a rudimentary cleanliness among the nobility, and from
them it would work down to the people, if the priests
could be kept quiet. This would undermine the
Church. I mean would be a step toward that. Next,
education -- next, freedom -- and then she would begin
to crumble. It being my conviction that any Estab-
lished Church is an established crime, an established
slave-pen, I had no scruples, but was willing to assail
it in any way or with any weapon that promised to
hurt it. Why, in my own former day -- in remote
centuries not yet stirring in the womb of time -- there
were old Englishmen who imagined that they had been
born in a free country: a "free" country with the
Corporation Act and the Test still in force in it --
timbers propped against men's liberties and dishonored