ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns with one aspect of the evolving definitions of the common law crime of blasphemy between the seventeenth and the twenty-first centuries, the test of decency. The Quaker James Nayler's entry into Bristol in 1656, in apparent emulation of Christ's entry into Jerusalem, along with palm fronds and female followers crying hosannah, was condemned as blasphemous by the Protectorate Parliament. In the minds of the orthodox, scoffing was a tidal wave of blasphemy, while the fashion for atheistic drollery' was a social and generational innovation. Clerical authors claimed to welcome sober reasoning', but they would not tolerate mockery and scoffing. Joss Marsh's close attention to nineteenth-century blasphemy trials has revealed that they were about so much more than the repression of heterodox opinion. In the 1970s Lord Scarman believed that the watershed between the old and the modern law' of blasphemy was located in the judgments on Hetherington in 1840 and Ramsay and Foote in 1883.
