The debate remained picturesque to the close. Lord Randolph Churchill, who has within the present year proved afresh his capacity to create a Parliamentary sensation, protested that "if the words 'so help me God' were held to be a mere superstitious invocation, the idea or the faith which had for centuries animated the House of Commons that its proceedings were under the guidance of Providence would lose its force, and would very soon have to be abandoned altogether." The better to exemplify the energy of the divine supervision, the noble lord, after quoting a somewhat strong passage from Bradlaugh's "Impeachment of the House of Brunswick," threw the pamphlet violently on the floor of the House, in parody of Burke's performance with the daggers. Baron de Worms hazarded the proposition that "this was an irreligious, not a religious question." The late Mr Thorold Rogers, an economist whose incapacity for logical thought led to his not unsuccessful cultivation of the department of historical detail, made a foolish and offensive speech on the Liberal side, setting out with a statement of his sense of intellectual superiority to Bradlaugh. "In his opinion, a person who recognised no law beyond that of his own mind, and such scanty rules as he thought fit to lay for his own guidance, very much weakened his own character and lessened the value of his own life and acts." Further, Mr Rogers had over and over again found "in the course of the study of history" that Atheists were Conservatives; and he cited in proof the names of Hobbes, a Theist; Hume, who till the latter part of his life was an emphatic Deist; and Gibbon, who was one till his death. "He knew something of the political views of educated sceptics; and when this unhappy gentleman became a little better educated it would undoubtedly be found that he was migrating towards the opposite benches." After other remarks to similar effect, Mr Rogers provoked even the protest of the much-tolerating Speaker by charging the Tories with being indisposed to "act as generously as they did in their sports, and to give a little law even to vermin." For this felicitous figure Mr Rogers made a stumbling apology. On this being privately repeated, Bradlaugh, with his usual magnanimity, later forgave the speech as a whole. Where a professed Radical could be thus insolent, on the score of his sense of superiority to opinions which he was incapable of discussing, the language of the customary Tory may readily be imagined. The revelations of ardent piety made by some eminent capitalists and company-promoters were unexpectedly gratifying to the religious feelings of the nation; and the unrelieved malignity of the personal allusions of these and other Christians to a man precluded from turning unto them there and then the other cheek, proved the injustice of the charge that this is an age of lukewarm religious convictions.