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South Place Ethical Society
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�REFLEXIONS
ON THE
BLASPHEMY PROSECUTION.
A better
TO
THE HON. JUSTICE NORTH
A.
HINDU.
LONDON:
FREETHOUGIIT PUBLISHING COMPANY,
63,
FLEET
STREET, E.C.
1 883.
PRICE THREEPENCE
�LONDON:
PRINTBD BY ANNIE BE8ANT AND CHARLES BRADLAUGH,
63, FLEET STREET, E.C
�REFLEXIONS ON THE BLASPHEMY PROSECUTIONS.
To
THE
Sir,
Hon. JUSTICE NORTH,
Private communications from British subjects in
the Eastern portion of her Majesty’s dominions professing
the respective faiths of Brahmanism, Parseeism, Buddhism,
Confucianism, and Islamism have recently been received in
this country, denouncing in terms of uniformly intense
indignation the despotic and fanatical bias animating your
judicial procedure, from the beginning to the end of the
trials of the three men condemned to imprisonment on
the charge of “ blasphemy.” The incoherent definition of
the law on the subject expounded by you, and the totally
inadequate legal evidence on which you demanded from
the jury the conviction—especially of Mr. Foote—has
filled many of my friends in India, and several Indian
gentlemen at present studying law in England like myself,
with blank amazement. In refusing bail for the alleged
culprits after the discharge of the first jury, and angrily
interrupting the above-mentioned gentleman in his defence,
your zeal for Christian orthodoxy completely eclipsed the
judicial dispassionateness and impartiality Indians have been
accustomed to associate with the administration of law by
a modern English Judge. Unwittingly you exchanged the
functions of a dispenser of justice for those of a vindictive
prosecutor and a bigoted theological partisan. The travesty
of biblical narratives, conscientiously believed by the defen
dants, rightly or wrongly, to be fictitious, and morally as
well as intellectually mischievous, was openly regarded by
you as a service rendered to the Christian “ devil,” and
consequently on a level with a flagrant offence against
essential morality. In the pious homilies you uttered in
“ summing up ” and delivering sentence, you confounded
theological polemics with law, and most uncharitably
�4
Reflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
assumed that true morality was impossible apart from
Christian belief. In so doing you prostituted your position
to the level of a vulgar and superstitious “ drum ecclesi
astic,” ignorant of the primary elements of the science of
comparative religion.
Writing of the features of the trial purely on its merits,
I have no concern with the eesthetic aspect of the carica
ture of Christian doctrines which in your judgment seemed
to constitute the gravamen of the prosecution. I have no
personal knowledge of the defendants, nor of the writings and
pictorial representations attributed to them. But it may
fairly be stated, in passing, that as the creed you so piously
championed consigns the unfortunate victims of your reli
gious malediction to the fires of an eternal hell hereafter,
some more conspicuous exhibition of commiseration with
them under the circumstances would have redounded more
signally to your credit, both as a sincere orthodox believer
and as a humane man. The Christian God, who is repre
sented in the gospel narrative as welcoming back with
fatherly tenderness his prodigal son, could, I fear, hardly
view with complacency the relentless inhumanity in which
you, a professed Christian judge, displayed such eagerness to
inflict on those you could at most regard as theological
errants condign punishment, while denying them oppor
tunities for preparing their defence which you would have
readily conceded to seducers of women or fraudulent bank
rupts. To your vision the open ridicule of what was
honestly believed to be a mythological development is a
graver crime than theft or wife-beating. The impression
conveyed to the minds of my Indian friends by this notorious
trial—to say nothing of other cases in which we heretics
think we have lately been denied justice—is that vigilance
has become quite as imperative in this country to ensure
that judges shall not abuse the prerogatives with which they
are invested as to check wanton obstruction in Parliament.
Again, your contradictory exposition of the law of blas
phemy—as if you were striving to protect from legal risk
learned and scientific sceptics while venting ill-disguised
bitterness upon a rougher type of opponents to Christianity
-■-was extremely marked. At the first trial you defined
blasphemy as a denial of the existence of God or ridicule of
the Trinity. In this you agreed with Mr. Justice Stephen,
�Reflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
5
in his “ History of the Criminal Law of England,” that
“ blasphemy consists in the character of the matter published,
and not in the manner in which it is stated.” But at the
second trial you effected a sudden and clumsy change of
front — possibly endeavoring to place yourself more in
accord with the New Criminal Code introduced by the
present Government—and represented blasphemy to be “ any
contumelious reproach or profane scoffing against the Chris
tian religion or the Holy Scriptures, and any act exposing
the Holy Scriptures and the Christian religion to ridicule,
contempt, or derision.” The latter definition evidently im
plies that the mere attacking of the sacred books and
dogmas of Christianity with elaborate argument is not in
itself blasphemous, always provided the manner in which the
controversy is conducted is free from all tendency to ridicule.
When to these shifting and incongruous definitions of the
law is added the doubtful nature of the evidence on which
the men were convicted, and the barbarous treatment they
suffered by your direction between the two trials, there is
room for the suspicion that their conviction was on your
part a foregone conclusion.
Can there be any pretence to justice in the distinction
involved in your second definition between a blow dealt to
Christianity in a cultured volume published by Longmans or
Williams and Norgate, and the same act done through an
obscure penny sheet known chiefly to a limited section of
the artisan class ? In fact, if the damage done to the
fashionable creed is to be measured by the publicity given to
the hostile opinions advanced in these respective instances,
and by the extent to which educated minds are influenced
by these opinions, it must be obvious that the prosecution of
the authors and publishers of the more scholarly works is by
far the more urgent desideratum.
