[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.  A man who robs or injures a church, or even an episcopal palace, is not prosecuted for sacrilege, but for larceny or malicious damage or something of the kind.

The abolition of penalties for blasphemy was proposed in the House of Commons (by Bradlaugh) in 1889 and rejected.  The reform is urgently needed.  It would “prevent the recurrence at irregular intervals of scandalous prosecutions which have never in any one instance benefited any one, least of all the cause which they were intended to serve, and which sometimes afford a channel for the gratification of private malice under the cloak of religion.” [2]

The struggle of reason against authority has ended in what appears now to be a decisive and permanent victory for liberty.  In the most civilized and progressive countries, freedom of discussion is recognized as a

[248] fundamental principle.  In fact, we may say it is accepted as a test of enlightenment, and the man in the street is forward in acknowledging that countries like Russia and Spain, where opinion is more or less fettered, must on that account be considered less civilized than their neighbours.  All intellectual people who count take it for granted that there is no subject in heaven or earth which ought not to be investigated without any deference or reference to theological assumptions.  No man of science has any fear of publishing his researches, whatever consequences they may involve for current beliefs.  Criticism of religious doctrines and of political and social institutions is free.  Hopeful people may feel confident that the victory is permanent; that intellectual freedom is now assured to mankind as a possession for ever; that the future will see the collapse of those forces which still work against it and its gradual diffusion in the more backward parts of the earth.  Yet history may suggest that this prospect is not assured.  Can we be certain that there may not come a great set-back?  For freedom of discussion and speculation was, as we saw, fully realized in the Greek and Roman world, and then an unforeseen force, in the shape of Christianity, came in and laid chains upon the human mind and

[249] suppressed freedom and imposed upon man a weary struggle to recover the freedom which he had lost.  Is it not conceivable that something of the same kind may occur again? that some new force, emerging from the unknown, may surprise the world and cause a similar set-back?