Excerpt from Charles Bradlaugh At the age of fourteen, too poor to buy the book, he had Oopied out for himself parts of Emerson's lecture on self-reliance. Doubtless they included the sentence: Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. His did, till his dying day; and he was soon to begin to live up to the great monition. His father, in those days, never went to church, but had no anti-religious views, and duly sent his children to Sunday school, already the well-established provision for relieving English parents of their religious responsibilities and securing domestic quiet during some part of the day of rest. The boy Charles was a diligent and promising pupil, and at the, age of fifteen had been promoted to the status of Sunday school teacher, in accordance with the inexpensive educational principle introduced by Joseph Lancaster in 1798, whereby pupils became teaching monitors as soon as they knew their rudiments. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.