is sure to spring up, as it were, from hell, their throats still parched and heated with that insatiable thirst which the guilty glutton felt before them, and which they now are determined to slake with blood.  For some of these men the apology of selfishness, an anxiety to raise themselves out of the struggles of genteel poverty, and a wolfish wish to earn the wages of oppression, might be pleaded; although, heaven knows, it is at best but a desperate and cowardly apology.  On the other hand, there are men not merely independent, but wealthy, who, imbued with a fierce and unreasoning bigotry, and stained by a black and unscrupulous ambition, start up into the front ranks of persecution, and carry fire and death and murder as they go along, and all this for the sake of adding to their reprobate names a title—­a title earned by the shedding of innocent blood—­a title earned by the oppression and persecution of their unresisting fellow-subjects—­a title, perhaps that of baronet; if I am mistaken in this, the individual who stands before you in that dock could, for he might, set me right.

“In fact, who are those who have lent themselves with such delight to the execution of bad laws? of laws that, for the sake of religion and Christianity, never ought to have been effected?  Are they men of moral and Christian lives? men whose walk has been edifying in the sight of their fellows? are they men to whom society could look up as examples of private virtue and the decorous influence of religion? are they men who, on the Sabbath of God, repair with their wives and families to his holy worship?  Alas! no.  These heroic persecutors, who hunt and punish a set of disarmed men, are, in point of fact, not only a disgrace to that religion in whose name they are persecutors, and on whose merciful precepts they trample, but to all religion, in whatever light true religion is contemplated.  Vicious, ignorant, profligate, licentious, but cunning, cruel, bigoted, and selfish, they make the spirit of oppressive laws, and the miserable state of the country, the harvest of their gain.  Look more closely at the picture, gentlemen of the jury, and make, as I am sure you will, the dismal and terrible circumstances which I will lay before you your own.  Imagine for a moment that those who are now, or at least have been, the objects of hot and blood-scenting persecution, had, by some political revolution, got the power of the State and of the laws into their own hands; suppose, for it is easily supposed, that they had stripped you of your property, deprived you of your civil rights, disarmed you of the means of self-defence, persecuted yourselves and proscribed your religion, or, vice versa, proscribed yourselves and persecuted your religion, or, to come at once to the truth, proscribed and persecuted both; suppose your churches shut up, your pious clergy banished, and that, when on the bed of sickness or of death, some of your family, hearing your cries for the consolations