after. He was buried in Ipsden churchyard, Oxfordshire, close to the family home. The Martyrdom Of Man (1872) The Martyrdom of Man (1872)—- whose summary line reads "From Nebula to Nation"—- is a secular, "universal" history of the Western world. Structurally, it is divided into four "chapters" of approximately 150 pages each: the first chapter, "War", discusses the imprisonment of men's bodies, the second, "Religion", that of their minds, the third, "Liberty", is the closest to a conventional European political and intellectual history, and the fourth, "Intellect", which discusses the cosmogony characteristic of a "universal history". Secularism According to one historian, the book became a kind of "substitute bible for secularists" in which Reade attempts to trace the development of Western civilisation in terms analogous to those used in the natural sciences. He uses it to advance the philosophy of political liberalism and social Darwinism. The final section of the book provoked enormous controversy due to Reade's "outspoken attack on Christian dogma" and the book was condemned by several magazines. In 1872 William Gladstone, the British Prime Minister, denounced The Martyrdom of Man as one of several "irreligious works" (the others included work by Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and David Friedrich Strauss). Reade was not an atheist, as some of his critics maintained; he had a "presumptive belief in a Creator, but one ineffable and unapproachable, far beyond the grasp of the human intellect or the reach of petty human prayers". He was a social Darwinist who believed in the survival of the fittest and wanted to create a new civilisation, contending that "while war, slavery, and religion had once been necessary, they would not always be so; in the future only science could guarantee human progress". Nevertheless, the book "drew attention to the immense tale of suffering and waste involved in the theory of evolution". Reception and influence V. S. Pritchett lauded The Martyrdom of Man as "the one, the outstanding, dramatic, imaginative historical picture of life, to be inspired by Victorian science". Since The Martyrdom of Man had, by Victorian standards, a relatively sympathetic account of African history, it was approvingly cited by W. E. B. Du Bois in his books The Negro (1915) and The World and Africa (1947). Cecil Rhodes, an English-born South African politician and businessman, said that the book "made me what I am". Other admirers of The Martyrdom of Man included H. G.