rs, 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 of religion,
ventured out, under the clouds of the night, pale with sorrow, and
trembling with apprehension, to steal for you, at the risk of life, that
comfort which none but a minister of God can effectually bestow upon the
parting spirit; suppose this, and suppose that your house is instantly
surrounded by some cruel but plausible Sir Robert Whitecraft, or some
drunken and ruffianly Captain Smellpriest, who, surrounded and supported
by armed miscreants, not only breaks open that house, but violates the
awful sanctify of the deathbed itself, drags out the minister of Christ
from his work of mercy, and leaves him a bloody corpse at our threshold.
I say, change places, gentlemen of the jury, and suppose in your own
imaginations that all those monstrous persecutions, all those murderous
and flagitious outrages, had been inflicted upon yourselves, with others
of an equally nefarious character; suppose all this, and you may easily
do so, for you have seen it all perpetrated in the name of God and the
law, or, to say the truth, in the hideous union of mammon and murder;
suppose all this, and you will