Chapter II: An Episode In Toleration. (1880-1883)

The state, in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their
opinions; if they be willing faithfully to serve it, that
satisfies. ... Take heed of being sharp, or too easily sharpened
by others, against those to whom you can object little but that
they square not with you in every opinion concerning matters of
religion.

—OLIVER CROMWELL.

I

One discordant refrain rang hoarsely throughout the five years of this administration, and its first notes were heard even before Mr. Gladstone had taken his seat. It drew him into a controversy that was probably more distasteful to him than any other of the myriad contentions, small and great, with which his life was encumbered. Whether or not he threaded his way with his usual skill through a labyrinth of parliamentary tactics incomparably intricate, experts may dispute, but in an ordeal beyond the region of tactics he never swerved from the path alike of liberty and common-sense. It was a question of exacting the oath of allegiance before a member could take his seat.

Mr. Bradlaugh, the new member for Northampton, who now forced the question forward, as O’Connell had forced forward the civil equality of catholics, and Rothschild and others the civil equality of Jews, was a free-thinker of a daring and defiant type. Blank negation could go no further. He had abundant and genuine public spirit, and a strong love of truth according to his own lights, and he was both a brave and a disinterested man. This hard-grit secularism of his was not the worst of his offences in the view of the new majority and their constituents. He had published an impeachment of the House of Brunswick, which few members of parliament had ever heard of or looked at. But even abstract republicanism was not the worst. What placed him at extreme disadvantage in fighting the battle in which he was now engaged, was his republication of a pamphlet by an American doctor on that impracticable question of population, which though too rigorously excluded from public discussion, confessedly lies among the roots of most other social questions. For this he had some years before been indicted in the courts, and had only escaped conviction and punishment by a technicality. It was Mr. Bradlaugh’s refusal to take the oath in a court of justice that led to the law of 1869, enabling a witness to affirm instead of swearing. He now carried the principle a step further.

When the time came, the Speaker (April 29) received a letter from the iconoclast, claiming to make an affirmation, instead of taking the oath of allegiance.(3) He consulted his legal advisers, and they gave an opinion strongly adverse to the claim. On this the Speaker wrote to Mr. Gladstone and to Sir Stafford Northcote, stating his concurrence in the opinion of the lawyers, and telling them that he should leave the question to the House. His practical suggestion was that on his statement being made, a motion should be proposed for a select committee. The committee was duly appointed, and it reported by a majority of one, against a minority that contained names so weighty as Sir Henry James, Herschell, Whitbread, and Bright, that the claim to affirm was not a good claim. So opened a series of incidents that went on as long as the parliament, clouded the radiance of the party triumph, threw the new government at once into a minority, dimmed the ascendency of the great minister, and what was more, showed human nature at its worst. The incidents themselves are in detail not worth recalling here, but they are a striking episode in the history of toleration, as well as a landmark in Mr. Gladstone’s journey from the day five-and-forty years before when, in (M5) reference to Molesworth as candidate for Leeds, he had told his friends at Newark that men who had no belief in divine revelation were not the men to govern this nation whether they be whigs or radicals.(4)

His claim to affirm having been rejected, Bradlaugh next desired to swear. The ministerial whip reported that the feeling against him in the House was uncontrollable. The Speaker held a council in his library with Mr. Gladstone, the law officers, the whip, and two or three other persons of authority and sense. He told them that if Bradlaugh had in the first instance come to take the oath, he should have allowed no intervention, but that the case was altered by the claimant’s open declaration that an oath was not binding on his conscience. A hostile motion was expected when Bradlaugh came to the table to be sworn, and the Speaker suggested that it should be met by the previous question, to be moved by Mr. Gladstone. Then the whip broke in with the assurance that the usual supporters of the government could not be relied upon. The Speaker went upstairs to dress, and on his return found that they had agreed on moving another select committee. He told them that he thought this a weak course, but if the previous question would be defeated, perhaps a committee could not be helped. Bradlaugh came to the table, and the hostile motion was made. Mr. Gladstone proposed his committee, and carried it by a good majority against the motion that Bradlaugh, being without religious belief, could not take an oath. The debate was warm, and the attacks on Bradlaugh were often gross. The Speaker honourably pointed out that such attacks on an elected member whose absence was enforced by their own order, were unfair and unbecoming, but the feelings of the House were too strong for him and too strong for chivalry. The opposition turned affairs to ignoble party account, and were not ashamed in their prints and elsewhere to level the charge of “open patronage of unbelief and Malthusianism, Bradlaugh and Blasphemy,” against a government that contained Gladstone, Bright, and Selborne, three of the most conspicuously devout men to be found in all England. One expression of faith used by a leader in the attack on Bradlaugh lived in Mr. Gladstone’s memory to the end of his days. “You know, Mr. Speaker,” cried the champion of orthodox creeds, “we all of us believe in a God of some sort or another.” That a man should consent to clothe the naked human soul in this truly singular and scanty remnant of spiritual apparel, was held to be the unalterable condition of fitness for a seat in parliament and the company of decent people. Well might Mr. Gladstone point out how vast a disparagement of Christianity, and of orthodox theism also, was here involved:—