Do you require to be told that the learned professions and
the thoughtful among the mercantile and trading classes
who read the more costly sceptical treatises are honey
combed with doubts and, in many cases, confirmed objec
tions to the Christian faith ? If the highest Christian
authorities are to be believed, all sections of the community
in Great Britain are already, more or less, hopelessly sunk
in unbelief. Last year the Archbishop of York, at the
annual meeting of his diocese, told his clergy that “ the
�6
Reflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
battle before them now was not with sects and heresy, but
one waged for the very existence of Christianity itself” In
August last Cardinal Manning declared that only 2 per cent,
of the population of London and Berlin attended any church at
all. At the Glasgow Free Church Presbytery meeting of
30th March, 1882, it was stated that “ out of a population
of 700,000 in the city and suburbs, a census showed that
only 135,932, that is, 16^ per cent., attended any place of wor
ship
and I have good reason to believe that even this
estimate is in excess of the reality. One reverend speaker
at the same meeting remarked that “ a great proportion of
the working classes in particular had no practical connexion
with the Church—not only the intemperate and depraved,
but the sober, industrious, and respectable among them.
Though fulfilling in a sort of commendable way very many
duties connected with their positions in life, they were yet un
connected with the Church of Christ.” In 1878 the Home
Mission of the same church reported that “ all the agricul
tural laborers of Scotland live in a state of heathenism.”
Another religious body in 1877 gravely asserted that “ there
were not a dozen Christians in Skye, though the population of
that island is 24,000 ! ” In the “ Journals ” of the late Dr.
Norman MacLeod we have answers to religious questions ad
dressed by him to intending participants in the membership of
his own church, illustrating the amazing ignorance prevail
ing among people otherwise exemplary, even in educated
Scotland, respecting the most elementary Biblical stories.
“ Who led the children of Israel out of Egypt ? Eve. Who
was Eve? The mother of God. What was done with
Christ’s dead body ? Laid in a manger. What did Christ
do for sinners? Gave his son. Any wonderful works
Christ did? Made the world in six days. Any others?
Buried Martha, Mary and Lazarus. What became of them
afterwards ? Angels took them to Abraham’s bosom.
What had Christ to do with that ? He took Abraham.
Who was Christ ? The Holy Spirit. Are you a sinner ?
No.” I venture to assert that there are multitudes of at
tendants upon Christian ordinances throughout England and
Europe whose acquaintance with the essentials of this faith,
if tested by similar methods, would be found not less
absurdly deficient. Yet to guard from ridicule tales and
dogmas which one large, morally-conducted section of the
�Reflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
7
community regard with absolute indifference, and another
equally large but more cultivated section regard with dis
belief, based on prolonged and serious investigation, the law
is set in motion, a judge forgets that mental equilibrium
traditionally characteristic of the Bench, and men whose
lives are reputed to be morally blameless are visited with the
loss of personal liberty!
On the other hand, when we pass into the realms of
literature and science, deliberate repudiation of the historical
and religious authority of both the Old and New Testaments
is not the exception, but the rule. The following eloquent lan
guage of Professor Huxley is endorsed by tens of thousands
of the most cultivated and eminent public writers throughout
Europe and America, despite the antagonism of the passage
with your recent decision. “ Everywhere priests have broken
the spirit of wisdom, and tried to stop human progress by
quotations from their Bibles or books of their saints. In this
nineteenth century, as at the dawn of physical science, the
cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew is the incubus of
the philosopher, and the opprobrium of the orthodox. Who
shall number the patient and earnest seekers after truth from
the days of Galileo until now, whose lives have been em
bittered and their good name blasted by the mistaken zeal of
bibliolators ? Who shall count the host of weaker men,
whose sense of truth has been destroyed in the effort to
harmonise impossibilities; whose lives have been wasted in
the attempt to force the generous new wine of science into
the old bottles of Judaism, compelled by the outcry of the
same strong party ? It is true that if philosophers have
suffered their cause has been amply avenged. Extinguished
theologies lie about the cradle of every science, as the
strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history re
cords that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly
opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists,
bleeding and crushed if not annihilated, scotched if not slain.
But orthodoxy learns not, neither can it forget, and though
at present bewildered and afraid to move, it is as willing as
ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the
beginning and the end of sound science, and to visit with such
petty thunderbolts as its half-paralysed hands can hurl, those
who refuse to degrade nature to the level of primitive Judaism.”
Mr. John Morley, M.P., the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette,
�8
Reflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
in the revised edition of his work on Voltaire, has uttered
burning words on the same side which have lately been
quoted in a well-known weekly: “ There are times when it
may be very questionable whether, in the region of belief,
one with power and with fervid honesty ought to spare the
abominable city of the plain just because it happens to
shelter five righteous. . . . The partisans of a creed in whose
name more human blood has been violently shed than in any
other cause whatever, these, I say, can hardly find much ground
for serious reproach in a few score epigrams'' In praising
Voltaire’s protest against the popular creed, he refers to
“ its mean and fatuous and contradictory idea of an omnipotent
God, who gave us guilty hearts so as to have the right ofpunish
ing us, and planted in us a love of pleasure so as to torment vs
the more effectually by appalling ills that an eternal miracle
prevents from ever ending, who drowned the fathers in the
deluge and then died for the children, who exacts an account of
their ignorance from a hundred peoples whom he has himself
plunged helplessly into this ignorance." Defending the attacks
of Voltaire on organised Christianity, Mr. Morley (p. 236)
says: “ He saw only a besotted people led in chains by a
crafty priesthood: he heard only the unending repetition of
records that were fictitious, and dogmas that drew a curtain
of darkness over the understanding. Men spoke to him of
the mild beams of Christian charity, and where they pointed
he saw only the yellow glare of the stake; they talked of
the gentle solace of Christian faith, and he heard only the
shrieks of the thousands and tens of thousands whom faith
ful Christian persecutors had racked, strangled, gibbetted,
burnt, broken on the wheel. Through the steam of inno
cent blood which Christians for the honor of their belief
had spilt in every quarter of the known world, the blood of
Jews, Moors, Indians, and all the vast holocausts of hereti
cal sects and people in eastern and western Europe, he saw
only dismal tracts of intellectual darkness, and heard only
the humming of the doctors, as they served forth to congre
gations of poor men hungering for spiritual sustenance the
draff of theological superstition.”
