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Secularism is the not inappropriate name, for general purposes, of the general doctrine of Bradlaugh and his adherents. That name, however, is attended by the drawback that the man who first employed it, Mr George Jacob Holyoake, is wont so to define it as to deprive it of specific meaning for the propagandists of Freethought, while showing no reason why it should be adopted by anybody else. Mr Holyoake--himself an Atheist--argues, in effect, that Secularism properly consists in simply attending to secular things; and that it is not committed to any hostile attitude towards theology. On that view, every political club is a secular organisation and an exponent of Secular_ism_. Bradlaugh always argued, and nearly all Secularists have always held with him, that this use of the term reduces it to nullity, since it makes every Christian a Secularist in so far as he attends to secular affairs on
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There is, of course, an important truth implied in this way of speaking; but it is a truth irrelevant to the issue. If we are merely to discuss secular things, there is no need for any
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Secular_ist_ organisation. Secularists commonly act freely--or as freely as they are allowed to--with their religious neighbours in political and other public matters. But if a distinct doctrine of the uselessness of
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machinery and theory is to be maintained; if it is to be shown that secular action is properly co-extensive with human affairs, then these views must be upheld by showing that all theology is delusive. A man who believes in the existence of a personal and governing God, broadly speaking, cannot be induced to keep theological procedure out of his life. There may be many Indifferentists who act as Secularists without caring at all to discuss the religious question; and there may even be a few of the
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Lucretian Theists assumed by Mr Holyoake; but none of the Indifferentists and not many of the Lucretian Theists will be induced to join in a Secularist propaganda, even on Mr Holyoake's lines. Bradlaugh fully recognised that the formulated principles of Secularism do not directly commit the subscriber to Atheism.
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I think, he avowed,
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; but he added that
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[95] The tendency has inevitably been, however, to identify Secularism with Atheism. And as Mr Holyoake has himself all along lectured on anti-theological lines, his definition has commonly seemed to Secularists to be wholly in the air, though his personal merits and practical services to Freethought are felt to outweigh minor infirmities of reasoning and judgment. Whether the name, thus capriciously defined by its framer, will continue to be employed by those who repudiate that definition, remains to be seen. It is not unlikely that new Freethought organisations, finding the word
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Secularism