box I should have shown you that he was one of the first then in the House to use the suggestion of blasphemy against me there.  Since then I have never had any peace until the Monday of this week.  Writs for penalties have been served, and suits of all kinds have been taken against me.  On Monday last the House of Lords cleared me from the whole of one set, and, gentlemen, I ask you to-day to clear me from another.  Three times I have been re-elected by my constituents, and what Sir Henry Tyler asks you to do is to send me to them branded with the dishonour of a conviction, branded not with the conviction for publishing heresy, but branded with the conviction, dishonourable to me, of having lied in this matter.  I have no desire to have a prison’s walls closed on me, but I would sooner ten times that, than that my constituents should think that for one moment I lied to escape the penalties.  I am not indicted for anything I have ever written or caused to be written.  As my Lord at the very first stage this morning pointed out, it is no question with me, Are the matters indicted blasphemous, or are they not blasphemous?  Are they defensible, or are they not defensible?  That is not my duty here.  On this I make no comment.  I have no duty here of even discussing the policy of the blasphemy laws, although I cannot help thinking that, if I were here making my defence against them, I might say that they were bad laws unfairly revived, doing more mischief to those who revive them than to those whom they are revived against.  But it is not for anything I have said myself; it is not for anything I have written myself; it is not for anything I have published myself.  It is an endeavour to make me technically liable for a publication with which I have nothing whatever to do, and I will ask you to defeat that here.  Every time I have succeeded I have been met with some new thing.  When I first fought it was hoped to defeat my election.  When I was re-elected it was sought to make me bankrupt by enormous penalties, and when I escaped the suit for enormous penalties they hope now to destroy me by this.  I have no question here about defending my heresy, not because I am not ready to defend it when it is challenged in the right way, and it there be anything in it that the law can challenge.  I have never gone back from anything I have ever said; I have never gone back from anything I have ever written; I have never gone back from anything I have ever done; and I ask you not to allow this Sir Henry Whatley Tyler, who dares not come here to-day, to use you as the assassin uses the dagger, to stab a man from behind whom he never dares to face.”