Persecutions and martyrdoms, however, are trifles compared to the
mischief done by censorships in delaying the general march of
enlightenment. This can be brought home to us by imagining what
would have been the effect of applying to all literature the
censorship we still apply to the stage. The works of Linnaeus and
the evolutionists of 1790-1830, of Darwin, Wallace, Huxley,
Helmholtz, Tyndall, Spencer, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Samuel Butler,
would not have been published, as they were all immoral and
heretical in the very highest degree, and gave pain to many
worthy and pious people. They are at present condemned by the
Greek and Roman Catholic censorships as unfit for general
reading. A censorship of conduct would have been equally
disastrous. The disloyalty of Hampden and of Washington; the
revolting immorality of Luther in not only marrying when he was a
priest, but actually marrying a nun; the heterodoxy of Galileo;
the shocking blasphemies and sacrileges of Mohammed against the
idols whom he dethroned to make way for his conception of one
god; the still more startling blasphemy of Jesus when he declared
God to be the son of man and himself to be the son of God, are
all examples of shocking immoralities (every immorality shocks
somebody), the suppression and extinction of which would have
been more disastrous than the utmost mischief that can be
conceived as ensuing from the toleration of vice.

These facts, glaring as they are, are disguised by the
promotion of immoralities into moralities which is constantly
going on. Christianity and Mohammedanism, once thought of and
dealt with exactly as Anarchism is thought of and dealt with
today, have become established religions; and fresh immoralities
are prosecuted in their name. The truth is that the vast majority