Be it known that John Bright had no part in that aristocratic and somewhat costly invention known as Bright's disease. This was the work of Doctor Richard Bright, a distant kinsman.

The parents of John Bright were both public speakers, and little John was an orator through prenatal tendency. A good plan for parents, or possible parents, to follow is to educate themselves in the interests of posterity, and this without asking that foolish question propounded by an Irish Member of Parliament, "What has posterity ever done for us?"

So this, then, is the recipe for educating your children: Educate yourself.

Beyond this, man inherits himself; he is both ancestor and posterity. I am today what I am because I was what I was last year; and next year I will be what I will be, because I am now what I ata. These were truths which were, very early in life, familiar to John Bright. Before he could speak without a childish lisp, his mother taught him to decide on his own actions. "I don't want to study; can't I go and wade in the brook?" once asked little John of his mother.

"Thee better go into the next room and listen for the Voice, then do as it says," answered the mother.

The boy went into the next room and soon returned, saying, "The Voice says I must study hard for half an hour and then I can go and wade in the brook."

"Very well," was the reply; "we must always obey the Voice."

At this time there was a wave of Socialism sweeping over England, originated largely by Robert Owen, a Welshman, who at the age of nineteen became manager, by divine right, of a Manchester cotton-mill. He was a man of splendid initiative, noble resources, generous impulses.

Robert Owen caught it from Josiah Wedgwood, and set out to make his cotton-mill a school as well as a factory. Among the good men he discovered and hired to teach his people was John Tyndall, one of the world's great scientists. Owen seized upon Fourier's plan of the "phalanstery"—five hundred or a thousand people living in one great palace, built in the form of a hollow square. Each family was to have separate apartments, but there would be common dining-rooms and one great laundry; certain people would be set apart to care for the children; there would be art-galleries, libraries, swimming-pools; and all these working people would have the benefits and advantages that now accrue only to the fortunate few. It was a scheme of co-operation, but Owen's people refused to co-operate—the world was not ready for it. Then Owen tried the plan in America, and founded the town of New Harmony, Indiana, which had the second public library in America, Benjamin Franklin having founded the first in Philadelphia.

Robert Owen thought he had failed, but he had not, for his ideas have enriched the world, and when we are worthy of Utopia it will be here.

John Bright's father caught it from Robert Owen, just as Owen had been exposed to Josiah Wedgwood. Great hearts never fail, no matter what occurs; even though they die, they yet live again in minds made better.

Joseph Bright had an auditorium attached to his mill, and often invited speakers to come from Liverpool or Manchester and give lectures to his people on science, travel or literature. By the time John Bright was twenty-one he was usually chosen to preside at these lectures. This, because he had learned to speak in Quaker meetings by speaking. He was quiet, simple, forceful, direct. In size he was small, but what he lacked in inches he made up in brain.

The grandfather of John Bright's mother was John Grattan, a Quaker preacher who spent five years in prison because he refused to take the oath of allegiance to the English Church. The life of Grattan descended as a precious legacy from mother to son, and all history was early made familiar to him through the teaching of this mother who passed away when the boy was eighteen. So she did not live to know the greatness of her son, but before her passing he had developed far enough so she prophesied that if ever a Friend were admitted to the Cabinet, John Bright would be that one. This prophecy, unlike so many born of the loving mother heart, came true, and this in spite of the fact that the Quakers up to this time had never had anything to do with politics.

Once John Bright was asked how he had been educated, and he replied, "By my mother, with the help of the Rochdale Literary Society."

And it was a fact that this society, founded by Joseph and Martha Bright, that met weekly for more than thirty years, was almost a university, and served to set Rochdale apart as a city set upon a hill. This society discussed every topic of human interest, save politics and religion, boxing the compass of human knowledge. The wisdom, excellence, worth and benefit of such a society in a town is of an importance absolutely beyond compute. No religious institution can compare with it in beneficent results, carried on, as it was, by a businessman, his wife and their children, all quite incidentally! Were they not Friends, indeed?

By the process of natural selection, John Bright slipped into the place of superintendent of his father's mill, and before he was twenty-five was the actual manager. As such he had traveled considerably, making various trips to London, and also to the various cities of the Continent.

But now in his twenty-seventh year there had been a marked increase in Church-Rates, and the Church people were jubilant over the fact that the Quaker mill-owners, who never went to Church, were obliged to pay more to the support of the Church than any one else in the town. John Bright called a meeting of the Literary Society and invited all clergymen in the town to be present, and for once there was a breaking over the rules and both religion and politics were discussed. From that time to his death John Bright was a-sail upon a sea of politics. Here is a portion of that first political speech:

The vicar has published a handbill, a copy of which I hold in my hands; he quotes Scripture in favor of a rate, and a greater piece of hardihood can not be imagined, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's," leaving out the latter part of the sentence.

I hold that to quote Scripture in defense of church-rate is the very height of presumption. The New Testament teems with passages inculcating peace, brotherly love, mutual forbearance, charity, disregard of filthy lucre, and devotedness to the welfare of our fellowmen. In the exaction of church-rates, in the seizure of the goods of the members of his flock, in the imprisonment of those who refuse to pay, in the harassing process of law and injustice in the Church courts, in the stirring-up of strife and bitterness among the parishioners—in all this a clergyman violates the precepts he is paid to preach, and affords a mournful proof of the infirmity or wickedness of human nature. Fellow townsmen, I look on an old church building—that venerable building yonder, for its antiquity gives it a venerable air—with a feeling of pain. I behold it as a witness of ages gone by, as a connecting link between this and former ages. I could look on it with a feeling of affection, did I not know that it forms the center of that source of discord with which our neighborhood has for years been afflicted, and did it not seem that genial bed wherein strife and bitter jarring were perpetually produced to spread their baneful influence over this densely peopled parish. I would that that venerable fabric were the representative of a really reformed Church—of a Church separated from the foul connection with the State—of a Church depending upon her own resources, upon the zeal of her people, upon the truthfulness of her principles, and upon the blessings of her spiritual head! Then would the Church be really free from her old vices: then would she run a career of brighter and still brightening glory: then would she unite heart and hand with her sister churches in this kingdom, in the great and glorious work of evangelizing the people of this great empire, and of every clime throughout the world. My friends, the time is coming when a State Church will be unknown in England, and it rests with you to accelerate or retard that happy consummation. I call upon you to gird yourselves for the contest which is impending, for the hour of conflict is approaching when the people of England will be arbiters of their own fate—when they will have to choose between civil and religious liberty, or the iron hoof, the mental thralldom of a hireling State priesthood. Men of Rochdale, do your duty! You know what becomes you. Maintain the great principles you profess to hold dear: unite with me in a firm resolve and under no possible circumstances will you ever again pay a tax to support a church: and whatever may await you, prove that good and bold principles can nerve the heart: and ultimately our cause, your cause, the world's cause, shall triumph gloriously.

* * * * *

Great men make room for great men. John Bright first met Richard Cobden in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-four. Bright was then twenty-three years old, while Cobden had reached the mature age of thirty. Bright regarded him as a patriarch, and called at his office in Manchester with thumping heart. Cobden looked at young Bright with his intuitive glance and concluded he wanted work. Cobden saw by his caller's clothes that he was a Quaker, and in an instant had decided to employ him.

In relating the incident, years after, Cobden said: "I was wrong in my conclusions—I thought he had come to me for work; instead, he had come to hire me. He wanted me to go over to Rochdale and lecture for his Literary Society."

When you go to a businessman and ask him to lecture, you catch him with his guard down. Cobden was complimented—he asked questions about the Bright Mill at Rochdale, and was ashamed to note that, although it was only a few miles away, he did not know of the spirit of humanity that dwelt in that particular commercial venture. The Brights were doing the very things which he was advocating—making business both a religion and an art. "My love went out to the gentle-voiced stranger," said Cobden, "and I was ashamed at my ignorance concerning the fine souls at my very door, who were actually carrying into execution the things which I had prided myself on having originated."

So Cobden went over to Rochdale to lecture, and there began that friendship between two strong men which only death could sever, and possibly even death did not—I really cannot say. But for many years Cobden was to speak at Rochdale—several times a year. Whenever he heard the Voice he went over to Rochdale and told his friends, the millworkers, what had come to him.

"When I had a big speech to make in London I always visited Rochdale and gave my message first, for the Brights had trained their audiences to think, and if they understood, I felt I could take my chances in the House of Commons."