The conviction is rapidly gaining ground among grave and
independent inquirers that so-called historic religions are just
as legitimate a subject of critical examination, and, if mythi
cal, of banter, as the comparative merits of Tory and Liberal
�Reflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
9
politics. In the political sphere it is happily no longer
viewed as incompatible with good government and social
order to assail opinions that are deemed false and unjust by
individuals or parties in the State, and to employ unsparing
invective and ridicule when such weapons are considered
expedient, in order to discredit these opinions. A large and
growing army of scholars, after bestowing many years of
sincere study on the alleged facts and doctrines of Judaism
and Christianity, have been driven by the irresistible force
of evidence to renounce both these systems, as resting on
superstitious legends and contradictory statements which it
is impossible to reconcile with verifiable history. It is the
conscientious belief of the same class of students, that the
practical results of Jewish and Christian faiths have been
the very reverse of conducive to the intellectual, moral, and
physical advancement of our fellow-subjects. If so, what
reasonable grounds have these religions or any others to
claim immunity from the “ fierce light” of free inquiry, and
if believed to be erroneous and injurious, why should they
be shielded from the shafts of sarcasm it is esteemed not
unlawful to direct against political and social theories and
organisations supposed to be obnoxious ? The late Pro
fessor de Morgan truly said, “ Belief is a state not an act of
the mind.” “ I shall believe has no existence,” he adds,
“ except in a grammar.” To prosecute and imprison men,
therefore, for convictions—the issue of study and reasoning
—and for caricaturing the religious notions of opponents
which they honestly and intelligently hold to be adverse to
the public good, is just as monstrous as it would be for the
strongest political party in the country to institute proceed
ings against an adverse political minority for employing
comic cartoons to expose what the latter should happen to
regard as untrue and pernicious. There no longer exists
any risk of losing one’s head in England for constitutional
opposition to monarchical institutions, even by the aid of
sarcastic cartoons and the advocacy of Republicanism. The
time is not far distant when equal freedom will be allowed
in striving to put down the established faith.
Indeed, ever since the dawn of history the representatives
of rival religions have fought their battles with ridicule and
jest as well as with fire and sword; and so far as the veil
separating historic from prehistoric times can be lifted in
�10
Reflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
the tablet inscriptions of India, Egypt, Assyria, and Europe,
there is good reason to believe that religious passions were
displayed by the Lingaites and the Yonites, with a similar
disregard of taste and humanity, in their solemn contentions
as to whether the male or female principle in nature was
the proper object of pious veneration. It is no longer
doubted by scholars that what imparted zest in the eyes of
the cultured Greek to the sneering gibes of Aristophanes
and the profane inuendoes of Euripides—pointed at con
temporary divinities—was that the philosophers of those
days had come to look upon the mythological and cere
monial structure around them, so jealously guarded by an
ignorant, cringing, and superstitious priesthood, as simply a
huge sham to be laughed down. Much the same feeling
was doubtless present in the mind of Cicero when he
wondered how two augurs could meet and keep their gravity,
considering the puerile notions they professed, and the in
anities of the Roman temple service, from which their living
was derived. Assuming—but only for the sake of argument
—the narrative of the prophet Elijah’s contest with the
priests of Baal on Mount Carmel to be genuine, could any
attack upon the religion of the latter appear more grossly
insulting or more blasphemous to them than the insinuation
that the cause of their prayers not being answered by the
Phoenician deity was that he might either be asleep or away
on a hunting expedition? Moreover, Jesus is reported in
the gospel story to have been actually charged with blas
phemy by the Jews of his day.
But although the ultra-Protestant party, with whom you
sympathise, had no scruple, in the heat of past controver
sies with Roman Catholics, about caricaturing the Pope, his
cardinals, and their doctrines, in pictures which could not
fail to be extremely provoking to conscientious adherents
of the Catholic faith, your own co-religionists have ever be
trayed a thin-skinned sensitiveness and an air of outraged
infallibility when the lex talionis has been applied by sceptics
in a similar fashion to themselves. When any of their
beliefs have been ridiculed by pictorial squibs they have
invariably taken the highest possible ground, and posed as
the privileged recipients of heaven’s secrets, and the possessors
of a supernatural key of interpretation, of which they claim
to have a chartered monopoly. Do you forget that the
�Reflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
11
establishment of Christianity is very largely indebted indeed
to the aid of ridicule and abuse which it applied to other
faiths ? Milman, in his book on “ Latin Christianity,” says
that religious pictures with a strong dash of both these
qualities in them were used alternately with bloody perse
cution in converting the Bulgarians. It is principally
by pictures of ideal “ Holy Families,” “ Crucifixions,”
“ Madonnas,” of the burial and resurrection and ascen
sion of Jesus, of the various alleged miraculous exhibitions
of his power in turning water into wine, conversing with
Moses and Elias on the Mount of Transfiguration, prevent
ing Peter from sinking, agonising in the garden of Geth
semane, etc., etc., that the adhesion of the priest-ridden and
the credulous has been gained to the Christian faith. I
venture to believe that in the dissemination of Christianity
the art of the painter and the sculptor has played quite as
powerful a part as the preacher’s tongue. It is the con
firmed persuasion of Agnostics, Comtists, Secularists, and
men of science in our day that all the Bible representations
of miracles are the creations of superstitious ages. If, then,
the inculcation of Christian beliefs is so widely due to the
influence of pictures, can there be anything intrinsically
wrong in answering and ridiculing pictures, or the teaching
these convey, believed to have no groundwork in nature and
authentic history, by pictures designed to expose a wild
delusion, by which the minds of millions are enchained in
darkness, and their lives rendered cheerless and unprofitable ?
