Part 5

We brought evidence yesterday to show that the suppression of objections to the Scriptures by penal enactments is tyrannical, unjust, and absurd, and that the law is partially administered. If we return to the subject, it is from a deep sense of its almost immeasurable importance. Our whole internal A policy, nearly, is framed with a view to support the Church. The Church is founded, or rather pretends to be founded, on the Bible; but we are now told by the decision of the Jury on Tuesday, that it is a crime to object to its statements. The happiness of society, then, is to be chained and bound by principles and doctrines, which society must not examine; for if men must not object, what is the use of examination?

"We see disorder pervading every part of society. The poor are set against the rich, and the rich are zealously engaged in oppressing and coercing the poor. Crime increases, and though more churches are building, religion is decaying. The remedies suggested for our disorders, within the bounds sanctioned by the Church, are more numerous than the disorders themselves; but though confusion and anarchy threaten us, the law forbids men to say aught against principles which our rulers have followed, while society has been brought into its present condition.

"What the law now decrees against what it calls blasphemy, it decreed, not two centuries ago, against witchcraft. It now denounces the former as displeasing to God; it then denounced the latter for the same offence. Men and women were in those less humane days burned for displeasing God, while now they are only fined and incarcerated. By the progress of knowledge, lawyers, both barristers and judges, have been compelled to give up that portion of the perfection of human reason, and the law against witchcraft has become obsolete. If our view of the law for suppressing objections to the Scriptures, under * the name of blasphemy, be correct, it is not more reasonable than the law against witchcraft. While no lawyer, however, will now lend himself to revive the latter or carry it into execution, there are numbers, we say it to the disgrace of the profession, zealous and eager to apply the former, at least to the penny tracts which are addressed to the poor.

"It is therefore with deep regret that we saw so eminent a man as the Attorney-General lending himself to this sorry work. We are ready to admit, as a Tory contemporary has stated, that he has done his duty, and he finds his reward in the praise of the Tories. Nor did he show, as far as we can learn, certainly not in his reply, any reluctance to perform it; people say he did it as if he had something to atone for, and was rather eager to gain the approbation of Bishop Philpotts. His labours were crowned with a success which his own party reprobate. In Westminster Hall he has triumphed, but an appeal lies from that to the world; and even the Whigs, who have heretofore denounced prosecutions for blasphemy as for witchcraft, consider that in the last resort he will sustain a terrible defeat.

"Mr. Hetherington has already suffered in body and mind, in purse and health; and probably awaits with apprehension the sentence, which may consign him to prison and ruin. He is down-stricken by the law; but those who have read his defence, and prefer reason to legal fictions, will place him far above the triumphant Attorney-General. He made an admirable pleading for free inquiry, which plain John Campbell instituted a prosecution to suppress. In his reply Sir John so far overstepped the bounds of propriety, that the Defendant would not allow him to proceed, and was supported by the Court. In a bad cause the Attorney-General used poisoned weapons. He upheld a prosecution for blasphemy, which is as ridiculous as a prosecution for witchcraft, and descended to misrepresent the accused. With our opinion of the law he was enforcing, we are bound to say that Sir John Campbell should have left such a duty to be performed by some taker of a half-guinea fee, who never got beyond the precincts of the Old Bailey. It was wholly unworthy of an eminent lawyer, who has risen into political power as a professed friend of free discussion. The slaves to lust have some pleasure for their punishment, but the servants of the grimgribber of Westminster Hall, who sacrifice present fame to a sense of duty to it, reap little more than disgrace for their nauseous drudgery.

"Sir John Campbell prosecuted Mr. Hetherington, in the language of the indictment, for being 'a wicked, impious, and ill-disposed person, having no regard to the laws of this realm, but most wickedly, blasphemously, impiously, and profanely devising and intending to asperse and vilify that part of the Holy Bible which is called the Old Testament.' Now, having no respect whatever for the fictions of the law, we have no hesitation in branding such accusations of a publisher as a monstrous tissue of falsehoods, and to affirm that it is a disgrace to any man who has the least respect for truth, to defend such a charge. We care not about its being the customary language of the law, for truth and men's liberties are not to be sacrificed by and for such absurdities.

