not two centuries ago, against witchcraft. It now denounces the former
as displeasing to God; it then denounced the latter for the same
offence. Men and women were in those less humane days burned for
displeasing God, while now they are only fined and incarcerated. By the
progress of knowledge, lawyers, both barristers and judges, have been
compelled to give up that portion of the perfection of human reason, and
the law against witchcraft has become obsolete. If our view of the law
for suppressing objections to the Scriptures, under * the name of
blasphemy, be correct, it is not more reasonable than the law against
witchcraft. While no lawyer, however, will now lend himself to revive
the latter or carry it into execution, there are numbers, we say it to
the disgrace of the profession, zealous and eager to apply the former,
at least to the penny tracts which are addressed to the poor.
"It is therefore with deep regret that we saw so eminent a man as the
Attorney-General lending himself to this sorry work. We are ready to
admit, as a Tory contemporary has stated, that he has done his duty, and
he finds his reward in the praise of the Tories. Nor did he show, as far
as we can learn, certainly not in his reply, any reluctance to perform
it; people say he did it as if he had something to atone for, and was
rather eager to gain the approbation of Bishop Philpotts. His labours
were crowned with a success which his own party reprobate. In
Westminster Hall he has triumphed, but an appeal lies from that to the
world; and even the Whigs, who have heretofore denounced prosecutions
for blasphemy as for witchcraft, consider that in the last resort he
will sustain a terrible defeat.
"Mr. Hetherington has already suffered in body and mind, in purse and
health; and probably awaits with apprehension the sentence, which may
consign him to prison and ruin. He is down-stricken by the law; but
those who have read his defence, and prefer reason to legal fictions,
will place him far above the triumphant Attorney-General. He made an
admirable pleading for free inquiry, which plain John Campbell
instituted a prosecution to suppress. In his reply Sir John so far
overstepped the bounds of propriety, that the Defendant would not allow
him to proceed, and was supported by the Court. In a bad cause the
Attorney-General used poisoned weapons. He upheld a prosecution for
blasphemy, which is as ridiculous as a prosecution for witchcraft, and
descended to misrepresent the accused. With our opinion of the law he
was enforcing, we are bound to say that Sir John Campbell should have
left such a duty to be performed by some taker of a half-guinea fee, who
never got beyond the precincts of the Old Bailey. It was wholly unworthy
of an eminent lawyer, who has risen into political power as a professed
friend of free discussion. The slaves to lust have some pleasure for
their punishment, but the servants of the grimgribber of Westminster
Hall, who sacrifice present fame to a sense of duty to it, reap little
more than disgrace for their nauseous drudgery.
"Sir John Campbell prosecuted Mr. Hetherington, in the language of the
indictment, for being 'a wicked, impious, and ill-disposed person,
having no regard to the laws of this realm, but most wickedly,
blasphemously, impiously, and profanely devising and intending to
asperse and vilify that part of the Holy Bible which is called the Old
Testament.' Now, having no respect whatever for the fictions of the law,
we have no hesitation in branding such accusations of a publisher as a
monstrous tissue of falsehoods, and to affirm that it is a disgrace to
any man who has the least respect for truth, to defend such a charge. We
care not about its being the customary language of the law, for truth
and men's liberties are not to be sacrificed by and for such
absurdities.
"Further, this said aspersing and vilifying the Bible is said by Sir J.
Campbell, at least such is the language of the indictment, which he used
arguments to sustain, to be greatly 'to the displeasure of Almighty
God.' Who knows that? What worm dares to say that the Almighty God is
displeased with another worm for uttering or writing a few words.' Who
is the vain and arrogant man that claims for himself the task of
interpreting the thoughts of the Most High, and demanding that a man be
punished for having displeased Almighty God? What name does the Court
deserve which, being instituted to do justice and protect the people,
punishes one of them because he displeases the Almighty? Can He not
punish those who displease Him? To doubt it, to undertake to protect or
avenge Him, to describe Him as displeased, while he showers prosperity
and contentment on the man said to displease Him, is far more impious,
more blasphemous, more dangerous to religion than anything Mr.
