On Thursday, the debate was resumed by Mr. Newdegate, in
a speech which was a variation on the well-known song, "Pity the sorrows of a poor old man r indeed, a threnody on his
hard fate, in being worsted, by Lord Coleridge's judgment, on the question between him and Mr. Bradlaugh. Then the most remarkable speech of the evening was made by the Solicitor-General,--a speech calm, clear, vigorous, in which he exposed Lord Randolph Churchill's blunder in relation to the construction of a repealed statute, of which he had treated the preamble as the operative part, and which, being directed solely against persons converted from Trinitarianism, he had treated as if it applied to Atheists. The Solicitor-General ex- pressed his profound conviction that to insist., as at the time of the relief of the Jewish disabilities, on the omission of the words "on the true faith of a Christian" as an abandonment of the national recognition of Christianity, was infinitely more plausible than to insist now on the admissibility of affirmation as a rejection of God, and concluded a very remarkable speech by a strong plea for the admission into Parliament of men who have already been relieved from their conscientious difficulties in Courts of Justice.
