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Updated: May 21, 2025
I remember one night when I addressed a club of secularists, which met at the corner of South Halsted and Madison streets, a rough-looking man called out: "You are all right now, but, mark my words, when you are subsidized by the millionaires, you will be afraid to talk like this."
Of the same class was that host of secularist lecturers who at one time thronged the lecture platforms of the English-speaking countries and of whom Bradlaugh and Ingersoll were in every way the best representatives. These secularists have now ceased to exercise any influence, and the Freethought societies, at one time so numerous, have now practically disappeared.
"Well I just know he's not a Catholic; and something of a politician." "Well, he's quite the shrewdest man the secularists have got. He's a complete materialist. And I've not the slightest doubt he's heard of your illness and has come to see whether he can fish anything out of you. He's exceedingly plausible; and very dangerous.
Of that teacher, and of others like him, Arnold wrote in later years: "If the matter were not so serious one could hardly help smiling at the chagrin and manifest perplexity of such of one's friends as happen to be philosophical radicals and secularists, at having to reckon with religion again when they thought its day was quite gone by, and that they need not study it any more or take account of it any more; that it was passing out, and a kind of new gospel, half Bentham, half Cobden, in which they were themselves particularly strong, was coming in.
"Secularists was, perhaps, the proper designation of all who dissented extremely from the religious opinions of the day." "Freethinking is the Secular sphere; drawing its line of demarcation between time and eternity, it works for the welfare of man in this world" "The Secularist is the larger and more comprehensive designation of the Atheist."
Start 'em on the Bishop of Peterborough and the Secularists. I've got a lot to say about that. He pushed Daddy laughingly to the door, and came back again to where Dora was once more grappling with her silks. Her expression had changed again. Oh! she had so many things to open to him, if only she could find the courage.
Dropping again into the editorial style, we have a question to ask of the Bishop of Chester, or rather of Mr. Waugh. It is this. Where are the statistics to justify your assertion? Men who are sent to gaol, for whatever reason, have their religions registered. Give us, then, the total number of convictions your Society has obtained, and the precise proportion of Secularists among the offenders.
While much of the teaching of the philosophers was apparently negative and destructive of faith, for Greece had her religious sceptics who turned the shafts of ridicule on existing beliefs, her Agnostics who considered that nothing certain could be affirmed about the gods, and even her secularists who held religion to be a mere invention of priests and rulers for their own purposes, the course of Greek philosophy was, on the whole, constructive, even in matters of faith, and laboured to provide religion with a stable foundation in thought.
I supposed that the Secularists thought as I did with regard to virtue. I thought their object was to advance the temporal interests of mankind, and never dreamt but that they regarded virtue as the greatest of those interests. And when I found first one and then another to be dishonest, drunken, licentious, I was disposed to regard them as exceptions to the general rule.
At the sight of David Grieve there were first stares and then shrieks of laughter. 'I say, Davy, cried a drunken young weaver, sidling up to him on his knees and embracing him from behind, 'my heart's real touched. Gie me yor coat, Davy; it's better nor mine, Davy; and I'm yor Christian brother, Davy. The emotion of this appeal drew uproarious merriment from the knot of Secularists.
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