Page:Did Charles Bradlaugh die an atheist.djvu/6

 various parts of the country, I have put together in convenient form extracts from Mr. Bradlaugh's own writings, showing his opinions on theology from the time of his earliest advocacy until within a few days of his death. For the last days of all the word of his attendants must suffice.

The earliest explicit statement that I can find in print of his position as an Atheist occurs in the debate held with Mr. John Bowes at Northampton, in March, 1859, when my father was twenty-six years of age, although, of course, he had expressed his views in his lectures at a much earlier period. In the Bowes debate he said:

Five years later Mr. Bradlaugh held a debate with Mr. Thomas Cooper, author of "The Purgatory of Suicides", and he then told his audience:

In June, 1870, in a debate with Mr. Alexander Robertson, he said:

"I am an Atheist, but I do not say there is no God; and until you tell me what you mean by God I am not mad enough to say anything of the kind. So long as the word 'God' represents nothing to me, so long as it is a word that is not the correlative and expression of something clear and distinct, I am not going to tilt against what may be nothing-nowhere. Why should I? If you tell me that by God you mean 'something' which created the universe, which before the act of creation was not; 'something' which has the power of destroying that universe; 'something' which rules