So Bright helped to evolve Cobden, and Cobden was a prime factor in the evolution of Bright. As the years went by, these men grew to look alike, and the term "David and Jonathan" seemed a fitting phrase for them, only no one could really say which was David and which Jonathan.

* * * * *

When John Bright was twenty-eight years old he married Elizabeth Priestman, a woman near his own age, and a person, like himself, of power. It seemed an ideal mating—they loved the same things. Many plans were made, for lovers are always given to planning. There was to be a cottage in the hills, where they were to live like peasants, without servants or equipage, and there John was to write a wonderful history of civilization, and make a forecast of the future, showing how the regeneration of the world was to come by wedding ethics to business.

The plan never materialized. John and Elizabeth journeyed together for two years, and then she died and was buried in her wedding-dress, holding a spray of syringa in her stiff, blue-veined hands.

John Bright had arranged to have the funeral very simple in all its arrangements—all quite Quaker-like. He himself was going to make a little speech, telling how the Voice had said to him that death was as natural as life, and perhaps just as good, and that she who was dead had no fear of death, but greeted it as an imitation, her only care being for the living.

But John Bright did not make the speech. He held in his arms his motherless baby girl, a little over a year old, and the baby laughed and pulled his hair in childish glee, and John Bright, groping for words, found them not. He took his seat, dumb. A Quakeress arose, a worker in the mills, and made the speech which he had intended to give—perhaps she made a better one.

John Bright had only turned thirty, but he thought that life for him was then and thereafter but a blank. He did not realize that whether death is an initiation for the dead or not, it surely is for the living. To stand by an open grave and behold the sky shut down on less worth in the world is a milestone—an epoch.

A month of dumb, dragging, bitter grief followed, and Richard Cobden came up from Manchester to visit his friend. Cobden had a message for Bright. It was this: "Grief hugged to the heart is a kind of selfish joy. To live is to think, to work, to act. At this moment thousands of women and children are starving in England—absolutely perishing for lack of bread. Come with me and help remove the tax that places food out of the reach of many. Transmute grief for the dead into love for the living. Let us never rest until the Corn Laws are abolished— Come!" To dedicate himself to humanity now seemed easy for John Bright. This he did, and life took on a great, quiet sanctity, purified and refined by death.

The baby girl grew into beautiful womanhood. She is now a grandmother with children grown, and true to tradition, as became the daughter of her father, she made herself notorious for the many and famous for the few, by heading an appeal to Parliament in favor of woman suffrage. For the same cause comes Mrs. Cobden-Sanderson, daughter of Richard Cobden, and spends four months in jail for insisting that her political preferences shall be officially recorded. We do move that precious slow!

* * * * *

Bright now took up the big business of the Anti-Corn-Law League, and devoted himself to the issue, even to neglecting his private affairs. The "League" had headquarters in Manchester, and Bright was its practical head. Cobden was then making a tour of the provinces, speaking in schoolhouses, townhalls and marketplaces, endeavoring to show the folly of maintaining a tax on food. The idea was then conceived of Cobden and Bright traveling together, going into the enemy's country, and offering to debate the issue with all comers. The challenge aroused the people, and wherever the orators went, they spoke to the capacity of the hall. Cobden opened the debate, started the question in a half-hour speech, and then the meeting was thrown open for the opposition. Occasionally a man replied, often a clergyman of local oratorical reputation being put forward by the landlords.

Bright then finished him and polished him off in a way that made any further opposition impossible. Bright had certain well-defined ideas about the clergy that took with the people, and a braver man never stood on a platform. Here is a taste of his quality:

The declaration of the Church as by law established, makes me say that I believe that the Establishment has been the means of increasing individual piety and national prosperity. But individually I would ask, how comes it that England is now, as regards a vast proportion of her population, ignorant and irreligious—how is it that while the Church has had the King for its head and governor, the two Houses of Parliament to support it, and the whole influence of the aristocracy and landed gentry of the country to boot (with the advantage of being educated at Oxford and Cambridge, from which Dissenters have been shut out)—that while the Church has had millions upon millions to work upon, drawn not only from her own party, but from the property of Dissenters-I ask how comes it that England is neither a sober nor a moral country, and that vice in every shape rears its horrid front? Does it not prove that there is a radical error in the system? By the union of the people of England advantages of no trifling amount have lately been gained: the barrier of the Test Acts has been broken down; the system of parliamentary corruption has been stormed with success; and I trust the time is not far distant when the consciences of men will be no longer shackled by the restrictions of the civil power, when religious liberty will take the place of toleration, and when men will wonder that a monopoly ever existed which ordained State priests sole venders of the lore that works salvation.

The farmers were in opposition to the League, being told by the landlords that if breadstuffs were allowed to come into the United Kingdom free, the tillers of the soil would be made bankrupt.

Cobden was a ready speaker, and his knowledge of history and economics commanded respect, but Bright's oratory went to their hearts. Bright had a touch of the true Methodist fervor which won the hearer without making too much of a demand on his intellect.

Shortly after Cobden and Bright made their alliance, Cobden ran for Parliament and was elected. "The one thing that formed the pivotal point, and won the farmers, as well as the men of Manchester, was the oratory of John Bright," said Gladstone. The term "Manchester men" was flung at Cobden and Bright, and stuck. It meant that they were merely manufacturers, neither scholars nor gentlemen. Bright had modified the severity of the Quaker costume, but wore the soft, gray colors with hat to match, "because," said his enemies, "it is so effective."

Cobden being now in the House of Commons, Bright called himself "Secretary of the Exterior," and often fought the good fight alone, speaking on an average three nights a week, and the rest of the time attending to his business.

Two years after Cobden's election, Bright was obliged to purchase a suit of solemn black and a chimney-pot hat, for he, too, had been chosen a member of the House of Commons.

"Another Manchester man—I do declare, you know, it will be a convention of bagmen, yet!" remarked Sir Robert Peel, as he adjusted his monocle. Peel, however, grew to have a very wholesome respect for the Manchester men. They could neither be bribed, bought nor bullied. They had money enough to free them from temptation, and they could think on their feet. They were in the minority, but it was a minority that could not be snubbed nor subdued.

The total repeal of the Corn Laws came in Eighteen Hundred Forty-nine, but not until both Cobden and Bright had been threatened with criminal proceedings for inciting revolution. However, the ministry backed down, the new era came, and proved to be one of peace and great prosperity.

John Bright worked for humanity. To his voice, more than to any other, Ireland owes her freedom from the "Establishment."

He struggled to free England from the clutch of the Established Church, but admitted at last that it would require time to unloose the grip of the clergy from their perquisites. Always and forever he argued and voted against war, or any increase of armament, even when he stood alone. And once he forfeited his seat for a term by going against the popular cry for blood. John Bright is a good example of a man with the study habit. Not only did he carry on a great private business, and at the same time bear heavy burdens in the management of his country's affairs, but he was always a student, always a learner, and also always a teacher. Neither he nor Richard Cobden ever divorced ethics from business, religion from work, nor life from education.

John Bright possessed a sterling honesty, a perennial good-cheer, and always and forever a tender, sympathetic heart. These things seemed to spring naturally, easily and gently from his nature; they were the habits of his life. And having acquired good habits his judgment was almost uniformly correct; his actions manly; his temper considerate; his opinion right. Private business was to John Bright a public trust. He, of all men, knew that the only way to help one's self is to help others.

During our Civil War, John Bright sided with the North, and fired his broadsides of scorn at the many in the House of Commons who hoped and prayed that the United States would no longer be united.

In Eighteen Hundred Sixty-eight, under Gladstone as Premier, Bright was chosen President of the Board of Trade, being the first Quaker to hold a Cabinet office.

John Bright was a rich man, and his life proves what riches can do when rightly used. That his example of absolute honesty and adherence to principle sets him apart as a character luminous and unique is and indictment of the times in which we live.

John Bright's energy, eloquence, purity of conduct, sincerity of purpose, his freedom from petty quarrels, his unselfishness, his lofty ideals, his noble discontent and prophetic outlook, have tinted the entire zeitgeist, and are discovering for us that Utopia is here now, if we will but have it so.