I may here take the opportunity of stating, from personal
knowledge, that Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries,
in India and China, spend a considerable portion of the
time redeemed from their mutual denunciation of each
other’s churches, in flagrantly misrepresenting the true sig
nificance of the ancient religions they vainly seek to displace
by their own conflicting and repulsive dogmas.
I respectfully ask, as a subject of the Queen, and as a
native of that portion of Her Majesty’s Empire which is
immeasurably the most populous, if blasphemy laws, framed
in a benighted age, are to be revived in England for the
purpose of silencing a few poor men without social import
ance, who have presented ludicrous pictures of miracles at
tributed to the days of the Hebrew patriarchs, prophets and
kings, and to the lifetime of Jesus—miracles, the incredibility
�12
Reflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
of which is proclaimed no less distinctly, if in a style more
in accord with the canons of refined taste, by scholars and
men of science—is no protection to be afl'orded by British rule
in India and Ceylon to the feelings of Brahmins, Mahometans,
Parsees and Buddhists, which are outraged daily by the vulgar
onslaughts of half-educated Christian missionaries, who so far
from having the most elementary acquaintance with Eastern
faiths, do not in any competent manner even understand their
own ? The profound intimacy of many of the natives
in India and China, according to their several creeds, with
the Vedas, Zenda-Vesta, Tripitika, Taotseekeng, Lykeng
and the Sastras, and the earnest dependence the mass of
Eastern people place on these and other sacred books for
spiritual strength and guidance, render them peculiarly sen
sitive to what they hold to be the blasphemy of true religion
in the preaching of an upstart, intolerant, and persecuting
faith like Christianity—a faith, moreover, not only the
junior of some Indian systems by thousands of years—but
only indorsed, even nominally, by a small minority of the
inhabitants of the world. To give some idea of the light in
which educated natives in India view the faith that is
guarded by the penal enactments of the blasphemy laws in
this country, it may be mentioned that many Hindus have
for years openly defied Government influence, preached
against missionary teaching, and circulated broadcast pla
cards cautioning the people against Christianity. Here are
extracts from one of these mural prints : “ Leave these
fanatics .... they cannot answer a simple question seri
ously put to them in connexion with what they say; they
SENSELESSLY ABUSE YOU AND YOUR FAITHS without having
studied them at all; they are hirelings working against truth
and common sense, and against the dictates of conscience for
a paltry piece of earthly bread. ... You know well that
their harangues cannot stand discussion. Do not waste
time with impostors ; serve the God of the universe heartily;
He alone will save all who so serve Him.”
These words exhibit an attitude of the higher order of
native mind—becoming daily more conspicuous—towards
the religion which silences those who ridicule it in England
with imprisonment; and which is at the same time impu
dently obtruded upon cultivated Hindus under the patron
age of Church of England dignitaries and Nonconformist
�Reflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
13
missionary societies. If the long-suffering Brahmins were
to show their resentment by sending propagandists to
sneer down Christianity, through the press in Lon
don, in the ribald tone often adopted with impunity
by unlearned Christian advocates in the East towards
the older faiths, the hospitality of a gaol would be
promptly provided for them. The accustomed oppo
nents of Christianity in this land of social, political, and
religious anomalies, are mostly met with an imputation of
base motives or an ebullition of unreasoning and fanatical
sentiment. Sober and honorable argument, derived from
first-hand historic sources, Christians — apparently from
conscious weakness—as a rule, studiously avoid. But in
the name of even-handed justice, if there are to be blasphemy
laws so appropriately administered by judges of your own
calibre in England against foes of Christianity, why should
my fellow-countrymen in the East be denied laws to put
down Christianity which appears to them as blasphemously
repugnant as the grotesque representations of Bible tales in
the Freethinker can possibly be to English Christians ?
Are you aware that out of a total population of 1,474
millions on the globe considerably less than one-third are in
any sense whatever Christian? After 1700 years of pro
selytism by the pulpit, the missionary, the press, by whole
sale slaughter—as in the Crusades and the Thirty Years’
War—by imprisoning, thumbscrewing, choking, quartering,
drowning, and burning enormous holocausts of martyrs
throughout Europe for the sin of sincere heresy, this is the
entire external result. General Forlong, in his recent learned
work on the faiths of mankind,1 remarking on the religious
statistics referred to above, says : “ It especially behoves
the Protestant to be undogmatic and humble, for though
assisted largely both by the secular and spiritual arm, and
with all the most approved machinery of sectarial combina
tion and discipline, only some 71 millions out of the total
1,474 millions have even nominally joined his churches, and
from none is the falling away becoming more prominent,
and in none is half-heartedness more the rule than in the
best Protestant communities.” In presence of these incontro
vertible facts the enforcement of a blasphemy law—especially
1 “Rivers of Life,” etc. (Quaritch), vol. ii., p. 590.