"Further, this said aspersing and vilifying the Bible is said by Sir J. Campbell, at least such is the language of the indictment, which he used arguments to sustain, to be greatly 'to the displeasure of Almighty God.' Who knows that? What worm dares to say that the Almighty God is displeased with another worm for uttering or writing a few words.' Who is the vain and arrogant man that claims for himself the task of interpreting the thoughts of the Most High, and demanding that a man be punished for having displeased Almighty God? What name does the Court deserve which, being instituted to do justice and protect the people, punishes one of them because he displeases the Almighty? Can He not punish those who displease Him? To doubt it, to undertake to protect or avenge Him, to describe Him as displeased, while he showers prosperity and contentment on the man said to displease Him, is far more impious, more blasphemous, more dangerous to religion than anything Mr. Hetherington ever published, or Mr. Haslam wrote. Such, however, was the crime charged against Mr. Hetherington, which Sir John Campbell endeavoured to substantiate, and of which a Jury, who are as much deserving of reproach as the prosecutor, found him guilty. Such is the crime for which the Court will hereafter pass sentence, undertaking, like the Inquisition, to decide for the Almighty, and punish actions as displeasing to Him, at which He, by the course of nature, shows no displeasure.

"At the present time, when a great portion of the Whig press will support the Attorney-General or be silent, leaving _The Sun_ to defend the great principle of free inquiry and free printing, as they left it to defend the same sacred and noble cause when it was assailed in the person of Mr. Harmer, we think it our duty not to be silent. As we should assail any Tory Attorney-General who had instituted such a prosecution, or carried it on, so we cannot allow it to pass unstigmatized because it has been instituted by a Whig Attorney-General. We know that the wisest and best politicians of the party deprecate such proceedings, and not the less because they will call forth in many independent journals, to the injury of the Whigs, an expression of honest indignation."

"TO LORD DENMAN, ON THE LATE PROSECUTION FOR BLASPHEMY

Mr Lord Chief Justice.

"Your conduct on the Bench, upon the recent trial, 'The Queen v. Hetherington,' for a religious libel, a nominal and an impossible offence, the fiction of fraudulent bigotry, has much increased the high esteem in which you have been always held by the public. Your Lordship's opinions on this impolitic, irreligious, and thoroughly infamous species of prosecution have oft-times been expressed with the integrity and high moral courage that have ever distinguished your public life. I never shall forget the manliness with which I heard you avow from the Whig Treasury Benches, in the House of Commons, in your place as Attorney General, your detestation of indictments for religious opinions; and the House hailed you when you fairly acknowledged your deep regret that, as Common Serjeant, you had been obliged, in obedience to your oath and to the law, to impose even the smallest punishment possible upon three men convicted by an ignorant Jury of a libel on the Scriptures; and you were still more cheerfully received when you expressed your joy at the liberation of the prisoners whom you had so unwillingly punished. There was one part of your speech that did not certainly satisfy me. I respect your sense of obligation to an oath; but when you punished men whom you conscientiously believed to be undeserving of infliction, and this 'in obedience to the law,' your Lordship might have reflected, that it was not Parliamentary, but Judge-made law--'Common-law,' as it is called; and you might have acted upon the principle that if a corrupt and ignorant Judge made a law to suit the prejudices of a brutal age, a pure and well-informed Judge might reverse that law in favour of an age more humane and more enlightened. I recollect with great satisfaction that when, in the case of Lord Langford, the Counsel, Mr. Thesiger, asked a witness (Mr. Nathan, a Jew) 'what religion he was of?' your Lordship expressed your strong displeasure; and, under your Lordship's sanction, the witness refused to answer the interrogatory, and treated both the query and the querist with the utmost contempt; and the whole Court and audience seemed strongly to approve of the result. In the recent trial your Lordship's conduct was a contrast to that of your immediate predecessors on the Bench, Lords Tenterden and Ellenborough, the last representatives of a most disgraceful school of political, prejudiced, corrupt Court Judges. You did all in your power to induce the Jury to acquit the accused. I am now credibly informed that the Attorney-General had the same object at heart; and having, intentionally, gone in a most slovenly and unimpressive manner, through his technical duty, he was abashed and mortified when he heard the verdict of guilty. Familiar as he must be with the extreme ignorance, stupidity, and corruption of Juries, on such occasions, he was still surprised at such a verdict. I am willing to give him credit for these common reports in his favour; but should the Government be so infatuated as to bring the defendant up for judgment, the country expects of you, my Lord Denman, that the sentence will be nominal, and that it will be accompanied by your reprobation of all such trials.

