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Outsiders had supposed that the jury trial ended the matter, but it was not so. Bradlaugh wrote in his journal undauntedly:
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If my constituents still give me their confidence, nothing can defeat me; and when friends wrote that they could see no hope of good from the
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There are only two weapons to defend the right with: Law and Force. As yet I try the law; and so long as I believe, as I do believe, the law to be on my side, it is to the law and to public opinion I ought to appeal. My opponents rely on force and trick. If the law was actually against me they would take away my seat by law. This they do not even try to do. They hope to weary my constituents, and to tire and ruin me in this contest. Hampden, resisting ship-money, fought more than three years in the law courts; but his wearisome litigation was not quite in vain. Wilkes, backed by Earl Temple with purse and power, struggled with the Commons through several weary years, and at last Middlesex gave him victory.
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who had tried the action
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Bradlaugh turning out to be right in his theory of the proper procedure, whereas the judges had all been avowedly in doubt. But the greater apparent force of the case as now put did not avail. Bradlaugh cogently argued that no Act of Parliament gave the least countenance to the notion that Atheists were to be disabled from swearing. The Parliamentary Oaths Act of 1866, cap. xix., enjoins on members of Parliament, with the exception only of those qualified to affirm, the taking of an oath of allegiance of uniform phrasing, thus admitting of no disability, and making an end of any disability which may be supposed to have previously existed. Yet again, an Act of 1867 expressly provided that any subject of Her Majesty, _without reference to his religious belief_, should take the oath of allegiance on taking office. But Lord Coleridge had in the previous trial fully made up his mind that
gpt
must mean
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and he early indicated that this conviction overthrew all arguments from the mere wording of statutes. On the Act of 1867 he remarked (with a discourtesy which for him was unusual, and which disappears in the report) that
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would have made the appellant aware that that Act was passed on behalf of a Roman Catholic judge. Bradlaugh knew the facts well enough, and capped the Lord Chief Justice's history with some more, all going to show that the wish of the legislature had then been to sweep away all religious disabilities whatever. It was all to no purpose. Lord Coleridge was rather a man of strong sentiments than a strong lawyer. He hated all persecution on behalf of religion; and on behalf of Messrs Foote and Ramsey he stated the law of blasphemy in the mildest possible way--a way to which Mr Justice Stephen, albeit a rationalist, declared he could not subscribe. But Lord Coleridge was also an emotional Christian; and though his admired friend Arnold would readily have taken the oath without any belief in the Deity adjured, his Lordship was strongly averse to having it taken by an
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Atheist; and though he must have known perfectly well that in Parliament there had for generations been known holders of atheistic views, and that nobody proposed their exclusion, he yet chose to assume that all laws as to oath-taking were meant to exclude oath-taking by Atheists. One or two notable passages took place between him and the appellant. Lord Coleridge, in his nervous irritation at being persistently argued against, once so far forgot himself as to say Bradlaugh was wasting time. The charge was too bad: Bradlaugh was one of the closest and concisest of pleaders, as many judges had admitted; and at a later stage in this trial the Lord Chief Justice took back his words. At another point he somewhat impatiently deprecated a particular line of argument, and Bradlaugh quietly answered,
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My Lord, I must fight with what weapons I can. Once or twice more his lordship was rather idly petulant,[186] but this was transient; and he was very genial when, on his remarking,
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It may be, of course, that you are right and we are all wrong, the appellant answered,
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With the utmost respect, my lord, that is practically what I am going to contend.
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Lucretian
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or
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had been raised--and the rule for a new trial was refused. Immediately Bradlaugh appealed; and the case was heard (on the motion for a new trial, and, secondarily for seven days' time to move for arrest of judgment after the first motion should have been adjudged upon) in the Court of Appeal on 15th December by Lords Justices Brett (Master of the Rolls), Cotton, and Lindley. These judges heard the appeal with great patience, and on the 18th gave judgment to the effect that they could not grant a rule for a new trial on the ground that the verdict was against the evidence. But on
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they thought it right to grant
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The argument on this rule was taken on 26th January 1885, when the Attorney-General and Sir Hardinge Giffard argued (a point which had been left open before) that no appeal lay, the case being technically a criminal one. This plea, after voluminous argument, was overruled--the point being settled by Bradlaugh's references to portions of the Crown Suits Act which the other side had not dealt with. Then came the argument on the main issue. To a lay listener Lord Justice Brett seemed to give a more strictly judicial attention to the problem than did any of the judges who had dealt with it hitherto, and never was the subject more fully illuminated. In a previous trial Justice Grove had noticed the anomaly that whereas an oath or affirmation was set up as a means of securing true answers, the judge had to satisfy himself beforehand on a witness's bare word as to the nominally all-important point whether an oath would be
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Bradlaugh now brought out another no less precious anomaly, namely, that the Speaker, at the opening of Parliament, must of necessity administer the oath to himself; and that the first forty members _must positively break the law_, seeing that they swear while there is not a
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sitting. Another curious issue was raised by the Court. An unbeliever could certainly be punished for perjury; how, then, could his oath be
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when perjury expressly meant false testimony given on oath? Sir Hardinge Giffard's answer was that no man may
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It might have been more dramatically put that the Christian law says to the Atheist,
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Heads, we win; tails, you lose.
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could only mean test as between different forms of religion, and that to exclude an Atheist from civic rights is not to impose a religious test. Now, the English tests of last century were as between sects, not as between religions; that is, they were denominational; that is, political. Still, they were always known as religious tests. It would surely follow that