indignities caused me bitter suffering,
outraging my pride, and soiling my good name. The time was to come
when I should throw that good name to the winds for the sake of the
miserable, but in those early days I had done nothing to merit, even
ostensibly, such attacks. Even by educated writers, who should have
known better, the most wanton accusations of violence and would-be
destructiveness were brought against Atheists; thus Miss Frances Power
Cobbe wrote in the _Contemporary Review_ that loss of faith in God
would bring about the secularisation _or destruction_ of all
cathedrals, churches, and chapels. "Why," I wrote in answer, "should
cathedrals, churches, and chapels be destroyed? Atheism will utilise,
not destroy, the beautiful edifices which, once wasted on God, shall
hereafter be consecrated for man. Destroy Westminster Abbey, with its
exquisite arches, its glorious tones of soft, rich colour, its
stonework light as if of cloud, its dreamy, subdued twilight, soothing
as the 'shadow of a great rock in a weary land'? Nay, but reconsecrate
it to humanity. The fat cherubs who tumble over guns and banners on
soldiers' graves will fitly be removed to some spot where their clumsy
forms will no longer mar the upward-springing grace of lines of pillar
and of arch; but the glorious building wherein now barbaric psalms are
chanted and droning canons preach of Eastern follies, shall hereafter
echo the majestic music of Wagner and Beethoven, and the teachers of
the future shall there unveil to thronging multitudes the beauties and
the wonders of the world. The 'towers and spires' will not be effaced,
but they will no longer be symbols of a religion which sacrifices
earth to heaven and Man to God."[25] Between the cultured and the
uncultured burlesques of Atheism we came off pretty badly, being for
the most part regarded, as the late Cardinal Manning termed us, as
mere "cattle."

The moral purity and elevation of Atheistic teaching were overlooked
by many who heard only of my bitter attacks on Christian theology.
Against the teachings of eternal torture, of the vicarious atonement,
of the infallibility of the Bible, I levelled all the strength of my
brain and tongue, and I exposed the history of the Christian Church
with unsparing hand, its persecutions, its religious wars, its
cruelties, its oppressions. Smarting under the suffering inflicted on
myself, and wroth with the cruel pressure continually put on
Freethinkers by C