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In uncharacteristically bold discussions after dinner Darwin asked his guests "Why do you call yourselves Atheists?", saying that he preferred the word "Agnostic". Aveling replied that "Agnostic was but Atheist writ respectable, and Atheist was only Agnostic writ aggressive". Darwin responded "Why should you be so aggressive?". Freethought is "all very well" for the educated, he argued, but are ordinary people "ripe for it?" Aveling retorted what if "the revolutionary truths of Natural and Sexual Selection" had been confined to the "judicious few" and Darwin had delayed publication of the Origin, where would the world be? Surely "his own illustrious example" encouraged freethinkers to proclaim truth "abroad from the house-tops". Darwin agreed that Christianity was "not supported by the evidence", but he had reached this conclusion only slowly: "I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age."

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