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The Faces of Janus: Free-Thinkers, Jews, and Christianity in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
Nineteenth-Century Britain was a Christian country, in that its laws and institutions were based upon the Christian religion. Not to be a Christian was to be excluded from full citizenship, for Christianity was, in the eyes of the Common Law, ‘parcel of the laws of England’. Until the Catholic Relief Act of 1829 Christianity was still for some purposes equated with Protestantism and, after this date, Jews and other ‘infidels’ continued unable to sit in Parliament or swear an oath as witnesses in courts of law. Conversely, those British Radicals of the nineteenth century who rejected the aristocratic politics of what they termed ‘Old Corruption’ frequently chose also to attack its religious base—Anglicanism or, in extreme cases, the entire Christian system under which they were required to live.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1992
References
1 Rex v. Taylor, King’s Bench (1676). The full passage from which this important and oft-quoted phrase comes is: ‘That such kind of wicked and blasphemous words were not only an offence to God and religion, but a crime against the laws, State, and Government, and therefore punishable in this Court; for to say “Religion is a cheat” is to dissolve all the obligations whereby civil societies are preserved, and Christianity is parcel of the laws of England, and, therefore, to reproach the Christian religion is to speak in subversion of the law’—quoted in Wickwar, W. H., The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press (London, 1928), p. 25.Google Scholar
2 Those with a religious objection to the judicial oath (including Quakers) were permitted to affirm instead in 1855; those with an irreligious or secular objection had to wait until 1869; parliamentary affirmation was not permitted to free-thinkers until 1888.
3 For the early history of nineteenth-century British free-thought, see Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels. The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791-1866 (Manchester, 1974).
4 The later period of free-thought is the subject of Edward Royle, Radicals, Secularists and Republicans. Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866-1913 (Manchester, 1980). See also Walter L. Arnstein, The Bradlaugh Case. Atheism, Sex and Politics among the Late Victorians, 2nd edn (Columbia, 1983) [hereafter Arnstein].
5 Republican, 6 (1822) [hereafter R] Carlile was at this rime in gaol for blasphemous libel.
6 Oracle of Reason; or, Philosophy Vindicated, 27 Nov. 1841, pp. 25-7.
7 Freethinker, (4 Sept.1881, p. 38 [hereafter F]. The first of the cartoons appeared on 6 Nov. 1881. They caused great offence to some—see Malcolm Quin, Memoirs of a Positivist (London, 1924), pp. 68-70; Tom Barclay, Memoirs and Medleys. The Autobiography of a Bottlewasher (Leicester, 1934), p. 48—but they helped put up the circulation to an unprecedented 10,000 a week.
8 Secular Review, 16 Nov. 1878, pp. 313-14 [hereafter SR].
9 Disraeli, Benjamin, Coningsby or, the New Generation, Everyman edn (London, 1911), ch. 25, pp. 208–9.Google Scholar
10 SR, 23 Nov. 1878, pp. 328-9.
11 Arnstein, pp. 57-8.
12 Among the other alternative dates used in the Republican in 1822 were: ‘1822, of the Carpenter’s Wife’s Son alias Ghost begotten God’; ‘1822 of the Christian Mythology’; ‘Year 1822 of the Christian Delusion’; and ‘Dec. 1, 1822, of Jehovah, jun.’
13 Even this view was to change among some free-thinkers later in the century, as when F.J. Gould explained of the Bible in 1895, ‘Through it the wondrous and profound emotions of thejewish heart yet speak. From its pages there issue, not the accents of God, but the voices of a noble people’:’Who wrote Genesis?’ Watts’s Literary Guide, supplement, Jan. 1895, p. 4.
14 New Moral World, 18 Feb. 1843, p. 276. Another anti-hero who attracted him was Iago in Othello—Reasoner, 18 April 1849, p. 256.
15 SR, 16 Nov. 1878, pp. 313-14.
16 Arnstein, p. 57.
17 National Reformer, 13 May 1883, p. 364 [hereafter NR].
18 NR, 11 May 1884, p. 324.
19 F, 30 April 1882, p. 137.
20 See Foote, G. W. and Ball, W. P., The Bible Handbook for Freethinkers and Inquiring Christians (London, 1888).Google Scholar
21 Foote referred with approval to the stand taken by the Society of Freethinkers of Antwerp against the growing anti-Semitic movement—‘They object to religious prejudice being employed against any class or nation’—F, 16 Jan. 1887, p. 21.
22 F, 5 Sept. 1897, pp. 561-2.
23 F, 20 Nov. 1898, p. 737.
24 F, 22 July 1906, p. 449.
25 Cohen, Chapman, Almost an Autobiography. The Confessions of a Freethinker (London, 1940).Google Scholar