They say this, that you may go any length you please in the denial
of religion, provided only you do not reject the name of the
Deity. They tear religion into shreds, so to speak, and say that
there is one particular shred with which nothing will ever induce
them to part. They divide religion into the dispensable and the
indispensable, and among that kind which can be dispensed with—I
am not now speaking of those who declare, or are admitted, under a
special law, I am not speaking of Jews or those who make a
declaration, I am speaking solely of those for whom no provision
is made except the provision of oath—they divide, I say, religion
into what can and what cannot be dispensed with. There is
something, however, that cannot be dispensed with. I am not
willing, Sir, that Christianity, if the appeal is made to us as a
Christian legislature, shall stand in any rank lower than that
which is indispensable. I may illustrate what I mean. Suppose a
commander has to despatch a small body of men on an expedition on
which it is necessary for them to carry on their backs all that
they can take with them; the men will part with everything that is
unnecessary, and take only that which is essential. That is the
course you ask us to take in drawing us upon theological ground;
you require us to distinguish between superfluities and
necessaries, and you tell us that Christianity is one of the
superfluities, one of the excrescences, and has nothing to do with
the vital substance, the name of the Deity, which is
indispensable. I say that the adoption of such a proposition as
that, which is in reality at the very root of your contention, is
disparaging in the very highest degree to the Christian
faith....(5)

(M6) Even viewed as a theistic test, he contended, this oath embraced no acknowledgment of Providence, of divine government, of responsibility, or retribution; it involved nothing but a bare and abstract admission, a form void of all practical meaning and concern.

The House, however, speedily showed how inaccessible were most of its members to reason and argument of this kind or any kind. On June 21, Mr. Gladstone thus described the proceedings to the Queen. “With the renewal of the discussion,” he wrote, “the temper of the House does not improve, both excitement and suspicion appearing to prevail in different quarters.” A motion made by Mr. Bradlaugh’s colleague that he should be permitted to affirm, was met by a motion that he should not be allowed either to affirm or to swear.

_To the Queen._

Many warm speeches were made by the opposition in the name of
religion; to those Mr. Bright has warmly replied in the name of
religious liberty. The contention on the other side really is that
as to a certain ill-defined fragment of truth the House is still,
under the Oaths Act, the guardian of religion. The primary
question, whether the House has jurisdiction under the statute, is
almost hopelessly mixed with the question whether an atheist, who
has declared himself an atheist, ought to sit in parliament. Mr.
Gladstone’s own view is that the House has no jurisdiction for the
purpose of excluding any one willing to qualify when he has been
duly elected; but he is very uncertain how the House will vote or
what will be the end of the business, if the House undertakes the
business of exclusion.

_June 22._—The House of Commons has been occupied from the
commencement of the evening until a late hour with the adjourned
debate on the case of Mr. Bradlaugh. The divided state of opinion
in the House made itself manifest throughout the evening. Mr.
Newdegate made a speech which turned almost wholly upon the
respective merits of theism and atheism. Mr. Gladstone thought it
his duty to advise the House to beware of entangling itself in
difficulties possibly of a serious character, by assuming a
jurisdiction in cases of this class.

At one o’clock in the morning, the first great division was taken,
and the House resolved by 275 votes against 230 that Mr. Bradlaugh
should neither affirm nor swear. The excitement at this result was
tremendous. Some minutes elapsed before the Speaker could declare
the numbers. “Indeed,” wrote Mr. Gladstone to the Queen, “it was
an ecstatic transport, and exceeded anything which Mr. Gladstone
remembers to have witnessed. He read in it only a witness to the
dangers of the course on which the House has entered, and to its
unfitness for the office which it has rashly chosen to assume.” He
might also have read in it, if he had liked, the exquisite delight
of the first stroke of revenge for Midlothian.

The next day (June 23) the matter entered on a more violent phase.

