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Updated: June 29, 2025
Nor was there much sympathy, under their ignominious defeat, between the members and friends of the Free-thought Club.
The only people that preserved freedom of thought through the middle ages, they have now to preserve God against the free-thought of the modern world. We are the Swiss guards of Deism. God was always the beginning and end of my thought. When I hear His existence questioned, I feel as I felt once in your Bedlam when I lost my guide, a ghastly forlornness in a mad world.
But there is one thing Free-thought can never be by any possibility Free-thought can never be progressive. It can never be progressive because it will accept nothing from the past; it begins every time again from the beginning; and it goes every time in a different direction. All the rational philosophers have gone along different roads, so it is impossible to say which has gone farthest.
"The soul knows all things," says Emerson, "and knowledge is only a remembering." The Martineaus were Huguenots, a stern, sturdy stock that suffered exile rather than forego the right of free-thought and free speech. These are the people who are the salt of the earth. And yet as I read history I see that they are the people who have been hunted by dogs, and followed by armed men carrying fagots.
But tonight not even the description of the valiant unshrinking martyr of Free-thought ascending the scaffold to meet his doom could in the slightest degree affect her. She tried another book, this time Dickens's "Tale of Two Cities."
Couple this fact with the general spirit of mockery that prevails in fashionable circles mockery of religion, mockery of sentiment, mockery of all that is best and noblest in the human heart add to it the general spread of "free-thought," and THEREFORE of conflicting and unstable opinions let all these things together go on for a few years longer and England will stare at her sister nations like a bold woman in a domino her features partly concealed from a pretense at shame, but her eyes glittering coldly through the mask, betraying to all who look at her how she secretly revels in her new code of lawlessness coupled with greed.
The Roman gods afforded no good theme for poetry and art, and when they were to be used as such they were invariably replaced by loans from the Greeks. But, as in the face of Greek free-thought and Greek criticism of religion, they had the advantage that the vital point for attack was lacking.
"That," replied he like a showman, "is the Honorable Grandmoulin, the National Liar, Premier Minister of the Province, and First Juggler of its finances: a profligate in public in the name of the Church in secret in the name of Free-Thought beau diseur demagogue of the rabble and chieftain of the Cave." "The Cave?" He lifted his glass of ruby liquid and faced me across it.
Poet, b. at Port Glasgow and brought up in the Royal Caledonian Asylum, was for some years an army teacher, but was dismissed for a breach of discipline. He became associated with Charles Bradlaugh, the free-thought protagonist, who introduced him to the conductors of various secularist publications. His best known poem is The City of Dreadful Night, deeply pessimistic.
It means that Free-thought is triumphing by the permeation of the Churches; that "advanced" ministers are now doing, in a sober, steady, scholarly way, the very work so brilliantly inaugurated by Voltaire and Thomas Paine; that the Bible is being subjected to rigorous criticism, in England as well as in France, Holland, and Germany; that its documents are being shifted like the pieces in a kaleidoscope, and every turn of the instrument makes them differ more and more from the orthodox pattern.
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