but it was met with a stubborn hardihood which wore out even the
bitter malice of piety. One of the worst features of the religious
crusade was that it affected to attack not unbelief but "vice," such
being the plea on which Wilberforce and others prosecuted, during a
period of more than twenty years, the publishers and booksellers who
issued the works of Paine. [1678] But even that dissembling device
did not ultimately avail. A name not to be forgotten by those who
value obscure service to human freedom is that of Richard Carlile,
who between 1819 and 1835 underwent nine years' imprisonment in his
unyielding struggle for the freedom of the Press, of thought, and of
speech. [1679] John Clarke, an ex-Methodist, became one of Carlile's
shopmen, was tried in 1824 for selling one of his publications,
and "after a spirited defence, in which he read many of the worst
passages of the Bible," was sentenced to three years' imprisonment,
and to find securities for good behaviour during life. The latter
disability he effectively anticipated by writing, while in prison, A
Critical Review of the Life, Character, and Miracles of Jesus, wherein
Christian feelings were treated as Christians had treated the feelings
of freethinkers, with a much more destructive result. Published first,
strangely enough, in the Newgate Magazine, it was republished in 1825
and 1839, with impunity. Thus did a brutal bigotry bring upon itself
ever a deadlier retaliation, till it sickened of the contest. Those
who threw up the struggle on the orthodox side declaimed as before
about the tone of the unbeliever's attack, failing to read the plain
lesson that, while noisy fanaticism, doing its own worst and vilest,
deterred from utterance all the gentler and more sympathetic spirits
on the side of reason, the work of reason could be done only by
the harder natures, which gave back blow for blow and insult for
insult, rejoicing in the encounter. Thus championed, freethought
could not be crushed. The propagandist and publishing work done by
Carlile was carried on diversely by such free lances as Robert Taylor
(ex-clergyman, author of the Diegesis, 1829, and The Devil's Pulpit,
1830), Charles Southwell (1814-1860), and William Hone, [1680] who
ultimately became an independent preacher. Southwell, a disciple of
Robert Owen, who edited The Oracle of Reason, was imprisoned for a year
in 1840 for publishing in that journal an article entitled "The Jew
Book"; and was succeeded in the editorship by George Jacob Holyoake
(1817-1906), another Owenite missionary, who met a similar sentence;
whereafter George Adams and his wife, who continued to publish the
journal, were imprisoned in turn. Matilda Roalfe and Mrs. Emma Martin
about the same period underwent imprisonment for like causes. [1681]
In this fashion, by the steady courage of a much-enduring band of men
and women, was set on foot a systematic Secularist propaganda--the
name having relation to the term "Secularism," coined by Holyoake.