seat in Parliament; while up to the present day men are tried for blasphemy and convicted under the decisions of Lord Hale, to the effect that “it is a crime either to deny the truth of the fundamental doctrines of the Christian religion or to hold them up to contempt or ridicule.”  Said Mr. Justice Horridge, at the West Riding Assizes, 1911:  “A man is not free in any public place to use common ridicule on subjects which are sacred.”

The purpose, as outlined by the public prosecutor in London, is “to preserve the standard of outward decency.”  And you will find that the one essential to prosecution is always that the victim shall be obscure and helpless; never by any chance is he a duke in a drawing-room.  I will record an utterance of one of the obscure victims of the British “standard of outward decency”, a teacher of mathematics named Holyoake, who presumed to discuss in a public hall the starvation of the working classes of the country.  A preacher objected that he had discussed “our duty to our neighbor” and neglected “our duty to God”; whereupon the lecturer replied:  “Our national Church and general religious institutions cost us, upon accredited computation, about twenty million pounds annually.  Worship being thus expensive, I appeal to your heads and your pockets whether we are not too poor to have a God.  While our distress lasts, I think it would be wise to put deity upon half pay.”  And for that utterance the unfortunate teacher of mathematics served six months in the common Gaol at Gloucester!

While men were being tried for publishing the “Free-thinker”, the Premier of England was William Ewart Gladstone.  And if you wish to know what an established church can do by way of setting up dullness in high places, get a volume of this “Grand Old Man’s” writings on theological and religious questions.  Read his “Juventus Mundi”, in the course of which he establishes a mystic connection between the trident of Neptune and the Christian Trinity!  Read his efforts to prove that the writer of Genesis was an inspired geologist!  This writer of Genesis points out in Nature “a grand, fourfold division, set forth in an orderly succession of times:  First, the water population; secondly, the air population; thirdly, the land population of animals; fourthly, the land population consummated in man.”  And it seems that this division and sequence “is understood to have been so affirmed in our time by natural science that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and established fact.”  Hence we must conclude of the writer of Genesis that “his knowledge was divine”!  Consider that this was actually published in one of the leading British monthlies, and that it was necessary for Professor Huxley to answer it, pointing out that so far is it from being true that “a fourfold division and orderly sequence” of water, air and land animals “has been affirmed in our time by natural science”, that on the contrary, the assertion is “directly contradictory to facts known to everyone who is acquainted with the elements of natural science”.  The distribution of fossils proves that land animals originated before sea-animals, and there has been such a mixing of land, sea and air animals as utterly to destroy the reputation of both Genesis and Gladstone as possessing a divine knowledge of Geology.