_To the Queen._

This day, when the Speaker took the chair at a quarter past
twelve, Mr. Bradlaugh came to the table and claimed to take the
oath. The Speaker read to him the resolution of the House which
forbids it. Mr. Bradlaugh asked to be heard, and no objection was
taken. He then addressed the House from the bar. His address was
that of a consummate speaker. But it was an address which could
not have any effect unless the House had undergone a complete
revolution of mind. He challenged the legality of the act of the
House, expressing hereby an opinion in which Mr. Gladstone
himself, going beyond some other members of the minority, has the
misfortune to lean towards agreeing with him.... The Speaker now
again announced to Mr. Bradlaugh the resolution of the House. Only
a small minority voted against enforcing it. Mr. Bradlaugh
declining to withdraw, was removed by the serjeant-at-arms. Having
suffered this removal, he again came beyond the bar, and entered
into what was almost a corporal struggle with the serjeant.
Hereupon Sir S. Northcote moved that Mr. Bradlaugh be committed
for his offence. Mr. Gladstone said that while he thought it did
not belong to him, under the circumstances of the case, to advise
the House, he could take no objection to the advice thus given.

The Speaker, it may be said, thought this view of (M7) Mr. Gladstone’s a mistake, and that when Bradlaugh refused to withdraw, the leader of the House ought, as a matter of policy, to have been the person to move first the order to withdraw, next the committal to the custody of the serjeant-at-arms. “I was placed in a false position,” says the Speaker, “and so was the House, in having to follow the lead of the leader of the opposition, while the leader of the House and the great majority were passive spectators.”(6) As Mr. Gladstone and other members of the government voted for Bradlaugh’s committal, on the ground that his resistance to the serjeant had nothing to do with the establishment of his rights before either a court or his constituency, it would seem that the Speaker’s complaint is not unjust. To this position, however, Mr. Gladstone adhered, in entire conformity apparently to the wishes of the keenest members of his cabinet and the leading men of his party.

The Speaker wrote to Sir Stafford Northcote urging on him the propriety of allowing Bradlaugh to take the oath without question. But Northcote was forced on against his better judgment by his more ardent supporters. It was a strange and painful situation, and the party system assuredly did not work at its best—one leading man forced on to mischief by the least responsible of his sections, the other held back from providing a cure by the narrowest of the other sections. In the April of 1881 Mr. Gladstone gave notice of a bill providing for affirmation, but it was immediately apparent that the opposition would make the most of every obstacle to a settlement, and the proposal fell through. In August of this year the Speaker notes, “The difficulties in the way of settling this question satisfactorily are great, and in the present temper of the House almost insuperable.”

II

It is not necessary to recount all the stages of this protracted struggle: what devices and expedients and motions, how many odious scenes of physical violence, how many hard-fought actions in the lawcourts, how many conflicts between the House of Commons and the constituency, what glee and rubbing of hands in the camp of the opposition at having thrust their rivals deep into a quagmire so unpleasant. The scandal was intolerable, but ministers were helpless, as a marked incident now demonstrated. It was not until 1883 that a serious attempt was made to change the law. The Affirmation bill of that year has a biographic place, because it marks in a definite way how far Mr. Gladstone’s mind—perhaps not, as I have said before, by nature or by instinct peculiarly tolerant—had travelled along one of the grand highroads of human progress. The occasion was for many reasons one of great anxiety. Here are one or two short entries, the reader remembering that by this time the question was two years old:—

_April 24, Tuesday._—On Sunday night a gap of three hours in my
sleep was rather ominous; but it was not repeated.... Saw the
Archbishop of Canterbury, with whom I had a very long conversation
on the Affirmation bill and on _Church and State_. Policy
generally as well as on special subjects.... Globe Theatre in the
evening; excellent acting.... 25.... Worked on Oaths question....
26.... Made a long and _begeistert_(7) speech on the Affirmation
bill, taking the bull by the horns.

His speech upon this measure was a noble effort. It was delivered under circumstances of unsurpassed difficulty, for there was revolt in the party, the client was repugnant, the opinions brought into issue were to Mr. Gladstone hateful. Yet the speech proved one of his greatest. Imposing, lofty, persuasive, sage it would have been, from whatever lips it might have fallen; it was signal indeed as coming from one so fervid, so definite, so unfaltering in a faith of his own, one who had started from the opposite pole to that great civil principle of which he now displayed a grasp invincible. If it be true of a writer that the best style is that which most directly flows from living qualities in the writer’s own mind and is a pattern of their actual working, so is the same thing to be said of oratory. These high themes of Faith, on the one hand, and Freedom on the (M8) other, exactly fitted the range of the thoughts in which Mr. Gladstone habitually lived. “I have no fear of Atheism in this House,” he said; “Truth is the expression of the Divine mind, and however little our feeble vision may be able to discern the means by which God may provide for its preservation, we may leave the matter in His hands, and we may be sure that a firm and courageous application of every principle of equity and of justice is the best method we can adopt for the preservation and influence of Truth.” This was Mr. Gladstone at his sincerest and his highest. I wonder, too, if there has been a leader in parliament since the seventeenth century, who could venture to address it in the strain of the memorable passage now to be transcribed:—

