The Bridge of History over the Gulf of Time

The book collects the substance of the lectures Cooper delivered around Britain after his return to Christianity — pitched at the mechanics' institutes and lecture halls where he had made his name as an unbeliever, and written in the direct platform manner of a man used to hecklers.

The argument is historical rather than philosophical: that the chain of evidence for the Christian facts runs back unbroken, that the New Testament documents are early and can be corroborated, and that the received text could in large part be reconstructed from quotation alone. He is fond of concrete illustrations of that last point, and repeats the anecdote of the challenge put to Lord Hales about whether the New Testament could be recovered from the writings of the second- and third-century fathers.

Its interest now is as much biographical as evidential. This is what a Victorian secularist found answerable in his own former position, argued for exactly the audience he had once persuaded the other way.

Thomas Cooper (1805–1892) was born in Leicester, apprenticed to a shoemaker, and educated himself to a formidable level — learning Latin, Greek and Hebrew while working. He became a schoolmaster, a journalist and then a leader of the Leicester Chartists, and was imprisoned for two years in 1843 for his part in the disturbances, writing the long poem The Purgatory of Suicides in Stafford gaol.

He spent the following decade as a lecturer on secularist and freethought platforms before his return to Christianity in 1856, after which he lectured on Christian evidences for over thirty years. His autobiography of 1872 remains the better-known book; this is the argument that occupied his second career.