Hetherington ever published, or Mr. Haslam wrote. Such, however, was the
crime charged against Mr. Hetherington, which Sir John Campbell
endeavoured to substantiate, and of which a Jury, who are as much
deserving of reproach as the prosecutor, found him guilty. Such is the
crime for which the Court will hereafter pass sentence, undertaking,
like the Inquisition, to decide for the Almighty, and punish actions as
displeasing to Him, at which He, by the course of nature, shows no
displeasure.
"At the present time, when a great portion of the Whig press will
support the Attorney-General or be silent, leaving _The Sun_ to defend
the great principle of free inquiry and free printing, as they left it
to defend the same sacred and noble cause when it was assailed in the
person of Mr. Harmer, we think it our duty not to be silent. As we
should assail any Tory Attorney-General who had instituted such a
prosecution, or carried it on, so we cannot allow it to pass
unstigmatized because it has been instituted by a Whig Attorney-General.
We know that the wisest and best politicians of the party deprecate such
proceedings, and not the less because they will call forth in many
independent journals, to the injury of the Whigs, an expression of
honest indignation."
"TO LORD DENMAN, ON THE LATE PROSECUTION FOR BLASPHEMY
Mr Lord Chief Justice.
"Your conduct on the Bench, upon the recent trial, 'The Queen v.
Hetherington,' for a religious libel, a nominal and an impossible
offence, the fiction of fraudulent bigotry, has much increased the high
esteem in which you have been always held by the public. Your Lordship's
opinions on this impolitic, irreligious, and thoroughly infamous species
of prosecution have oft-times been expressed with the integrity and high
moral courage that have ever distinguished your public life. I never
shall forget the manliness with which I heard you avow from the Whig
Treasury Benches, in the House of Commons, in your place as Attorney
General, your detestation of indictments for religious opinions; and the
House hailed you when you fairly acknowledged your deep regret that, as
Common Serjeant, you had been obliged, in obedience to your oath and to
the law, to impose even the smallest punishment possible upon three men
convicted by an ignorant Jury of a libel on the Scriptures; and you were
still more cheerfully received when you expressed your joy at the
liberation of the prisoners whom you had so unwillingly punished. There
was one part of your speech that did not certainly satisfy me. I respect
your sense of obligation to an oath; but when you punished men whom you
conscientiously believed to be undeserving of infliction, and this 'in
obedience to the law,' your Lordship might have reflected, that it was
not Parliamentary, but Judge-made law--'Common-law,' as it is called;
and you might have acted upon the principle that if a corrupt and
ignorant Judge made a law to suit the prejudices of a brutal age, a pure
and well-informed Judge might reverse that law in favour of an age more
humane and more enlightened. I recollect with great satisfaction that
when, in the case of Lord Langford, the Counsel, Mr. Thesiger, asked a
witness (Mr. Nathan, a Jew) 'what religion he was of?' your Lordship
expressed your strong displeasure; and, under your Lordship's sanction,
the witness refused to answer the interrogatory, and treated both the
query and the querist with the utmost contempt; and the whole Court and
audience seemed strongly to approve of the result. In the recent trial
your Lordship's conduct was a contrast to that of your immediate
predecessors on the Bench, Lords Tenterden and Ellenborough, the last
representatives of a most disgraceful school of political, prejudiced,
corrupt Court Judges. You did all in your power to induce the Jury to
acquit the accused. I am now credibly informed that the Attorney-General
had the same object at heart; and having, intentionally, gone in a most
slovenly and unimpressive manner, through his technical duty, he was
abashed and mortified when he heard the verdict of guilty. Familiar as
he must be with the extreme ignorance, stupidity, and corruption of
Juries, on such occasions, he was still surprised at such a verdict. I
am willing to give him credit for these common reports in his favour;
but should the Government be so infatuated as to bring the defendant up
for judgment, the country expects of you, my Lord Denman, that the
sentence will be nominal, and that it will be accompanied by your
reprobation of all such trials.
