The offence with which I am charged is an offence at common law. There is no statute which punishes a man simply for denying the existence of God. There is a statute (9 and 10 Wm. III., c. 32) directed against those who denied the Trinity and who renounced Christianity. But the former part has been repealed in favour of Unitarians, by the 53rd Geo. III., e. 160; and the words I am charged with having spoken cannot be brought within the latter. There is a statute against profane cursing and swearing (19 Geo. II., c. 21), but it takes no cognisance of this offence. Human beings have also been put to death for witchcraft (33 Hen. VIII., c. 8; and 1 James I., c. 12), under the merciless statutes which were enacted in times of the grossest ignorance and superstition; but those statutes have been repealed (9 Geo. II., c. 5). This offence, therefore, is an offence against the common law, if it is an offence at all. It is to be found in the recorded decisions of the judges, if it is to be found anywhere; and the punishment for it is in their discretion. Had it been an offence under a statute, it would have been impossible for me to have denied the authority of the statute; but, as it is an offence at common law, it is quite competent for me to show that the authorities which have been supposed to constitute the offence do not warrant such a construction. Should your lordship even declare that you had no doubt upon the subject, it would still be competent for me to bring before you the decisions of former judges, to argue upon those decisions, and to show, if I could, that there was some mistake or error running throughout the whole of them. Your lordship, I am sure, will admit that judges are fallible, and that a blind, unreasoning submission to them no man should give. As some excuse for presuming to doubt the decision of some of your lordship's predecessors, I shall quote the following passage from the preface to Mr. Watkin's treatise on Conveyancing, allowed to be a master-piece of legal sagacity and method. 'I believe,' writes that gentleman, 'it will be found, on examination, that an implicit submission to the assertions of our predecessors, whatever station those predecessors may have held, has been one of the most certain sources of error, Perhaps there is nothing which has so much shackled the human intellect, nothing which has so greatly promoted whatever is tyrannic, preposterous, and absurd, nothing perhaps which has so much degraded the species in the scale of being as the implicit submission to individual dicta.' And he then goes on in vigorous terms to reprobate the practice of allowing 'authority to shoulder out common sense, or adhering to precedent in defiance of principle.' Upon the principle contained in this passage I shall act, in claiming the attention of your lordship, and you, gentlemen of the jury, whilst I examine the authorities for the doctrine which brings the offence with