagement at Liverpool. After the exertion of delivering three lectures he felt so much worse that the journey to Keighley, followed by three nights' discussion, seemed out of the question. He communicated with Mr. Porteous and came home; I have a distinct recollection of seeing my father come into the house, looking terribly ill. The Rev. Mr. Porteous refused to postpone his engagement; in fact, he never answered Mr. Bradlaugh's letter, but insisted on proceeding in his absence. For the first two nights he "debated" in solitary grandeur, but on the third night Mr. Bradlaugh was represented by Mr. John Watts, who, "at Iconoclast's request," went to Keighley to meet Mr. Porteous on one night at least. The committee of the Rev. Mr. Porteous paid their champion out of the proceeds, but "he nevertheless afterwards claimed and received from Iconoclast the further sum of £2 10s., not for expenses, but to make up his 'fee.'"[79] In June of the following year Mr. Bradlaugh was lecturing at Keighley, and when he arrived there he found the walls of the town and neighbourhood placarded with a "Challenge to the Image Breaker" from Mr. Porteous. This "challenge" rather prematurely assumed reluctance on Mr. Bradlaugh's part; it was at once accepted, and the debate fixed for two or three days later, the 14th and 15th June. The subject for the discussion, which was held in the Temperance Hall, was "Is the Bible a divine revelation?" and people attended from Burnley, Leeds, Bradford, and outlying districts; but judging from a brief report which is all I have to guide me, I doubt whether it was much worth a journey to listen to. Mr. Porteous angrily spoke of my father as

"one who, being a lawyer's clerk, had never been trusted with a brief; but who, in swollen rhetoric and with blatant voice, had indulged in misstatements and misrepresentations of the Bible which nothing could justify."[80]

It is rather curious to note, too, that during the evening the Rev. Mr. Porteous, just as the Rev. Brewin Grant had done on a former occasion, strongly complained that Iconoclast looked at him whilst he was speaking.[81]