"If it be true that hope is the last passion that leaves a man, equally
true is it that the spirit, the accursed spirit of religious
persecution, is the last passion that man deserts, or is willing to
abandon. I sincerely believe that if the alternative were put to a
hundred dying men, at their last, moment of consciousness, at their last
gasp of breath, whether they preferred their own future salvation or
beatitude, or the persecution of man upon earth for conscientious
differences of opinion on religious subjects, full ninety-nine out of
the hundred would choose the latter, on the ground of its being the
turnpike-road to the former, and from the inherent delight in the spirit
of religious intolerance. Fanaticism is the primeval curse of our
nature. From its first victim Abel, to the present hour, it has raged
through the human race. Moral sins and physical or corporeal diseases in
the course of ages wear themselves out, or can be cured by instruction
or medical treatment; but the most foul, leprous, and crime-engendering
of all maladies that flesh is heir to, fanaticism--call it if you
please, bigotry or superstition--admits of no cure, and of little
mitigation. If this hellhound were now let loose from the restraints of
law, we should in one year have every gaol and dungeon full of
prisoners, and in another, the fires and faggots of the olden times
would be raging more fiercely than of yore, and more furiously in this
country than in any other. Whatever Catholics might have been in the
middle ages, there has been more of religious persecution in Great
Britain and Ireland, in the last century, than in all the Catholic
countries of Europe within the same period. On the Continent the spirit
is on the wane; in England it is on the increase.
"My Lord Denman, in the very abstraction of our individual nature, and
of the nature of society, a court of justice cannot take cognizance of
opinions. Its functions are confined exclusively to facts. Can any two
classes of things be more distinct and opposite? The one is fixed, the
other perpetually varying. Law, cultivated reason and common sense have
rescued subjects of opinion from judicial interference, except with
respect to politics and religion, the two which of all others most need
the exemption. The interference of courts of justice with religious
opinions had immensely decreased, and it is now reviving; but it is in
your Lordship's power to annihilate it by passings nominal sentence on
the defendant. The effects or results of a fact are ascertainable; those
of an opinion are but speculative and uncertain. There is not in
existence, there never has existed, and probably never can exist, a
religious opinion that has not been deemed blasphemous, and of a
destructive tendency to morals and social peace, by its opponents, who,
if they had been strong enough, have relied upon the arguments of
torture and death, or punishments as severe as society would permit.
"My Lord, legism, or jurisprudence, are sufficiently understood to
render it indisputable that punishments cannot be vindicatory or
retrospective, and less than either, vindictive. All religious
prosecutions seek only for revenge. The object of a legal punishment
relates solely to the prevention of the offence. If a sentence against
Mr. Hetherington cannot effect this object, it cannot be justified. Will
a sentence alter his opinions? will it alter conscientiously that of any
class or single member of society? and, above all, will it stop or check
the dissemination of his doctrines? The two first points are nugatory;
the last is defeated in its pretended object. All history and experience
prove that persecution, let its form or degree be what it may, increases
that which it is meant to destroy. Whether the tyrant be called Pope or
Inquisition, Attorney-General or Court of Queen's Bench, the principle
and the result are the same.
