Omnipotence is _able_ to punish those who offend it, and Omniscience knows _when_ to punish.

Man's interference is grossly impertinent.

When the emperor Tiberius was asked by an informer to allow proceedings against one who had "blasphemed the gods," he replied: "No, let the gods defend their own honor." Christian rulers have not yet reached that level of justice and common sense.
Next, it was flagrantly unjust to accuse us of aspersing and vilifying Almighty God at all.

The _Freethinker_ had simply assailed the reputation of the god of the Bible, a tribal deity of the Jews, subsequently adopted by the Christians, whom James Mill had described as "the most perfect conception of wickedness which the human mind can devise." What difference, I ask, is there between that strong description and the sentence quoted from the _Freethinker_ in our Indictment, which declared the same being as "cruel as a Bashi-Bazouk and bloodthirsty as a Bengal tiger"?
The one is an abstract and the other a concrete expression of the same view; the one is philosophical and the other popular; the one is a cold statement and the other a burning metaphor.

To allow the one to circulate with impunity, and to punish the other with twelve months' imprisonment, is to turn a literary difference into a criminal offence.
Further, as Sir James Stephen has observed, it is absurd to talk about bringing "the Holy Scriptures and the Christian religion into disbelief and contempt." One of these words is clearly superfluous.