"If it be true that hope is the last passion that leaves a man, equally true is it that the spirit, the accursed spirit of religious persecution, is the last passion that man deserts, or is willing to abandon. I sincerely believe that if the alternative were put to a hundred dying men, at their last, moment of consciousness, at their last gasp of breath, whether they preferred their own future salvation or beatitude, or the persecution of man upon earth for conscientious differences of opinion on religious subjects, full ninety-nine out of the hundred would choose the latter, on the ground of its being the turnpike-road to the former, and from the inherent delight in the spirit of religious intolerance. Fanaticism is the primeval curse of our nature. From its first victim Abel, to the present hour, it has raged through the human race. Moral sins and physical or corporeal diseases in the course of ages wear themselves out, or can be cured by instruction or medical treatment; but the most foul, leprous, and crime-engendering of all maladies that flesh is heir to, fanaticism--call it if you please, bigotry or superstition--admits of no cure, and of little mitigation. If this hellhound were now let loose from the restraints of law, we should in one year have every gaol and dungeon full of prisoners, and in another, the fires and faggots of the olden times would be raging more fiercely than of yore, and more furiously in this country than in any other. Whatever Catholics might have been in the middle ages, there has been more of religious persecution in Great Britain and Ireland, in the last century, than in all the Catholic countries of Europe within the same period. On the Continent the spirit is on the wane; in England it is on the increase.

"My Lord Denman, in the very abstraction of our individual nature, and of the nature of society, a court of justice cannot take cognizance of opinions. Its functions are confined exclusively to facts. Can any two classes of things be more distinct and opposite? The one is fixed, the other perpetually varying. Law, cultivated reason and common sense have rescued subjects of opinion from judicial interference, except with respect to politics and religion, the two which of all others most need the exemption. The interference of courts of justice with religious opinions had immensely decreased, and it is now reviving; but it is in your Lordship's power to annihilate it by passings nominal sentence on the defendant. The effects or results of a fact are ascertainable; those of an opinion are but speculative and uncertain. There is not in existence, there never has existed, and probably never can exist, a religious opinion that has not been deemed blasphemous, and of a destructive tendency to morals and social peace, by its opponents, who, if they had been strong enough, have relied upon the arguments of torture and death, or punishments as severe as society would permit.

"My Lord, legism, or jurisprudence, are sufficiently understood to render it indisputable that punishments cannot be vindicatory or retrospective, and less than either, vindictive. All religious prosecutions seek only for revenge. The object of a legal punishment relates solely to the prevention of the offence. If a sentence against Mr. Hetherington cannot effect this object, it cannot be justified. Will a sentence alter his opinions? will it alter conscientiously that of any class or single member of society? and, above all, will it stop or check the dissemination of his doctrines? The two first points are nugatory; the last is defeated in its pretended object. All history and experience prove that persecution, let its form or degree be what it may, increases that which it is meant to destroy. Whether the tyrant be called Pope or Inquisition, Attorney-General or Court of Queen's Bench, the principle and the result are the same.

"Every religion, church, and sect, that exists or is defunct, in Europe and in Asia, from the earliest record, has had at its origin, and through its infancy, to encounter obloquy and persecution. The Jewish religion received animation and vigour from the contempt and cruelties of surrounding polytheists, and the Jews sought in one God a protection from the horrors which had been inflicted on them by the worshippers of many; and well did this atrocious people revenue themselves 011 their former persecutors, and this by assuming their own claim to the right of punishing men for differing in opinions. The progress of Christianity was accelerated by the Jews, in their attempts to crush it by inflicting an ignominious and most cruel death on an innocent individual, under that absurd fiction of blasphemy, in the foul name of which your Lordship is now called upon to punish, against your will, another innocent individual. If blasphemy has any meaning, its definition must be--'a resistance to a predominant priestcraft.' Every religion, at its commencement, is but a confluent mass of blasphemies to the previously-established religions; and persecution is the reverse of annihilation, Where would Protestantism have been but for its persecution by the Catholics, and _vice versa_? From the dawn of Protestantism in England, under Wycliffe, and the burning of the first Protestants by the priests, in the reign of the Hero of Agincourt (what a hero!) down to the death of Mary, English Protestants were tortured, burnt, hanged, and punished, and yet the religion spread. Throughout Germany the same effects proceeded from the same cause. Our English persecutions of the Catholics in Ireland have been long, incessant, and too dreadfully cruel to reflect upon, and yet Catholicism has increased under them. We have not one respectable sect in England that has not arisen in despite of persecution, and increased by means of it, and these, with hundreds or thousands of other instances (for history abounds with them), prove that persecution or punishment does not, and cannot, effect the object in view; and that, consequently, punishment cannot be justified by its only legitimate principle of justification--utility. It is madness to punish for an offence which must be increased by the very nature of the punishment. Formerly, in punishments for blasphemy, men, women, and children were burnt and put to every variety of torture, for the good of their souls--now, we substitute for the word soul, the phrase--'_the security of society_,' or other jargon equally nonsensical. The Court of Inquisition was, and is, wherever it exists, more honourable than the Protestant Court of Queen's Bench, for the Inquisitors tortured and destroyed for the sake of the soul, but our Courts punish only for the profit of the priest. The old plea, the impudent and barbarous plea, of 'Benefit of Clergy,' is annulled by law, and yet an indictment for blasphemy is nothing more or less than a process for the 'Benefit of Clergy.' Thus, my Lord, have I humbly attempted to prove that your punishment of this individual will be in strong and violent opposition to the principles, opinion, and feelings which you have avowed on the Ministerial Benches of the House of Commons; and if the Whig Administration is so infatuatedly base as to call the defendant up for punishment your Lordship will be in the unenviable position of passing a sentence, as Lord Chief Justice of England, against the nature, principles, and objects of which you have expressed little less than abhorrence in the character of Her Majesty's Attorney-General in the House of Commons. At that period, my Lord, you were the freely and most honourably chosen representative of one of the largest and most enlightened constituencies of Great Britain--the town of Nottingham--and your constituents expressed no dissatisfaction at your speech. Is there not a sympathy between Nottingham and other large, and populous, aud enlightened towns and cities, and between them all and the general population of the empire? I have likewise, my Lord, shown, to the best of my very humble abilities, as a legist, that any punishment inflicted on this individual, violates the only principle on which all punishments can be justified--the prevention of the offence--if it be one.

