"Turning again for a moment to the question of probabilities: I ask your Honor if it is probable, even thinkable, that any minister, standing in the position of regard in which this minister stood last Sunday morning before the eyes of his people, would deem a crisis like this insufficient to unseal his lips and absolve him from his confessional vows? His very duty to his God and to his congregation, to the poor dupes of his hypocrisy, to say nothing of his duty to himself, would compel him to go upon the witness stand voluntarily and reveal the name of the alleged thief! "Such a consideration again forces upon any unbiased mind the conviction that this man is not speaking the truth. View him as a thief, and you suspect that his story is a lie. Try to view him as a minister, acting honestly and in good faith, and you no longer suspect, but you deeply and unalterably know that his story is a lie!" Searle, now at the height of his self-induced passion, as well as at the climax of his argument, stood bent over, his eyes blazing at the judge, his face red, his neck swollen, his features working in rage, and his voice deepening to a bull-like roar, while with an upper-cut gesture of his clenched fist and right arm, he appeared to lift the words to some mighty height and hurl them like a thunder bolt of doom. The minister, sitting with every muscle taut, as he strained under the viciousness of this assault, felt just before its climax some insensible cause directing his gaze from the face of his official accuser to that of his real Nemesis, the actress, and was surprised to see her crouching like a tigress for a spring, with eyes fixed upon the prosecutor, and a look of unutterable malice, hate, and loathing in their savage beams. But with this scene thrown for a moment on the screen of his mind, the suddenly sobering utterance of Searle indicated that he was concluding his argument, and the defendant’s eyes returned quickly to the attorney’s face. "For these reasons, your Honor," the man was saying, "so patent and bristling from the testimony that I need not even have spoken of them in order to bring them to your attention, I ask you to find that the offense as charged in the complaint has been committed, and that there is sufficient cause to believe the defendant guilty thereof, and to order that he be held to answer before the Honorable, the Superior Court of the County of Alameda and the State of California." Searle sat down and wiped his brow,—confident that he had added greatly to his reputation by a masterly argument which had sealed the fate of a man, against whom, despite the minister’s suspicions, he really had nothing in the world but that instinct for the chase to which, once a strong nature gives up, it may find itself led on to excesses that are the extreme of injustice.