23 April 1880 Mr. Bradlaugh - Cumberland and Westmorland Newspaper Transcriptions

23 April 1880 Mr. Bradlaugh

The Vicar of Northampton, the Rev. R. B. HULL, was announced to attend the
annual meeting of the Northamptonshire Band of Hope Union held on Thursday.

The rev. gentleman did not attend, and in a letter explaining his absence,
said; “I am reminded by a note which I have received that I had promised to
take part in the Band of Hope Union meeting. I am very sorry not to fulfil an
engagement, but I feel now that I cannot possibly attend the meeting. I have
always desired to co-operate heartily with Nonconformists in every possible
way, and have hitherto found no difficulty in doing so. But the case is now
entirely altered.

Now that the Nonconformists of this town have declared that they put
politics before religion in choosing such a man as Mr. BRADLAUGH as their
representative, I feel it impossible to join with them any longer. To ally myself with
those who have returned Mr. BRADLAUGH would, in my eyes, be to make myself a
partaker in the insult they have thereby offered to Almighty God.

I write this in no spirit of bitterness, but in all sorrow that our common
Christianity should have been so disgraced, and that Nonconformity should have
come down from the high religious position it once occupied and have identifi
ed itself with atheism, and worse than atheism.”