BRADLAUGH

The Right Honorable Baronet has said there has been no word of recantation. The Right Honorable Baronet speaks truth. There has been no recantation, neither will there be. You have no right to ask me for any recantation. You have no right to ask me for anything. If I am legally disqualified, lay the case before the courts. When you ask me to make a statement, you are guilty of impertinence to me, of treason to the traditions of this House, and of impeachment of the liberties of the people. I beg you now, do not plunge me into a struggle I would shun. The law gives me no remedy if the House decides against me. Do not mock at the constituencies. If you place yourself above the law, you leave me no course save lawless agitation, instead of reasonable pleading. It is easy to begin such a strife, but none knows how it would end. You think I am an obnoxious man, and that I have no one on my side. If that be so, then the more reason that this House, grand in the strength of its centuries of liberty, should have now that generosity in dealing with one who tomorrow may be forced into a struggle for public opinion against it. —Bradlaugh to the House of Commons



Thomas Paine, Robert Ingersoll and Charles Bradlaugh form a trinity of names inseparably linked. The memory of Paine was for many years covered beneath the garbage of prevarication. In order to find the man, we had to excavate for him. Happily, with the help of the Reverend Moncure D. Conway, we found him.

Ingersoll's life lies open to us, and the honest, loving, and gentle nature of the man is beyond dispute. The pious pedants who tried to traduce him were self-indicted. No one now even thinks to answer them. The man who said, "In a world where death is, there is no time to hate," needs no defense. We smile. With Bradlaugh it is the same. His biography in two volumes, by his daughter, is a very human document. The work is worthy of comparison with that most excellent book, the life of Huxley by his son.

The essence of good biography lies largely in indiscretion. This loving daughter's tribute to her father tells things which some might say do no honor to anybody. Quite true, but these are the corroborating things which inform us that the book is truth.

Charles Bradlaugh performed for England the same service that Robert Ingersoll did for America. Both presented the minority report. Through their influence the Church was able to renounce the devil and all his works.

These men were both born in the year Eighteen Hundred Thirty-three, about a month apart. In many ways they were very much alike. In physique they were heroic; both were lawyers; both were natural orators.

Bradlaugh, however, began his radical career before he was of age, while Ingersoll was nearly forty before he set aside diplomacy and ceased wooing bronchitis.

Charles Bradlaugh was the first child of a worthy clerk married to a housemaid. His father never earned more than two guineas a week. All these parents ever did for their son was to supply him with physical life, and teach him by antithesis. No trace can be found that he in any mental characteristic resembled either. Parents are evidently people who are used for a purpose by a Something.

Bradlaugh's parents were wedded to the established order, and never doubted the literal inspiration of the Scriptures. They also believed in the divine origin of the prayer-book, a measure of credulity which, although commendable, is, I believe, not required. These parents were severe, exacting, imperious—not bad nor exactly cruel—simply "consistent." They believed that man was a worm of the dust, and stood by the traditions. They believed in the dogma of total depravity and lived up to it.

A bundle of old clothes sent yearly from a rich cousin in Kent was an epoch. Sugar in the house was out of the question, and once when the rich cousin in Kent, who was an omnibus-inspector, sent a pound of brown sugar in the pocket of an old coat, the sweets suddenly vanished. Charles was accused and stubbornly denied the theft. He was then punished with the handy strap for both the denial and the larceny. Later, it turned out that a little girl next door stole the sugar, and when Charles refused to inform on her, she informed on herself. Then the boy was again whipped because he had not informed on the girl. Charles got all of the disgrace and none of the sugar.

Charles was sent to a "ragged school," and became, at the mature age of ten, so exact a penman that he almost rivaled his father, who could write the Lord's Prayer on the back of a postage-stamp. At this school, beside getting an education, Charles got pedagogic scars on his body which ten years later, when he enlisted in the army, were noted in the physical description.

The daughter of Bradlaugh has in her possession a beautiful motto from Scripture done into antique text by the lad for his mother when the boy was nine years old. All around the motto are flying birds penned in pure Spencerian. The motto is this: "Then said Joab, I may not tarry long with thee. And he took three darts in his hand and thrust them through the heart of Absalom while he was yet alive in the midst of the oak. And ten young men of Joab's smote Absalom and slew him." This was before the art of working mottoes with worsted in perforated cardboard had been perfected.

When ten years of age Charles was taken from school and hired out as an office-boy at five shillings a week, the money being paid to the father and duly used for the support of the family. It is good to see, though, that at that early day the expense-account was made to serve its legitimate use. When the boy had bundles to deliver and was given money for 'bus-fare, he walked and kept the fare. The bridge-toll was a half-penny, and by climbing aboard of a wagon this was saved. To be back on time he would run. He became an expert in catching on 'buses and riding on the axle of cabs, well out of reach of the driver's whip. With the money so saved he bought penny tracts on politics, history and religion. One day he was sent to deliver a bundle to Mark Marsden, a writer and publisher. Charles did not know the man, but in his hand, all unconsciously, he carried a tract written by Marsden. Nothing interests an author like a copy of his own amusing works. Marsden gave the boy two pats on the head, a bun, a half-crown and three penny pamphlets on political economy.

Charles went away stepping high, but his tongue was so paralyzed with surprise and joy that he forgot to thank the man. Twenty years after he remembered the transaction vividly—it was the first real human kindness that had ever come his way. He told of it, standing on the same platform with Marsden and speaking to two thousand people. Marsden had forgotten the incident—happy Marsden, who gave out love and joy as he journeyed and made no notes. This little story proves two things: That authors are not wholly bad, and that kindness to a boy is a good investment. Boys grow to be men—at least some do, and I trust it will not be denied that all men were once boys. Bradlaugh, to the day of his death, was always kind to boys. He realized that with them he was dealing with soul-stuff, and that Destiny awaited just around the corner.

When Charles was fourteen years old he had gravitated to the cashier's desk, and his pay was twelve shillings a week.

He was large for his age, and the life of the streets had sharpened his wits, so he was old for his years. He was studious and very religious, as children struggling with adolescence often are. Sundays were sacred to church, morning and evening, and the spare hours were given over to reading the lives of the martyrs. Only on weekdays did he read history or political tracts. In Sunday School he was a very promising teacher.

Then comes in one, the Reverend J. G. Packer, incumbent of Saint Peter's, who lives in history only because he entered into a quarrel with this boy.

Young Bradlaugh was preparing for confirmation; he could say the catechism backward and forward, and he also knew Bible history from Genesis to Revelation. But he could not reconcile certain portions of Bible history with our belief in an all-loving, all-wise and ever-just God. So he wrote to his pastor a long and respectful letter in precise and exact Spencerian, asking for light.

Now, the Reverend J. G. Packer regarded interrogation as proof of depravity, and straightway sent the letter to the boy's father. At the same time he suspended the youth for three months from Sunday School, denouncing him before the school as atheistical, all this in the interests of discipline. These tactics of coercion were the rule a hundred years ago, and the Reverend J. G. Packer had simply lost his reckoning as to longitude and time. There was a violent scene between father and son, and the boy being too big to chastise was simply handed a few pages of Billingsgate.

At this time Bonner's Fields was a great place for open-air meetings. The custom of public speaking in London parks still continues, and on any pleasant Sunday afternoon one can hear all kinds of orthodox and heretical vagaries defended on the turf. Young Bradlaugh took to the open-air meetings, and lifted up his voice in praise, feeling the usual stimulus and joyous uplift that goes with martyrdom. After his own orthodox service was over, he sought out the opposition and tried to silence the infidels in debate. One of these infidels, in pity for the boy's innocence and ignorance, loaned him a copy of Paine's "Age of Reason." Up to this time he had never heard of Paine. Now he began to study him, and he began by reading his life. From this he gleaned the fact that Paine had suffered for conscience sake and had been driven out of England, just as he, himself, had been driven out of the church.

The three months' suspension having expired, young Bradlaugh was invited to come back into the fold. But he did not come. He had been learning things. Paine and persecution had sharpened his mind. I do not believe that Packer drove Bradlaugh into atheism, but I do believe that he hastened the process by about twenty years. Bradlaugh did not have the quality of mind that could ever have been encysted by orthodoxy.

Boyhood was being left behind. He had joined a Free-thinkers' Club, which met at a coffeehouse kept by Mrs. Richard Carlile, who had come up to London, alone, from the country, and published a little magazine devoted to the rights of woman. She had kept up the fight for freedom for a score of years. Poverty and calumny could not subdue her. She was bordering on fifty, and spoke in the parks, to all and any who would listen, scorning to take up a collection. Her private character was beyond reproach. Indeed, her namesake, Tammas the Titan, who spelled his name in a different way, speaks of her as one "insultingly virtuous." And so the Reverend J.G. Packer discovered that young Bradlaugh was "loitering at the coffeehouse of that Jezebel, the Carlile woman." Straightway he wrote a letter to young Bradlaugh, giving him three days in which to return to the church, renouncing all infidel beliefs, or his employers would be informed of his habits, in which case his cashiership would be taken from him.

