its full danger and genuine colours, the ruin which is brought to our doors. Can ministers still presume to expect support in their infatuation? Can parliament be so dead to their dignity and duty as to give their support to measures thus obtruded and forced upon them? Measures, my Lords, which have reduced this late flourishing empire to scorn and contempt! But yesterday, and Britain might have stood against the world; now, none so poor as to do her reverence." The people whom we at first despised as rebels, but whom we now acknowledge as enemies, are abetted against us, supplied with every military store, have their interest consulted, and their ambassadors entertained by our inveterate enemyand ministers do not, and dare not, interpose with dignity or effect. The desperate state of our army abroad is in part known. No man more highly esteems and honours the British troops than I do; I know their virtues and their valour; I know they can achieve anything but impossibilities, and I know that the conquest of British America is an impossibility. You cannot, my Lords, you cannot conquer America. What is your present situation there? We do not know the worst; but we know that in three campaigns we have done nothing, and suffered much. You may swell every expense, accumulate every assistance, and extend your traffic to the shambles of every German despot; your attempts will be for ever vain and impotent-doubly so, indeed, from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your adversaries, to over-run them with the mercenary sons of rapine and plunder, devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty. If I were an American— as I am an Englishman-while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms. Never!

never! never!

But, my Lords, who is the man, that, in addition to the disgraces and mischiefs of the war, has dared to authorise and associate to our arms the tomahawk and scalpingknife of the savage? To call into civilised alliance, the wild and inhuman inhabitant of the woods? To delegate to the merciless Indian the defence of disputed rights, and to wage the horrors of his barbarous war against our

H

brethren? My Lords, these enormities cry aloud for redress and punishment. But, my Lords, this barbarous measure has been defended, not only on the principles of policy and necessity, but also on those of morality; "for it is perfectly allowable," says Lord Suffolk, "to use all the means, which God and nature have put into our hand.”

I am astonished, I am shocked, to hear such principles confessed; to hear them avowed in this House, or in this country. My Lords, I did not intend to encroach so much on your attention; but I cannot repress my indignation, I feel myself impelled to speak. My Lords, we are called upon as members of this House, as men, as Christians, to protest against such horrible barbarity! “That God and nature have put into our hands!" What ideas of God and nature that noble Lord may entertain, I know not; but I know that such detestable principles are equally abhorrent to religion and humanity. What! to attribute the sacred sanction of God and nature to the massacres of the Indian scalping-knife! to the cannibal savage torturing, murdering, devouring, drinking the blood of his mangled victims!

Such notions shock every precept of morality, every feeling of humanity, every sentiment of honour. These abominable principles, and this more abominable avowal of them, demand the most decisive indignation.

I call upon that right reverend, and this most learned bench, to vindicate the religion of their God, to support the justice of their country. I call upon the Bishops to interpose the unsullied sanctity of their lawn; upon the Judges, to interpose the purity of their ermine, to save us from this pollution. I call upon the honour of your Lordships, to reverence the dignity of your ancestors, and to maintain your own. I call upon the spirit and humanity of my country, to vindicate the national character. I invoke the genius of the constitution. To send forth the merciless cannibal thirsting for blood! against whom?— our brethren! to lay waste their country, to desolate their dwellings, and extirpate their race and name, by the aid and instrumentality of these horrible hounds of war! Spain can no longer boast pre-eminence in barbarity. She armed herself with bloodhounds, to extirpate the wretched

natives of Mexico! We, more ruthless, loose these dogs of war against our countrymen in America, endeared to us by every tie that can sanctify humanity. I solemnly call upon your Lordships, and upon every order of men in the state, to stamp upon this infamous procedure, the indelible stigma of public abhorrence. More particularly, I call upon the holy prelates of our religion, to do away this iniquity; let them perform a lustration to purify the country from this deep and deadly sin. My Lords, I am old and weak, and at present unable to say more; but my feelings and indignation were too strong to have said less. I could not have slept this night in my bed, nor even reposed my head upon my pillow, without giving vent to my eternal abhorrence of such enormous and preposterous principles. LORD CHATHAM.

SPEECH, AGAINST THE PRINTER AND PUBLISHER OF "THE AGE OF REASON."

