evinces any designs hostile either to the stability of the church or the general character and conduct of its ministers. My learned friend has said that Mr. Williams had probably been bred a sectary, and retained sectarian prejudices. No argument is necessary to refute this supposition. The passage which has been read to you carries with it the conviction that he is no sectary, and entertains no schismatical views against the church; for there is a more severe attack upon the sectaries themselves than upon the clergy of Durham. No man can have the least hesitation in saying that the sentiments breathed in it are anything but those of a sectary. For myself, I am far from approving the contemptuous terms in which he has expressed himself of those who dissent from the establishment; and I think he has not spoken of them in the tone of decent respect that should be observed to so many worthy persons, who, though they differ from the church, differ from it on the most conscientious grounds. This is the only part of the publication of which I cannot entirely approve, but it is not for this that he is prosecuted. Then, what is the meaning of the obnoxious remarks? Are they directed against the establishment? Are they meant to shake or degrade it? I say that no man who reads them can entertain a moment's doubt in his mind that they were excited by the conduct of certain individuals, and the use which he makes of that particular conduct, the inference which he draws from it, is not invective against the establishment, but a regret that it should, by such conduct, be lowered. He says no more than this: "These are the men who do the mischief. Ignorant and wild fanatics are crowding the tabernacles, while the church is deserted;" and he traces, not with exultation, but with sorrow, the cause of the desertion of the church, and the increase of conventicles. "Here," says he, "I have a fact which accounts for the clergy sinking in the estimation of the community, and I hold up this mirror, not to excite hostility toward the established church, nor to bring its ministers into contempt among their flocks, but to teach and to reclaim those particular persons who are the disgrace and danger of the establishment, instead of being, as they ought, its support and its ornament." He holds up to them that mirror in which they may see their own individual misconduct, and calculate its inevitable effects upon the security and honor of the establishment which they disgrace. This is no lawyer-like gloss upon the passage,-no special pleading construction, or far-fetched refinement of explanation,-I give the plain and obvious sense which every man of ordinary understanding

must affix to it. If you say that such a one disgraces his profession, or that he is a scandal to the cloth he wears (a common form of speech, and one never more in men's mouths than within the last fortnight, when things have happened to extort a universal expression of pain, sorrow, and shame), do you mean by such lamentations to undermine the establishment? In saying that the purity of the cloth is defiled by individual misconduct, it is clear that you cast no imputation on the cloth generally; for an impure person could not contaminate a defiled cloth. Just so has the defendant expressed himself; and in this light I will put his case to you. If he had thought that the whole establishment was bad; that all its ministers were time servers, who, like the spaniel, would crouch and lick the hand that fed it, but snarl and bite at one which had nothing to bestow, fawning upon rich and liberal patrons, and slandering all that were too proud or too poor to bribe them; if he painted the church as founded upon imposture, reared in time serving, cemented by sordid interest, and crowned with spite and insolence and pride,-to have said that the Durham clergy disgraced such a hierarchy would have been not only gross inconsistency, but stark nonsense. He must rather have said that they were worthy members of a base and groveling establishment; that the church was as bad as its ministers, and that it was hard to say whether they more fouled it or were defiled by it. But he has said nothing that can bring into jeopardy or discredit an institution which every one wishes to keep pure, and which has nothing to dread so much as the follies and crimes of its supporters.

Gentlemen, you have to-day a great task committed to your hands. This is not the age—the spirit of the times is not such— as to make it safe, either for the country or for the government, or for the church itself, to veil its mysteries in secrecy; to plant in the porch of the temple a prosecutor brandishing his flaming sword, the process of the law, to prevent the prying eyes of mankind from wandering over the structure. These are times when men will inquire, and the day most fatal to the established church -the blackest that ever dawned upon its ministers-will be that which consigns this defendant, for these remarks, to the horrors of a jail, which its false friends, the chosen objects of such lavish favor, have far more richly deserved. I agree with my learned friend, that the Church of England has nothing to dread from external violence. Built upon a rock, and lifting its head towards another world, it aspires to an imperishable existence, and defies any force that may rage from without. But let it beware of the