"What, in other respects, will be the effects of this brutal prosecution? Burn Mr. Hetherington alive,--slowly roast him, torture him by every device, hang him, quarter him, and stick his head on Temple-bar, and his quarters on the gates of four of our principal cathedral towns, as in all such cases used to be the practice of our most pious Christian ancestors in 'the good old times'--or let your Lordship pass the most lenient sentence on him, and what will be the result? Will any thing be proved, disproved, strengthened, or invalidated, by either mode of punishment? If divines or laymen argue upon the Scriptures _in toto_ or in parts, _en masse_ or in detail, could any of the disputants establish his point by arguing that Mr. Hetherington or Mr. Snookes, for the names are indifferent, was or was not in gaol, or that the sentence was six days' or six months' incarceration--how would the case stand syllogistically? A asserts that the Bible ought to be burnt--A is not prosecuted--ergo, the Bible ought to be burnt. B asserts that the Bible ought to be burnt--B is prosecuted--B is acquitted by the Jury--ergo, the Bible ought to be burnt. C asserts that the Bible ought to be burnt--C is prosecuted--C is found guilty--ergo, the Bible ought not to be burnt. Again, D, E, F, and G, are prosecuted for saying that the Bible ought to be burnt. They are all found guilty under different Judges, and their sentences vary from three, six, twelve, and eighteen months' imprisonment. Here the public mind is in utter confusion between the cases of A, B, and C, and between the ratios of punishment inflicted on D, E, F, and G, I have gone to the extent of the musical gamut. Ratios might be calculated by arithmeticians aud algebraists. Thus--'As burning the Bible is to the acquittal of B,--so is not burning the Bible to the sentence on D, E, F, or G." Really, my Lord, as a man of the most cultivated intellect, you must see the monstrous absurdity, the atrocious cruelty, of subjecting opinions on Scriptures to 'Trial by Jury.' If opinions on a book are to be brought before a Jury, so might its author. I speak in no disrespect of Scriptures, but I speak in utter disgust and abhorrence of bringing them before Juries. What, in fact, does a verdict of 'Guilty' or 'Not Guilty' amount to, in case of an opinion on the Scriptures? The ignorant Jury men unwittingly set themselves above the Scriptures, and tyrannise over the Deity himself. The impiety lies all in the Jury, and not in the accused. The trial my Lord, proceeds entirely on the conceded point that the Scriptures are the word of God; a word is an empty, unintelligible, worthless sound, except by the interpretation put upon it; and if the Jury will be the interpreters, they are the authors of the word, and usurp the powers of the Deity. God may say 'this is my word and commandment,' and a Jury replies, 'the substance utility, intelligibility of a word depend entirely upon the meaning attached to it, and we Jurymen will put and make all other men put what construction we please, upon it, under pains and penalties, so that the word is not yours, but ours.' A Defendant may argue, 'my construction is a matter between my conscience and my God.' The verdict replies, 'God has nothing to do with it; your construction is entirely a case between your conscience and us Jurymen, stock-brokers, bill-brokers, pawnbrokers, gambling-house-keepers, and, peradventure, keepers of houses of a still worse description.' My Lord Denman, the manly character of your mind will make you fearlessly grapple with this important subject, and will induce your Lordship to feel that I have as fearlessly and as honestly stated the merits of the case. Pause, my Lord, before you ruin, and almost torture a man, for whose defence you have expressed respect from the Judgment-seat, and this by a sentence for the nature and principles of which you have publicly and officially declared an abhorrence.