You draw your line at the point where the abstract denial of God
is severed from the abstract admission of the Deity. My
proposition is that the line thus drawn is worthless, and that
much on your side of the line is as objectionable as the atheism
on the other. If you call upon us to make distinctions, let them
at least be rational; I do not say let them be Christian
distinctions, but let them be rational. I can understand one
rational distinction, that you should frame the oath in such a way
as to recognise not only the existence of the Deity, but the
providence of the Deity, and man’s responsibility to the Deity;
and in such a way as to indicate the knowledge in a man’s own mind
that he must answer to the Deity for what he does, and is able to
do. But is that your present rule? No, Sir, you know very well
that from ancient times there have been sects and schools that
have admitted in the abstract as freely as Christians the
existence of a Deity, but have held that of practical relations
between Him and man there can be none. Many of the members of this
House will recollect the majestic and noble lines—

Omnis enim per se divom natura necesse est
Immortali ævo summa cum pace fruatur,
Semota a nostris rebus sejunctaque longe.
Nam privata dolore omni, privata periclis,
Ipsa suis pollens opibus, nihil indiga nostri,
Nec bene promeritis capitur, nec tangitur ira.(8)

“Divinity exists”—according to these, I must say, magnificent
lines—“in remote and inaccessible recesses; but with, us it has no
dealing, of us it has no need, with us it has no relation.” I do
not hesitate to say that the specific evil, the specific form of
irreligion, with which in the educated society of this country you
have to contend, and with respect to which you ought to be on your
guard, is not blank atheism. That is a rare opinion very seldom
met with; but what is frequently met with is that form of opinion
which would teach us that, whatever may be beyond the visible
things of this world, whatever there may be beyond this short span
of life, you know and you can know nothing of it, and that it is a
bootless undertaking to attempt to establish relations with it.
That is the mischief of the age, and that mischief you do not
attempt to touch.

The House, though but few perhaps recollected their Lucretius or had ever even read him, sat, as I well remember, with reverential stillness, hearkening from this born master of moving cadence and high sustained modulation to “the rise and long roll of the hexameter,”—to the plangent lines that have come down across the night of time to us from great Rome. But all these impressions of sublime feeling and strong reasoning were soon effaced by honest bigotry, by narrow and selfish calculation, by flat cowardice. The relieving bill was cast out by a majority of three. The catholics in the main voted against it, and many nonconformists, hereditary champions of all the rights of private judgment, either voted against it or did not vote at all. So soon in these affairs, as the world has long ago found out, do bodies of men forget in a day of power the maxims that they held sacred and inviolable in days when they were weak.

The drama did not end here. In that parliament Bradlaugh was never allowed to discharge his duty as a member, but when after the general election of 1885, being once more chosen by Northampton, he went to the table to take the oath, as in former days Mill and others of like non-theologic complexion had taken it, the Speaker would suffer no intervention against him. Then in 1888, though the majority was conservative, Bradlaugh himself secured the passing of an affirmation (M9) law. Finally, in the beginning of 1891, upon the motion of a Scotch member, supported by Mr. Gladstone, the House formally struck out from its records the resolution of June 22, 1881, that had been passed, as we have seen, amid “ecstatic transports.” Bradlaugh then lay upon his deathbed, and was unconscious of what had been done. Mr. Gladstone a few days later, in moving a bill of his own to discard a lingering case of civil disability attached to religious profession, made a last reference to Mr. Bradlaugh:—

A distinguished man, he said, and admirable member of this House,
was laid yesterday in his mother-earth. He was the subject of a
long controversy in this House—a controversy the beginning of
which we recollect, and the ending of which we recollect. We
remember with what zeal it was prosecuted; we remember how
summarily it was dropped; we remember also what reparation has
been done within the last few days to the distinguished man who
was the immediate object of that controversy. But does anybody who
hears me believe that that controversy, so prosecuted and so
abandoned, was beneficial to the Christian religion?(9)