�14
Reflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
in a country where not more than one-eighth of the adult popula
tion attend any place of worship, where the State Church is
virtually disowned by more than half the worshipping com
munity, and where a fervent religionist is often regarded by
the multitude as one to be treated, in common worldly
transactions, with suspicion, amounts to intolerable in
solence. But your bearing as an English judge repre
senting the Inquisition spirit of the dominant faith, and
partially usurping the functions of a Protestant pope,
in lecturing and condemning the editor, publisher, and
vendor of the Freethinker, becomes still more objectionable
when it is remembered that your judgment and sentence
de facto include 1,074 millions out of 1,474 millions of the
human race, since the estimated number of Christians of
all descriptions only amounts to 400 millions. By the
definition of the English law of blasphemy you consign, in
spirit, to prison in the persons of these culprits 550 millions
Buddhists, 240 millions Mahometans, 180 millions of Hin
dus, 2 millions Seiks, 8 millions Jews, and 94 millions of
other and nondescript faiths, who reject with scorn and
contempt the special Christian doctrines fenced round by
the blasphemy laws. Nay, the dimensions of your devout
audacity have not yet been adequately measured. At least
one-third of the 400 millions set down as Christians openly
or secretly repudiate orthodoxy, and these also are poten
tially included in your judicial excommunication and sentence
of imprisonment. Even the venerable Lord Shaftesbury—
himself an acknowledged stickler for Christian “ Evangelicism ”—shows a vastly more intelligent appreciation of the
teaching of religious statistics on this head than you seem
to do. When Lord Redesdale brought forward his Bill a
year ago for the imposition of a Theistic test in the Upper
House, the former peer frankly urged in opposition : “ A
law of this kind passed in our day would be in absolute and
unqualified discord with all the opinions, feelings, and
tendencies of men around us.” He added that “ those who
allowed the existence of a First Cause, but deny his inter
vention in the affairs of men, who admit no revelation of a
future state, or any system of rewards and punishments, may be
counted by myriads.” This is strikingly attested by an
examination of Max Muller’s estimate (1871—78) of the
world’s religions, corrected to date by General Forlong.
�Reflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
15
Against 648 millions, or 44 per cent, of the population of
the earth (including Christians, Islamis, Jews, etc.), who
believe in a personal god, a soul, and immortality, there are
826 millions, or 56 per cent, of the entire population of the
earth, who deny or doubt a future life and the existence of
a soul apart from matter. Among the latter unbelieving or
agnostic element there are many millions who have reached
the convictions to which they cling after prolonged, anxious,
and learned inquiry, and all such—branded by you as blas
phemers in posse or in esse—who hear of your judgment and
the pious harangue which accompanied it, must take your
words as a personal affront, in so far as these non-Christians
concur with the victims of your judicial bias in rejecting
Christianity as a historical illusion, a philosophical ana
chronism, and a misleading scheme of morals.
By your indiscreet zeal for the faith dominant in England
because established by law, you and your co-abettors of a
resentful orthodoxy have defeated the end ordinary pru
dence would have sought to attain by totally opposite
means. You have dragged into notoriety an obscure print,
the very existence of which was only known to an extremely
restricted circle, who had already been long alienated from
popular creeds and churches. The Freethinker was never
advertised, as learned sceptical works usually are, in the
great publishers’ lists, in the daily press, and in the cultured
weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies, sold at railway book
stalls and obtainable in public reading rooms. This illstarred prosecution, with which your name will be as imperishably associated as that of Jeffreys with the “ bloody
assize,” has done for the spread of the Freethinker precisely
what the malicious and unconstitutional persecution of Mr.
Bradlaugh by Mr. Newdegate, Sir Henry Tyler and other
morbid religionists in the House of Commons, has done for
the victimised junior member for Northampton, in increasing
his power as a teacher and his popularity as a leader among
the toiling millions of the land.
Again, the most deplorable aspect in the exposure of
Bible faith to scorn by the three defendants immediately in
question is not only the supposed discord between unsophisti
cated reason and many of the contents of the Christian
sacred books on the one hand, and the evidence in sup
port of the authenticity on the other, but it is the melan
�16
Reflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
choly and senseless inconsistencies in the creeds and prac
tices of Christians themselves.
In one of the opening “ sentences” of the Morning Ser
vice of the Church of England Prayer Book the clergyman
reads: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to
forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteous
ness.” But as the same Service proceeds reason is staggered
by the unexpected announcement that confession of sin is
not enough to secure forgiveness: “ Whosoever will be
saved before all things [i.e., notwithstanding above, beyond
and before repentance, confession, and the turning away
from evil ways] it is necessary that he hold the Catholic
faith, which faith except everyone do keep whole and un
defiled without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.” And what
is this faith ? The bewildered penitent must believe that
“ the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost
is God yet “ we are forbidden by the Catholic religion to
say there be three Gods or three Lords ” ! If these meta
physical propositions were found dissociated from religion
they would be looked upon by the bulk of sane men as
simply nonsense. Again, one of the articles informs
us that the true God is “ without body, parts, or
passions,” while the Church commands that Christ, who
was a man with “ body, parts, and passions,” is to be
worshipped as God. A passage in the Old Testament,
adopted by the Prayer Book, tells us that “ the Lord is a
man of war,” and in another place the same book declares
Him to be “ the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.”
