"There boldly, defiantly, recklessly--with the air of the dreadnought bravo or the Alpine bandit--stood the creator's work [elsewhere styled 'clayformed ingrate'] toiling, sweating, labouring strenuously, to heap slander upon his creator, and to convert into odious lies the book by which that creator has made himself known to the world!... Need we go further to express our more than disgust--our horror--at the fact of a young and accomplished man standing forth in crowded halls, and, while the beauteous moon marches aloft in the vast and indefinable firmament, and the myriad of silvery stars shoot their refulgent rays upon the desecrated lecture-room, actually telling the people that no God lives! no Supreme hand fretted the brave o'erhanging firmament with golden fire--no Jehovah made the wide carpet of fair nature bespangled with laughing flowers--no God made roaring seas and mighty rivers--no God revealed the Bible--no God made man!" One really needs to draw breath after all that: the lecture-room lighted by star rays, the firmament fretted with golden fire, the laughing flowers and roaring seas, must surely have carried conviction. The _Doncaster Chronicle_, if more prosaic, is not the less hostile. Its report thus describes the lecturer:-- "He is a tall, beardless, whiskerless young man, with a pale face, and has rather a harmless and prepossessing appearance"--[compare the _Herald's_ 'Alpine bandit!']--"certainly not the fierce individual we had previously imagined him to be from the elements of destruction indicated in his name--'the image breaker!' He is a person possessing great fluency of speech, of ready wit, and the declamatory style of his oratory is well calculated to excite and carry away a popular audience." And the _Chronicle_, in a vain endeavour to outvie its colleague in choice epithets, winds up by styling the arguments of Atheists as "the miserable sophistry of these 'filthy dreamers,'" the delicate wording of which phrase would be hard for even a "coarse" Atheist to match, and urges that "for the sake of the youth of our town, the municipal authorities will not again lend the Guildhall for such an object." In Sheffield Mr Bradlaugh was rapidly growing in popularity; lecturing there again immediately after his Doncaster lecture, he had an audience of 2000 persons to hear his address on "Has Man a Soul?"