The Prime Minister made an effort to narrow the issue to the simple judicial question of whether a duly elected member could be prevented by the House from fulfilling his statutory obligations and he proposed his Select Committee. The debate which followed was long, serious, and savage. Two views, both held with intensity, prevailed about the man: first, that he was a blatant contumacious atheist who made a living by blasphemy, republicanism, and indecent literature, and sought in Parliamentary honours a fresh advertisement for his hateful trade; and, secondly, that he was a martyr gone wrong, whose zeal and convictions--honest, albeit pernicious--had caused him to suffer in private prospects and public life. The unfavourable view predominated in the House and was adopted with vehemence by the Conservative party. There was a third view--that the House of Commons was no judge of such matters, that it had received no evidence but common report, and even so had no business to exclude members because of their opinions. But such arguments, although urged by orators like Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright, found little acceptance. Extracts were read from ‘The Impeachment of the House of Brunswick’ and ‘The Fruits of Philosophy.’ Mr. Bradlaugh’s declaration that an oath was to him an idle and meaningless ceremony was repeated over and over again. Was the House to connive at an act of blasphemy? Mr. Gibson from the Front Opposition Bench, taking the Bible in his hands from the table on which it lay, read out impressively the solemn words which were to be mockingly invoked. Mr. F. H. O’Donnell, a militant Irish Catholic, spoke in unmeasured abhorrence of the Bradlaugh doctrines, which he said would degrade human love and human wedlock to something lower than union of beast with beast. The speech of Mr. Walter of the Times, which, although favouring the appointment of a Select Committee, declared that Mr. Bradlaugh could not be permitted to go through the form of taking the oath, was regarded as representing an important element of moderate Liberal opinion.