Jesus is referred to in the New Testament as the son of
Joseph, and almost in the same breath is represented as owing
his physical existence solely to conception in the womb of
a virgin, “ by the power of the Holy Ghost.” How a spirit
could possibly be the parent of a human being, brought into
the world by the ordinary parturition of a pregnant woman,
however, remains totally incomprehensible. The prayer
perpetually ascends from Anglican priests : “ Give peace in
our time, O Lord.” Nevertheless, the Church is incorpo
rated with the State, and the state is engaged at intervals in
sanguinary encounters with foreign tribes and governments,
and is most frequently actuated by flagrant worldly ambition
in making war. But the flexible and accommodating piety of
the clergy and their credulous followers, who do not pause
�Reflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
17
to contemplate the iniquitous inconsistency thus practised, is
ever ready to petition the Christian deity, whenever war is
declared, to destroy and “confound” the foes of their
sovereign, whether these foes be Christians or Pagans. In
seasons of excessive drought, “ bishops and curates ” with a
preposterously selfish, ungrateful and unscientific disregard
of the unalterable laws of nature, implore God to interfere—
he can only do so by a miracle—and, at more than a risk of
the serious disturbance of natural forces, and of inconveni
ence to dwellers in other parts of the globe (which an answer
to prayer renders inevitable) pray that sufficient moisture
should fall to nourish the crops. A corresponding violation
of physical law is similarly demanded by the ecclesias
tical authorities when the watery element in the sky un
duly preponderates, and fair weather is asked for. The
same line of remark applies with equal appropriateness to
“ prayers for the sick.” These irrational proceedings might
be excusable in times before the principles of science were
understood. But for a body of instructed men to continue
so ludicrous an outrage on reason, looks very much, in these
days of popular scientific education, like the deliberate and
hypocritical perpetuation on their part, from interested
motives, of a childish delusion. The mummeries connected
with “ baptismal regeneration,” “ partaking of the body and
blood of Christ,” with the rites of “ Confirmation,” and the
“ Burial of the Dead,” are only fit to be relegated to the
same category of effete superstitions. The mystery-monger
ing forms gone through in “consecrating” bishops with
nolo episcopari on the lips of the candidates for office, and
the passionate hankering after palaces, princely incomes,
and episcopal dignities, in their hearts, constitute the most
revolting form of sacrilege and blasphemy that could well be
imagined. We are taught that God “ before the founda
tion of the world hath constantly decreed, by his counsel
secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those
whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to
bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation as vessels
made to honor.” At the same time, with transcendent theo
logical incongruity, the Christian preacher charges upon his
unbelieving hearers the entire responsibility for not comply
ing with the invitations proffered to them, to enter the
“ kingdom of God,” and to cultivate a spiritual and moral
�18
Reflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
life. The inference deducible from these contradictory
dogmas is, that God is either unable or unwilling to over
come the obstacles of salvation presented by the declared in
disposition of the human will. If he is unable, he obviously
cannot be omnipotent. If, on the contrary, he be omnipo
tent and is unwilling, he is chargeable with cruelty in not
devising suitable means to ensure the adoption by mankind
of the appointed course leading to eternal happiness. But
the injustice of the supreme being in permitting a single
member of the human family to perish, is rendered still
more apparent by the consideration that a complete “ atone
ment” has been actually made for the express purpose of
propitiating divine justice, and removing the moral barriers
said to be opposed, by the governmental character and rela
tions of the deity, to the deliverance of transgressors from
the penal consequences of sin. There is here involved, con
sequently, a further imputation on the divine perfections.
Although a vicarious substitute has been provided and
accepted for sinners of all time, a certain indispensable con
dition of mind is, nevertheless, required on their part. To
the attainment of this condition the vast majority seem
utterly unequal, and heavenly wisdom has strangely omitted
to make the necessary provision for supplying this lack of
moral power in those who die unsaved, to enable them to
take practical advantage of the sacrificial merits of the in
nocent victim—the second person of the godhead—who
underwent the full measure of suffering needed to expiate
their sins. I defy any reasonable person to ponder these
repellent doctrines without feeling contempt and disgust
for the tyrannical and capricious character in which they
exhibit the Almighty. For the honor of those very idea
lised attributes of justice, kindness, and truth, to which all
rightly constituted minds instinctively do homage, we are
bound to loathe and scout the portraiture of an immoral
God enforced by orthodox Christianity, and even the coarsest
caricatures are not to be despised, if by their aid reverence
for so odious a deity can be dislodged from people’s minds
and aversion inspired instead.
