"You talk a great deal about morality and religion; you manifest in your pulpits a great anxiety to spread them amongst the people; but who can believe you to be sincere, when you resist every attempt to remove the causes of immorality and irreligion? You must know that effects cannot be removed without removing the causes of them, and by resisting the removal of these causes, you evidently show a disposition to keep the people in wickedness. This wickedness proceeds from certain causes. We have pointed these causes out to you, and if you will not remove them, does not that evidently show that you would rather that the people were wicked? Can there be conclusions more logical? What ridiculous cant it must be then to talk about morality and religion? "My assumption then is, that the belief of every man is given to him _independently of his will_, and that, therefore, no just power can punish him for it. "Your assumption is the opposite of this; you assert that the belief of every man depends upon his own will; _that he can either believe in the Bible, or not believe in the Bible_; that he can either be Christian or Jew, Mahomedan or Infidel, and that, therefore, God will punish him if he do not believe in a particular manner. "These then, are our respective assumptions--and now let reason, ’the grand prerogative of man,’ determine between us. "Gentlemen, contrast the spirit of Mr. Haslam in this passage with the spirit of my prosecutors. He invokes Reason, ’the grand prerogative of man,’ to determine between them; the Clergy, on the contrary, resort to prosecution to crush a reasoning opponent. "I beg to inform you that I have read the Bible attentively, and that the more I read it the more reason I see for disbelieving it. "The Bible asserts things which the whole of my senses tell me are false; and if my senses are independent of myself, how can I help disbelieving it? "I know that God gave me my senses; but how can I believe God made the Bible, when it is directly opposed to these senses? To believe that God is the author of both, is to believe that God commits absurdities like yourselves; and to ascribe such a paltry and blundering performance as the Bible to that power which governs the universe is to dishonour that power, if any thing can dishonour it. "But a man’s belief is not only formed independently of his will, but it is often formed in direct opposition to it. I, for instance, once believed that the principles which I now hold were false; I used to argue against them, and even write against them, and my will to disbelieve them was so strong, owing to their apparent absurdity, that I used to be delighted when I imagined I had discovered a fresh argument with which I might overturn them. Continuing, however, to argue, I began to see their truth; I saw the principles more clearly; I found I had mistaken them very much; and at last I saw into them as clearly, as Cobbett used to say, as the sun at noon-day.