the attacks now made on Christianity, though they ought to awaken among its defenders the watchfulness, need ever awaken the trepidation of fear. Every man, in truth, who loves Christianity and obeys its laws is a defender of the faith, but there is a mightier band, both of the living and the dead, drawn up in this land of light around the strong-holds of our religion. And before Christianity could cease to be our creed, not only would it be necessary to burn or obliterate the magnificent library of the genius of England-but to root out from the deep soil of the English heart all the grand thoughts and lofty associations that have for centuries there grown and prospered-to cut down the mysterious groves of the imagination-to strip the whole region of the English spirit naked and bare and to leave it without hope, or memory, or emotion, or passion, one wide and cheerless blank of sterility and desolation. This is a catastrophe which never can befall us. We have no fears lest the temples of the living God should be pushed from their base by the fierce but feeble hands of their wretched assailants. These blind and impious hordes seem to us like madmen impotently dashing themselves against impediments which to them seem tottering or air-built, but against whose massive and enduring strength they fall down in miserable pain and baffled ferocity. We who know what Christianity is-and what is and what has been the Christian church-will not endure the degradation of one moment's fear, lest the mean should over throw the mighty-lest the wretched hands of the ignorant, the vile, and the wicked, stretched forth through the darkness in which they dwell, should be permitted to touch, much less to scatter, the unextinguishable beacon-light that burns on the altar of Religion. But is there any man so senseless as not to know that Christianity may remain, pure and undefiled, the Religion of the land; and yet that there may, at the same time, be in that land much of the wickedness and the wretchedness of infidelity. Though we have no fears for Christianity, which is of God, are we to have none for Christians, who are but mere frail and erring men? Are the blasphemies of a Paine not to be put down by punishment, because, forsooth, we are told, that if our religion is from God, it stands in no need of the support of man, while, at the same time, we are beholding the hearts and the souls of all who join in such blasphemies, polluted, seared, and blasted? Who, but the infidel himself, ever ventured to affirm, that God gave us Christianity to be a blessing, that was to exist among us for ever, in spite of all ingratitude, contempt, scorn, and blasphemy? If it is from God, why care for seeing it subjected to the puny attacks of man? Oh! blind, base, and wicked thanklessness to our Benefactor! It is, we reply, because our religion is from God, that we will not suffer it to be profaned. If it were even the mere human invention of some benign philosopher, who had seen farther than his fellow-mortals into the mysteries of our souls, even then so much perfect beauty, and stainless purity, and unapproached sublimity, though of mortal birth, would have been guarded both by righteousness and by law, and wo would have been to their blasphemers. But when God has sent down in mercy his own word unto earth, shall we dare to pride ourselves on our poor virtues of liberality, and toleration of what we are pleased to call the opinions of our brethren, and stand by without smiting the of fender in his guilt, while the revelation that made us what we now are, and worthy of the higher destinies of futurity, is mocked by the mouths of the ignorant, the profligate, the ferocious, and the wicked? What promise has our Creator ever given to us-what reason can we draw from his moral government, that he will not, to punish sin and iniquity, allow the light of Christianity to be darkened all over the earth? The sins of a nation bring upon it all kinds of evil— weakness, disorder, convulsions, and revolution. Thence, too, the decay of all human virtues, and of all human knowledge. And are we to suppose, that Christianity is still to abide among the melancholy ruins-and that the wickedness of the creature shall no more move the Creator unto wrath? Let no man, then, dare thus to speak of his religion; for, after all, its temple is in the heart; and if our hearts can be so cold, so dead in the frost of ingratitude as not to burn and kindle up into indignation, when God himself is insulted, how may Chris tianity any longer abide there-Christianity, the religion, it is true, of gentleness and of love, but whose Sanctities, when profaned, are terrible, and will not be so profaned without a terrible vengeance being wrought by heaven on the guilty Nation. What is there in the heart of man, beautiful or great, that is not from Heaven? Love, by which men are held together in communities, is from God. Its principles are laid by God in the intellect and the heart. Parental and filial love are from and of God-their uttermost perfection is brought to light in the Christian dispensation. All created existence is in God. What then is or can be meant by telling us, that Christianity needs not our support, and that it is at once cruel, and unjust, and needless to inflict punishment on its enemies? Will not parental love, that mingles with ineffable and blissful tenderness with the heart blood of all human life, support for ever its own fearless and undying energies? Will not filial love yearn, even to its latest day, towards the bosom on which it lay in its helplessness? Yet, is there