That desecration can be practised in the most manifold wise is here to be passed over, and only that desecration is to be preferentially mentioned which threatens the sacred with danger through an _unrestricted press_.
As long as respect is demanded even for one spiritual essence, speech and the press must be enthralled in the name of this essence; for just so long the egoist might "trespass" against it by his _utterances_, from which thing he must be hindered by "due punishment" at least, if one does not prefer to take up the more correct means against it, the preventive use of police authority, _e. g._ censorship.
What a sighing for liberty of the press! What then is the press to be liberated from? Surely from a dependence, a belonging, and a liability to service! But to liberate himself from that is every one's affair, and it may with safety be assumed that, when you have delivered yourself from liability to service, that which you compose and write will also belong to you as your _own_ instead of having been thought and indited _in the service_ of some power. What can a believer in Christ say and have printed, that should be freer from that belief in Christ than he himself is? If I cannot or may not write something, perhaps the primary fault lies with _me_. Little as this seems to hit the point, so near is the application nevertheless to be found. By a press-law I draw a boundary for my publications, or let one be drawn, beyond which wrong and its _punishment_ follows. I myself _limit_ myself.
If the press was to be free, nothing would be so important as precisely its liberation from every coercion that could be put on it in the _name of a law_. And, that it might come to that, I my own self should have to have absolved myself from obedience to the law.
Certainly, the absolute liberty of the press is like every absolute liberty, a nonentity. The press can become free from full many a thing, but always only from what I too am free from. If we make ourselves free from the sacred, if we have become _graceless_ and _lawless_, our words too will become so.
As little as _we_ can be declared clear of every coercion in the world, so little can our writing be withdrawn from it. But as free as we are, so free we can make it too.