When a preacher or an editor becomes crooked in his teaching, and others criticize him until public opinion frowns upon him, he nearly always cries out that he is persecuted; that the ecclesiastic thumb-screws are being applied to him; and all the instruments of torture once used in the Spanish Inquisition became familiar to him. He cries out for freedom of thought and liberty of speech; and if the church he has scandalized undertakes to put him away for denying the truth, he is at once proclaimed a martyr by a whole host of fellows as crooked as he.

      Unfortunately for these victims of persecution, their views on the subject of free speech are very one-sided. They want all possible freedom themselves, but they are not willing to grant it to those on the other side. They desire to teach their heretical or infidel theories with perfect freedom, but they are not willing to be held up as heretics or infidels by those who believe them to be such. [246] Why not have freedom of thought and liberty of speech on both sides? Why should it be regarded as a rightful exercise of freedom for a man to hold me up to ridicule, for believing the Bible, but an abuse of it for me to condemn and ridicule his unbelief? By all means let us have free speech; but when, by the full exercise of it, some fellow is floored, let him take it as his part, and not begin the cowardly cry of persecution. Jesus taught his disciples to be content when they were called Beelzebub; why should his enemies think themselves too good or too tender for the same treatment?

[SEBC 246-247]