This letter was evidently the joint work of the boy's parents and the busy and unctuous clergyman. The only trouble was that their plan worked too well. The boy, believing that it meant the loss of his position, was desperate. He waited until two days had expired, and then on the morning of the third boldly resigned his position, and taking his scanty effects left home forever. Thus began that lifelong fight for freedom which ended only with his death.

* * * * *

And so we find Charles Bradlaugh absolutely severed from his parents. He used to walk up and down past the home that was once his, but his sisters were forbidden, on pain of being turned into the streets, to speak to him.

That he suffered terribly, there is no doubt; but that a fine, sustaining pride was his, is equally true. Sorrow is never quite all sorrow, and most funerals carry with them a dash of consoling satisfaction for the mourners.

Young Bradlaugh now began to concentrate on his books—he felt sure that he had a mission. He became a waiter at a coffeehouse, then a clerk, next a salesman; but the reputation of being an infidel follow him, and he could not disprove the charge. In fact, I do not think he tried to, for on Sundays he was at Hyde Park lecturing on temperance and saying unsavory things about the clergy on account of their indifference concerning the real needs of the people.

A teetotaler in England then was almost as much of a curiosity as in the days of Franklin. Young Bradlaugh seemed to possess all the heresies. He became a vegetarian, rented a room for three shillings a week, and boarded himself on sixpence a day. Cooking is a matter of approbation and emulation, and he who cooketh unto himself alone is on the road to dyspepsia.

This long, lanky youth, intent on reforming the world in the matter of food, drink and theological diet, was six feet two, and weighed exactly ninety-nine pounds in the shade. He wore a chimney-pot hat, a tight-fitting, long, black coat, and lavender spats. Fasting and study had given him a visage like the ghost in "Hamlet," and gotten him where no man would hire him.

Then it was that hunger forced him into a recruiting-office, no doubt aided by the specious argument that he wanted to teach temperance to Tommy Atkins. The recruiting-officer gazed at the apparition and sent for a surgeon. This surgeon sent for another, and both went over the skeleton, tapping, listening, prodding and counting. "All he needs is food and work," said surgeon Number One, giving the subject a final poke with his pudgy forefinger.

So Private Bradlaugh was sworn in, and that night shipped to Dublin, where uniforms were to be provided. Very naturally, the chimney-pot hat did not survive the voyage, the rim being smashed down around his neck for a 'kerchief. The clerical coat also soon looked the worse for wear; and a copy of Euclid as well as books by David Hume served for footballs.

It was hard, but all a part of life, and young Bradlaugh took his lesson. We know this because in just six months his regiment was stationed near the storied village of Donnybrook, and Bradlaugh was one of sixteen selected to attend the Fair. This committee did not got to the Fair armed with feather dusters.

Bradlaugh now weighed one hundred sixty, and had proved his prowess with the shillalah. It was the unwritten law at Donnybrook that no soldiers should be allowed to attend the Fair. The managers, however, still continued to sell tickets to soldiers, yet to keep the enterprise from being wiped out of existence, only sixteen soldiers from each regiment were allowed to attend on any single day.

Bradlaugh's reach and height saved him, and the motto, "Wherever you see a head, hit it," did not disturb him, since his headpiece was well above high-water mark.

Regular food, regular work and regular sleep did Bradlaugh a world of good. He never much believed in war, but the idea of the Government giving her male citizens a little compulsory physical training always appealed to him.

Three years of soldier life did not supply Bradlaugh any bad habits, and whether he influenced Tommy Atkins in following the straight and narrow path is still a problem.

On pleasant Sundays it was the rule that the regiment should be marched to church. On one occasion a certain clergyman had excused himself from explaining a passage of Scripture on the ground that soldiers could not understand it, anyway. This brought a letter from Private Bradlaugh, wherein he explained that particular passage to the pastor, and also revealed the fact that a soldier might know quite as much as a preacher.

The next Sunday, when the clergyman referred to the letter and in scathing tones rebuked the sender, three hundred soldiers unhooked their sabers and dropped them on the stone floor. The din broke up the service. Very shortly after, as punishment, the regiment was sent to a barracks in a region that lacked religious advantages.

In the absence of a chaplain Private Bradlaugh was allowed each Sunday to address the men "on some moral theme."

This continued until complaint was made to the home office, when there came a curt order forbidding "any public talk by Private Bradlaugh or others on the subject of politics or religion."

Bradlaugh's three years of army life held back his mental processes and allowed his body to develop. On the other hand, he had been exiled from society, so he idealized things, seeing them with the eye of imagination rather than beholding them as they actually were.

Sometimes this is well, and sometimes not. When Charles Bradlaugh, aged twenty, married Susannah Hooper, some people said it was a "lovely wedding." Miss Hooper had social station, while Bradlaugh only had prospects. The bride was handsome, vivacious, witty, pink and twenty-one.

Never was a man more beset by unkind Fate than Bradlaugh. His wife's intellect was merely a surface indication; she cared nothing for his ideals, and all of his love for truth was for her a mockery. She sought to lead him into conventional lines, to have him renounce his peculiar views and join the church. His fond dreams of educating her slid into disarrangement, and inside of a year he found himself mentally absolutely alone. Five years went by and three children had been born to them.

Bradlaugh was still preaching temperance in the parks; and as if to defy his precepts, his wife took to strong drink, so that when he returned home he often found her cared for by the neighbors, who in pity had come in to protect the children.

That peculiar English custom of women drinking at public bars helped along the work of undoing. It is a sorry tale, save for the devotion of the two girls and their brother for their father and his love for them. The mother was only a mother in name. She became a confirmed and helpless victim of alcoholism, and lingered on for some years, existing in a sanitarium or cared for by a special attendant.

* * * * *

After his marriage Bradlaugh entered a lawyer's office. He soon became head clerk to the firm. His natural ability for public speaking made him a good trial advocate, and then he had a physical ability that rendered him especially valuable where seizures were to be made or evictions effected.

The practise of law then, it seems, was not at a very high mark. Wise men nowadays try to keep out of court. They know that in a lawsuit both sides lose, also that a bad compromise is better than a good lawsuit. But forty years ago, to "have the law on him" was quite the common way of dealing with your enemy, instead of forgetting the wrong that had been done you, and leaving the man to Nemesis.

We hear of a certain case where one of Bradlaugh's clients had built a brick house on rented ground, without the legal precaution of taking a ninety-nine-year lease. Naturally, the rapacious landlord—for all landlords are rapacious, I am told—ordered the renter out at the end of the year.

The renter then demanded that the landlord should pay him for his building. This was very foolish on the part of the renter, and revealed a woeful ignorance of common law. Bradlaugh was retained and interviewed the obdurate landlord—for all landlords, I am told, are obdurate as well as rapacious. But all was in vain.

That night Bradlaugh and his client got together a hundred good men and true and carried the house away from chimney to cornerstone, leaving nothing but the cellar.

This legal move was very much like that of Robert Ingersoll, who had a railroad company lay half a mile of track through one of the streets of Peoria, between midnight and sun-up, and then let the opposing party carry the case to the courts.

Ingersoll's interest in the world of thought cost him the Governorship of the State of Illinois. Bradlaugh's interest along similar lines cost him the foremost position at the English bar. The man had presence, persistence, courage, and that rapid, ready intellect which commands respect with judge, jury and opposition. Before he was twenty-five he knew history, mythology, poetry, economics and theology in a way that few men do who spend a lifetime in research.

Public speaking opens up the mental pores as no other form of intellectual exercise does. It inspires, stimulates, and calls out the reserves. Perhaps the best result of oratory is in that it reveals a man's ignorance to himself and shows him how little he knows, thus urging him to reinforce his stores and prepare for a siege.

All this, of course, does not apply to clergymen whose efforts are purely "ex parte," and where a reply on the part of the pew is considered an offense.

Wendell Phillips advised the young oratorical aspirant to take "a course of mobs." Most certainly Bradlaugh did, and then he continued to take post-graduate courses. His Donnybrook experiences were simply prophetic.

The crowds at Hyde Park who came to hear him speak were not actuated wholly by a desire to hear the answer to Pilate's question.

