hristian employers, speaking under constant threats
of prosecution, identifying Christianity with the political and social
tyrannies of Christendom, I used every weapon that history, science,
criticism, scholarship could give me against the Churches; eloquence,
sarcasm, mockery, all were called on to make breaches in the wall of
traditional belief and crass superstition.

To argument and reason I was ever ready to listen, but I turned a
front of stubborn defiance to all attempts to compel assent to
Christianity by appeals to force. "The threat and the enforcement of
legal and social penalties against unbelief can never compel belief.
Belief must be gained by demonstration; it can never be forced by
punishment. Persecution makes the stronger among us bitter; the weaker
among us hypocrites; it never has made and never can make an honest
convert."[26]

That men and women are now able to speak and think as openly as they
do, that a broader spirit is visible in the Churches, that heresy is
no longer regarded as morally disgraceful--these things are very
largely due to the active and militant propaganda carried on under the
leadership of Charles Bradlaugh, whose nearest and most trusted friend
I was. That my tongue was in the early days bitterer than it should
have been, I frankly acknowledge; that I ignored the services done by
Christianity and threw light only on its crimes, thus committing
injustice, I am ready to admit. But these faults were conquered long
ere I left the Atheistic camp, and they were the faults of my
personality, not of the Atheistic philosophy. And my main contentions
were true, and needed to be made; from many a Christian pulpit to-day
may be heard the echo of the Freethought teachings; men's minds have
been awakened, their knowledge enlarged; and while I condemn the
unnecessary harshness of some of my language, I rejoice that I played
my part in that educating of England which has made impossible for
evermore the crude superstitions of the past, and the repetition of
the cruelties and injustices under which preceding heretics suffered.

But my extreme political views had also much to do with the general
feeling of hatred with which I was regarded. Politics, as such, I
cared not for at all, for the necessary compromises of political life
were intolerable to me; but wherever they touched on the life of the
people they became to me of burning interest. The land question, the
incidence of taxation, the