no language in which the word-Parricide-is unknown. The light of nature, whether original or revealed, is put into our own keeping-we are bound to feed and to protect it—and, if needs must be, to punish all who seek to extinguish it, by the infliction of degrading, and shameful, and humiliating punish ment. With many of those acts to which law, with a necessary regard to the rights of the community, has adjudged punishment, there are in human nature many sources of sympathy; and this feeling not unfrequently renders such punishment nugatory, or at least greatly diminishes its efficacy in the prevention of crime. But there is one crime which shuts up the hearts of all against its perpetrator, and makes them to award and to witness his punishment with a stern and almost unpitying spirit. That is the crime of Blasphemy. In the Blasphemer we see the enemy of all the human race. We see him flinging poison into the well of life; and when we think that the poor who repair thither in their thirst for refreshment may drink pollution and death, from what corner of the satisfied conscience can come one single feeble whisper against in flicting punishment on the merciless destroyer? We find ourselves sometimes driven to the stern necessity of putting a malefactor to death for some one dangerous and unpardonable crime. He has forfeited his life-and the forfeit must be paid. Say that he is a robber or a murderer-that he has violated property and shed blood. Never did there exist in any human society, robber and murderer who had the power of being so destructive by acts of violence and blood to his fellow creatures as the-blasphemer. The one disregards the commandment of God and man-the other would obliterate them-would break the tablets on which they are engraven. A thousand robberies and murders lie at the door of every blasphemer. Could we suppose Paine to have suffered separate punishment for each of all the capital crimes that he had virtually committed,-hour after hour, and day after day, must the bones of the unhappy wretch have been broken on the wheel. One act of guilt is perpetrated, and the actor must die. And shall the fiend, who by cowardice or fear merely has been prevented from the commission of every crime, and who devotes all the energies of his nature, such as they may be, to the destruction of those feelings and principles and beliefs by which the actions of mankind are either restrained or kindled, shall he be held to stand aloof in impunity, beyond the reach of human law, and sacred from the vengeance of the society which he is plotting to undermine and to overthrow? The universal voice of conscience cries out for his punishment. But, no one who is capable of knowing the dignity of human nature, supposes that, by the punishment of blasphemy, the sole good sought or gained, is either the prevention of the further crime of an individual, or even the reformation of that individual. A wrong has been done an insult offered to the spirit of religion in men's hearts-and unless the sin against God and the divine influence be punished, society would feel as if it retained the blasphemer within its bosom, and become a party in his crime. There must for such fault be an expiation ordained even by a human tribunal. Nature calls that criminal to the bar-and delivers him up to justice. None can doubt or question the right which society holds of doing with the blasphemer whatsoever it will, who knows any thing of what Christianity is, or the principles by which alone can exist the great nations of Christendom. It is most true, that Christianity is with us part of the law of the land, and it would be strange if it were not; but however that may be-it is the law of God, and the law of nature admits it into our hearts; and, therefore, it is a crime to touch it with an unhallowed hand, and a crime whose punishment carries with it its own vindication. It is therefore unworthy of any man of intellect to talk about the evil which is done by trials for blasphemy. If a crime is perpetrated, it must be punished-and he must have a poor opinion both of the laws of God, and the constitution of human nature, who thinks that a Christian society can be deterred by fear from the punishment of guilt. It is most true, that the wickedness of the blasphemer is aggravated by any evil that may result from the publicity which must be given to some portion of his blasphemy, by the only means that society can take for its ultimate suppression, and his immediate punishment. That guilt is on his own head. But though his impieties may, indeed must, in the course of justice, be made visible to some eyes which had otherwise been saved from the foulness, can that be held as an argument against passing sentence on them at all, and for suffering them to float over the whole of society, unbranded with the stigma of a righteous law? No man can think so. However hideous the crime of blasphemy-and however lamentable that the innocent should be almost obliged to hear or to look on it, when brought forward even for the purpose of punishment, that evil is light and trifling indeed, compared to that which would spring out of impunity-for then we should seem to have abandoned, as it were, the cause of nature and of God. It is well that the religious mind should not be exposed to the contamination that there is felt to be in the mere knowledge that such foul things have been conceived and written, but, if they have been so conceived and written, is it better that they should be suffered, silently and surely, to scatter themselves abroad, or that they should be fearlessly