In 1977 the House of Lords in R v Lemon unanimously asserted that the offence of blasphemy had survived a long period of desuetude, and remained very much alive and capable of being used. This surprised many. There had been no prosecution for the offence for sixty-five years. Lord Goddard had once declared it ‘obsolescent’, Lord Denning had described it as a ‘dead letter’, and in 1959 the Society for the Abolition of the Blasphemy Laws had abolished itself. Despite this, and despite disagreement among their Lordships as to the intention or mens rea of the offence, they had no doubt that it still existed as a criminal offence. Indeed, Lord Scarman expressly disassociated himself from the view that the offence ‘serves no useful purpose in modern law’.