It is worth while recording the curious, not to say ignominious, ways from which justice to new thought has emerged. In the 5 and 6 Victori?, cap. 38, 1842, the trial of eighteen offences were removed from the jurisdiction of Justices of the Peace in Quarter Sessions and transferred to the Assize Court. Persons accused were often subject to magisterial intolerance, ignorance and offensiveness. Among the transferred offences were forgery, bigamy, abductions of women. "Blasphemy and offences against religion," often of doubtful and delicate interpretation, were two of the subjects taken out of magisterial hands and placed under the decision of better-informed and more responsible judges. "Blasphemy" was the general title under which atheism, heresy, and other troubles of the questioning intellect were designated. "Composing, printing or publishing blasphemous libels," were included in the list of subjects to be dealt with in higher courts. Thus better chances of justice were secured to thinkers and disseminators of forbidden ideas. This new charter of thought, which conceded legal fairness to propagandism, was not the subject of a special statute, but was interpolated in a list, which read like an auctioneer's catalogue, eluded Parliamentary prejudice, which might have been fatal, had it been formally submitted to its notice.
In the same manner the Affirmation Act, which changed the status of the disbeliever in theology from that of an outlaw to that of a citizen, crept into the Statute Book through a criminal avenue. A Bill to admit atheists, agnostics, or other conscientious objectors to the ecclesiastic oath, to make a responsible affirmation instead, was twice or thrice thrown out of the windows of Parliament. Sir John Trelawny used to say Mr. Gathorne Hardy (afterwards Lord Cranbrook) would rise u............