The reasonable provision against unnecessary outrages on the deepest feelings
of religious people should, in fact, be made a general law applicable to all forms and all sects of religion or no religion. We would not allow a clergyman to abuse agnostics or free-thinkers or materialists or atheists as, say, necessarily evil livers, in a public place, or to use provo- cative language in regard to them. Let us add, on the question as a whole, that we detest more than we can say the notion that true religion requires to be supported in its essentials by laws making blasphemy a special crime quite apart from its effects on public order. We must never forget that our Lord Himself was called a blasphemer. Christianity, when it was conquering the world, instead of having any blasphemy laws to help it, was exposed to the attacks of the blasphemy laws of the Jewish Church and of the Roman Empire.
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