ARTISAN ATHEISM.

AN old friend, a London clergyman of long and wide experience, said to me lately, 'I cannot understand the position of the working classes towards religion: they seem to put it on one side, to do without it; not to have any ill-feeling towards it, but simply to regard it with indifference.' My own experience is shorter than my friend's, but leads to the opposite impression: that the great body of artisans do not do without religion; that they are as much governed by conscience as any body of professing Christians: but also that towards all professions, and especially all teachers, of religion, they have a very strong and very bitter antipathy; that they look on theology as having the same value as astrology, and esteem the clergy as on about the level of fortune-tellers, as encouraging ignorance that they may live by teaching that which they know to be false.

It is possible that my friend and myself are both right, so far as the evidence before us goes. He is a distinguished looking person, with remarkable powers of forming dispassionate judgments and of expressing them very clearly and incisively. The artisans whom he meets are probably awed by the majesty of his appearance and influenced by their innate respect for his profession; while I am taken no more account of than a tame cat on the hearth, and so they give me that frank utterance which is denied to my friend.

Some few years ago I was asked to lecture at a working men's club in Pimlico-my first experience of any London club. The subject was The Antiquity of Man,' and the lecture was purely scientific. The discussion that followed was entirely on the clergy and their attitude towards science. The only interest in the antiquity of man was because it disproved Genesis and showed the clergy to be teaching what they ought to know had been disproved. The argument was very simple. There was a theory that the world was only 6,000 years old; the Bible gives an account of the Creation; the clergy read the Bible and preach about it. The world is shown to be more than 6,000 years old; therefore the Bible is wrong; therefore the clergy, who are educated people, preach that which they know to be untrue. To suggest that the Church had not adopted any scheme of chronology, that Ussher's chronology was but two centuries old, that the Bible was not a chronology but a body of

literature, was to pour water on the back of a duck, to talk of a rainbow to a blind man. By common consent the clergy were either fools not to know better or knaves to preach untruth. A very earnest speaker spoke of them as 'blackbeetles with white throats.'

This was at an ordinary social club, and its members were not banded together by anything more literary than the daily newspaper, and when I was soon after invited to lecture at a secular club I comforted myself with the belief that I should find a body of men somewhat familiar with theology and accustomed to something like argument. The subject of the lecture was the same; the discussion was the same in character, except that the feeling against the clergy was more intense and more bitter, and that all the speakers had been members of Sunday schools, either as teachers or scholars, regarding that time as the Jews regarded the captivity in Egypt, Secularism being their Canaan and Freethought a combination of Moses and Joshua.

I mentioned to a friend learned in such matters the apparent want of knowledge and of argument, and he replied, 'That was a small club; you go to club, and they'll tear you to pieces, and do it according to rule.' I invited this club to invite me, and took for my subject 'The Bible and Modern Science,' so that the clergy might receive due attention. The result was much the same; there was the same bitterness towards the clergy, the same admiration of science, not for its own sake but as a powerful weapon against the teaching of the clergy, the same idea that the Bible was a literal and official document, a sort of celestial London Gazette. As in all other cases, the Bible meant only Genesis, Exodus, and the Gospels, or rather only a few passages in these. The creation, the deluge, the exodus, and the birth of Jesus, are usually the subjects of discussion. Balaam and Jonah have been immortalised in secular clubs, but chiefly because they were fortunate enough to be associated with a remarkably large fish and a remarkably clever ass. Joshua also is known, not as a national leader, but as having unusual authority over the sun.

Of course my unimportance prevented my being noticed by the leading prophets of secularism, and my object here is to speak of the artisans and their opinions on religion, not of secularism. But I extended my researches to the east of London, with a new experience. Here I found discussion assisted by beer and tobacco, and at one club I had to speak in the brief intervals between long fits of coughing, some two hundred pipes in full work being too much for me until the chairman most considerately suggested the opening of a window in the roof. This trinity of Bible, beer, and bacca,' of politics, pots, and pipes, belongs more to the east, though I found it in Soho once, where I arrived one Sunday morning, and was asked to begin with an audience of three or four, the chairman comforting

me with the remark, 'If you begin, the others will drop in as you go on.' In many instances I believe the lecture is regarded as a kind of pastime, which gives a certain zest to the tobacco and beer, and enables the members to enjoy them with a certain profundity of sensation which they take to be thought.

I also went beyond London, and at Baskerville Hall, Birmingham, I found a very intelligent audience in a very tastefully decorated building, but the discussion was on the usual lines. I went also to another town, where the secular club had a reputation for being more given to drinking than discussion, and the surroundings seemed to my fastidious taste somewhat grovelling and sordid. But the greatest shock I had was in London, where one Sunday morning I found a small number of men engaged at cards and bagatelle (I think it is called) in a back kitchen, and I felt the underground atmosphere and the grimy surroundings to be greater evils than the cards and green-covered tables, even on Sunday.

There are very many artisans who are not secularists, much less atheists, and these must be considered, if only because it might be possible to find some broad difference of social standing, education, training, or some other kind, that might help to explain the different result, and so give hope for the future of all. I was asked to lecture at a Church club in Poplar, where I had some two hundred or more very well-dressed and well-behaved people, to whom the ideas of modern science appeared to be new and also doubtful, not so much as to their truth as to their propriety. The minister of the church took part in the discussion. Three lectures passed, and it was proposed to have a lending library and art exhibition and more lectures after the summer. But when the time came, it was discovered that the church had already so much work on hand it could not undertake any more. In another part of East London the minister of the parish was greatly distressed because the young men would not come to church, and asked me to help him to interest them by lectures. For three or four months we had every Sunday afternoon some hundred men, sometimes nearly double that number, to discuss subjects of science and theology, and I believe the Sunday afternoon lectures have become in that parish an institution of considerable value in bringing together minister and young men.

