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The Jury empanneled and sworn were —

Isaac Newton, John Bacon, John Locke,

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Robert Boyle, Soame Jenyns, Robert Nelson,

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-Henry Hyde,

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George Lyttleton, Henry

West, Joseph Addison,- Richard Steele,
Johnson.

The Attorney-General then rose: --

Samuel

May it please your Lordship! Gentlemen of the Jury! This Information is filed against the Defendants, charging them; first, with printing and publishing works by which they have attempted to uproot Christianity, and upon the ruins of it to build up a system of Deism; and next, with publishing scandalous libels on the doctrines of the Christian Religion, the Established Religion of this Realm, with intent to excite false and dangerous notions of such Religion in the minds of His Ma jesty's liege subjects. Now, Gentlemen, with respect to the first part of this Information, in which these persons are charged with a conspiracy to uproot the Christian religion, and to plant Paganism on the ruins of it, it is only necessary, simply to ask; What is Christianity? and, I think, you will not hesitate one moment in saying with me, that it is the religion of Jesus Christ, the divine Saviour of man, and that mankind are called and designated Christians, from the God whom they worship; and therefore, that they who deny Christ to be their God, and do not worship Him with divine

honour, cannot, with any propriety of speech, be called Christians; it being neither just nor reasonable to denominate any one a Christian who merely believes Christ as a human teacher; for I affirm the common acceptation of the title of "Christian" to apply to those, and to those only, who acknowledge Christ for their God. With respect to the first charge made against the Defendants, of attempting to substitute Paganism for Christianity; it would be easy to support this, by showing that an impious attempt has been made by these mistaken men to melt down the Christian religion into the dross of Mahomedanism, and that in this they have so far succeeded, that they and the Mahomedans have come to these common terms namely, that they both believe Christ to have been the Messiah, and the revealer of God to man; that he was a true prophet; that he gave sight to the blind, healed the lame, and raised the dead; and that what he taught was truth. Indeed, it is a matter upon record, that an eminent leader and chief propagator of the Socinian heresy in the Palatinate, Adam Neuser, minister of the Church of Heidelberg, began in Unitarianism, and finished his career by turning Mahomedan, and underwent the rites at Constantinople; and what has happened in this way may occur again, particularly among those who are less able to understand the system. This result is not, perhaps, so much to

be deprecated, since, of the two systems, the Mahomedan is the nearest to Christianity, for it embraces the belief that Christ was the WORD of God; that He is the intercessor between God and man; and that He was conceived and miraculously born of a virgin: and, Gentlemen, if any of you have ever taken up the volume of the Alcoran, you will have found, in the early parts of it, that none are to be accounted true Mussulmans, who do not believe the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be the word of God. Now, in all these several points of Mahomedan belief, the disciples of the Impostor excel the Unitarians, and out-run them in the nearness of their approach to Christianity: nor must it be forgotten, that it was principally on account of this adherence on the part of the Mahomedans to the writings of the Old and New Testaments, that the negotiation, opened by the English Unitarians, in the reign of Charles the Second, with the ambassador of the emperor of Morocco, to form an alliance with the Mahomedans for a more extensive propagation of Unitarian principles, failed. If, then, it be admitted that the Mahomedans are Pagans, and that they are opposed to Christians and Christianity, it follows, as a necessary consequence, that much more so are the Unitarians, the Defendants and their adherents.

1 See Horsley's sixteenth letter to Priestley. See Sale's Koran, ch. 3, 4, and 5.

But, my Lord, and Gentlemen of the Jury, it is not my intention to proceed in this trial upon the first count of this Information, but to rely on the second, as that which furnishes more extensive and certain ground for expecting your verdict on this prosecution, a prosecution, let me say, carried on in no spirit of vindictive feeling towards any of the persons before you, but with the aim of protecting the public against, what I am fully prepared to show, their pernicious and blasphemous writings.

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Gentlemen, — It is hardly necessary for me to tell you, that the doctrines of our National Church, and more particularly that which is explained in the first article of our faith respecting the holy and undivided Trinity, is a part or parcel of the statute laws of the realm; and that to attempt to turn the minds of his Majesty's subjects against the admission of them, proved true by the warrant of Scripture; or to attempt to lessen their importance, by withdrawing from them their only support, the evidence of the word of God, constitute a very serious offence. With this offence, grave and awful as it is, the Defendants stand charged; and it devolves on me, as the Officer of the Crown, to bring to merited punishment those who impugn the Christian Religion.

In all Christian countries it is necessary that some form of public worship to the Creator should exist: in England it has been established by statute,

in the reign of Charles the Second, that if any man, in writing, reviles, scoffs, or ridicules it, by the Law of the land he is guilty of a libel. Now, to deny the Holy Trinity, by an attempt to show that our blessed Saviour was not a divine but a human being, is taking away the corner-stone on which the beautiful and sacred edifice of Christianity rests, and is reviling the sacred character of its Author; and an attempt to rob this Being of that divinity which is his own, and to hold him out as a mere human creature, and as an unworthy and improper object of worship, is to scoff at his high claims, if not to ridicule them. The Information charges the Defendants with devising, and intending to excite by these means, in the minds of the King's subjects, false and dangerous notions of religion.

By some, perhaps, it may be thought that such prosecutions as the present are a direct infringement upon that natural law of toleration, which permits every man to worship God in the manner his conscience prescribes. For the establishment and force of this law, I am at all times, and upon every occasion, the firm and decided advocate; and, indeed, in this happy country, it is both the privilege and enjoyment of every individual to seek his God in the way, and after the manner, which he honestly believes and feels to be his duty. Happily for us, we have no such edicts

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