Now, were the edifice of society founded on the shifting and variable sands of human folly and weakness, such reasoning might pass current: but if, as we believe and know, its foundations are laid deep below the waves of time and change, on the eternal and immutable rock of divine strength and wisdom, it becomes our duty to test that reasoning by the revealed will of God; and if we find it ring false (as even its advocates confess it does), then, in the confidence that the expediency consists in the resolution of human wisdom and will into the wisdom and will of God, boldly to repudiate the perversion of the doctrine usually promulgated under its name, in this as well as in every other instance, as alike sinful and cowardly in its principle, short-sighted in its views, and destructive in its operation. The Bible is the only standard of right and wrong; and we read there, “Thou shalt not do evil that good may come of it.” The defence, therefore, of duelling on the ground of expediency falls to the ground; and no other defence is set up for it. But the truth is, that society, so far from courting or needing the support of duelling, abhors and disowns a system which strikes at the very foundation of social order. Duelling is the mere foster-child of public opinion—the public opinion, moreover, not of the nation at large, but of a class, on whose sentiments and practices any opinion expressed by your Lordships, its brightest ornaments, must necessarily possess incalculable influence. It is this influence which we implore you to exercise on the present occasion.