The Sun.
London, England, 1827-10-25 00:00:00

Societies, as well as your Missionary and Bible Asso-
ciations, do not proceed one step off the safe ground
of keeping the prerogative of speech exclusively to
themselves, but would sooner meet the devil himself,
than suffer themselves to be addressed in turn by an
honest man, who could confute their fallacies, con-
front their falsehood; and confound their folly--92d
oration." Such was the general character of my
orations. I ask only, was not the witness likely to
misunderstand them ? Has lie not misunderstood
them ? And is there any law or power on earth to
punish me for not bringing my language down to the
level of his comprehension ? God bless him ! I
could not do it ! As to the charge of my having
treated certain portions of Scripture with indecent
levity—I answer, I have treated no passages of
Scripture with levity, but such as the soundest theo-
logians and most learned critics in,Europe have ad-
mitted to be most flagrantly and flagitiously apo-
cryphal. I am still as orthodox as the majority of
our bench of Bishops, and when I first became
clergyman was much more so than any of them—
much more so, to my own certain knowledge, may I
say, than my diocesan himself, who told me
.that
heaven and hell was all a fable ; that the romances
of the crucified God was a version of the Pro-
metheus 'Vinctus of lEschylus ; that the articles
of the Church of England were a nose of wax,
and that if he thought I. had a better opinion of
them, he would not ordain me, " because there
were fools enough in the Church' already?' You
will observe too, that the writings of that very
Doctor which have been so learnedly quoteelo you
—that Dr. Paley, who declared he could not afford to
keep a conscience ; and in the writings of
.Watson,
Leslie, Doddridge, Belsliam, Portens, Addison, and
Chalmers, upon the evidences of the Christian reli-
gios—all of which have been publicly read, and
fairly discussed in our meetings—the objections of
infidels are largely and extensively, quoted. Might
you not, therefore; as fairly quote those quotations,
and charge them upon those Christian writers them-
selves, as charge me upon the testimony of this wit-
ness, who will not pretend to a sufficient extent of
reading to ascertain whether the language he takes
to have been mine, was that of quotation or not ?
Gentlemen, I would not borrow any sort of favour
from your judgment upon this consideration, for it
would really be the keenest sarcasm on Christianity
to make the distinction, that the objections of infidels
may be quoted, but the infidels themselves must
never be allowed to stand by their objections.—
Brave champions of a cause, might it be exclaimed,
who would defeat in effigy, an adversary whom they
dared not look in the face—who would 'gather up
his arrows after he had left the field, and then go
boast the triumphs they have won ! I appeal, then,
to your good sense, whether the evidence adduced
is such as would be held sufficient to establish any
historical fact whatever. I appeal to your know-
ledge of the human heart, whether such a person as
the witness has shown himself to be, would not be
likely; not only purposely to omit many things which
he is conscious that I said, and which if he had had
conscience enough to have given them in his report,
would have removed all ground of complaint : but
whether he would not be likely also purposely to
set down many things which he could not imagine
that I. did say. I- appeal to the gentlemen
of the press, who are in the habit of report-
ing public declamations, whether their noble art
which costs them an education of the highest order
to qualify them to pursue, and the laborious practice
of many years to acquire a perfection in, was to be
picked up out of the very kennel, at the first try at
it by a parish beadle ? Shall a court of justice re-
ceive as competent evidence of truth a species of
testimony which the meanest journal in the kingdom
would reject, as insufficient to make up the decent
verisimilitude of a well-told falsehood ? If it is to
be so with me, the apparatus of judicature, and the
formality of a trial, are but a gossamer veil over the
grim features of predetermined cruelty and oppres-
sion ; and it never could have been otherwise in-
tended, from first to last, but that. I should be their
victim, and any dirty faggot would have done for
fuel to the sacrifice. But where, I ask, where are
the men who shoal have been my accusers, bad a
regard for the moral interests of society called for
this prosecution ? Where are the clergy, the scho-
lars and accomplished men, whose testimony would
have given respeciability to this charge ? They are
all in the back ground, all standing aloof, and, if you
can suppose them wicked enough to wish for my
conviction, they at least were not wicked enough to
lend a hand to the foul play by which alone I can be
convicted. But so blind and stupid is the genius of
religious intolerance, that it happens that 'every one
of, the sentences sworn to as blasphemous in my
oration, not excepting one that was delivered 'didac-
tically, and with a view to produce an impression
that it was true, is either a direct quotation from the
writings of our best English divines, or is the best
translation my learning could produce from the
Greek and Latin fathers, or from divines of Ger-
many, France, and Holland, of no less name than
Mosheim, Michaelis, Bretchneider, Beausobre, and
Griesbach. And surely, gentlemen, it was a little
like persecution that your Lord Mayor should sacri-
fice Me to his own ignorance, and commit me to a
prison for my use of the critical learning which raised
another to a bishopric—for quoting in a public ora-
tion the very words which he might have found in
the 315th page of the German Miehaelis's Intro-
duction to the New Testament, as translated by
Herbert Marsh, Lord Bishop of Peterborough.

Ille crucem sceleris pretium tulit—hic diaderna
,
But after all, Gentlemen, even as set forth in the in-
dictment, and read them as you will, there is no
blasphemy in them; but there are, instead, the most
express protests and caveats against any illegitimate
acceptation of the hypothetical language there used.
I was maintaining, even as it there appears, the di-
vinity of Christ in opposition to the Unitarian heresy,
which would degrade that incomprehensible hypos-
tasis to the level of a man. I therefore delivered
the strongest assertions which are charged against
me, according to the Euclidian logic of the reductio
ad absurdum, as consequences merely that would fol-
low upon denial of the assumed hypothesis. And
who, I ask, could deliver a learned and critical dis-
quisition upon any subject whatever, or venture one
step beyond the puling arrant nonsense of Methodism,
if the sentiments which Occupy nine-tenths of both
the indictments are such as must subject a man to
be treated as I have been ? Are orators and public
lecturers to be held in a state of subjugation, as to
what they deliver; are they to be ruled with a rod
of iron in the hands of babies with beards, of yeller-
able fools, and holy idiots ? Must we all become as
innocent and as stupid as Whittington and his cat,
and never be allowed to deliver, or to hear any
thing, better than the Methodistical canting balder-
dash which they tell us is so necessary to keep the
lower orders in subjection—to' teach them to order
themselves lowly and reverently to all their betters,
and to be content with rags and righteousness—with
broken victuals and salvation ? Gentlemen, the evi-
dence which has been brought before you is as incomt.
petent as idiotcy, and as false as it is incompetent.
For, view the question as you are bound to view it,
on rational grounds only, not as priests or religionists,
but as jurymen and citizens of the world,—not as
sitting there to be the umpires of theological con-
trovcrsy, but as administering impartial justice be-
tween man and man, with equal indifference whe-
ther it be to Jew, Turk, Infidel, or Christian,—view-
ing nothing in a man but a man, and rendering unto
Cesar the things that are Caesar's, but unto God the
things that are God's ; and then say what is it but
next a-kin to downright idiotcy to suffer one man to
be indicted for reviling the figment of another man's
conceit—for defaming a person of whom the com-
plainants cannot show who he is, nor where ho lives,
nor what injury lie bath sustained, nor why he can-
not appear for himself, nor what business they have to
appear for him. But they believe : why then let diem
believe, and let me have liberty, if you please, not to
believe, and the'matter is settled for ever. For if it be a
matter of faith and credence merely, it is, from that very
predicament, out of the cognizance of this Court. Will
man, whose sole purpose and intend
you turn this sacred seat of justice between man and
Qn is to deal