marks, and I shall leave it to your own breasts, as Christians, citizens, fathers, and husbands, to determine whether that holy religion be only a fable and an imposture, that religion, on which all our civil and religious institutions have been founded.

Christianity is, undoubtedly, a part of the common law of the land, and therefore a part of the constitution of the country; that it is so, cannot be disproved, and it has always been considered as a crime to revile that religion, on which the proper administration of public justice depends, and only under the sanction of which you are this day assembled to decide the question to be brought before you. If you did not believe in this, why did you come here? If you are not satisfied of this, why pledge yourselves by taking the oath tendered to you-by your hopes of happiness here and hereafter, to give an impartial verdict? Unless the defendant can wipe away such a part of the Christian religion as that which forms your oath-unless, I may almost say, he can persuade you to be purged from that solemn obligation-unless he can make you perjure your. selves-unless he is able to effect all this, it is impossible for him to be acquitted. If it is, then, an offence to revile the Christian religion, the religion of the State, as it has been held to be through many succeeding ages, when I shall come to those disgusting passages in the publication of the defendant, which it will shortly be my duty to read to you, Gentlemen of the Jury, I am sure I may sit down content alone with their bare perusal-and satisfied, that no man, whether a Christian or not, whatever may be his religious tenets, whatever his political creed-that no man, while Christianity continues a part of the law of the land, will be permitted to defame and to revile it as the Defendant has done; and that no man will be found to say he has not violated the law in the publication now charged against him. Gentlemen, you are not to take the law from me, but in what I say I am sure of being confirmed by his Lordship, when he comes to address you at the proper season-that to revile, with a view to bring into contempt the Christian religion, is contrary to the common law of the land. I say, also, that it is a statutable offence, if it is necessary to refer to them on the present occasion. Now, I shall find no more difficulty in shewing that to be the case, than that the publication now charged against the Defendant is a criminal offence, for which the party committing it is liable to be punished. The first case to which I shall call the attention of

the Court occurred so long ago as the time of King Charles II. It was tried before a Judge, who, as long as British law shall endure, will be held in the highest estimation as a lawyer and as a man. I mean Sir Matthew Hale. It was an information against a person of the name of Taylor, for merely uttering blasphemous expressions. I will not disgust the Jury by repeating the whole of the words he uttered, as they are horrible to hear, though not worse than those which it will be my duty to prove have been published by the present Defendant. Taylor, it was proved, had called religion a cheat, and declared that he feared neither God nor Devil. Being on his trial, he owned the words, but endeavoured to shew that part of them had been uttered with a meaning different from that which had been supposed to attach to them. The Judge, however, decided, that to say religion was cheat, was not only an offence against religion, but a subversion of all law, as it went to dissolve all those obligations which held society together. This was the decision of Sir Matthew Hale; yet now we are told by the present Defendant, that the charge brought against him has no foundation in law. I may now say, in the language of the learned Judge I have just mentioned, that to revile the Christian religion." was not only an offence against God, but also against the law of the State, and the Government of the realm." Christianity is part and parcel of the law. Taylor was convicted, and a very severe sentence was given against him. But the precedents that might be adduced did not stop at the period to which I have gone back. At the commencement of the reign of George II. a person of the name of Woolston was convicted on four informations, He attempted to justify himself, by impugning, as he had previously done, the miracles of our Saviour, and the belief which all Christians profess. But this mode of defence the Court would not suffer him to proceed with, and without wishing to interfere with the discussions of learned men on particular points, they held it was forbidden to make a general attack on the Christian religion, while to call religion a cheat was an offence cognizable by a civil Court. In this case also conviction took place, and a sentence commensurate with his crime was given against the defendant. I may refer to what has been done at a later period, when Williams had the temerity to send forth the same infamous and blasphemous publication which is the subject of the present prosecution. On that occasion, the defendant was prosecuted by an advocate who had ever been distin

guished among the friends of free discussion and the liberty of the press-the present Lord Erskine. He, though he adhered to all he had ever uttered in defence of those inestimable blessings, had contended that punishment was called for in a case where it was attempted to undermine those religious principles on which the present comfort of mankind, and their hopes of eternal happiness were founded: not to undermine them in the minds of thinking men, but in the minds of those who have perhaps neither capacity nor leisure to enter into an investigation of their origin and effects, but for whose especial comfort and welfare, religious principles are so necessary, I mean the lower orders of the people. On that occasion, the defendant was convicted, after an attempt to do that which I hope will not be attempted this day, to defend the publication. In 1812, a person of the name of Eaton sent forth the very same book. He was tried before the predecessor of the present Chief Justice; but was it held by the learned persons engaged on that occasion, that to revile the Christian religion was not contrary to the law of the land? No such a doctrine has ever obtained there; and three successive juries and successive courts, have found successive defendants guilty of a serious offence against the laws of their country, and this was so decided at a period when every thing connected with the liberty of the press and freedom of discussion was most likely to be fully inquired into, and sifted to the bottom. Having stated this, I am content to leave it to the Court and Jury to say, whether or not such conduct at the present day ought not to be viewed as an infraction of the law of the land. If it be admitted that the Christian religion is a part of the law of the land, it remains to be shewn, whether or not the defendant has violated that law, by publishing one of the most abominable, disgusting, and wicked attacks on religion and its author, that has ever appeared in the world. The first attack is made on the Old Testament, as the writer knew that throwing discredit. on that, was the readiest way to bring the New Testament into discredit.

