r. W.
R. Bradlaugh was never converted, because he was always a
professed Christian; that Sir Isaac Holden must be laboring under a
misapprehension; and that if Mr. Rees would call upon her she would tell
him the facts which made it "utterly impossible" that her father could
have spoken of his brother in the way alleged. Mrs. Bonner also wrote
to Sir Isaac Holden, asking him whether he "really did tell this to the
Rev. Allen Rees." Sir Isaac Holden did not reply. He is a very old man,
years older than Mr. Gladstone. This may be an excuse for his manners as
well as the infirmity of his memory.

Mr. Rees did reply. He said that "of course" he could not tell an
untruth, that he had "made no absolute statement," that he "knew he
had no positive evidence," and that his remark was "a bare suggestion."
Having crawled away from his clear responsibility, Mr. Rees gratuitously
committed another offence. "There was," he wrote, "another remark which
your father uttered at the Hall of Science." Now this _is_ a "positive
statement." And where is the evidence? "I can give you," Mr. Rees added,
"the name of the person who heard him say it." According to Mr. Rees,
therefore, it is only "a bare suggestion" when he gives the authority
of Sir Isaac Holden, but an anonymous authority is a good basis for
a direct, unqualified assertion. And what is the "remark" which Mr.
Bradlaugh "uttered" (what etymology!)?

It is this--"A man twenty-five years old may be an iconoclast, but I
cannot understand a man being one who has passed middle age."

Mrs. Bonner took leave to disbelieve (as she well might) that her
father had uttered such nonsense. She told Mr. Rees that her father had
lectured and written as "Iconoclast" till he was thirty-five, and only
dropped the "fighting name" then because his own name was so well known.
She repeated her assurance that he had never wavered in his Atheism, and
begged Mr. Rees to take her father's own written words in preference to
"other people's versions of his conversation." His _Doubts in Dialogue_,
the final paper of which left his hands only three or four days before
his last illness, would show what his last views were, and she ventured
to send Mr. Rees a copy for perusal. Mr. Rees read the volume, and,
instead of admitting that he had been mistaken, he had the impertinence
to tell Mrs. Bonner that her father's book was full of "sophism" and the
"merest puerilities," and ended by expressing his "simple con