After condemning us to death they commit us for contempt of court, which surely is an anomalous procedure! You can mock the Grecian mythology, you can burlesque Shakespeare, without wounding any pious heart? No: Olympus is as sacred to many as Mount Sion is to you; our own Shakespeare is as venerable and dear to us as to you that bundle of dissimilar anonymous treatises which you have made coherent by help of the bookbinder and called the Book of Books. And mark this; the Grecian mythology is dead, is no longer aggressive in its absurdities; the priestcraft and the foul rites have long since perished, the beauty and the grace and the splendor remain. But your composite theology is still alive, is insolently aggressive, its lust for tyrannical dominion is unbounded; therefore we must attack it if we would not be enslaved by it. The cross is a sublime symbol; I would no more think of treating it with disrespect while it held itself aloft in the serene heaven of poetry than of insulting the bow of Phoebus Apollo or the thunderbolts of Zeus; but if coarse hands will insist on pulling it down upon my back as a ponderous wooden reality, what can I do but fling it off as a confounded burden not to be borne? And now let us consider for a moment the meaning of this word “blasphemy,” which is the burden of the _S. R.’s_ slanderous song; not the legal meaning, but the philosophic, the sense in which it would be used by enlightened and fair controversialists. The most Christian _S. R._ says to the Atheistic Iconoclast, You blaspheme. Whom? The Christian God! And the _S, R._ does not appear to see that it is assuming the very existence of God which is in dispute between itself and Iconoclast! For the Atheist, God is a figment, nothing; in blaspheming God he therefore blasphemes nothing. A man really blasphemes when he mocks, insults, pollutes, vilifies that which he really believes to be holy and awful. Thus a Christian who really believes in the Christian God (and there _may_ be a hundred such Christians in England) can be guilty of blasphemy against that God, whether that God really subsists or not; for such a Christian in mocking or vilifying God would really be violating the most sacred convictions of his own nature. Speaking philosophically, an honest Atheist can no more blaspheme God than an honest Republican can be disloyal to a King, than an unmarried man can be guilty of conjugal infidelity. [This “Word on Blasphemy,” as I have ventured to call it, is from a long article on the _Saturday Review_ and the _National Reformer_, the rest of which was of merely temporary interest, and that only to the readers of those two journals. The “outburst of Rabelasian laughter” which so provoked the _Saturday Review_, was a short satire on Christian theology and priestcraft, entitled “The Fanatical Monkeys,” ascribed to Charles Southwell, and just then published in the _National Reformer_.—Editor.]