see their triumph close at hand, they glory in their career, `and are full of bold determination to proceed.

Have I need to explain any further the evils of these persecutions, and to shew how the wars among mankind have been the wars of religion? Shall I shew you how the civil wars in the time of the first Charles and of Cromwell were strictly speaking religious wars? What shall we say of all the wars, rebellions, and famines in Ireland for three centuries past? What has caused them but a difference in opinion about matters of religion? It has been carried to such excess in that oppressed country, that now, the peasantry from despair, are set against every thing that is termed religious, and the torch of civil war and resistance to religious oppression is again blazing forth, whilst they have the wishes of all but tyrauts, that their unity and courage may lead them, with the similarly situated Greeks, to emancipation and to inde pendence.

Shall I take you back to the Crusades of the Christians against the Mahometans, and shew you the alternate triumph of the cross and the crescent, whilst millions of humar beings were its victims, and it became the mere turn of a battle in France that prevented the Mahometans overrunning the whole of Europe? Read your own Holy Bible, read the History of the Jews, and say how far this indicted fragment i consistent with truth. Read the history of the Courts o Inquisition on the Continent, or the wars of the Hugonot and Papists in France, What did the Christian Spaniard and Portuguese in taking and keeping possession of South America? What millions of human sacrifices have they there made to the Christian Gods? But there is an end to their power; and liberty, glorious liberty, shall pervade that delightful Continent, in spite of the tyranny of Kings and Priests combined.

I call upon my persecutors, or their Counsel, to show us. to point out to us, the religion, that does not owe its power and propagation to the sword. I know of none. History shews us none such since the word religion has made part of human language and human action: and we may trace the word religion from place to place, and from time to time, until we come to the conclusion that it is synonymous with war, misery, and destruction.

The Christian Religion has been called the religion of peace: but where shall we look for the practical part of the assertion? In this persecution? Shall we look into Dorchester Gaol for it, and see a whole family immured for calling

it in question, and for wishing to have it examined?-Where, where is the peace among Christians? When, when was it, or when shall it be? Let it begin now, Gentlemen. Discountenance this persecution. Tolerate the opinions which may differ from yours, and you shall find peace. There will be no peace until you do so, and experience teaches us that every persecuted opinion destroys its persecutors. Now, Gentlemen, I presume we have found nothing like blasphemy or profaneness yet; let us proceed further and examine the next extract. It is not of Mr. Carlile's writing: it is from the letter of a friend to him, written from Manchester, in which it is stated, that the writer admires the conduct and opinions of Mr. Carlile, but to avoid persecution he does as his neighbours do, goes to Church and repeats the Christian Creed, as loud as any of them. Such conduct is by no means singular: it has long been the practice of persons in office, and those we denominate the aristocracy. It is a case in point that these persecutions are immoral and mischievous: they make hypocrites from the terror they excite in weak and fickle minds, but they never make conscientious proselytes.

It is notorious that those who are denominated the higher class or the aristocracy throughout Europe, have boasted of an infidelity towards all religion for more than a century past, and it is only within these few years, since the labouring useful classes have begun to have their eyes opened about the matter, that the clamour about blasphemy and profaneness has been raised by the hypocrites. Infidelity has been viewed as a luxury by this pretended higher order of beings, and which, like all other luxuries, they wish to keep from the useful and productive class of mankind.

This, Gentlemen, is the comment I offer upon this extract; you have heard it read, and as it contains nothing more than a description of the Christian Creed, and as there is some little indelicacy connected with that creed, I forbear to comment further upon it; but in the extract before you there is nothing misstated, and if there be blasphemy and profaneness connected with it, which I deny, the same terms must be applied to your own creed. It is nothing more than a plain recital of the Christian Creed.

This, Gentlemen, concludes my defence to the first count and the first pamphlet, and I am sure that here you can see nothing like blasphemy, profaneness, or impiety, and recollect, that this is the whole of the charge against me. I am not charged with publishing any thing seditious or false, the

charge is that of impiety, blasphemy and profaneness, published by me with a wicked intention, and you must see. Gentlemen, that the extracts in the first count of the indictment do not support the charge, but are the very reverse. The indictment is impious, blasphemous, and profane, because it is false and founded in falsehood, but not the extracts, from my publications, nor the publications altoge ther.

The second count of the indictment is a repetition of a portion of the first, consequently, does not require any ob servations from me; but the third count opens with extract from another pamphlet, and why it was thought necessary to make the indictment embrace two pamphlets I am at a loss to conceive, because, if they are not separately blasphe mous and profane, they cannot be so jointly. Perhaps the object was to deter Mr. Carlile from further publication o his writings or correspondence, by showing him that the two Prosecuting Societies, the Bridge Street Gang, and the Essex Street Gang, were determined between them to prosecute every thing that he writes and publishes from his shop But I can tell the members of these societies, that it is M Carlile's pride and pleasure to have his sentiments discussed and examined, and he knows well it cannot be more effectu ally done any where than in this Court. These prosecu tions can please or serve no one more than Mr. Carlile, and therefore, as his agent here, I challenge his enemies to pro ceed and do their worst. He will never want persons t stand in this Court and defend his publications; therefore no prosecutions, no fines, no imprisonments, will deter him or make him shrink for a moment, from a straight forward assertion of the right of free discussion on all subjects.