Bradlaugh had his own corner in the Park where he spoke on Sunday mornings, when the weather was pleasant. At this meeting he invited replies, so the proceeding usually took the form of a debate. And he had a way of enlivening in a similar manner the service of his friends the enemy. Often the audience, for pure love of mischief, would start pushing, and two hundred hoodlums would overrun the meeting. There was no special violence about it—it is very English, you know. Occasionally it happens yet in Hyde Park, and the true London Bobby, who never sees anything he does not want to see, allows the beefeaters to crowd, jostle, and push themselves tired. It was really all very funny unless you were caught in the pushing crowd, then all you could do was to keep on your feet and go with the merry mass. But the attendance at Hyde Park meetings was increasing, and in the rough- house, at times, some one would fall and be trampled upon.

So an order was issued from Scotland Yard that all public speaking in the parks should cease between ten o'clock in the morning and two in the afternoon. This was during church hours, for church attendance had begun to fall off very perceptibly.

Bradlaugh thought the order was without due process of law—that the parks belonged to the people, and that public speaking in the open was not an abuse of the people's rights. More people than ever flocked to Hyde Park on the Sunday set for the fray. Bradlaugh arranged that a dozen or more of his colleagues should begin to speak at the same time in different parts of the park. The police began to charge and the crowds began to push. Then the police used their truncheons. Two policemen seized Bradlaugh. He politely asked them to keep their hands off, and when they did not he showed them his quality by wresting their truncheons from them, and flinging them to the cheering crowd. He then bumped the heads of the officers together, inciting riot, so ran the records.

This all sounds rather tragic, and I am sorry to believe that Bradlaugh rather enjoyed it. No one man physically was a match for him, and all men fall easy victims to their facility. The police did not succeed on this occasion in arresting him; and it seems that there was a sentiment abroad that made the Government hesitate about arresting him on a bench warrant. A few years before, and Bradlaugh would have been hanged, and there would 'a been an end on't. However, several friends of the "Cause" were locked up, and the next day Bradlaugh appeared in court to defend them. A truce was declared, without renouncing the rights of free speech, and Bradlaugh agreed, for the present, to cease holding public meetings.

The little weekly newspaper, "The Reasoner," published by Bradlaugh was paying expenses, and there was a fair demand for his intellectual wares. When he lectured in the provinces, there were the usual warnings from pastors to their flocks which served to lessen the advertising expenses of the lecture. Many of those warned not to go, of course went, just to see how bad it was. Then occasionally halls were closed against Bradlaugh on account of local pressure, and lawsuits followed, for the "Iconoclast," while not believing much in law, was yet so inconsistent as to invoke it. So all through life, when he did not have a lawsuit on hand, existence seemed tasteless and insipid. After he had lectured in a town, there was the usual theological and oratorical pyrotechnics in reply, with sermons from that indelicate text, "The fool saith in his heart, there is no God," and challenges that he should come back and fight it out. The number of people who won tuppence worth of fame by replying to Ingersoll were as naught compared to those who achieved fame by berating Bradlaugh.

In all of the opposition encountered by Ingersoll, his arguments were never met with physical violence. Halls were locked against him, newspapers denounced him, preachers thundered, but no mobs gathered to hoot him down. Neither did he ever have to excuse himself in the midst of a discourse, and go outside to stop a tin-pan serenade.

The Governor of Delaware, I believe, once notified Ingersoll that Delaware had its whipping-post ready for his benefit when he came that way. But the threat raised such a laugh that Delaware, for a time, became a national joke. Later, a committee of Delaware citizens, as if to make amends, invited Colonel Ingersoll to speak at Dover, and this he did, also addressing the State Legislature.

Bradlaugh, however, for many years encountered ancient eggs, vegetables, rocks, and pushing, jostling mobs, which on several occasions swept him off the platform, but not before a few first citizens had been tumbled pellmell into the orchestra. Let it here be repeated that the sole offense of Bradlaugh was that he opposed the Christian religion. The violence offered him was of necessity the work of Christians, or those directly influenced and instigated by them. Ingersoll's reference to the fact that the most zealous, orthodox Christian State in the Union still had its whipping-post was a turn of the argument which Bradlaugh effectively used. And so stingingly true was his statement that violence and mob-rule in England were the monopoly of organized religion, that the better element began to discourage the hot-headed communicants instead of urging them on. So, by Eighteen Hundred Seventy-six, Bradlaugh lectured throughout the United Kingdom to large audiences of highly cultured people, who came and gladly paid admission to hear him speak. Newspapers that had tried either to smother him with silence or else denounce him without reason began to report his speeches. Of course there was a little unkind comment, too, but this became less frequent, and was mostly the work of insignificant journals. One semi-religious paper of very small caliber, in a suburb of London, where he lived, published a "roast" that is worth repeating. It runs as follows:

We have in our midst the very Corypheus of infidelity, a compeer of Holyoake, a man who thinks no more of the Bible than if it were an old ballad—Colenso is a babe to him. This is a mighty man of valor, I assure you—a very Goliath in his way. He used to go starring it in the provinces, itinerating as a tuppenny lecturer on Tom Paine. He has occasionally appeared in our Lecture-Hall. He, too, as well as other conjurers, has thrown dust in our eyes and has made the platform reel beneath the superincumbent weight of his balderdash and blasphemy. The house he lives in is a sort of "Voltaire Villa." The man and his "squaw" occupy it, united by a bond unblessed by priest or parson. But that has an advantage: it will enable him to turn his squaw out to grass, like his friend Charles Dickens, when he feels tired of her, unawed by either the ghost or the successor of Sir Cresswell Cresswell. Not having any particular scruples of conscience about the Lord's Day, the gentleman worships the God of Nature in his own way. He thinks "ratting" on a Sunday with a good Scotch terrier is better than the "ranting" of a good Scotch divine— for the Presbyterian element has latterly made its appearance among us. Like the homeopathic doctor described in the sketch, this gentleman combines a variety of professions "rolled into one." In the provinces he is a star of the first magnitude, known by the name of Moses Scoffer; in the city a myth known to his pals as Swear 'Em Charley; and in our neighborhood he is a cipher—incog., but perfectly understood. He contrives to eke out a tolerable livelihood: I should say that his provincial blasphemies and his city practise bring him a clear five hundred pounds a year at the least. But is it not the wages of iniquity? He has a few followers here, but only a few. He has recently done a very silly act; for he has, all at once, converted "Voltaire Villa" into a glass house, and the whole neighborhood can now see into the wigwam, where he dwells in true Red Indian fashion with his squaw.

Had this clumsy libel appeared anywhere else than in a paper circulated in the immediate neighborhood of his home, probably Bradlaugh would have paid no attention to it. Other things quite as bad had been said about him; but this time he simply put on his hat and called on the writer, the Reverend Hugh McSorley. Just what happened Bradlaugh never told, and about it McSorley was singularly silent. It is feared, however, that at that time Bradlaugh had not quite gotten rid of all his Christian virtues.

He carried a rattan cane, and his daughters thought that he went to see McSorley with no intent of breaking the Bible injunction to spare the rod. This we know, that the Reverend Mr. McSorley linked his name with that of the Reverend J. G. Packer, and that McSorley's friends paid Bradlaugh five hundred pounds, which money was promptly turned over by Bradlaugh to the "Masonic Home" and "The Working-Men's Relief," two charities that Bradlaugh ever remembered when he realized on libel-suits. In the next issue of McSorley's paper appeared the following apology:

The editor and proprietor of this newspaper desires to express his extreme pain that the columns of a journal which has never before been made the vehicle for reflection on private character should, partly by inadvertence, and partly by a too-unhesitating reliance on the authority and good faith of others, have contained a mischievous and unfounded libel upon Mr. Charles Bradlaugh.

That Mr. Bradlaugh holds, and fearlessly expounds, theological opinions entirely opposed to those of the editor and the majority of our readers, is undoubtedly true, and Mr. Bradlaugh can not and does not complain that his name is associated with Colenso, Holyoake or Paine; but that he has offensively intruded those opinions in our lecture-hall is not true. That his ordinary language on the platform is balderdash and blasphemy is not true. That he makes a practise of openly desecrating the Sabbath is not true. That he is known by the name of Moses Scoffer, or Swear 'Em Charley, is not true. Nor is there any foundation for the sneer as to his city practise, or for the insinuations made against his conduct or character as a scholar and a gentleman.

While making this atonement to Mr. Bradlaugh, the editor must express his unfeigned sorrow that the name of Mrs. Bradlaugh should have been introduced into the article in question, accompanied by a suggestion calculated to wound her in the most vital part, conveying as it does a reflection upon her honor and fair fame as a woman and a wife. Mrs. Bradlaugh is too well known and too much respected to suffer by such a calumny; but for the pain so heedlessly given to a sensitive and delicate nature the editor offers this expression of his profound and sincere regret.

