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 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 feel what such men as he who stands in that dock deserves from humanity and natural justice; for, alas! I cannot say, from the laws of his country, under the protection of which, and in the name of which, he and those who resemble him have deluged that country with innocent blood, laid waste the cabin of the widow and the orphan, and carried death and desolation wherever they went.

But, gentlemen, I shall stop here, as I do not wish to inflict unnecessary pain upon you, even by this mitigated view of atrocities which have taken place before your own eyes; yet I cannot close this portion of my address without, referring to so large a number of our fellow-Protestants with pride, as I am sure their Roman Catholic friends do with gratitude.