To deny what you believe to be true, to admit to be true what you believe to be a lie—that is blasphemy.
To strike the weak and unprotected, in order that you may gain the applause of the ignorant and superstitious mob—that is blasphemy.
To persecute the intelligent few, at the command of the ignorant many—that is blasphemy.
To forge chains, to build dungeons, for your honest fellow-men—that is blasphemy.
To pollute the souls of children with the dogma of eternal pain—that is blasphemy.
To violate your conscience—that is blasphemy.
The jury that gives an unjust verdict, and the Judge who pronounces an unjust sentence, are blasphemers.
The man who bows to public opinion against his better judgment and against his honest conviction, is a blasphemer.
Why should we fear our fellow-men? Why should not each human being have the right, so far as thought and its expression are concerned, of all the world? What harm can come from an honest interchange of thought?
I have been giving you my real ideas. I have spoken freely, and yet the sun rose this morning, just the same as it always has. There is no particular change visible in the world, and I do not see but that we are all as happy to-day as though we had spent yesterday in making somebody else miserable. I denounced on yesterday the superstitions of the Christian world, and yet, last night I slept the sleep of peace. You will pardon me for saying again that I feel the greatest possible interest in the result of this trial, in the principle at stake. This is my only apology, my only excuse for taking your time. For years I have felt that the great battle for human liberty, the battle that has covered thousands of fields with heroic dead, had finally-been won. When I read the history of this world, of what has been endured, of what has been suffered, of the heroism and infinite courage of the intellectual and honest few, battling with the countless serfs and slaves of kings and priests, of tyranny, of hypocrisy, of ignorance and prejudice, of faith and fear, there was in my heart the hope that the great battle had been fought, and that the human race, in its march towards the dawn, had passed midnight, and that the "great balance weighed up morning." This hope, this feeling, gave me the greatest possible joy. When I thought of the many who had been burnt, of how often the sons of liberty had perished in ashes, of how many of the noblest and greatest had stood upon scaffolds, and of the countless hearts, the grandest that ever throbbed in human breasts, that had been broken by the tyranny of Church and State, of how many of the noble and loving had sighed themselves away in dungeons, the only consolation was that the last Bastile had fallen, that the dungeons of the Inquisition had been torn down and that the scaffolds of the world could no longer be wet with heroic blood.