This again, like many of the things which we may reasonably complain about in what is, as the world goes, a humane criminal law, is one of the matters handed down by our forefathers which we have not had time to set right. In the old days Unitarians and others were burned alive. Fuller in his Church History says: it was found that "such burning of heretics much startled common people, pitying all in pain and prone to asperse justice itself with cruelty because of the novelty and hideousness of this punishment.... Wherefore King James politickly preferred that heretics hereafter, though condemned, should silently and privately waste themselves in prison." And that is what all heretics ought to do to-day if the law were equally administered, but as a matter of fact these laws are only put in force against poor, noisy people who preach their doctrines in the market place, and are a dead letter against those who preach the same doctrines on hand-made paper bound in morocco. I can quite believe that a bye-law to hinder one man saying coarse and ill-mannered things about another man's religion in open spaces might be a reasonable police proposition; but there must be free trade in these things and the Established Church must not have a preference. Moreover, such a law must not be extended to pulpits or printing presses or much interesting theological polemics would be lost to us. For the Blasphemy Laws in the twentieth century, protecting only one form of religion and set in motion only against the poor, nothing can be said. Foul language and obscenity can and are punishable in other ways, and the cause of religion is poorly served by being protected by laws which are only set in motion when the well-to-do are annoyed by the vulgarity and ill-manners of the poor. There is no gainsaying that once in the dock all men are equal or very nearly so, but one may harbour a suspicion whether all men have equal opportunities of getting there. Theoretically, the dock, like the Bench and the Cabinet and all other British institutions, is approached by an ever open door; but in practice more goats wander through the opening than sheep. Yet your sheep is a born trespasser. There are some who believe that his immunity from punishment is due to the wool on his back.