[Footnote 96: Preface to "The Bible: What it is," 1865.]
To such a declaration as this all protests against "Bible-smashing" are irrelevant, by whomsoever made. Made by literary humanists, they ignore the practical situation. It is one thing to recognise that the Bible is a profoundly interesting body of ancient literature, illustrating for all time the manner of growth of a cult; it is another thing to deal with the pretensions of that cult to retain to-day the status secured for it by all manner of sinister means in bygone ages. Coming from clergymen, the protest is worse than irrelevant. The most advanced of them are still, from the rationalist point of view, in the position of using the Bible as a fetish; and men who as public teachers regularly resort to a primitive priestly literature for sanctions and cues to current conduct have no right whatever to protest against those who show the people what the sacrosanct literature really is. Bible-smashing is the necessary checkmate to Bible-worship. When the literary humanists get the clergy to stop cultivating and trading on Bibliolatry, it will be time for them to object to the exposure of the Bible. But by that time there will be no occasion for the objection. Bradlaugh did not go about lecturing against witch-burning or the Koran. He attacked an aggressive and endowed superstition; and to asperse him as being himself aggressive is about as idle as to charge Mr Gladstone with aggressiveness against Beaconsfield's foreign policy, or to denounce Home Rulers for being aggressive against the Union. It speaks volumes for the state of average English opinion that the adjective "aggressive" is still held to be a damaging epithet against Freethought; as if zeal were a good and great thing on one side of a dispute, but wrong and vulgar on the other. Churchmen whose bells set up pandemonium every Sunday count it an aggression to other people to meet by summons of a handbill to discuss whether church-going is reasonable. And they are kept in countenance, unluckily, by the mass of easy-going or timid unbelievers, who, not caring or daring to act on their own convictions, keep up their self-esteem by speaking ill of those who do so.