"Every religion, church, and sect, that exists or is defunct, in Europe
and in Asia, from the earliest record, has had at its origin, and
through its infancy, to encounter obloquy and persecution. The Jewish
religion received animation and vigour from the contempt and cruelties
of surrounding polytheists, and the Jews sought in one God a protection
from the horrors which had been inflicted on them by the worshippers of
many; and well did this atrocious people revenue themselves 011 their
former persecutors, and this by assuming their own claim to the right of
punishing men for differing in opinions. The progress of Christianity
was accelerated by the Jews, in their attempts to crush it by inflicting
an ignominious and most cruel death on an innocent individual, under
that absurd fiction of blasphemy, in the foul name of which your
Lordship is now called upon to punish, against your will, another
innocent individual. If blasphemy has any meaning, its definition must
be--'a resistance to a predominant priestcraft.' Every religion, at its
commencement, is but a confluent mass of blasphemies to the
previously-established religions; and persecution is the reverse of
annihilation, Where would Protestantism have been but for its
persecution by the Catholics, and _vice versa_? From the dawn of
Protestantism in England, under Wycliffe, and the burning of the first
Protestants by the priests, in the reign of the Hero of Agincourt (what
a hero!) down to the death of Mary, English Protestants were tortured,
burnt, hanged, and punished, and yet the religion spread. Throughout
Germany the same effects proceeded from the same cause. Our English
persecutions of the Catholics in Ireland have been long, incessant, and
too dreadfully cruel to reflect upon, and yet Catholicism has increased
under them. We have not one respectable sect in England that has not
arisen in despite of persecution, and increased by means of it, and
these, with hundreds or thousands of other instances (for history
abounds with them), prove that persecution or punishment does not, and
cannot, effect the object in view; and that, consequently, punishment
cannot be justified by its only legitimate principle of
justification--utility. It is madness to punish for an offence which
must be increased by the very nature of the punishment. Formerly, in
punishments for blasphemy, men, women, and children were burnt and put
to every variety of torture, for the good of their souls--now, we
substitute for the word soul, the phrase--'_the security of society_,'
or other jargon equally nonsensical. The Court of Inquisition was, and
is, wherever it exists, more honourable than the Protestant Court of
Queen's Bench, for the Inquisitors tortured and destroyed for the sake
of the soul, but our Courts punish only for the profit of the priest.
The old plea, the impudent and barbarous plea, of 'Benefit of Clergy,'
is annulled by law, and yet an indictment for blasphemy is nothing more
or less than a process for the 'Benefit of Clergy.' Thus, my Lord, have
I humbly attempted to prove that your punishment of this individual will
be in strong and violent opposition to the principles, opinion, and
feelings which you have avowed on the Ministerial Benches of the House
of Commons; and if the Whig Administration is so infatuatedly base as to
call the defendant up for punishment your Lordship will be in the
unenviable position of passing a sentence, as Lord Chief Justice of
England, against the nature, principles, and objects of which you have
expressed little less than abhorrence in the character of Her Majesty's
Attorney-General in the House of Commons. At that period, my Lord, you
were the freely and most honourably chosen representative of one of the
largest and most enlightened constituencies of Great Britain--the town
of Nottingham--and your constituents expressed no dissatisfaction at
your speech. Is there not a sympathy between Nottingham and other large,
and populous, aud enlightened towns and cities, and between them all and
the general population of the empire? I have likewise, my Lord, shown,
to the best of my very humble abilities, as a legist, that any
punishment inflicted on this individual, violates the only principle on
which all punishments can be justified--the prevention of the
offence--if it be one.
"What, in other respects, will be the effects of this brutal
prosecution? Burn Mr. Hetherington alive,--slowly roast him, torture him
by every device, hang him, quarter him, and stick his head on
Temple-bar, and his quarters on the gates of four of our principal
cathedral towns, as in all such cases used to be the practice of our
most pious Christian ancestors in 'the good old times'--or let your
Lordship pass the most lenient sentence on him, and what will be the
result? Will any thing be proved, disproved, strengthened, or
invalidated, by either mode of punishment? If divines or laymen argue
upon the Scriptures _in toto_ or in parts, _en masse_ or in detail,
could any of the disputants establish his point by arguing that Mr.
