Once in a long while a gross circumstantial lie would move him to strike with the handle of the dog-whip, so to speak. A case of the kind is set forth in his tract entitled "Lying for the Glory of God: a Letter to the Rev. Canon Fergie, B.D., Vicar of Ince, near Wigan." This dealt with one of the idiotic anecdotes by which the truth of Christianity and the wickedness of Atheism are proved for so many people--anecdotes of which the absurdity and the untruth seem equally apparent, but which find instant credence with thousands of pious persons. Such an anecdote is the "watch story" in its complete form, in which the blasphemer is struck dead, a detail which has to be regretfully withheld from the narrative when it is applied to living sceptics. Such are the endless "infidel deathbed" stories, which still do duty in religious tracts, among them being statements concerning the deaths of Voltaire and Paine, which have been a hundred times circumstantially refuted. Such is the venerable anecdote of the nurse who would never again attend an infidel's deathbed--a story which is told with religious impartiality of Rousseau, Voltaire, Paine, and Hume, and will doubtless be told in due course of Bradlaugh. In recent Christian propaganda, the growing humanity of the age is seen in a disposition to convert the atheist rather than to send him to hell shrieking. But all these anecdotes alike have one quality in common; they are rigorously untrue, though they are never told in the same way by two Christians running. One sample story of seventeen (more or less) "leading Secularists," of whom fourteen came to bad ends, after signing a blasphemous covenant with blood for ink, does not on investigation yield even a grain of fact. In another narrative, sixteen "leaders" are represented as having all re-embraced Christianity. Of the sixteen, over a dozen are unknown to Secularism, and one known convert had been reconverted to Freethought. It was partly the lawyer in Bradlaugh that made him treat these anecdotes with seriousness and severity, finding the lie circumstantial some degrees worse than the lie conventional or sophistical. He specially detested downright fabrication of facts. But he also had a chivalrous loathing of the tactic which stabbed a doctrine in the back instead of meeting it in face; and for his own part he never used the means he might to assail religion through the scandals of its daily record. He would not stoop to collect the stories of frightful "fidel" deathbeds, which surpass the contrary sort as much in force as in truth; and he never would collect in his journal the frequent stories of clerical misconduct which appear in the ordinary press, though all his life he was being libelled by clerics. He was indeed a dangerous enemy when provoked, but he had little vindictiveness. His interests were too broad, his relation to life too genial, to permit of his being satisfied with the triumphs of feud. He