When Bradlaugh was forty-one years of age he met Annie Besant. This was in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-four, and a friendship grew up between them that was of great benefit to both. Mrs. Besant was a woman of much power, a clear, logical thinker, and a fluent and eloquent public speaker. Her influence upon Bradlaugh was marked. After meeting her, much of the storm and stress seemed to leave his nature, and he acquired a poise and peace he had never before known.

They entered into a business partnership and together published the "National Reformer." The exceptional quality of Mrs. Besant's mind raised the status of the paper. Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant were influencing their times, and were being influenced by their times. Once they talked to mobs, now they had audiences.

It was through Mrs. Besant's influence that Bradlaugh was nominated for Parliament in Northampton. Three successive elections he ran, and was defeated, each defeat, however, being by a smaller majority than before. Mrs. Besant campaigned the district and certainly introduced a new element into politics. "I can not vote," she said, "but I trust I can use a woman's privilege and influence men concerning the use of the ballot for truth and right."

In Eighteen Hundred Eighty, Bradlaugh was elected with Mr. Labouchere, whose views as to theology and the Established Church were one with Bradlaugh's.

"Labby" took the oath quite as a matter of course, just as atheists everywhere kiss the book in courts, it being to them but an antique form of affirming that what they say will be truth. Had Bradlaugh followed Labouchere's example, the most important chapter of his life would not have been written. Bradlaugh asked that he be allowed to affirm his allegiance, instead of making oath. Here the House of Commons blundered, for if as a body it had given assent, that would have made the request of Bradlaugh quite incidental and trivial. Instead, the House made a mountain out of a molehill, by refusing the request and appointing a select committee of seventeen members to consider the matter. They called Bradlaugh before them and interrogated him at length as to his belief in a Supreme Being and a life after death. Then they voted, and the ballot stood eight to eight. The chairman, a large white barn-owl, gave the casting vote, declining to accept the affirmation. The matter was reported to the House, and the action duly confirmed. Bradlaugh then, on advice of Labouchere, notified the House that he was willing to accept the regulation oath, all in the interests of amity, it being of course understood that his religious views had not changed. Bradlaugh thought, of course, that this would end the matter, his view being that he had fully receded from his former position, and was conforming to the pleasure of his colleagues in accepting the regulation oath. To his surprise, however, when he approached the bar to take the oath, Gladstone arose and remonstrated against administering the oath to a man who had publicly disavowed his belief in a Supreme Being, and moved that the question be referred to a select committee.

Here was a new and unexpected issue. The ayes had it. A committee, consisting of the suggestive number of twenty-three, examined Bradlaugh at length and finally reported against allowing him to take the oath, but recommended that he be allowed to affirm at his own legal risk. The suggestion was promptly voted down, to the eternal discredit of Gladstone, who led the opposition, and was bent on keeping the "infidel" out of Parliament. During the conflict, the character, high endowments, and personal worth of Bradlaugh were never officially challenged—it was just his lack of religious belief. The matter was fast becoming a national issue, and Churchwomen without number were canvassing all England with petitions asking Parliament to remember that England was a Christian nation.

Bradlaugh was down and out, legally, but he presented himself again at the bar, showed his election credentials, and demanded that the oath be administered. He was arrested as an intruder on motion of Sir Stafford Northcote, but was immediately released, as it was seen he was going to meet violence with violence.

Gladstone here came in with a very sharp bit of practise. He introduced a resolution that "any member shall be allowed to affirm or to take oath, at his own legal peril."

Bradlaugh here fell an easy prey, and at once affirmed, and took his seat, when he was straightway arrested on a warrant for violation of the rules of the House, which ordained that no man should take official part in Parliament who had not taken the oath.

This transferred the case to the criminal courts, where the case was tried and Bradlaugh found guilty. This legally vacated his seat. The Church folks were jubilant, and Gladstone received many congratulations from men with collars buttoned behind, on having disposed of the infidel Bradlaugh.

But the matter was not yet settled. Northampton had another election, and Bradlaugh was again elected.

Again he presented himself at the bar of the House and asked to be sworn. The House, however, would not accept either his oath or his affirmation, and asked for time to consider. In the meantime, writs were issued to "show cause," demurrers filled the air, and the mandamus grew gross through lack of exercise.

Four months passed, and the House making no move, Bradlaugh endeavored to appear and address the members on his own behalf. He was ordered to leave. But he demanded "English fair play." He said: "I have been elected a member of the House of Commons, you do not contest my election, neither do you declare my seat vacant. I ask to be allowed either to take the oath or to affirm, whichever you choose, but so far you allow me to do neither. In justice to my constituents I am here to stay."

The order was given that he be removed, and then occurred a scene such as had never occurred in the House before, and probably never will occur again. Four messengers attempted to seize Bradlaugh. He flung them from him as though they were children. They stood about him attempting to get a hold upon him, menacing him. The police were called and ten of them made a rush at the man. Benches were torn up, tables upset, and the mass of fifteen men went down in a heap. Bradlaugh's clothing was literally torn into shreds, and his face was bruised and bloody when after ten minutes' battle he was overpowered and carried outside. No attempt was made to arrest him: he was simply put out and the gates locked. The crowd in the street would have overrun the place in an instant, had not Mrs. Besant, who stood outside, motioned them back. They had put him out, but the end was not yet. Things done in violence have to be done over again.

Bradlaugh was elected for the third time. Again he presented himself at the House, and on refusal to administer the oath he administered it himself. He was arrested for blasphemy, and charges of circulating atheistic literature were brought in various courts. The endeavor was to enmesh him in legal coils and break his spirit. Where then was the English spirit of fair play!

But public opinion was crystallizing, society was waking up, and a rapidly growing conviction was springing into being that, aside from the injustice to Bradlaugh himself, the House of Commons was unfair to Northampton in not allowing the borough to be represented by the man they so persistently sent. "An affirmation bill" was introduced in the House and voted down.

Again Bradlaugh was elected. On his sixth election Bradlaugh presented himself as usual at the bar, and this time, on the order of Speaker Peel, who had been elected on this very issue, Bradlaugh's oath was accepted, and he took his seat. The opposition was dumb. Bradlaugh had won.

He promptly introduced an affirmation bill which became a law without any opposition worth the name. Bradlaugh's crowning achievement is that he fixed in English law the truth that the affirmation of a man who does not believe in a Supreme Being is just as good as the oath of one who does.

During the Bradlaugh struggle, John Morley, the free-thinker, was a member of the House of commons, having taken the regulation oath and been accepted without quibble. Morley constantly used his influence with Labouchere in Bradlaugh's behalf, but for five years he was blocked by Gladstone.

However, John Morley is now a member of the Cabinet. Gladstone is dead. In January, Eighteen Hundred Ninety-one, when it was known that Bradlaugh was dying, a resolution was introduced and passed by the House of Commons, expunging from the records all references to Bradlaugh having been expelled or debarred from his seat. Gladstone, the chief figure in the expulsion and disbarment, favored the resolution.

When the dying man was told this, he said: "Give them my greetings—I am grateful. I have forgiven it all, and would have forgotten it, save for this." Here he paused, and was silent. After some moments, he opened his eyes, half-smiled, and motioning to Labouchere to come close, whispered: "But, Labby, the past can not be wiped out by a resolution of Parliament. The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on, nor all your tears shall blot a line of it."



THEODORE PARKER

He tells of the rhodora, the club-moss, the blooming clover, not of the hibiscus and the asphodel. He knows the bumblebee, the blackbird, the bat and the wren. He illustrates his high thought by common things out of our plain New England life: the meeting of the church, the Sunday-School, the dancing-school, a huckleberry party, the boys and girls hastening home from school, the youth in the shop beginning an unconscious courtship with his unheeding customer, the farmers about their work in the fields, the bustling trader in the city, the cattle, the new hay, the voters at a town meeting, the village brawler in a tavern full of tipsy riot, the conservative who thinks the nation is lost if his ticket chances to miscarry, the bigot worshiping the knot-hole through which a dusty beam of light has looked in upon the darkness, the radical who declares that nothing is good if established, and the patent reformer who screams in your unwilling ears that he can finish the world with a single touch—and out of all these he makes his poetry, or illustrates his philosophy. —Theodore Parser's Lecture on Emerson



Among wild animals, members of each species look alike. Horses, wolves, deer, cattle, quails, prairie-chickens, rabbits—think it over!

