It was noticeable that all of these insults were uttered in Bradlaugh's absence, or in periodicals where he was allowed no reply. From the first he had been refused the right of reply in the _Nineteenth Century_. Men did not now venture to attack him in the House; but they were bold when among their constituents, especially in the rural districts. On his own part he was scrupulous to give no just cause for offence. One journalist recklessly represented him as having once obtruded himself on the ceremony of prayers in the House, when in point of fact he had been accidentally shut in, and had remained motionless where he stood. We have seen how he besought all of his freethinking followers to beware of seeming to presume on the vote in his favour. During the autumn of 1880 there was much discussion of the question of the Burials Bill, a test which served to show the amount of good-will subsisting between bodies of citizens professing belief in the same God and the same sacred books. Dissenters were fit to swear and sit in the House of Commons, but from the Church point of view were not fit to be buried "on their own recognisances," so to speak, in the public churchyard. The Tories in their traditional fashion opposed all concession, arguing that if dissenters were allowed to hold their own services, Atheists and heathens would follow. One Conservative member, named St Aubyn, pictured Atheists holding "indecent orgies over the bodies of the dead." Considering that drunkenness at funerals had been a reproach to Christendom for centuries; that it was common in Presbyterian Scotland within the century; and that Irish wakes are still customary, the suggestion may serve to measure the "honour and conscience" of the speaker, who further signalised himself by admitting, as a lawyer, that Bradlaugh had a legal right to sit in the House, while he confessedly opposed his taking his seat. In view of the general state of the Christian mind, Bradlaugh abstained from speaking on the subject in the House, and the National Secular Society decided to present no petitions in support of the Bill, lest they should thereby injure its chances. They had their thanks in a speech from Mr Osborne Morgan, who asked in Wales whether it was "reasonable to keep four millions of Nonconformists knocking at the churchyard gate for years because a handful of Secularists wanted to enter with them?" Any suggestion, however indirect and unobtrusive, that Secularists were entitled to the rights of other citizens, was sure in those days to elicit some display of animosity from the majority of those who call their creed a religion of love. Upright and scrupulous Nonconformists there were in the House, such men as Richards and Illingworth, who were faithful to the principle of equal liberty, and sought to carry it out; but the feeling that Secularists were as much of a nuisance dead as alive was the prevailing one.