CHAPTER XXII.
PROTESTANT BALLADS.
Among my many fly-leaves, scattered by thousands from time to time in handbills or in newspapers all over the world, those in which I have praised Protestantism and denounced the dishonesty of our ecclesiastic traitors have earned me the highest meed both of glory and shame from partisan opponents.

Ever since in my boyhood, under the ministerial teaching of my rector, the celebrated Hugh M'Neile, at Albury for many years, I closed with the Evangelical religion of the good old Low Church type, I have by my life and writings excited against me the theological hatred of High Church, and Broad Church, and No Church, and especially of the Romanizers amongst our Established clergy.

Sundry religious newspapers and other periodicals, whose names I will not blazon by recording, have systematically attacked and slandered me from early manhood to this hour, and have diligently kept up my notoriety or fame (it was stupid enough of them from their point of view) by quips and cranks, as well as by more serious onslaughts, about which I am very pachydermatous, albeit there are pasted down in my archive-books all the paragraphs that have reached me.

But, even as in hydraulics, the harder you screw the greater the force, so with my combative nature, the more I am attacked the more obstinately I resist.

Hence the multitude and variety of my polemical lucubrations,--mostly of a fragmentary character as Sibylline leaves: some, however, appear in my "Ballads and Poems" (among them a famous "Down with foreign priestcraft," circulated by thousands in the Midlands by an unknown enthusiast),--and Ridgeway of Piccadilly has published in pamphlet form my "Fifty Protestant Ballads and Directorium," which originally appeared in the _Daily News_, and _The Rock_: I have certainly written as many more, and among these one which I will here reproduce as now very scarce, and lately of some national importance: seeing that it was sent by my friend Admiral Bedford Pim to every member of the two Houses of Legislature on the Bradlaugh occasion, and was stated to have turned the tide of battle in that celebrated case.
_"So Help Me, God!"_ "'So help me, God!' my heart at every turn Of life's wide wilderness implores Thee still To give all good, to rescue from all ill, And grant me grace Thy presence to discern.
"'So help me, God!' I would not move a yard Without my hand in Thine to be my guide, Thy love to bless, Thy bounty to provide, Thy fostering wing spread over me to guard.
"'So help me, God!' the motto of my life, In every varied phase of chance and change, So that nought happens here of sad or strange But 'peace' is written on each frown of strife.
"For Thou dost help the man that honoureth Thee! Ay, and Thy Christian-Israel of this land That hitherto hath recognised Thy hand, How blest above the nations still are we! "Yet now our Senate schemes to spurn aside (On false pretence of liberal brotherhood) The Heavenly Father of our earthly good, Because one atheist hath his God denied! "What, shall this wrong be done?
Must all of us Groan under coming judgment for the sin Of welcoming avowed blasphemers in To vote with rulers who misgovern thus?
"So help us, God! it shall not: England's might Stands in religion practised and profest; For so alone by blessing is she blest, Christian and Protestant in life and light." To gratify an eminent friend who wished not to exclude Jews and Mahometans from an open profession of godliness as they viewed the question, I altered, in subsequent reprints, the last line, "Christian and Protestant in life and light," to "Loving and fearing God in faith and light:" though personally my sturdy Orangeism inclined to the original.