corruption engendered within and beneath its massive walls; and let all its well-wishers-all who, whether for religious or political interests, desire its lasting stability-beware how they give encouragement by giving shelter to the vermin bred in that corruption, who "stink and sting" against the hand that would brush the rottenness away. My learned friend has sympathized with the priesthood, and innocently enough lamented that they possess not the power of defending themselves through the public press. Let him be consoled. They are not so very defenseless; they are not so entirely destitute of the aid of the press as through him they have represented themselves to be. They have largely used that press (I wish I could say "as not abusing it"), and against some persons very near me, I mean especially against the defendant, whom they have scurrilously and foully libeled through that great vehicle of public instruction, over which, for the first time, among the other novelties of the day, I now hear they have control. Not that they wound deeply or injure much,—but that is no fault of theirs, without hurting, they give trouble and discomfort. The insect brought into life by corruption, and nestled in filth, though its flight be lowly and its sting puny, can swarm and buzz, and irritate the skin and offend the nostril, and altogether give nearly as much annoyance as the wasp, whose nobler nature it aspires to emulate. These reverend slanderers,-these pious backbiters,devoid of force to wield the sword, snatch the dagger, and, destitute of wit to point or to barb it, and make it rankle in the wound, steep it in venom to make it fester in the scratch. The much-venerated personages whose harmless and unprotected state is now deplored have been the wholesale dealers in calumny, as well as largest consumers of the base article, the especial promoters of that vile traffic, of late the disgrace of the country,-both furnishing a constant demand for the slanders by which the press is polluted, and prostituting themselves to pander for the appetites of others; and now they come to demand protection from retaliation, and shelter from just exposure, and, to screen themselves, would have you prohibit all scrutiny of the abuses by which they exist, and the malpractices by which they disgrace their calling. After abusing and well-nigh dismantling, for their own despicable purposes, the great engine of instruction, they would have you annihilate all that they have left of it to secure their escape. They have the incredible assurance to expect that an English jury will conspire with them in this wicked design. They expect in vain! If all existing institutions and all public functionaries must hence

forth be sacred from question among the people; if at length the free press of this country, and with it the freedom itself, is to be destroyed, at least let not the heavy blow fall from your hands. Leave it to some profligate tyrant; leave it to a mercenary and effeminate parliament, a hireling army, degraded by the lash, and the readier instrument for enslaving its country; leave it to a pampered house of lords, a venal house of commons, some vulgar minion, servant-of-all-work to an insolent court, some unprincipled soldier, unknown, thank God, in our times, combining the talents of a usurper with the fame of a captain; leave to such desperate hands, and such fit tools, so horrid a work! But you, an English. jury, parent of the press, yet supported by it, and doomed to perish the instant its health and strength are gone, lift not you against it an unnatural hand! Prove to us that our rights are safe in your keeping; but maintain, above all things, the stability of our institutions by well guarding their corner-stone. Defend the church from her worst enemies, who, to hide their own misdeeds, would veil her solid foundations in darkness; and proclaim to them, by your verdict of acquittal, that henceforward, as heretofore, all the recesses of the sanctuary must be visited by the continual light of day, and by that light its abuses be explored!

HORACE BINNEY.

[Horace Binney was born in Philadelphia, Pa., 1780. He was educated at Harvard College, where he was graduated in 1797 at the head of his class. He at once began the study of law in the office of Jared Ingersoll, one of the leaders of the Philadelphia bar, and was admitted to practice in 1800. In 1806 he served a single term in the state legislature. Between 1807 and 1814 he published six volumes of reports of the decisions of the supreme court of Pennsylvania. By 1815 his scholarly tastes and profound acquirements had placed him in the front rank of the profession. In 1830 his health began to fail, and he was compelled to retire from active practice. Only once after 1836 did he appear in the courts. He was elected and served as a member of the twentythird congress. In 1827, at the invitation of the Philadelphia bar, he delivered a scholarly address on the life and character of Chief Justice Tilghman, and in 1835, by request of the common council of Philadelphia, an address on Chief Justice Marshall. In 1858 he published a sketch of Justice Bushrod Washington; in the same year he published his much-admired sketches of the leaders of the old Philadelphia bar. His well-known "Inquiry into the Formation of Washington's Farewell Address" is a model of critical scholarship, and his three pamphlets in support of the power of the president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, published in 1862 and 1863, are among his ablest efforts. He died in Philadelphia, August 12, 1875.]

Horace Binney's long and distinguished career connects the era of the Revolution with the era of the Civil War. When he was admitted to the bar, John Adams was president, Ellsworth chief justice of the supreme court, and Marshall secretary of state: Hamilton was practicing law, Story was preparing for the bar, and Webster was in college. Although he virtually retired from practice in 1840, the subsequent years embrace his argument in the Girard will case, and his scholarly efforts as eulogist, biographer, and controversialist.

Binney began his work at the Philadelphia bar in the palmy days of William Lewis, Edward Tilghman, William Rawle, and A. J. Dallas. The service he rendered, while waiting for clients.