Hetherington or Mr. Snookes, for the names are indifferent, was or was
not in gaol, or that the sentence was six days' or six months'
incarceration--how would the case stand syllogistically? A asserts that
the Bible ought to be burnt--A is not prosecuted--ergo, the Bible ought
to be burnt. B asserts that the Bible ought to be burnt--B is
prosecuted--B is acquitted by the Jury--ergo, the Bible ought to be
burnt. C asserts that the Bible ought to be burnt--C is prosecuted--C is
found guilty--ergo, the Bible ought not to be burnt. Again, D, E, F, and
G, are prosecuted for saying that the Bible ought to be burnt. They are
all found guilty under different Judges, and their sentences vary from
three, six, twelve, and eighteen months' imprisonment. Here the public
mind is in utter confusion between the cases of A, B, and C, and between
the ratios of punishment inflicted on D, E, F, and G, I have gone to the
extent of the musical gamut. Ratios might be calculated by
arithmeticians aud algebraists. Thus--'As burning the Bible is to the
acquittal of B,--so is not burning the Bible to the sentence on D, E, F,
or G." Really, my Lord, as a man of the most cultivated intellect, you
must see the monstrous absurdity, the atrocious cruelty, of subjecting
opinions on Scriptures to 'Trial by Jury.' If opinions on a book are to
be brought before a Jury, so might its author. I speak in no disrespect
of Scriptures, but I speak in utter disgust and abhorrence of bringing
them before Juries. What, in fact, does a verdict of 'Guilty' or 'Not
Guilty' amount to, in case of an opinion on the Scriptures? The ignorant
Jury men unwittingly set themselves above the Scriptures, and tyrannise
over the Deity himself. The impiety lies all in the Jury, and not in the
accused. The trial my Lord, proceeds entirely on the conceded point that
the Scriptures are the word of God; a word is an empty, unintelligible,
worthless sound, except by the interpretation put upon it; and if the
Jury will be the interpreters, they are the authors of the word, and
usurp the powers of the Deity. God may say 'this is my word and
commandment,' and a Jury replies, 'the substance utility,
intelligibility of a word depend entirely upon the meaning attached to
it, and we Jurymen will put and make all other men put what construction
we please, upon it, under pains and penalties, so that the word is not
yours, but ours.' A Defendant may argue, 'my construction is a matter
between my conscience and my God.' The verdict replies, 'God has nothing
to do with it; your construction is entirely a case between your
conscience and us Jurymen, stock-brokers, bill-brokers, pawnbrokers,
gambling-house-keepers, and, peradventure, keepers of houses of a still
worse description.' My Lord Denman, the manly character of your mind
will make you fearlessly grapple with this important subject, and will
induce your Lordship to feel that I have as fearlessly and as honestly
stated the merits of the case. Pause, my Lord, before you ruin, and
almost torture a man, for whose defence you have expressed respect from
the Judgment-seat, and this by a sentence for the nature and principles
of which you have publicly and officially declared an abhorrence.
"Our laws, Lord Denman, lay down a principle that every man is presumed
to be acquainted with the business, profession, or study to which he
belongs, or to which he has devoted himself. The converse--a most
rational converse, is that he is unacquainted with what he does not
belong to, or has not studied; or, in plain terms, that he is
unacquainted with that of which he knows nothing. Sir Isaac Newton would
have been a most ignorant Juryman upon a case resting upon the details
of business in the butter trade of Cork; and a Mr. Jones, in that trade,
would be an equally ignorant Juryman on a case involving the complex
observations and abstract calculations of Sir Isaac's Observatory.
Shakspeare, as a Juryman, would have been puzzled to determine a
disputed point of commerce; and a tradesman would be as equally
perplexed in deciding a point upon the machinery of Arkwright, or the
steam-engine of Watts. In the present case, a man named Haslam, (but the
name is immaterial, for I apply myself to abstractions and not to
individuals,) has devoted himself to the study of a subject. He is
evidently a man of strong mind, of great knowledge, and of the most
honest intentions. On many points I differ with him, but individual or
public difference is not the case at issue. His very able work is
submitted, not to the public mind, but to 'Trial by Jury;' and its
merits or demerits are determined upon by merchants, brokers, tradesmen.