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National Character speaks of Bradlaugh as having likened the Trinity to a monkey with three tails. Bradlaugh never did any such thing. A more elaborated figure of that sort appeared in a condensed account once contributed to his journal of an old lecture by a deceased Freethinker, who had satirised human anthropomorphism by making a monkey theologise for monkeys, as Heine makes the bear do in
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Atta Troll. In the context the figure was fitting enough; but in any case it was not Bradlaugh's. And in reply to those persons who affect to see vulgarity, or worse, in every jest at Christian beliefs, it may be said once for all that Christians have from the first century onwards put themselves out of court on this head by jealously ridiculing the beliefs of all other believers, as well as of rationalists; that they have not stopped at ridicule, but have in all ages freely resorted to gross calumny; and that they in turn are not very badly used when their beliefs are merely subjected to the satire to which they are confessedly open. Even sheer coarseness is just as reprehensible, no more and no less, when directed against living persons, as when directed against dead or imaginary beings, or particular beliefs concerning them; but those who are readiest to impute the latter offence seem to make small account of the other, when the object of attack is an unbeliever. Bradlaugh was never coarse; yet he was abused with unspeakable scurrility by thousands of Christian people. And if coarseness ever arose in his movement, as it so easily may in a popular movement involving controversy, that movement was in any case a hundred times more sinned against than sinning. Mrs Humphrey Ward has been at pains in two of her novels to represent
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of Secularists as either resorting to physical violence against revivalists, or showing a disposition to resent angrily the appearance of a well-behaved clergyman at their meetings. Such slanders would call for very strong comment were they not so nakedly absurd. In no town in England would avowed Secularists dare as such to molest avowed pietists even if they were inclined to do so; and it has always been their express aim to encourage clerical opposition and debate in their meeting-places. This is a rule without exception. And Bradlaugh, in particular, at all times urged upon his followers--not to abstain from gratuitous violence towards revivalists or clergymen: he never needed to say anything on that head--but to be very careful to give opponents no reasonable pretext for making a disturbance against them.[99] He counselled not only orderliness but tact; and he sharply rebuked any of his followers who would not listen patiently to even a stupid opponent's speech. Mrs Ward's account of Secularist organisations is an unfortunate proof that the spirit of religiosity does not change with mere modifications of dogma. Even if it were really found that plain, unlettered men, facing a religion they feel to be absurd, spoke out their feeling without due courtesy or refinement, an instructed observer would see in their reaction the measure and correlative of the crudity of the doctrines assailed. But people of Mrs Ward's way of thinking look tenderly on the worst buffooneries of popular faith, and on the most brutal propaganda of hell and blood-redemption, while recoiling sentimentally from the perfectly sincere derision of these things by men on whom they are blatantly thrust. The right spirit, surely, is that which would enlighten the deluded as individuals, neither patronising them nor abusing them. That was the attitude of Bradlaugh as a publicist and as a man. He never talked, in public or in private, with malice, and seldom even with disgust, of fanatics as such. He explained them, and respected their honesty. Of certain employees of the Christian Evidence Society he would on occasion speak publicly in the strongest terms, as
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But towards honest bigots, however imbecile, he was incapable of feeling the virulent animosity which Mrs Ward seems to feel for the Secularists of her imagination. To speak of him, as some journalists have done, as accounting for all religion by