“It is too much the custom, my friends,” Northcote continued to the jury when Mr. Weekes had sat down as spasmodically as he had got up, “to regard this divine mystic of whom I have spoken as a supernatural being whose name can only be mentioned with propriety in the presence of an elaborate ritual. That fetish dies hard, my friends, but dying it is, for if ever a human being walked this earth, whose life and opinions are a great poem that deserves to be recited in our bosoms and our businesses during every hour that we dwell, it is the life and opinions of him who has already given his verdict in this case. There are very few things that are of any importance to us upon which we have not his pronouncement in one form or another; and though that pronouncement may not always be coincident with the technical lawyer’s law of the time, which is understanded of no man, least of all of themselves, these _obiter dicta_ of his, delivered upon the spur of the occasion, have already outlasted kings, dynasties, and nations; and they are likely to endure when court-houses, jury-boxes, and scaffolds have long ceased to be. “A few centuries ago such words as I am now addressing to you would have sent me to the lions, and you also would have been torn in pieces for having deigned to listen to them. It is not a hundred years since small children were hanged in this country for stealing five shillings. A hundred years before that a woman was burned at the stake for the practice of witchcraft. It was the custom to disembowel those who were guilty of a felony; to break on the wheel those who did not hold orthodox political opinions; and to burn, maim, cut off the heads, and inflict indescribable physical torments upon any person because of his religious views. “I am going to ask you, my friends, how these monstrous enactments were overcome. By the lawyers who drew their fees from the Crown to put them in practice? Not so. By those educated minds that conducted the business of the state? Not so. These unspeakable crimes committed in the name of justice were overcome by a handful of prophets, seers, and reformers, who arose in Israel. They were common and unrefined, of small education, and less culture; poor and obscure herdsmen and fishermen, a pedlar by the wayside; the keeper of a public-house; a small tradesman in Lambeth; a miserable grocer of Spitalfields; a wretched old tinker who passed the choicest part of his days in Bedford jail. This very Jesus himself, the foreman of this jury which is sitting with you in the box, which at this moment urges these words to my lips, was a common rustic by trade, a carpenter. And you will remember that he paid for the extreme unorthodoxy of his religious and political views by crucifixion upon the tree.