The highest accredited authority on Christian morals,
Jesus himself, forbids swearing under all circumstances
whatsoever: “ swear not at all.” Yet the clergy and ad
herents of the National Church are at the present moment
�Reflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
19
moving heaven and earth to obtain signatures to memorials
addressed to Parliament, begging that the un-Christian
method of swearing allegiance, by members preliminary to
taking their seats, shall be retained. In the fervor of
clerical zeal to enforce a religious test—for the sole purpose
of excluding a certain legally-elected representative who
happens to disbelieve in the unintelligible tenet of “ a per
sonal God,” but who in preferring affirmation to an oath is
more Christian than Christians themselves—they are madly
Aying in the face of the plainest Christian precepts, and jus
tifying their conduct in so doing as promoting the “ greater
glory of God ” 1
The three leading sections composing the Church and the
clergy profess, in public ceremonial, to be members of one
happy Christian family, whose motto is, according to the
prayer of their Master, “ forgive us our trespasses as we for
give them that trespass against us.” But if a Ritualist like
Mr. Green should trespass on “LowChurch” notions of the
rubrics, and multiply altar decorations, even though with
the avowed object of exalting the commonly acknowledged
founder of Christianity, the boasted charity and brotherly
love of that religion, loudly maintained in theory, is sum
marily set aside in practice, and the well-meaning trans
gressor is compelled to expiate his offence in the same abode
with felons and murderers. “ High,” “ Low,” and “ Broad”
pastors alike pray for spiritual guidance, to understand the
one revelation given in the Bible, and respectively believe
the solicited boon to be attainable. But no sooner do they
rise from their supplications than they appear to forget the
most elementary amenities of civilised life, and indulge in
bitter mutual objurgations against each other, as possessed
by deadly error. What shall we say of the congregations
which statedly worship in churches and chapels throughout
Christendom? Heaven forbid that those associated with
them who are thoughtful, generous, and true-hearted should
be ignored; but what are these bodies, as a rule, except
centres of bigotry, nests of scandal, hotbeds of envy, malice,
worldliness, and all uncharitableness? The history of
Christianity has been almost one unvarying recoi’d of
priestly ambition, division, jealousy, heartburning, and
strife, alternating with brutal cruelty. Christian sects have
largely degenerated in this country into boundary-lines of
�20
Reflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
social distinction. People of ancient family, and others of
the British Philistine type, who vulgarly aspire to the imitation of the external trappings of social greatness, conform
to popular religious appointments rather to escape the sus
picion of being odd than from any intelligent conception of
the meaning of religion, which has been long since buried
from the multitude in dogmatic Shibboleths and the dreary
routine of ecclesiastical forms. The time was when, under
the Roman Empire, to exchange fashionable Paganism for
a religion then despised by statesmen and philosophers
afforded some guarantee for earnestness and sincerity. But
churches and sects have long been refuges for semi-imbeciles,
fanatics, and hypocrites, who suffer grievously in mental
strength and noble aim when compared with those elevated
and wholesome natures outside psalm-singing institutions,
who view Christianity as a huge excrescence abnormally
superinduced upon real human interests, and who are per
fectly satisfied in following the dictates of physical and
moral law written upon the constitution of the universe.
The class of blasphemers most potent for evil to orthodox
creeds and churches is not the candid, though sneering,
sceptic. The true foes of Christendom are the traitors in
the. Christian camp. It is the insincere formalists—and
their name is legion in all Christian bodies—who openly
avow with a light heart most stupendous beliefs which really
serious thinkers would deem it appalling to conceive or
utter, and who persistently belie their faith by a tortuous
and sensual life. How many tens of thousands every Sun
day, including the highest ranks in wealth and social position,
confess themselves “ miserable sinners ” not only with a total
absence of becoming emotion, but with the fixed intention
of returning, when their hollow forms of devotion have been
decently gone through, to their gluttony, whoredoms, cheattying, their grinding down of the poor, their fighting
for unjust “ vested interests,” their fluttering amidst the
jewelled shams of fashionable society, their participation in
the organised tricks of finance and trade. The real blas
phemers, who are fast undermining the Christian faith, are
those shameless self-deceivers who assent to the doctrine
that the deity omits from his perpetual and faultless record
no thought, word, feeling, purpose, or action attributable to
them, who believe in a quenchless hell for heartless wrong
�Reflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
21
doers, and who nevertheless live from day to day as if their
repetitions of creeds and prayers were an unblushing false
hood, as if God, heaven, and hell were visionary phantoms,
and as if their real aim was to draw down the scorn and
hatred of rational minds upon the whole fabric of their
faith and practice. This is the canker to be chiefly feared,
and the one that is ceaselessly gnawing at the root of Chris
tianity. By this insidious influence within its own pale it
is destined ultimately to crumble and decay. But the great
dignitaries of the church are too busy in warding off the
imaginary earthquakes and thunderstorms of Atheism by
which they fancy the ark to be endangered, to watch the rapid
progress of dry-rot, of intellectual supineness, spiritual
insensibility, and moral turpitude, in the very pillars and
foundations of the structure. With infatuated blindness
the clergy and those who echo their feeble whine of
distress about “ infidelity,” vainly suppose they can avert
the impending decomposition of creeds and rituals by
sending to prison obscure inventors of lampoons against
the faith, by reiterating holy catchwords about “ the pro
fanation of the oath,” and “ blotting the name of God out
of the statute-book,” by memorialising Parliament to commit
the injustice of refusing his seat to a man who has honestly
tried, without success, to believe in the Yaveh of the Jews
and the Trinity of the Christians. The spectacle, though
sad, has its ludicrous aspect, reminding one somewhat of the
Laputan philosophers on their floating island, soaring in
ether above the solid earth, lost in profitless abstractions
which bore no practical relation to the sublunary realities
beneath them. But the day of reckoning is on the wing,
when the laity and clergy alike will be roused, nolens nolens,
from the swoon of delusion into which they have been
lulled by a stupifying orthodoxy. They will then be
abundantly convinced that, instead of prints like the Free
thinker deriving their power to make Christianity ridiculous
from any profane love in their editors of bringing exalted
realities into contempt, the sting was given to atheistic sneers
—whether expressed in words or in caricatures—by the
awaking sense of doubt in the heart of Christendom itself
as to whether there is not after all something unsound and
grotesque in its whole system of doctrine and practice
answering to the dreaded homethrusts of the “infidel.”
