MODERN IDEAS OF BLASPHEMY.

IT is a healthy sign of the times that the old question, Shall we prosecute men for blasphemy? has been reopened. The case of the Cornish labourer, Pooley, so strangely dealt with by Sir John Coleridge, has proved far more unmanageable than his reverend prosecutor anticipated. Mr. Holyoake and his friends took it up, and, as a result, we have had a great deal of discussion which involves the justice (or injustice) of all such prosecutions. The last on the list is that which occurred in the Juridical Society-reported in the columns of the Solicitor's Journal, in which, after Mr. Lewis, Q.C., had read a paper upon the law regulating the prosecution of "Blasphemous Libels," there was a very animated debate upon many points raised by its statements and reasonings. We, however, are not satisfied with the manner in which the subject was treated, and, for the simple reason, that all who spoke, either by design or through inadvertence, omitted the really strong points in the argument.

The paper itself was wholly a mistake, for-independently of its confusion of thought and terms-it failed completely, through not defining the main points at issue, viz. :-What is religion? what is blasphemy? Mr. Lewis believes that there is no religion but his own, and that he calls the Christian. It is rather late in the day to deny that the Hindoo, Parsee, Mahometan, and other forms of faith are religions. In so many words Mr. Lewis acknowledges that they are such, but, and as though alarmed at his own liberality, he speedily falls back again behind his narrow-minded ramparts, and reasserts that the only real religion is the Christian, which must therefore be defended from insult.

That is all he asks, "that it be defended from insult! They who speak against it must do so in dulcet phrases. All coarseness and vituperation are to be treated as crimes which the law should punish. The man who has any objection to make must state it in such a form that the believer will not deem his religion insulted-the said believers being the sole judges of what is respectful. Mr. Lewis may not have read, as we have done, and not merely in one, but in various works, that "to doubt the divine nature of the "Christian religion is to blaspheme against God." What kind of language could the objecter employ which would be considered innocent by such VOL. III.

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writers? There was a time when the Press of England was under a censorship-Archbishop Laud being the Controller-General-and it was argued in the courts that they who published books without proper authority were deservedly punished. But the question was, how a man could write a book against the episcopal system which would be as strongly worded as truth demanded, and yet so mildly written that the Bishops would give it their imprimatur ? It was tried, and naturally enough so completely without effect, that John Milton was compelled to write his " Speech in favour of "Unlicensed Printing." And the same result must follow all similar attempts in relation to the Christian religion. The good sense of the community is the only safeguard required against coarseness and obscenity, or unfairness in the mode of attack. And that which is true needs no other guardian. A vulgar tirade is sure to be destroyed by the poison of its own vulgarity. Indeed, we cannot discover that any such have been published, and consequently if Mr. Lewis meant, as he said, to provide only against such an evil, he is like the policemen, who are never at hand when wanted, but who come running up in shoals when their services are no longer needed. Society has already accomplished what Mr. Lewis asks for. But Mr. Lewis omitted to notice the fact that the greatest degree of intolerance is exhibited not by the opponents of what the Churches falsely call the Christian religion, but by the professed believers in that system. The reader himself afforded an example of the fact; for, in the course of his paper, he said:"Now, it "would be mere disingenuousness, a mere evasion, were I to profess myself "satisfied with the alternative offered of an equality of treatment to be "extended to the defamers of Christianity, and the supposed defamers of "unbelief. I shall not shelter myself under any such compromise! Part of my argument, indeed, will be, that there is nothing in unbelief to defame! "It is plausible, but utterly false (as I shall hope to show), to assume that "there is room, or material, here for any bargain. The man who rejects religion has nothing to offer which can entitle him to put the Christian "under terms. There is no subject-matter for an exchange. The offence (supposing the fact of an offence to be established), is all on one side. "How can any one defame infidelity, which, in its very nature, abjures all "claim to veneration, and which says, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow "we die!' Its own description of itself confesses that there is no sacredness "in it to desecrate." (The italics are his own.)

So that, according to Mr. Lewis, they who do not believe in our Orthodox Christianity, have nothing which they hold to be sacred. They cannot be insulted by anything said against them in the matter of faith, because they have no faith; they who cleave to Christianity have religious feelings which may be wounded; but they who turn away from it, unto them we may say what we please without fear, for there is no injustice, because they no longer have anything to venerate. Surely this is a strange statement to be ventured upon by a Queen's Counsel while engaged in pleading the cause of moderate speaking. A raw student who had just passed through his first theological course would hardly undertake to pile up a greater mass of absurdities, and we are painfully compelled to advise the learned gentleman that in theology, as well as law, it is best to study the facts of a case before venturing to teach the world by the utterance of our opinions.

Mr. Lewis identifies " religion" and " convertible terms. Let us test his reasoning. times who stood by when a party were stoning

Christianity," and uses them as
There was a man of the olden
Stephen-he was young and

earnest, and he hated Christianity. That man was Paul; but will any one undertake to say, that while he was in a state of unbelief in relation to the Christian scheme, he had nothing sacred in his form of faith-nothing that he venerated? There are millions who reject the idea that Christ was Godmillions who, as Theists, are profoundly religious, but, according to Mr. Lewis, because they reject "Christianity," on its doctrinal side, they have no religion, no faith, no feelings which may be wounded, and consequently have no right to demand that the Christian shall use respectful language when speaking of their religious ideas.

