Opposing persecution without accepting freethought's promise
Militant atheists are still unjustly persecuted
A concrete earlier example is G. W. Foote's prosecution over the Freethinker. In Prisoner for Blasphemy (1886; inspected in Project Gutenberg's electronic transcription of the Progressive Publishing Company text), Foote describes the Christmas 1882 number as the publication for which he received twelve months' imprisonment. Chapter IX records shorter sentences for his co-defendants Ramsey and Kemp. This is an interested participant's testimony, not a neutral court transcript, but it makes the paragraph's concession concrete. Chesterton can regard religious punishment as unjust while denying the persecuted movement's claim to intellectual novelty or future promise. The distinction matters: the paragraph's asserted philosophical bankruptcy is not offered as a justification for censorship. Foote, chapters V and IX.
Sources
Revision 1 of 1 · 2026-11-07 · Suggest an edit