If you
[246] grant its falsehood, you cannot maintain that it deserves special
protection. But the law imposes no restraint on the Christian, however
offensive his teaching may be to those who do not agree with him;
therefore it is not based on an impartial desire to prevent the use of
language which causes offence; therefore it is based on the hypothesis
that Christianity is true; and therefore its principle is persecution.
Of course, the present administration of the common law in regard to
blasphemy does not endanger the liberty of those unbelievers who have
the capacity for contributing to progress. But it violates the supreme
principle of liberty of opinion and discussion. It hinders uneducated
people from saying in the only ways in which they know how to say it,
what those who have been brought up differently say, with impunity, far
more effectively and far more insidiously. Some of the men who have been
imprisoned during the last two years, only uttered in language of
deplorable taste views that are expressed more or less politely in books
which are in the library of a bishop unless he is a very ignorant
person, and against which the law, if it has any validity, ought to have
been enforced. Thus the law, as now administered, simply penalizes bad
taste and places disabilities
[247] upon uneducated freethinkers. If their words offend their audience
so far as to cause a disturbance, they should be prosecuted for a breach
of public order, [1] not because their words are blasphemous.
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