rother for being witty
in the pulpit, he replied, "My dear brother in the Lord, do you mean to
say that if God had given you any wit you wouldn't have used it?" Let
Bishop South stand for the "blasphemer," and his dull brother for the
orthodox jury, and you have the moral at once.

"Such a law," says Sir James Stephen, "would never work." You cannot
really distinguish between substance and style; you must either forbid
or permit all attacks on Christianity. Great religious and political
changes are never made by calm and moderate language. Was any form of
Christianity ever substituted either for Paganism or any other form of
Christianity without heat, exaggeration, and fierce invective? Saint
Augustine ridiculed one of the Roman gods in grossly indecent language.
Men cannot discuss doctrines like eternal punishment as they do
questions in philology. And "to say that you may discuss the truth
of religion, but that you may not hold up its doctrines to contempt,
ridicule, or indignation, is either to take away with one hand what you
concede with the other, or to confine the discussion to a small and in
many ways uninfluential class of persons." Besides, Sir James Stephen
says,

"There is one reflection which seems to me to prove with
conclusive force that the law upon this subject can be
explained and justified only on what I regard as its true
principle--the principle of persecution. It is that if the
law were really impartial, and punished blasphemy only because
it offends the feelings of believers, it ought also to punish
such preaching as offends the feelings of unbelievers. All
the more earnest and enthusiastic forms of religion are extremely
offensive to those who do not believe them. Why should not
people who are not Christians be protected against the rough,
coarse, ignorant ferocity with which they are often told that
they and theirs are on the way to hell-fire for ever and ever?
Such a doctrine, though necessary to be known if true, is, if
false, revolting and mischievous to the last degree. If the
law in no degree recognised these doctrines as true, if it were
as neutral as the Indian Penal Code is between Hindoos and
Mohametans, it would have to apply to the Salvation Army the
same rule as it applies to the _Freethinker_ and its contributors."

Excellently put. I argued in the same way, though perhaps less tersely,