"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