Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/166

 Mr. Bradlaugh was first employed as errand-boy to the firm which his father served. In his fourteenth year he was equal to the more important duty of acting as wharf-clerk and cashier to a firm of coal-merchants in Britannia Fields, City Road. While so engaged, the serious troubles of his life began. In his sixteenth year he was a model young Christian, an enthusiastic Sunday-school teacher,—altogether a promising neophyte of the Church as by law established. But he had not, like Mr. Spurgeon, attained to that chronic state of conversion, that sublime superiority to reason, which should enable him to dote with unutterable joy on such empty words as "Look, look, look!" The Bishop of London was announced to hold a confirmation in Bethnal Green; and the incumbent of St. Peter's, Hackney Eoad, in an evil hour, requested his youthful Sunday-school teacher to be prepared with suitable answers to any questions that might be put by the Right Reverend Father in God affecting the Thirty-Nine Articles and cognate matters. Like an obedient son of the Church, young Bradlaugh complied, and began to compare the Articles with the Gospels; but finding, as well he might, that they differed, he wrote a respectful note to his clergyman, asking to be piloted through one or two of his difficulties. The ill-advised incumbent replied by informing the lad's parents that their son had turned atheist, and that he had been suspended from his functions as a Sunday-school teacher for a period of three months. It is not given to the clerical profession, as a rule, to know much about human nature; but this was an exceptional blunder. I do not know that Mr. Bradlaugh is constitutionally a doubter,—indeed, I think not; but he is a born