Huxley and Bradlaugh did not constitute one negative creed
all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to Bradlaugh
The names mark a range of opposition rather than a single agreed philosophy. In ‘Agnosticism’ (first published 1889; inspected in the Clark University transcription of Collected Essays V), Huxley disclaims speaking for an agnostic sect. He makes agnosticism a discipline of proportioning certainty to demonstrable grounds, whose results differ with personal knowledge and the state of science. Disagreement among investigators is therefore compatible with his stated method; rejecting ecclesiastical authority does not entail a common positive doctrine. Huxley, pp. 210–211, 245–247.
Bradlaugh gives a different emphasis in his reply to the Bishop of Peterborough in the Norwich controversy of 1871, inspected in Gutenberg’s transcription of the Austin & Co. edition dated editorially [1873]. He distinguishes an undefined God, about which affirmation and denial lack a clear object, from particular revealed deities, which he denies. His atheism is thus neither simply a universal assertion that no God exists nor merely a suspension of judgment. Later in the exchange he insists that a sceptic’s ignorance cannot establish a believer’s knowledge. Bradlaugh, second reply, p. 35; third reply, p. 56.
These distinctions qualify the force of ‘self-contradiction.’ One critic’s charge and another critic’s opposite charge do not by themselves make either inconsistent. They may disagree about the good or address different Christian practices. Chesterton’s report explains what made Christianity newly puzzling to him; it has not yet demonstrated a contradiction within an identifiable joint argument. This paragraph supplies no titles connecting either man individually to its geometrical caricatures. The sources cited here therefore illuminate the named positions without being established as the particular writings Chesterton remembered.
Sources
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