But Mr. Lewis goes farther in his injustice. As he falsely uses the terms Religion" and "Christianity" as convertible, so, with equal incorrectness, he identifies unbelief in Christianity with all kinds of injustice and animalism. He says that they who refuse to teach Christianity teach that we should "eat "and drink, for to morrow we die." Possibly he was not aware of the fact, that the words he puts into the mouth of "the infidel" are those employed by the "inspired teacher of wisdom." It is in Ecclesiastes that this teaching occurs, and not in the works of free-thinkers-it is a divine speaker," not an infidel, who gives this animal injunction. Does Parker teach men to abandon themselves to beastliness? Does Greg inculcate that life has no sanctity beyond that of living up to our chins in animal pleasures? Does Mackay instruct men in the way of disobedience to the natural laws? Or does Newman revel in the mire of gustative enjoyments? We are proudand with the most perfect confidence in our position-that we are able to repudiate this calumny. It is not, however, merely a matter of which the free-thinker has to complain, for all who are outside the orthodox pale are treated by believers in the same manner. They speak at Missionary meetings in the most scurrilous manner of Hindoos and Mahometans, and we venture to assert that if provision had to be made in order to prevent the use of improper language against the religious belief of men, it is the Orthodox and not the free-thinkers who would receive the lion's share of punishment.

But, as we stated above, the reader and the debaters omitted to name the chief features in blasphemy which call the loudest for reprehension. Were we called upon to give our definition of blasphemy, we should say it consists, not in repudiating creeds, but in making false representations about God-it consists in statements in relation to God which shock our sense of moral rectitude, and make us feel that it is a Demon of Evil, not a God of Goodness, whose actions have been presented unto our notice. Any statement which makes God to be the approver of evil, to be partial, vengeful, or fond of servile adulation, we esteem as blasphemous. Were a man to tell us that he had received a command from heaven to hang the descendants of a king who committed a great sin before these were born, and to hang them as a compensation for the ancestral crime, we should call such a statement blasphemous, and this because we are satisfied that God is not the Author of blind revenge to be executed upon innocent heads. Were we informed that God had issued His command that the English people should march upon the Germans, and put them all to the sword, leaving nor babe nor beast alive, we should not hesitate to declare the statement to be blasphemous, and that, because we are certain that if God wished them to be put to death, He would reach His aim in such a way that none of His followers would need to convert themselves into demons of butchery and revellers in blood.

We advise Mr. Lewis to take a turn in the direction of putting down blasphemy of that nature. If he desires to make religion flourish, he will act

upon our advice, for it is the blasphemy uttered in our churches which needs most to be restrained. Not that we would punish the teachers by any civil process. We leave them to the operation of natural curative influences. We believe that they are digging the pit into which eventually they and their systems must fall. Common sense will conquer in the end. There is no permanent power in falsehood, and, through knowing this, the free-thinkers ask no favour from society. They seek no law-made buttresses. They are confident that the truth they have and hold will outlive all opposition, and laugh to scorn all cramping laws. While upholding the idea that God is too just to support Abraham in his scandalous fraud practised upon the Egyptian king, they may be denounced by the zealots, but will be approved by Him who endowed them with their power of reason. While maintaining that David was not a good man, that Job was not patient, that Esau was defrauded, that Jacob was a knave, they know they must incur the charge of blasphemy; but they know also that, as Christ himself was called a blasphemer, so it must be with all who dare to declare the truth in opposition to organised bodies of men who, consciously or unconsciously, prosper in worldly things by teaching falsehood.

P. W. P.

STUDIES OF CHURCH HISTORY.-XIII.

A BISHOP OF BISHOPS.

IN the series of articles contained in our last volume, we completed the review of the ecclesiastical history of the reign of the Founder of the State Church of Rome, which has formed the model of all subsequent establishments in connection with Christianity; and we saw, in the course of those articles, that the influence of the State, used for the advancement of Church power and priestly authority tended to destroy whatever there was of value in the Christian idea, and all that was admirable in the Christian character; and "if," says Neander, "the reign of Constantine bears witness that the State "which seeks to advance Christianity, by the worldly means at its command, may be the occasion of more injury to this holy cause than the earthly power which opposes it with whatever virulence, this truth is more clearly "demonstrated by the reign of his successor, Constantius."* That this was so arose from the difference of the characters of the two men exemplified by a comparison of the relation borne by Constantius to Christianity, and that borne by his father Constantine. Constantine took a politician's view of Christianity, and used it as a means to consolidate his power as Emperor, but Constantius viewed it with the eye of a theologian, and used his power as Emperor, rather to enforce his doctrinal views than for the purpose of procuring unity in the Church. Constantine sought unity, because he knew in that, and that alone, lay strength, and he cared but little whether that unity were Arian or Trinitarian; but Constantius sought to make the Church entirely Arian, and he would not have accepted a unity which gave the triumph to the Catholics; hence his contests with Athanasius were not merely those of an Emperor with a bishop, but a polemic warfare between contending theologians, and it is well known how bitter such contests are. The courtly Churchmen

* Church History, iii., p. 43.