THE defendant stands indicted for having published this book, which I have only read from the obligations of professional duty, and which I rose from the reading of with astonishment and disgust. For my own part, gentlemen, I have been ever deeply devoted to the truths of Christianity, and my firm belief in the Holy Gospel is by no means owing to the prejudices of education (though I was religiously educated by the best of parents), but arises from the fullest and most continued reflections of my riper years and understanding: it forms, at this moment, a great consolation of my life, which, as a shadow, must pass away; and without it, indeed, I should consider my long course of health and prosperity (perhaps too long and too uninterrupted to be good for any man), only as the dust which the wind scatters, and rather as a snare than as a blessing.

This publication appears to me to be as mischievous and cruel in its probable effects, as it is manifestly illegal in its principles; because it strikes at the best, sometimes, alas! the only refuge and consolation amidst the distresses and afflictions of the world. The poor and humble, whom it

affects to pity, may be stabbed to the heart by it-they have more occasion for firm hope beyond the grave than those who have greater comforts to render life delightful. I can conceive a distressed, but virtuous man, surrounded by children, looking up to him for bread, when he has none to give them, sinking under the last day's labour, and unequal to the next, yet, still looking up with confidence to the hour when all tears shall be wiped from the eye of affliction, bearing the burden laid upon him, by a mysterious Providence which he adores; and looking forward with exultation to the revealed promises of his Creator, when he shall be greater than the greatest, and happier than the happiest of mankind. What a change in such a breast might not be wrought by such a merciless publication!

But it seems, this is an age of reason, and the time and the person are at last arrived, that are to dissipate the errors which have overspread the past generations of ignorance. The believers in Christianity are many; but it belongs to the few that are wise to correct their credulity. Belief is an act of reason; superior reason may, therefore, dictate to the weak. In running the mind over the long list of sincere and devout Christians, I cannot help lamenting that Newton had not lived to this day, to have had his shallowness filled up with this new flood of light. But the subject is too awful for irony. I will speak plainly and directly. Newton was a Christian! Newton, whose mind burst forth from the fetters cast by nature upon our finite conceptions. Newton, whose science was truth, and the foundation of whose knowledge of it was philosophy-not those visionary and arrogant presumptions which too often usurp its name, but philosophy resting on the basis of mathematics, which, like figures, cannot lie. Newton, who carried the line and rule to the utmost barriers of creation, and explored the principles by which all created matter is held together and exists. But this extraordinary man, in the mighty reach of his mind, overlooked, perhaps, the errors which a minuter investigation of the created things on this earth might have taught him, of the essence of his Creator.

What shall then be said of the great Mr. Boyle, who looked into the organic structure of all matter, even to the

brute inanimate substances which the foot treads on? Such a man may be supposed to have been equally qualified with Mr. Paine, to look up through nature to nature's God! Yet the result of all his contemplations was the most confirmed and devout belief of all which the other holds in contempt as despicable and drivelling superstition: but this error might perhaps arise from a want of a due attention to the foundations of human judgment, and the structure of that understanding which God has given us for the investigation of truth.

Let that question be answered by Mr. Locke, who was, to the highest pitch of devotion and adoration, a Christian. Mr. Locke, whose office was to detect the errors of thinking, by going up to the fountain of thought, and to direct into the proper track of reasoning the devious mind of man, by showing him its whole process, from the first perceptions of sense to the last conclusions of ratiocination, putting a rein besides upon false opinion, by practical rules, for the conduct of human judgment. But these men were only deep thinkers, and lived in their closets, unaccustomed to the traffic of the world, and to the laws which practically regulate mankind.

Gentlemen,-In the place where we now sit to administer the justice of this great country, above a century ago the never-to-be-forgotten Sir Matthew Hale presided, whose faith in Christianity is an exalted commentary upon its truth and reason, and whose life was a glorious example of its fruit in man, administering human justice with a wisdom and purity drawn from the pure fountain of the Christian dispensation, which has been, and will be, in all ages, a subject of the highest reverence and admiration.

Thus you find all that is great, or wise, or splendid, or illustrious, among created beings-all the minds gifted beyond ordinary nature (if not inspired by its Universal Author for the advancement and dignity of the world)— though divided by distant ages, and by the clashing opinions, distinguishing them from one another, yet joining, as it were, in one sublime chorus, to celebrate the truths of Christianity, and laying upon its holy altars the never fading offerings of their immortal wisdom. LORD ERSKINE.