Breeds in birds and animals are formed by taking individual peculiarities and repeating them through artificial selection until that which was once peculiar and unique becomes common. White pigeons are simply albinos. But all breeds in time "run out" and form a type, just as a dozen kinds of pigeons in a loft will in a few years degenerate into a flock, where all the members so closely resemble each other that you can not tell one from another.

A religious denomination or a political party is a breed. When it is new it has marks of individuality; it means something. In a few years it reverts to type. Political parties grown old are all equally bad. They begin as radical and end as conservative. That which began in virtue is undone through profligacy. Among successful religions there is no choice—they all have a dash of lavender.

When the man who founded the party, or upon whose name, fame and influence the party was founded, dies, the many who belong to it are tinted by the whims and notions of Thomas, Richard and Henry, and it reverts to type.

Only very strong and self-reliant characters form sects. Moses founded a denomination which has been kept marvelously pure by persecution, and healthy by constant migration. Jesus broke away from this sect and became an independent preacher. Naturally he was killed, for up to very recent times all independent preachers were killed, and quickly. Paul took up the teachings of Jesus and interpreted them, and by his own strong personality founded a religion. Paul was crucified, too, head downward, and his death was really more dramatic than that of his chief, but there was a lack of literary men to record it.

So we get the religion of Christ interpreted by Paul, and finally viseed and launched by a Roman Emperor. Now, countries are this or that, because the reigning ruler is. This must be so where there is a state religion and forth thousand priests look to the king for their pay-envelope and immunity from all taxation. Henry the Eighth and his daughter Elizabeth decreed that England should be Protestant. They gave the Catholic clergy the choice of resigning their livings or swearing allegiance to the new faith. Only seventy-nine out of ten thousand dropped out. If Mary Tudor and Mary Stuart had succeeded politically, England would today have been Catholic. The many have no belief of any kind: they simply accept some one's else belief.

When Constantine professed Christianity, every pagan temple in Rome became a Christian Church. Had Constantine been circumcised, instead of baptized, all the pagan temples would have become synagogues, and every priest a rabbi. They do say it was a Christian woman who influenced Constantine in favor of Christianity, If so, it is neither remarkable nor strange. Constantine made the labarum the battle-flag of Rome. "By this sign I conquer." And he did. So we get the religion of Jesus, siphoned through the personality of Paul, fused with paganism, and paganism being the stronger tendency, the whole fabric reverts to type.

We loose the pouter, the tumbler is forgot, and we get slaty-gray men and women ruled by ruffed Jacobins.

* * * * *

Christianity is one thing; the religion of the Christ is another. Christianity is a river into which has flowed thousands upon thousands of streams, springs, brooks and rills, as well as the sewage of the cities. In the main it traces to pagan Rome, united with the cool, rapid-running Rhone of classic Greece. But the waters of placidly flowing Judaism, paralleling it, have always seeped through, and the fact that more than half of all Christianity prays to a Jewess, and that both Jesus and Paul were Jews, should not be forgotten.

The blood of all the martyrs, rebels and revolters who have attempted to turn the current of this river has tinted its waters. That its ultimate end is irrigation, and not transportation, is everywhere evident.

To keep religion a muddy, polluted, pestilential river, instead of allowing it to resolve itself into a million irrigating-ditches, has been the fight of the centuries. The trouble is that irrigation is not an end—it is just a beginning. Irrigation means constant and increasing effort, and priests and preachers have never prayed, "Give us this day our daily work." Their desire has been to be carried—to float with the tide, and he who floats is being carried downstream. Men who have tried to tap the stream and divert its waters to parched pastures have usually been caught and drowned in its depths. And this is what you call history.

All new religions have their beginning in exactly this way: they are streams diverted from the parent waters. And the quality and influence of the new religion depend upon the depth of the new channel, its current, and the territory it traverses.

As before stated, most of the rebels were quickly caught, Moses rebelled from the religion of Egypt; Jesus rebelled from the religion of Moses; Paul rebelled from Judaism, adopted the name and led the little following of the martyred Savior; Constantine seized the name and good-will, and destroyed rebellion and competition by a master stroke of fusion—when you can not successfully fight a thing, all is not lost, you can still embrace it; Savonarola was an unsuccessful rebel from Constantine's composite religion; Luther, Calvin and Knox successfully rebelled; Henry the Eighth defied the Catholic Church for reasons of his own and broke from it; Methodism and Congregationalism broke from both the canal of John Knox and that of Queen Elizabeth and her lamented father; Unitarianism in New England was a revolt from the rule of the Congregational Church, and Emerson and Theodore Parker were rebels from Unitarianism.

Emerson and Parker were irrigators. They gave the water to the land, instead of trying to keep it for a fishpond. Neither one ever ordered the populace to cut bait or fall in and drown. As a result we are enriched with the flowers and fruits of their energies; they bequeathed to us something more than a threat and a promise—they gave us the broad pastures, the meadows, the fertile fields, and the lofty trees with their refreshing shade.

* * * * *

Theodore Parker was the first of his kind in America—an independent, single-handed, theological fighter—a preacher without a denomination, dictated to by no bishop, governed by no machine. He has had many imitators, and a few successors. The number will increase as the days go by. Parker was a piece of ecclesiastical nebulae thrown off by the Unitarian denomination, moving through space in its orbit towards oblivion, the end of all religions, where one childless god presides, Silence. The destiny of all religions is to die and fertilize others. It is yet too soon to say what man's final religion will be.

Parker's business was not to start a new world; rather, it was to collide with old, reeling, wobbling worlds, break them into pieces, and send these pieces spinning through space.

For fourteen years Theodore Parker spoke at Music-Hall, Boston, every Sunday, to congregations that varied from a thousand to three thousand, the capacity of the auditorium. During these years he was the dominating intellectual factor of Boston, if not all New England. People went to Boston, for hundreds of miles, just to hear Parker, as they went to Brooklyn to hear Beecher. And as for many people, Plymouth Church and Beecher were Brooklyn, so to others Music-Hall and Parker were Boston.

Churchianity can only be disintegrated by the slow process of erosion. Joseph Parker's work in London tended to make all English clergymen who desired freedom, free. For over twenty years he preached every Thursday noon, and often twice on Sunday. No topic of vital human interest escaped him. He was a self-appointed censor and critic— sharp, vigilant, alert, yet commending as well as protesting. The two Parkers, one in America and one in England, made epochs. In point of time Theodore Parker comes first, and his discourses were keyed to a higher strain. Less theatrical than his gifted namesake, not so fluid nor so picturesque, his thought reduced to black and white reads better. What Theodore Parker said can be analyzed, parsed, taken apart. He always had a motif and his verb fetches up. He said things.

His best successor was David Swing, a man so great that the Presbyterian Church did not need him. Gentle, deliberate, homely, lovable, eloquent—David Swing was made free by those who had not the ability to appreciate him, and of course knew not what they did. You keep freedom by giving it away. Swing swung wide the gates that the captives might go free. Truly was it said of him that he liberalized every denomination in the West. Contemporary with Swing was Hiram W. Thomas, the door of the Methodist cage opening for him, because he believed in the divinity of everybody. Thomas believed even in the goodness of bad people. Swing and Thomas prepared the way, and are the prototypes of these modern saints: Felix Adler, Minot Savage, Brand Whitlock, B. Fay Mills, Rabbi Fleischer, M. M. Mangasarian, Henry Frank, Thomas Osborne, John Worthy, Ben Lindsey, Margaret Lagrange, Levi M. Powers, John E. Roberts, Winifred Sackville Stoner, Sam Alschuler, Katharine Tingley, James A. Burns, Jacob Beilhart, McIvor Tyndall, and all the other radiant rationalists in ordinary who gratify the messianic instinct of their particular group.

It is the unexpected that happens. One of the peculiar, unlooked-for results of independent preaching was to evolve the sensational preacher, who, clinging like a barnacle to orthodoxy, sought to meet the competition of the independent by flaunting a frankness designed to deceive the unwary. This species announced on blackboards and in the public prints that he would preach to "Men Only," or "Women Only," and his subjects were "Girls, Nice and Naughty," "Baldheads, Billboards and Bullheads," "Should Women Propose?" "Love, Courtship and Marriage," "Lums, Tums and Bums," "The Eight Johns," "The Late Mrs. Potiphar," or some other subject savoring of the salacious.

