Lanterna Rally

Author: Annie Besant

Publisher:

Published: 2015-08-04

Total Pages: 44

ISBN-13: 9781332111725

Excerpt from Charles Bradlaugh, Vol. 1: A Sketch of His Life and Work During the past four or five years her sympathies have led her to take views of the remedies for social misery in which I cannot concur; and she has found guidance to a mysticism which seems to me unsound and unreal. But of this I am sure, that, with Lessing, she always seeks for truth, and will never hesitate, whatever the personal consequence, to proclaim in turn each truth she thinks she has found. This Character Sketch, written by her when the grave had but closed over Mr. Bradlaugh, does not profess to be an impartial summing up of his life's work. Partisan journalists of the baser sort have done their worst for years to defile this man's name, and to represent him as a kind of unclean Yahoo, full of blasphemy and sedition. Mrs. Besant's picture, painted from life, comes as a useful corrective to the malignant attacks of bigoted opponents. No doubt Mr. Bradlaugh said very much that was painful, even revolting, to the reverent mind. But what Christian is there who, on reading over the shameful story of intolerance with which Mr. Bradlaugh was treated, does not feel that the responsibility for much that was most deplorable in Mr. Bradlaugh's teaching, lies at the door, not of the Freethinker, but of the un-Christlike Christian of our time. That this resolute soul lived and died doing so much good work for the poor and the oppressed, although without the conscious inspiration of Christianity, should surely not be reckoned so much a reproach to him as to those blind leaders of the blind, whose bigotry and stupidity drove him outside the fold. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.