Secularism, Spiritualism, and Altruism had not come into
existence. Their professors were weeping and wailing in long clothes.
Now we have, indeed, swept into a younger day, and society makes lions of
men of whom our fathers would have taken no heed. We have become more
tolerant--even Exeter Hall has moved with the times. Perhaps one of the
boldest things connected with it was the attempt to utilise it for public
religious worship on the Sunday. Originally some of the Evangelical
clergy had agreed to take part in these services, but the rector of the
parish in which Exeter Hall was situated disapproved, and consequently
they were unable to appear. The result was the services were conducted
by the leading ministers of other denominations, nor were they less
successful on that account.

CHAPTER XIII.
MEN I HAVE KNOWN.

It is the penalty of old age to lose all our friends and acquaintances,
but fortunately our hold on earth weakens as the end of life draws near.
In an active life, we see much of the world and the men who help to make
it better. Many ministers and missionaries came to my father's house
with wonderful accounts of the spread of the Gospel in foreign parts. At
a later time I saw a knot of popular lecturers and agitators--such as
George Thompson, the great anti-slavery lecturer, who, born in humble
life, managed to get into Parliament, where he collapsed altogether. As
an outdoor orator he was unsurpassed, and carried all before him. After
a speech of his I heard Lord Brougham declare it was one of the most
eloquent he had ever heard. He started a newspaper, which, however, did
not make much way. Then there was Henry Vincent, another natural orator,
whom the common people heard gladly, and who at one time was very near
getting into Parliament as M.P. for Ipswich, then, as now, a go-ahead
town, full of Dissenters and Radicals. He began life as a Chartist and
printer, and, I believe, was concerned in the outbreak near Newport. Of
the same class was a man of real genius and immense learning, considering
the disadvantages of his lowly birth, Thomas Cooper, the Chartist, and
author of that magnificent poem, "The Purgatory of Suicides," written
when he was in gaol for being connected with a Chartist outbreak. He had
been a Methodist, he became a Freethinker, and, when I knew him, was
under the influence of Strauss's Life of Jesus, a book which George Eliot
had translated, and which made a grea