ood. What more natural than that they should
think of me as a man not afraid to call himself an atheist and able
to hold his own on the platform? Accordingly, they invited me to
address them; and one memorable night I held forth on Progress in
Freethought. I was received with affectionate hope; and when the
chairman announced that I was giving my share of the gate to the
memorial library (I have never taken money for lecturing) the
enthusiasm was quite touching. The anti-climax was super-Shavian. I
proceeded to smash materialism, rationalism, and all the philosophy
of Tyndall, Helmholtz, Darwin and the rest of the 1860 people into
smithereens. I ridiculed and exposed every inference of science, and
justified every dogma of religion, especially showing that the
Trinity and the Immaculate Conception were the merest common sense.
That finished me up as a possible leader of the N.S.S. Robertson came
on the platform, white with honest Scotch Rationalist rage, and
denounced me with a fury of conviction that startled his own
followers. Never did I grace that platform again. I repeated the
address once to a branch of the N.S.S. on the south side of the
Thames--Kensington, I think--and was interrupted by yells of rage
from the veterans of the society. The Leicester Secularists, a pious
folk, rich and independent of the N.S.S., were kinder to me; but they
were no more real atheists than the congregation of St. Paul's is
made wholly of real Christians.

Foote is still bewildered about me, imagining that I am a pervert.
But anybody who reads my stuff from the beginning (a Shelleyan
beginning, as far as it could be labelled at all) will find implicit,
and sometimes explicit, the views which, in their more matured form,
will appear in that remarkable forthcoming masterpiece, "Shavianism:
a Religion."

By the way, I have omitted one more appearance at the Hall of
Science. At a four nights' debate on Socialism between Foote and Mrs.
Besant, I took the chair on one of the nights.

I take advantage of a snowy Sunday afternoon to scribble all this
down for you because you are in the same difficulty that beset me
formerly: namely, the absolute blank in the history of the immediate
past that confronts every man when he first takes to public life.
Written history stops several decades back; and the bridge of
personal recollection