ters; but I do not
claim equality with them; I merely ask the same liberal judgment. A man
is no more to be judged by a few casual sentences from his pen, without
any reference to all the rest, than he is to be judged by a few casual
expressions he may let fall in a year's conversation.

Curiously, in all those twenty-eight folios of blasphemy, only three
sentences were from my own pen, and two of them were extracted from long
articles. One was a jocose reference to the Jewish tribal god, who, as
Keunen allows, was carried about, probably as a stone fetish, in that
wooden box known as the "ark of the covenant." Another occurred in a
long review of Jules Soury's remarkable book on the subject of Jesus
Christ's hallucinations and eccentricities, in which he endeavors to
show that the Prophet of Nazareth passed through certain recognised
stages of brain disease. Referring to the close of his career, I wrote
that, "When Jesus made his triumphant entry into Jerusalem he was
plainly crazed." That one sentence was picked out from a long review,
running through three numbers of the _Freethinker_, and filling six
columns of print. The third sentence was a satirical comment on the
sensational and blasphemous title of Dr. Parker's book on "The Inner
Life of Christ." I asked, "How did he contrive to get inside his maker?"
There was a fourth sentence I wrote for the _Freethinker_, but as it was
a verbatim report of some Bedlamite observations of a Salvationist at
Halifax, published, as I said, "to show what is being done and said in
the name of Christianity," I decline to be held responsible for it. Let
General Booth be answerable for the blasphemies of his own followers.

All the other passages in the Indictment were from the pens of
contributors, over whom, as they signed their articles, I never held
a tight rein. They were mostly amplifications of the sentence I have
already quoted about the cruel character of the Bible God. I did not,
however, dwell on this fact in my address to the jury. I took the full
responsibility, and fought my contributors' battle as well my own. I
bore their iniquities, the chastisement of their peace was upon me, and
by my stripes they were healed.

Four of the Comic Bible Sketches were included in the Indictment. They
appeared in the _Freethinker_ on the following dates:--January 29, April
23, May 28, and June 11 (1882). Readers who care to see what they were
like can refer to the file in the British