'You tell us', a Parliamentary Committee once said to a clergyman, 'that ...

'You tell us', a Parliamentary Committee once said to a clergyman, 'that the railway navvies are mostly infidels.

Would you say that they are also socialists?' In practice, yes; because though most of them appear to have partners, few of them are really married.' The more intelligent workmen professed a belated rationalism,' nourished on the writings of Tom Paine, with which often went, for philosophy, a wondrous addiction to the phrenology of Alan Combe.' The older sects meant little to the working classes.

The Wesleyans, whose services in humanizing the masses were handsomely recognized by authority, on principle held aloof from political contests; and Chartism, which disgusted fair-minded men by the violence of its invective, terrified a still larger class by its supposed designs, not only on movable property, but on religion and the family. Yet there was much silent sympathy with the Chartists as men; if the new rich had been their only enemies, many young gentlemen would have been glad to strike a blow for the old poor.

Young England was a sincere if boyish gesture of goodwill, and to play King Bryan to somebody else's Wat Tyler has always been a Tory fancy. The term Secularism was invented by Holyoalte and first appears in his paper, The Reasoner, 1846. The badge of the Secularist was the defiance of Sabbatarian restrictions.