benevolent mind, will follow you, wherever your oppressors may convey your person. Yet, I cannot but cherish anticipations of a very different termination of these proceedings, engendered as they are between religious bigotry and political folly, when submitted by both sides to a jury of our countrymen. I trust that impartial justice will guide their decision. As a friend to the universal freedom of mankind, civil and religious, I take leave to address you, for the purpose of contributing my sincere congratulations on the honours that await you, and the fine opportunity presented to you of benefiting mankind. I regret that the nature of my situation constrains me to conceal my name. To disclose it would, in all probability, prove my ruin in worldly circumstances, and thus both my present and future usefulness in this very cause be destroyed. I know many individuals, eminent for public and private virtue, who entertain the same sentiments as myself, who, by the prejudices so assiduously kept up, are equally obliged to be silent. I have felt desirous, too, of sending you a few unconnected thoughts which have occurred to me on your case. It is very likely that they are quite common, and may have been much better expressed by others; yet, nevertheless, I shall state them. I can easily suppose, that, even if you had an intention to employ counsel in your defence, you would find some difficulty, in the present servility of the bar to the powers that be, to obtain any assistance. But you require none, and you will be your own best advocate. I am not a lawyer, and therefore am I neither deeply read in musty statutes, nor skilled in legal subtleties. I apprehend, however, that there is not a law in the statute book forbidding theological controversy. The crime with which you are charged is called a _libel_. Now, what a libel is I do not know, nor can any body tell me; yet you are doubtless pretty well aware, that your prosecutors will, in a strain of inflated declamation and bombast, describe this libel as a thing of the most atrocious and diabolical nature and tendency. Your mode of defence against this attack is obvious. Since the question at issue between you and your accusers is not one of law, but of fact, your object is to get behind their ambuscade of words, and beat down their phillippics by that irresistible weapon, common sense, wielded by an honest man. It has always appeared to my understanding that the most powerful argument that can be used with well-meaning people who assisted in, or approve of, prosecutions to support the ascendancy of their religion, is, that which shews such prosecutions to have a _directly opposite tendency_. Persecution is the very scandal of religion: it confesses weakness at once, and is a complete admission that the origin, doctrines, and progress of that religion cannot bear investigation.