Six weeks before her death, Rose gave a copy of a speech, "In Defense of Atheism," to the London Freethinker. An Atheist to the last, Rose said there was nothing in it to alter.

Some of the better-known Fabians include atheist-turned Theosophist Annie Besant, the virulently anti-Christian dramatist George Bernard Shaw, the atheist novelist H.G. Wells, and Rupert Brooke, the Agnostic poet.

The Dictionary of American Biography admits of Barton that "she ... was never a Church member."

Crisp once quipped, "a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?'"

What enraged the clerics of Dickens' day was not capitalist excess, but that Dickens took Christ out of Christmas. Scrooge is shamed into changing his narrow, grasping, capitalist ways by being shown for the first time their human cost.

It is characteristic of the teaching of European history that it assumes the general populace acquiesced in all the ideas of a church that diverged radically from the organization founded under the original gospels.

"All Christendom professes to receive the Bible as the word of God, and what does it avail?"