This, as you truly say, is the age of Atheism--both practical and professional. But it is not only Bradlaugh and Mrs. ---- who distinguish it as such--multitudes of most worthy and respectable people (in their own estimation) are classifiable under this category. Indeed all worldly people whose religion consists in saving appearances, all self-interested folk whose lives are passed in struggles with their neighbour for their own advantage--all such as wear down heart and mind and even physical well-being in the feverish ambition to pile up riches, not knowing who shall gather them or purely for the renown of possessing them. All ritualists who think they get to heaven by peculiar haberdashery, and intoning the prayers, which makes a farce of them by depriving them of articulate meaning. All believers in the vicarious atonement of faith alone, which creed signifies that all _has been done_ instead of all has _to be done_ for them. All who hurry to conventicles on Sunday with gilt-edged prayer-books, and begin on Monday morning to slander, ill-treat, or cheat their neighbours. In short all that excludes the spiritual from _this_ life--which generally indicates unbelief in any other and virtually denies the _necessity_, and therefore the existence, of a Divine Governor. All Professors ---- and ---- in Physical science, all Herbert Spencers, etc. in metaphysical--who arrive by different courses at the same conclusion, viz. that God is _unknowable_ [_sic_] and that therefore they need not take the trouble to know Him. All this is but Atheism virtual and avowed. And materialism he considered little better than rank Atheism.