A Rough, Self-Taught Infidel

I pray the opposing forces to continue their attacks, that by teaching me my weaknesses they may make me strong.

Here’s a nice Charles Bradlaugh passage, quoted in Four Hundred Years of Freethought, by Samuel P. Putnam, 1894. Putnam seems to be a very interesting character in his own right, and Bradlaugh was a giant. Stay tuned for more material from each of them…

I am an Infidel, a rough, self-taught Infidel. What honors shall I win if I grow grey in this career? Critics who would break a lance against me in my absence will tell you now that I am from the lower classes, without university education, and that I lack classical lore. Clergymen, who see God’s mercy reflected in an eternal hell, will tell you even that I am wanting in a conception of common humanity. Skilled penmen will demonstrate that I have not the merest rudiments of biblical knowledge. I thank these assailants for the past; when they pricked and stung me with their waspish piety, they did me good service, gave me the clue to my weaknesses, laid bare to me my ignorance, and drove me to acquire knowledge which might otherwise never have been mine. I pray the opposing forces to continue their attacks, that by teaching me my weaknesses they may make me strong. …I have preached ‘equality,’ not by aiming to reduce men’s intellects to the level of my own, but rather by inciting each of my hearers to develop his mind to the fullest extent, obtaining thus the hope, not of an equality of ignorance, but of a more equal diffusion of knowledge.