The Reverend T. DeWitt Talmage was the high priest of all sensational preachers. He was without the phosphorus to attract an audience of intellectual people, but he did draw great crowds who came out of curiosity to see the gyroscopic gyrations. Talmage never ventured far from shore, and he of all men knew that while the mob would forgive vulgarity—in fact, really enjoyed it—unsoundness of doctrine was to it a hissing. Orthodoxy is very tolerant—it forgives everything but truth. Every fetish of the superstitious and cringing mind, Talmage repeated over and over in varying phrase. He was the antithesis of an independent, exactly as Spurgeon was. It is the fate of every man who lives above the law to be hailed as brother by some of those who are genuine lawbreakers.

Talmage thought he was an independent, but he was independent in nothing but oratorical gymnastics. Talmage spawned a large theological brood who barnstorm the provinces as independent evangelists. These base, bawling, baseball ranters, who have gotten their pulpit manners from the bleachers, do little beyond deepening superstition, pandering to the ignorance of the mob, holding progress back, and securing unto themselves much moneys. They mark the degeneration of a dying religion, that is kept alive by frequent injections of sensationalism. Light awaits them just beyond.

Theodore Parker drew immense audiences, not because he pandered to the many, but because he deferred to none. He challenged the moss-covered beliefs of all denominations, and spoke with an inward self-reliance, up to that time, unknown in a single pulpit of America.

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In the year Eighteen Hundred Ten, Lincoln, Darwin, Tennyson, Gladstone, Elizabeth Browning, Mary Cowden Clarke, Felix Mendelssohn, Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Cyrus McCormick were each and all a year old.

The parents of Theodore Parker had been married twenty-six years, and been blessed with ten children, the eldest, twenty-five years old, and the youngest five, when Theodore persistently forced his presence upon them. Of course, no one suspected at the time that it was Theodore Parker, but "Theodore" was the name they gave him, meaning, "One sent from God." That this implied no disrespect to the other members of the family can be safely assumed.

The Old-World plan of making the eldest son the heir was based upon the theory that the firstborn possessed more power and vitality than the rest. The fact that all of Theodore Parker's brothers and sisters occupy reserved seats in oblivion, and he alone of the brood arrived, affords basis for an argument which married couples of discreet years may build upon if they wish.

Theodore Parker was born in the same old farmhouse where his father was born, three miles from the village of Lexington. The house has now disappeared, but the site is marked with a bronze tablet set in a granite slab, and is a place of pilgrimage to many who love their historic New England.

The house was on a hillside overlooking the valley, pleasant for situation. Above and beyond were great jutting boulders, over which the lad early learned to scramble. There he played I-Spy with his sisters, his brothers regarding themselves as in another class, so that he grew up a girl-boy, and picked flowers instead of killing snakes.

The coming of Spring is always a delight to country children, and it was a delight that Theodore Parker never outgrew. In many of his sermons he refers to the slow melting of the snow, and the children's search for the first Spring flowers that trustingly pushed their way up through the encrusted leaves on the south side of rotting logs. Then a little later came the violets, blue and white, anemones, sweet- william, columbine and saxifrage. In the State House at Boston the visitor may see a musket bearing a card reading thus: "This firearm was used by Captain John Parker in the Battle of Lexington, April 19, 1775." Then just beneath this is another musket and its card reads: "Captured in the War for Independence by Captain John Parker at Lexington. Presented by Theodore Parker." These two guns were upon the walls of Theodore Parker's library for over thirty years. And of nothing pertaining to his life was he so proud as that of the war record of his grandfather. When little Theodore was four years of age his sisters would stand him on a chair and ask, "What did grandpa say to the soldiers?" And the chubby cherub in linsey-woolsey dress would repeat in a single mouthful, "Do not fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war let it begin here!"

John Parker, son of the man who captured the first British musket in the War of the Revolution, lacked the proverbial New England thrift. Instead of looking after his crops and flocks and herds, he preferred to putter around a little carpenter-shop attached to the barn, and make boats and curious windmills, and discuss that wonderful day of the Nineteenth of April, Seventeen Hundred Seventy-five, when he was fourteen years old, and had begged to try just one shot from his father's flintlock at the straggling British, who had innocently stirred up such a hornets' nest.

That storied twenty-mile march from Boston to Concord was mapped, re- mapped, discussed and explained, and is still being explained and wondered at by descendants of the embattled farmers.

All of which is beautiful and well; and he who cavils concerning it, let his name be anathema. But the actual fact is that, instead of the War of the Revolution beginning at Lexington, it began several years before at Mecklenburg, North Carolina, where the mountaineers arose in revolt against laws made in London and in the making of which they had no part. There at Mecklenburg over two hundred Americans were killed by British troops, while the "massacre" at Lexington cost the Colonists just seven lives.

And the moral seems to be this: Parties about to perform heroic deeds would do well to choose a place where poets, essayists and historians abound. It was Emerson who fired the shot heard 'round the world.

* * * * *

All good writing men exercise their privilege to use that little Pliocene pleasantry about the boy who is not strong enough to work being educated for a preacher. We are apt to overlook the fact, however, that the boy not strong enough to work is often the only one who desires an education—all of this according to Emerson's Law of Compensation.

Theodore Parker in his youth was slight, slender and sickly, but he had a great hunger for knowledge. Those who have brawn use it, those without fall back on brain—sometimes.

It can not be said that Theodore Parker's parents set him apart for the ministry: he set himself apart and got his education in spite of them. At fifteen, he once created a small seismic disturbance by announcing to the family at supper, "I entered Harvard College today."

This educational move was scouted and flouted, and the fact pointed to that there was not enough money in the ginger-jar to keep him at Cambridge a week. And then the boy explained that he was going to borrow books and do his studying at home. He had passed the examinations and been duly admitted to the freshman class.

Let the fact stand that Theodore Parker kept up his studies for four years, and would have been entitled to his degree had he not been a non-resident. In Eighteen Hundred Forty, when Parker was thirty years of age, Harvard voted him the honorary degree of A.M. This was well, but if a little delay had occurred Parker would not have been so honored, and as it was, it was suggested by several worthy persons that the degree should be taken away without anesthetics. Both Parker and Emerson seriously offended their Alma Mater and were practically repudiated.

When eighteen years old Theodore Parker was a fairly prosperous pedagogue, and at twenty had saved up enough money to go to Harvard Divinity School.

Here he was very studious, and his skill in Greek and Latin made the professors in dead languages feel to see that their laurels were in place. Everybody prophesied that the Parker boy would be a great man— possibly a college professor! Theodore was passing through the realistic age when every detail must be carefully put in the picture. He was painstaking as to tenses, conscientious as to the ablative, and had scruples concerning the King James version of Deuteronomy. About the same time he fell in love—very much in love. Some one has said that an Irishman in love is like Vesuvius in a state of eruption. A theological student in love is like a boy with the hives. Theodore thought that all Cambridge was interested in his private affairs, so he wrote to this one and that advising them of the engagement, but cautioning secrecy, the object of secrecy in such cases being that the immediate parties themselves may tell everybody. He asked his father's consent, intimating that it made no difference whether it was forthcoming or not—the die was cast. He asked the consent of the girl's parents, and they having a grudge against the Parkers assented. Having removed all obstacles, the happy couple waited four years, and were safely married. Lydia Cabot's character can all be summed up in the word "good." She went through Europe, and remembered nothing but the wooden bears in Switzerland, of which she made a modest collection. When her husband preached, her solicitude was that his cravat might not become disarranged, for once when he was discussing the condition of sinners after death, his necktie gravitated around under his ear, and his wife nearly died of mortification. When he began to lose his hair she consulted everybody as to cures for baldness, and brought up the theme once at prayer-meeting, making her appeal to the Throne of Grace. This led Parker to say that the calamity of being bald was not in the loss of hair; it was that your friends suddenly revealed that they had recipes concealed on their person. Before his marriage Parker had positive ideas on the bringing up of children, and intimated what he proposed to do. But Fate decreed that he should be childless, that all religious independents might call him father. There is only one thing better than for a strong man to marry an absolutely dull woman. She teaches him by antithesis: he learns by contrast, and her stupidity is ever a foil for his brilliancy. He soon grows to a point where he does not mentally defer to her in the slightest degree, but goes his solitary way, making good that maxim of Kipling, "He travels the fastest who travels alone." He learns to love the ideal. The mediocre quality of Parker's wife was, no doubt, a prime factor in bringing out the self-reliant qualities in his own nature.