�22
Reflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
I have but touched the fringe of the tangled mass of
Christian incoherencies. Many volumes might be written,
setting forth the “ pious frauds,” forgeries, inventions, and
interpolations in classic and patristic writings resorted to by
those concerned under Constantine, as well as before his day,
in bolstering up the hollow pretensions of Christianity to be
a supernatural revelation. The accumulation of proof in
respect of these extensive and varied lying machinations has
become, during the last half-century, simply overwhelming,
as those who will take the trouble to study the right books
on the subject without prejudice may easily discover for
themselves. It is now found just as impossible for students
who^have given the requisite amount of time and attention
to the question to believe in the miraculous stories of the
Old and New Testament as to believe in the Olympian
gods or in the suckling of Romulus and Remus by a
wolf. Let the blasphemy laws do their worst, and let their
penalties be equitably extended, as they ought to be, to
cultivated and University-bred “infidel” writers; the sooner
will the disestablishment and downfall of Christianity be
accomplished. Let the clergy and the more bigoted among
the laity try with redoubled effort to stamp out Atheism at
the cost of Atheists being denied their just political rights,
and the numbers will be the more rapidly swelled who
execrate the fanaticism, oppression, and injustice for which
ecclesiastical authorities of every grade and of every age
have been notorious. Unbelievers look in vain in the
statute-book of this “ Christian nation ” for any law the
protection of which they can invoke against the malicious
and wilful misrepresentations of their conscientious convic
tions by Christian priests and their votaries. But as those
enslaved by the popular faith are in so far incapacitated
from impartially seeking truth and doing justice, the gross
unfairness of this one-sided arrangement is never acknow
ledged by them.
I only wish to say in conclusion that the blasphemy laws
—as every intelligent reader of history knows—are but the
relics of a superstitious age. They belong to a time when
the doctrine was enforced by rulers on the people at the
point of the bayonet, that kingcraft and priestcraft were
equally sacred, mutually dependent on each other for sup
port, and must stand or fall together as God-given institu-
�Reflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
23
lions. Christianity, in some form most plastic to the
political aims of the monarch, was adopted and sustained by
the State. Ranks of priests, from the curate to the Arch
bishop, were developed—corresponding to the graduated
positions of the people in the social scale—for the purpose of
making “ the divine right ” of sovereigns and their claims
upon the absolute obedience of their subjects religiously felt
in every class, from the beggar to the peer. Heirs of
hereditary titles and estates have always been loudest in
upholding Christianity, but particularly that phase of it
which happened to form a buttress to the recognised social
distinctions in the country. Hence the bitterness with
which every description of Nonconformity has—until the
power of the latter became a strong political factor—been
ostracised and hunted down. The sovereign, for expedient
political reasons, assumed the august function of “ by the
Grace of God Defender of the Faith,” and it became indis
pensable that those rubrics and modes of service should be
appointed by the State best fitted to exalt the monarch in
the eyes of the people as pre-eminently “the servant of
God,” born to rule and to be obeyed. The alliance between
the State and the Church became so inextricably close that
it was regarded as equally sinful to cast ridicule upon the
monarchy and upon the State faith. The suppression of
reproachful criticism, in reference to the political adminis
tration of the country, was carried to the last pitch of in
tolerance by the Stuarts. But now-a-days it appears to be
possible for persons of avowed Republican principles to
discharge creditably official duties as Cabinet ministers.
Proportionate freedom, however, is still withheld by law in
opposing the State religion. Monarchy may be jeered at
with impunity, but the religion of the State is still guarded
from infidel taunts by blasphemy laws, and hard penalties en
forced by pious judgesenflamed with superstitious and partisan
acrimony against jesting critics of the faith. Nevertheless, I
make bold to predict, sir, that the days of Christianity as a
religion credited by independent thinkers are numbered.
It has already been mortally “ wounded in the house of its
friends,” and the occasional offence of outsiders is that they
now and then betray their undisguised satisfaction at the
accelerated progress of its dissolution. The resuscitation of
your superannuated and expiring religion cannot be effected
�24
lieflexions on the Blasphemy Prosecution.
by heavy sentences, and sermonic platitudes directed from
the judicial bench against rank sceptics, as if such men could
or would destroy any true thing in the earth. The convulsed
rancor you displayed through the trial in question, and the
harsh punishment you inflicted, were alike an unconscious
tribute on your part to power in the culprits which you
foolishly exaggerated, a painful confession that Christianity
was too weak to withstand the sarcasm of its foes without
the aid of the secular arm, and without a glaring violation
of that charity towards the erring which Christians are
never weary of extolling as the crown and glory of their
religion. I commend to you the sentiment of Carlyle, at
the close of his essay on Voltaire: “It is unworthy a reli
gious man to view an irreligious one with alarm or aver
sion, or with any other feeling than regret and hope and
brotherly commiseration. If he seek truth is he not our brother,
and to be pitied? If he do not seek truth is he not
STILL OUR BROTHER, AND TO BE PITIED STILL MORE ? ”
Ra Mohun Bhotgee.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Pamphlet
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Reflexions on the blasphemy prosecution : a letter to the Hon. Justice North by a Hindu
Creator
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Bhoygee, Ra Mohun
Description
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 24 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical reference. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. The prosecution of G.W. Foote and others over the Christmas issue of The Freethinker. Signed Ra. Mohum Bhoygee.
Publisher
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Freethought Publishing Company
Date
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1883
Identifier
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N076
CT74
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Blasphemy
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Reflexions on the blasphemy prosecution : a letter to the Hon. Justice North by a Hindu), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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English
Blasphemy
Conway Tracts