Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Popular Attacks on Christianity
Every Sunday, when other devout Christians are quite otherwise engaged, quietly and peacefully wor shipping in church, I make my way past scores of churches, and busy cinematograph palaces, and through streams of festive holiday-makers to some park. There, within sound of many church bells, and within sight of many church steeples, but beyond the horizon and outside the field of attention of the Church, I find about a dozen portable platforms each of which is occupied by a popular lecturer and is surrounded by a crowd. There are probably three Atheist meetings being conducted simultaneously, and only one Christian Evidence platform (which belongs to the Christian Evidence Society, or to one of its active branches, such as the North London Christian Evidence League). The other platforms represent various popular causes, most of which are keen rivals to Christianity, and some of which are violently hostile to all religion. There are, however, evangelistic meetings of some kind in many parks and in other open spaces, but the religious people who support such meetings and who form the bulk of the audiences, become exhausted in a third, or even in one-sixth of the time that the average Atheist or Christian evidence meeting lasts, and during which it retains the whole attention of the people.
These parks are essentially the strongholds of the enemies of all religion, the happy hunting grounds of Atheists, Materialists, and Determinists. The lecturing, the arguing, the questioning, etc., goes on (with but short intervals for meals - which are, however, some times dispensed with), all the morning, all the after noon, and all the evening. With the exception of the short intervals for meals, the vast crowds of people stay there the entire day, and many ignore meal times, and seem to dispense with lunch and tea. These people are there for fresh air, for instruction, and for amusement. Some prefer instruction to amusement, others prefer amusement to instruction, and both kinds of listeners mean by instruction dogmatic statements which may not or may be true, and which consist for the most part of attacks upon current religious beliefs, or upon what are erroneously regarded as being current religious beliefs.
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