The first extract in the third count of the indictment, is ta ken from a letter from Mr. Carlile to the inhabitants o Glodwick, a village near Manchester, in answer to one writ ten to him, which noticed the glorious progress of revolu tion in both America and Europe, and the hourly decay and the certain speedy dissolution, of the feudal system o government. In noticing the advantages arising from a Re presentative System of Government, Mr. Carlile observes "A Representative System of Government would soon se the propriety of turning our Churches and Chapels into Temples of Science, and in protecting (not perfecting, it is a misprint) and cherishing the Philosopher instead of the Priest. Kingcraft and Priestcraft I hold to be the bane of society and to entail all those miseries which are now and

have been constantly felt by the great body of mankind; those two evils operate jointly against the welfare both of the body and mind, and to palliate our miseries in this life, the latter endeavours to bamboozle us with a hope of eternal happiness! A frail and ridiculous notion!"

Now, Gentlemen, it requires very different optics and ideas from mine to perceive any thing like blasphemy and profaneness in this paragraph. No writer on political ecoHomy-no writer on polemics would excite the least interest, or get the least attention paid to him, if he took the other side of this question. The case stands thus: The great body of the people are removing the film from their eyes which has so long kept them in a state of darkness and misery, and they will no longer be bamboozled with any further sophistry and delusion upon the points noticed in this paragraph. The whole of them are become points of general discussion throughout Europe and America; our oppoments can find no argument but brute force, no reason but that such evils do exist, to meet the overwhelming attacks we make upon them; therefore, vain will be all prosecutions,-vain will be all verdicts against them,-vain will be all fines and imprisonments, for where it is possible to excite discussion, truth will triumph, and in this country discussion cannot be stayed, neither by corrupt laws, nor a corrupt administration of laws-one single printing press that is free, is a sufficient buttress for truth against the assaults of a thousand that are hired and corrupt. The press is our weapon and our defence; the verdicts of juries on matters of opinion are as indifferent as they are preposterous in our sight.

The opinions we support by argument and fair discussion, and to which our enemies give us no answer but in the shape of brute-force persecution, are spreading throughout the seminaries of literature in Europe, and even throughout despotic Germany we find both professors of the arts and sciences and students, are Republicans and Deists. Similar indications begin to display themselves in Russia, and we hear of professors removed because they inculcate what my persecutors, and all other despots, call dangerous opinions, but which are spreading in a ratio with the violence of the opposition made to them.

If

you, Gentlemen, to day, say, that I have published what is blasphemous and profane, you will be despised for it to-morrow. Opinions must no longer be subject to persecution. It will not do, Gentlemen, and if I am to be a victim to such persecutions, I have no fear that I shall not survive

them, and live to reap a reward in the triumph of reason and free discussion.

As to the assertion in the paragraph now under notice, that it is a frail and ridiculous notion to hope for eternal life; it is sufficient that I say, the sciences of Astronomy and Chemistry have annihilated every hope of the kind with those who have examined and who understand them.

I come now, Gentlemen, to the last extract, which is longer than any of the former, but upon which I shall have but very little to say, as it consists of private matter which passed between the aforesaid Parson Wait and Mr. Carlile, and forms part of an answer to one of the Parson's letters, and to some of his denunciations and invectives.

Really, Gentlemen of the Jury, it is not to be borne, that such a man as an interested priest should pour forth his denunciations and invectives against a man of opposite opinions, and that the latter cannot reply to him without dooming some member of his family to a dungeon. Is this fair play? Call you this toleration? Is this a land of liberty Or I would ask on which side does the licentiousness lie in this case? Parson Wait began the correspondence, by challenging the opinions of Mr. Carlile, after he was confined in Dorchester Gaol, in the most domineering and insolent manner; and what man of spirit would sit quietly under such impudence and insult? Mrs. Carlile is now doomed to two years imprisonment merely for selling one of her husband's letters to this old hypocrite, which was an answer imperatively called for by the infamous insinuations in the Parson's letter.

Chief Justice. I cannot suffer such language to be used here. (Mrs. Wright still persisted as if he had not spoken.) This is what is called hearing both sides of the question Go on, ye hypocrites of the Vice Society! Go on, all ye public robbers of whatever gang! We will brave and defy your persecutions, and triumph over you at last! We will have free discussion! We will brave the dungeon or the faggot-the torture, or the scaffold, like the sturdy martyrs of old, and vain shall be all your persecutions! As the blood of the Christian martyrs became the seed of the Christian Church, so shall our sufferings become the seed of free discussion, and in those very sufferings we will triumph over you!

Let it not be thought, Gentlemen, there is any thing in this last extract that I shrink from defending. There is no word of it that conveys an opinion but coincides with mine,