Chief-Justice Willes concurs with Lord Hardwicke as to dispensing with strict rules of evidence. "Such evidence," [he says,] "is to be admitted as the _necessity_ of the case will allow of: as, for instance, a marriage at Utrecht, certified under the seal of the minister there, and of the said town, and that they cohabited together as man and wife, was held to be sufficient proof that they were married." This learned judge (commenting upon Lord Coke's doctrine, and Serjeant Hawkins's after him, that the oaths of Jews and pagans were not to be taken) says, "that this notion, though advanced by so great a man, is contrary to religion, common sense, and common humanity, and I think the devils, to whom he has delivered them, could not have suggested anything worse." Chief-Justice Willes, admitting Lord Coke to be a great lawyer, then proceeds in very strong terms, and with marks of contempt, to condemn "_his narrow notions_"; and he treats with as little respect or decorum the ancient authorities referred to in defence of such notions. The principle of the departure from those rules is clearly fixed by Lord Hardwicke; he lays it down as follows:--"The first ground judges have gone upon, in departing from strict rules, is _absolute strict necessity_; 2dly, a _presumed_ necessity." Of the first he gives these instances:--"In the case of writings subscribed by witnesses, if all are dead, the proof of one of their hands is sufficient to establish the deed. Where an original is lost, a copy may be admitted; if no copy, then a proof by witnesses who have _heard_ the deed: and yet it is a thing the law abhors, to admit the memory of man for evidence." This enlargement through two stages of proof, both of them contrary to the rule of law, and both abhorrent from its principles, are by this great judge accumulated upon one another, and are admitted from _necessity_, to accommodate human affairs, and to prevent that which courts are by every possible means instituted to prevent,--A FAILURE OF JUSTICE. And this necessity is not confined within the strict limits of physical causes, but is more lax, and takes in _moral and even presumed and argumentative necessity_, a necessity which is in fact nothing more than a great degree of expediency. The law creates a fictitious necessity against the rules of evidence in favor of the convenience of trade: an exception which on a similar principle had before been admitted in the Civil Law, as to mercantile causes, in which the books of the party were received to give full effect to an insufficient degree of proof, called, in the nicety of their distinctions, a _semiplena probatio_.[52]