grasped by the law, and when by it exhibited, exhibited with the seal of reprobation affixed to them, to universal loathing, execration, and scorn? It would not only be weak but wicked to know that infidelity was openly at work, and yet to be afraid of arresting the evil spirit as he was selling perdition. We have remarked, that though many of our periodical writers have lamented (and who would not) that the conviction of that caitiff Carlisle was necessarily accompanied with the publication of some of his hideous impieties, yet that none have regretted or blamed the trial of such a pest, but men of the very narrowest intellect, or those who, in their secret souls, are unbelievers like himself, and would fain, by some plausible plea, shield such criminals from punishment. Nor, on such occasions, has the self-named philosopher been silent and we have been told, that OPINIONS must be put down, not by the pains of law, but by the power of reason. OPINIONS-Of what do such persons speak? Has intellect any fetters imposed upon it in this country? May it not thinkspeculate-theorize-doubt-attackand overturn? And in what place, or in what time of the world, were all kinds of OPINIONS So freely and boldly, and even audaciously promulgated, without fear of either stop or stay?Never in any country was the human intellect so free-and heaven forfend that we should seek to abridge its freedom. But though virtue, and knowledge, and sense, and philosophy, should be free, because they will nobly repay their freedom to the state,who contends, and with what motives, for uncontrolled liberty to vice, ignorance, madness, and folly? Have they a right to be free? or rather, is there not an obligation laid by liberty and knowledge on those whose country is blessed by their light, to bind, and shackle, and scourge, and punish, what is at eternal enmity with all most glorious and sacred to man? OPINIONS! they are the fruit of thought and such is the honour in which intellect is held in this country, that its very errors are respected, and we look with pardon even upon falsehood, if we are assured that the intellect has embraced it, mistaking it for truth. But the foul and obscene blasphemies of which we speak, cannot, without the violation, not of language only, but of all feeling and thought, be for a single moment, denominated OPINIONS! They are conceived in the most deplorable ignorance-cherished in defiance of the convictionof their falsehood-expressed in words abhorrent from every emotion or faculty by which human nature is ennobled disseminated in the spirit of wickedness among minds totally incapable of judging of the awful subjects which they vilify-sold by cold-blooded cupidity and insensate selfishness to poverty that, under the delusion of its darkness and its distress, barters its last rag for perdition. It is not to be endured, that in this land that has so long held its faith in the open light of day, and at all times possessed champions willing to meet the infidel, it should be said even by her most degenerate sons, that OPINION has not a fair field. On the contrary, we could almost be disposed to think that christian divines have sometimes, we will not say degraded themselves, but stooped from their high place, to meet the atheist or the deist who, with all his loud vaunts, was at the time an object only of pity and of scorn. The wickedness of the infidels of the present day is almost lost sight of in the folly of their pride. It is on their intellect that they depend! They see through the delusions under which the wisest of men have lain ; they discern the monstrous contradictions and inconsistencies of that evidence on which the best of men have trusted to the truth of revelation-they discover imperfections even in that morality which the purest of men have regarded as a standard to be looked up to with ennobling but hopeless aspirations; and who are they who have done and are doing all this, and would fain burst the bubble of Christianity, -why, they are the most ignorant, the most vile, the most selfish, the most profligate, and the most wicked of mankind. And it is they who would substitute reason for faith who, alas! stand at zero on the scale of intellect, and never from their birth to their death shall comprehend, or catch even one single glimpse of one of the least perplexing mysteries of our nature. VOL. VI. It may perhaps be thought, that we state this too strongly, for that all men are agreed in their contempt of the radicals in religion. But have we not, during some of the late discussions which the act against blasphemous writings occasioned, heard the names of Calvin and Luther, and of other great reformers, mentioned by persons who ought better to have known how, and when, and where to speak of the benefactors of mankind? Little can they know of the real blessings of the Reformation, or of the sublime intellects which wrought it, who could endure to think of the one or the other in the same mood of mind in which they regarded the proceedings of our modern infidels. It is a shocking and a senseless abuse of the great events of history, or the mighty achievements, and the noble enterprises, and the unconquerable characters of its personages, to employ them as vague and indefinite arguments to sanction things, or opinions, or any courses either of action or of thought, that may happen to bear some seeming resemblance to them, but that are ever separate and opposed by a thousand essential differences. It is true, that all the immortal reformers of old had to contend against many of the most inveterate prejudices of