Gentlemen, I must read to you several passages from this abominable production, however shocking to our feelings it may be to do so. I feel myself under the painful necessity. of offending you and the Court and every moral man who hears me, by a recital of those disgusting passages, on the tendency of which, it will shortly become your duty to de cide. Gentlemen, this writer commences his attack upon the foundation of our holy religion, vainly imagining if he

succeeded in his object, that the superstructure built upon it would fall. Gentlemen, the first passage to which I invite your attention is this:

"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than one half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind."

I wish to put it to you, Gentlemen of the Jury, as fathers of families, anxious to teach your children to fear God, and hope for that eternal happiness so gloriously displayed by our holy religion, what your feelings would be, if you found such a paper had been put into the hands of your offspring and domestics? But if you wanted a key to the mind of the author, you will find it in the following passage:

"Did the book called the Bible (for such is the contemptuons manner in which the author speaks of that sacred work) excel in purity of ideas and expression, all the books that are now extant in the world, I would not take it for my rule of faith as being the word of God, because-(because what ?)-the possibility would, nevertheless, exist, of my being imposed upon; but when I see, throughout the greatest part of this book, scarcely any thing hut a history of the grossest vices, and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales, I cannot dishonour my Creator by calling it by his name."

So that the writer would reject the purest system of religion, because there might be a possibility of being imposed upon. The publication goes on to say :—

"To charge the commission of acts upon the Almighty, which, in their own nature, and by every rule of moral justice, are crimes, as all assassination is, and more especially the assassination of infants, is matter of serious concern. The Bible tells us that these assassinations were done by the express command of God—to believe, therefore, the Bible to be true, we must unbelieve all our belief in the moral justice of God; for wherein could crying or smiling infants offend? And to read the Bible without horror, we must undo every thing that is tender, sympathizing, and benevolent in the heart of man, Speaking for myself, if I had no other evidence that the Bible is fabulous then the sacrifice I must make to believe it to be true, that alone would be sufficient to determine my choice."

Gentlemen, there are many other passages relating to the Old Testament, the essence of which may be summed up in a single line, in which the author declares :

"It is a book of lies, wickedness, and blasphemy."

Such is the conclusion, Gentlemen of the Jury, to which the author of these paragraphs has arrived. All this must be shocking to you, and I know you feel it. 1 cannot but anticipate its effect upon you, and I wish consistently with my duty, that I could close these disgusting extracts, and abstain from the still more shocking blasphemies which the work contains against the New Testament and the name of our divine and blessed Saviour. Indeed, Gentlemen, I can assure you without the least affectation, that I feel the utmost pain in proceeding to this part of my painful duty. It is painful in the extreme, to me and to you. The indecent and blasphemous levity, with which the author treats the subject, shocks and must shock every man of feeling, or of religious habits; but still I am compelled to call your attention to the following passage:

"As it is nothing extraordinary that a woman should be with child before she was married, and that the son she might bring forth should be executed, even unjustly, I see no reason for not believing that such a woman as Mary, and such men as Joseph and Jesus existed; their mere existence is a matter of indifference, about which there is no ground either to believe or disbelieve, and which comes under the cominon head of, It may be so, and what then? The probability, however, is, that there were such persons, or at least such as resembled them in part of the circumstances, because almost all romantic stories have been suggested by some actual circumstances, as the adventures of Robinson Crusoe, not a word of which is true, were suggested by the case of Alexander Selkirk, It is not then the existence or non-existence of the persons that I trouble myself about. It it the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and vision ary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taken it as it is told, is blasphemously obscene; it gives an account of a young woman engaged to be married, and while under this engagement she is, to speak plain language, debauched by a ghost, under the impious pretence (Luke, chap. i, ver, 35,) that the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee.'

Are we living in a Christian age? Do we profess a religion at all? Surely it might have been expected that the most sceptical person, that the greatest infidel, would pause before he wrote such a paragraph. "If it were possible," he says why then he admits it to be possible--I will use his own argument against him. The defendant and the writer of these passages ought to have paused. When those shall occur to him in his last moments-and reflection will then come I will ask, with what feelings will he reflect on