ch it
had been held with a sudden burst of talk and movement. In the midst of
it, and as the majority of the audience were filing out into the
adjoining rooms, the gasfitter's tall companion Andrews mounted the
platform, while the gasfitter himself, with an impatient shrug, pushed
his way into the outgoing crowd. Andrews went slowly and deliberately to
work, dealing out his long cantankerous sentences with a nasal _sang
froid_ which seemed to change in a moment the whole aspect and
temperature of things. He remarked that Mr. Elsmere had talked of what
great scholars had done to clear up this matter of Christ and
Christianity. Well, he was free to maintain that old Tom Paine was as
good a scholar as any of 'em, and most of them in that hall knew what
_he_ thought about it. Tom Paine hadn't anything to say against Jesus
Christ, and he hadn't. He was a workman and a fine sort of man, and if
he'd been alive now he'd have been a Socialist, 'as most of us are,' and
he'd have made it hot for the rich loafers, and the sweaters, and the
middlemen, 'as we'd like to make it hot for 'em.' But as for those
people who got up the Church--Mythologists Tom Paine called 'em--and the
miracles, and made an uncommonly good thing out of it, pecuniarily
speaking, he didn't see what they'd got to do with keeping up, or
mending, or preserving _their_ precious bit of work. The world had found
'em out, and serve 'em right.

And he wound up with a fierce denunciation of priests, not without a
harsh savour and eloquence, which was much clapped by the small knot of
workmen amongst whom he had been standing.

Then there followed a Socialist--an eager, ugly, black-bearded little
fellow, who preached the absolute necessity of doing without 'any cultus
whatsoever,' threw scorn on both the Christians and the Positivists for
refusing so to deny themselves, and appealed earnestly to his group of
hearers 'to help in bringing religion back from heaven to earth, where
it belongs.' Mr. Elsmere's new church, if he ever got it, would only be
a fresh instrument in the hands of the _bourgeoisie_. And when the
people had got their rights and brought down the capitalists, they were
not going to be such fools as put their necks under the heel of what
were called 'the educated classes.' The people who wrote the newspapers
Mr. Elsmere objected to, knew quite enough for the working-man--and
people should not be too smooth-spoken; what the working class wanted
beyond e