human nature. And it was theirs to dispel the mists which hung over Christianity. Shall it be said, that the present reformers of religion too have their prejudices to fight against-and that they have to dispel the mists which are breathed from Christianity? But no person of common capacity will listen to such foolishness, or think, because wisdom, and virtue, and knowledge, and zeal, and rational piety, met in their day with opposition from authorities which they succeeded in laying prostrate, and in building on their ruins the temples of truth, that therefore, folly, and vice, and ignorance, and impiety, should be now-a-days granted privileges which to them were denied, and that we have no right to guard religion by the terrors of law against the wicked and the dark, because our ancestors were unable to guard superstition against the good and the enlightened. Look at the end which our reformers have in view-and look at the means by which they hope to attain it-and then say, if any Christian government 2 T were not mad that did not crush them by the severest enactments. There is something, at first hearing, suspicious in one single expression in favour of liberty for such men. For, what if they were all, in one single day, put down into everlasting silence and oblivion? What thing, civil or sacred, human or divine, could suffer from their destruction? It is true, that with all their wickedness, and all their power of evil, no true Christian would wish them to be treated with cruelty, and no true religion would desire them to be overwhelmed by oppressionbut all that Christian charity is called upon to do is to forgive them, and all that civil liberty ought to do is to endure them so long as they do not violate the laws; he is neither a Christian nor a freeman, who raves only at rights which it is impossible for them to possess, and who, even when he beholds their unwearied and unextinguishable hatred of all noble things, gives vent to his declamatory love of liberty, in resistance to those enactments which can affect only its foulest and most inveterate enemies. Whoever has paid any attention to the history of religion in this island knows, that the blasphemies which are now circulated throughout town and country are the same that have been so frequently issued and have again fallen into disrepute, since the days of Tindall and Collins. All the arguments of the deists have been refuted over and over again many hundred times-so false and foolish is it to say that any other power but that of reason has been brought to bear against infidelity. But some wicked spirits appear every twenty years, and dig up the buried blasphemy-to each generation of youth the objections of the infidel appear to be new-the ignorant inexperienced mind is staggered for a while by arguments that before its riper judgment fall asunder into shapeless pieces-and the man looks back with contempt on the delusions practised upon the boy. But it ever must be the fate of religion, so long as the human mind is constituted as it now is, and so long as the Evidences of Revelation remain the same, to enter the minds of millions through the gates of Doubt. Nor is this to be deplored:for faith, though a gift, is a gift that must be won. But it is a sufficient answer to those purblind philosophers who are averse to all legal enactments against infidelity, lest they arrest the progress of Thought and Opinion, that infidelity has, in fact, no thoughts or opinions at all-that the vender of blasphemy steals and does not produce that instead of trusting to his own thoughts, he rakes out of the dust the buried falsehood, and the convicted lie-that it is from depravity of heart, and meanness of capacity, that he is unable to comprehend the evidences and doctrines of Christianitythat it is to him a relief to shut his eyes to that beauty and that sublimity which is knowledge too high for him, and to take refuge from those duties of thought which faith imposes on all, among the coarseness, the hardness, and the brutality of a creed, not as he would make others believe, of reason, but of the senses. How widely and deeply the spirit of infidelity may at present be interfused with the character of the English people, it would be rash for any man to pretend to decide; but that it is an element, and a prime element too, of the present condition of the popular mind, as it has been lately exhibited in ways so hostile to the whole principles of the constitution, is certain; and this is a truth which ought not for one moment to be lost sight of by those who wish to promote their country's weal. The temper of the people, that is to say, of that part of them who have lately forgotten themselves and their country, is precisely that in which infidelity delights. It exhibits a blind and angry opposition to all established authorities-a scorn of many things that in a kindlier mood they were wont to respect-a distempered eagerness to swallow novelties from whatever quarter they come-a sad dereliction of many of those domestic habits which were once the preservation of virtue and happiness,—and it may be said, without injustice, sometimes a fierceness and a ferocity certainly alien to their nature, and not to be entirely accounted for on the ready and sweeping principle of distress. It is not to be denied by any one, that there is apparent, on the face of the times, to an extent that is undefined, a disturbance of men's minds from the old opinion and feeling that are hereditary in the country. The country itself has been shaken and unsettled by the events of many years. Its agitated |