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Updated: June 14, 2025
Holyoake admits the very same truth in regard to Nature which we maintain in regard to God: "I am driven to the conclusion that Nature is eternal, because we are unable to conceive a state of things when nothing was.... And in the eternity of matter, we are assured of the self-existence of matter, and self-existence is the most majestic of all attributes, and includes all others;" it is "the power of being independent of the law of other beings."
Holyoake takes refuge in the other alternative of his dilemma: "If there are other worlds, those will best be fitted for the enjoyment of them who have made the welfare of humanity their business in this." Secular philanthropy is the best, and only needful, preparation.
The jury convicted, and the brave old man, sixty-eight years of age, was condemned to four months' imprisonment and £50 fine for selling a pamphlet which had been sold unchallenged, during a period of forty-five years, by James Watson, George Jacob Holyoake, Austin Holyoake, and Charles Watts. Mr. Grain, the counsel employed by the Vice Society, most unfairly used against Mr.
Holyoake, "the Secularist applied himself to the reinspection of the general field of controversy, and the adoption of the following rules, among others, has been the consequence: 1. To disuse the term Atheist, since the public understand by that word one who is without God and also without morality, and who wishes to be without both. 2.
Holyoake, at one time an associate and fellow-laborer of Robert Owen, still cleaves to the doctrine that his belief is entirely dependent on evidence, and that his character is, to a large extent, determined by the circumstances of his condition. An attempt is thus made to establish the Ethics of Atheism on the ruins of Religion.
He is bound to give some intelligible answer to the question, What is the cause of these marvellous phenomena which I behold? and what is the ground of that religious belief which has always prevailed in the world? But Mr. Holyoake is deterred from any attempt to answer such questions by its amazing presumption: "The assumption is, we may look through Nature up to Nature's God.
Paston House was the home of William Black before he removed to Rottingdean. Ainsworth produced a goodly portion of his historical novels at No. 5, Arundel Terrace, and at 4 Percival Terrace, Herbert Spencer spent the last years of his life and here died. The name of Holyoake, the social reformer, is connected with Eastern Lodge, Camelford Street.
Hence the absence of actuality in the fierce denunciations of Bradlaugh and Holyoake and Ingersoll. They did valiant battle against religious formalism of the past; they were champions of reason and science at a time when religionists fought to exclude both. It is not science which is undermining the future of institutional religion. There is a new enemy, more subtle and more powerful.
But "Science," says Mr. Holyoake, "is the providence of life, and spiritual dependence may be attended with material destruction." He would substitute, therefore, the Science of man for the Providence of God, and secular diligence for spiritual dependence. But is there no room for both? Are they necessarily incompatible or mutually exclusive?
He knows that there can be no practical religion without faith in Providence and confidence in prayer; for "he that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him." Mr. Holyoake does not err in supposing that this is the general belief of Christians, or that it is explicitly sanctioned in Scripture.
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