f life, you know and you can know nothing of it, and that it is a
bootless undertaking to attempt to establish relations with it.
That is the mischief of the age, and that mischief you do not
attempt to touch.

The House, though but few perhaps recollected their Lucretius or had ever
even read him, sat, as I well remember, with reverential stillness,
hearkening from this born master of moving cadence and high sustained
modulation to "the rise and long roll of the hexameter,"--to the plangent
lines that have come down across the night of time to us from great Rome.
But all these impressions of sublime feeling and strong reasoning were
soon effaced by honest bigotry, by narrow and selfish calculation, by flat
cowardice. The relieving bill was cast out by a majority of three. The
catholics in the main voted against it, and many nonconformists,
hereditary champions of all the rights of private judgment, either voted
against it or did not vote at all. So soon in these affairs, as the world
has long ago found out, do bodies of men forget in a day of power the
maxims that they held sacred and inviolable in days when they were weak.

The drama did not end here. In that parliament Bradlaugh was never allowed
to discharge his duty as a member, but when after the general election of
1885, being once more chosen by Northampton, he went to the table to take
the oath, as in former days Mill and others of like non-theologic
complexion had taken it, the Speaker would suffer no intervention against
him. Then in 1888, though the majority was conservative, Bradlaugh himself
secured the passing of an affirmation (M9) law. Finally, in the beginning
of 1891, upon the motion of a Scotch member, supported by Mr. Gladstone,
the House formally struck out from its records the resolution of June 22,
1881, that had been passed, as we have seen, amid "ecstatic transports."
Bradlaugh then lay upon his deathbed, and was unconscious of what had been
done. Mr. Gladstone a few days later, in moving a bill of his own to
discard a lingering case of civil disability attached to religious
profession, made a last reference to Mr. Bradlaugh:--

A distinguished man, he said, and admirable member of this House,
was laid yesterday in his mother-earth. He was the subject of a
long controversy in this House--a controversy the beginning of
which we recollect, and the ending of which we recollect. We
remember with what zeal it was