At the secular clubs the knowledge of science was general if limited, the knowledge of the Bible still more limited and much less general. In the Church clubs I found the knowledge of science was very hazy and the knowledge of the Bible somewhat at second hand. Some dozen years ago a young man came to me to ask if I could lend him a book about the Last Supper, as he had to write a paper about it for his Sunday school. I handed him a Bible, saying, 'Here's the very book: four accounts of it.' He took it, turned it over, and handed it back, saying, 'Yes, but I want a book about it.'

I gave him a shilling manual and he went rejoicing; afterwards he told me the curate had greatly praised his paper. About the same time, another young man, member of a very distinguished congregation, talked to me for half an hour of the wickedness of Ecce Homo, then comparatively new. I handed him the book, with 'Show me some of the statements you say are in the book.' He replied, 'Oh! I've never seen the book till now; it's what our minister says about it.' This is somewhat the kind of knowledge as to the Bible which is very common, narrowness of mind inducing the hearer to give to his teacher's words the poorest interpretation of which they are capable.

Of late years I have lectured regularly on Sunday evenings at the Free Library in South Lambeth, near the Dogs' Home, to audiences neither specially secular nor holding, as a body, any form of religious opinions, and, so, free from any special prejudices either for or against any faith, but always of the artisan type, and offering fair opportunity for judging of their general opinions. Sometimes a specialist will startle us by his profound knowledge, as when a lecture on 'Joshua and the Sun' brought in an earnest advocate of the theory that the world is flat, who insisted that this theory, once received, would make everything clear and finally reconcile science and religion, and denounced me as a wriggling worm: ' as when a lecture on 'The World 200,000 years ago' brought an informal representative of a secularist periodical, who reproached me with not giving the proper 'moral,' by which he meant his moral, that the antiquity of the world quite disproved the Bible and therefore made religion an imposture and the clergy wilful teachers of untruth: I urged that the lecture was purely scientific; he replied it showed Genesis to be nonsense: I appealed to his consideration for Genesis as literature; he retorted it was only a copy of older Chaldean legends: and as when, after a lecture on the origin of man, a very earnest Darwinist, having led me through a long series of questions to an answer he wanted, sprung upon the audience a mine of wisdom in the assertion that this rendered the miracle of the birth of Jesus impossible. But the one feeling, rather than opinion, is that the clergy are impostors in undertaking work they do not do, and in teaching what should not be taught.

This being my experience in speaking with artisans, I was anxious to know what are their means of acquiring right opinions-how far they had means of education. Of course I can only infer this, but I had a small revelation on the subject some twelve years ago, when reading Macaulay's History with a class of men varying from twenty to forty years in age. In the course of some discussion I mentioned the name of Aristotle, and was surprised to see a half smile spread over their faces as they glanced at each other and then at me. On inquiry I found that Aristotle was to them nothing whatever but

the name of the supposed compiler of a shilling book of midwifery, filled with stories of monstrous births grafted on to a chapter of Aristotle's Natural History, just as one might bind up a chapter of Darwin with a collection of witch stories, and sell it sub rosa in neighbourhoods of shady morals to ignorant people who would buy it only because it was an improper book, not to be found in any respectable shop. I thought this was a very exceptionally unfortunate set of young men, but when two years ago I mentioned this in a lecture on Aristotle to a large audience I found that this was still a very widely spread opinion.

This did not lead me to expect that the reading of the ordinary artisan is very wide or very deep, and I think it is probable that in most cases the newspaper supplies him with readymade opinions, and that he reads those newspapers which are most likely to give him the opinions he wishes to have, being in this much the same as other people. Magazines seldom come in his way, and when they do, the more weighty articles have but little permanent influence, because of his want of a basis of knowledge. Books are still less read, for the same reason. By many, a book is regarded as a statement of fact, and its merit is to be tried by the one standard, 'Is it true?' Mr. Gradgrind is not the only person who says, 'What I want is facts,' or who regards education as being simply the acquisition of knowledge that can be easily tested.

But newspapers are not the source of the wonderful display of knowledge that has often astonished me. A man will often fire off at me the words, 'So and so says,' &c., and I have often wondered, first, how my friend acquired so familiar a knowledge of some great thinker, and, secondly, how it was that his knowledge, while so precise, was also so fragmentary as it usually proved to be. I think I find at least one source of these crumbs of knowledge in the three periodicals which weekly advocate anti-Christianity. One only of these calls in the aid of art, having regularly an illustration, usually of some event in Jewish history. In the number last published it is Comic Bible Sketch, No. 175, A Skeleton Army,' and represents the death of the Assyrians before Jerusalem. But the Assyrians are represented by skeletons of members of the Salvation Army. An article on Bible Fasting Men' speaks of Moses, David, Elijah, Daniel, and Jesus, and in it occur such sentences as 'Holy Moses was the original Grand Old Man;'' He lived entirely on his own gravy, though how it was done is like the peace of God-it passes all understanding,' 'Jesus taught that the power to work miracles was only gained by prayer and fasting-but our bishops and clergy think differently. Their philosophy is eat and grow fat.' These sentences give a fair idea of the highest literary standard reached. Such phrases as 'addle-pated Bible-reader,' the pantomime he played with the devil,' are on a