and his Apostles, and to the duty which they themselves confess to be incumbent upon them.

But upon the coming into power of Mr. Anthony Browne, as Lord Mayor of London, he being a Dissenter from the Church of England, a crusade of persecution was commenced against your Petitioner. Three indictments, for Blasphemy alleged to have been delivered in your Petitioner's orations before the Areopagus, were entered against your Petitioner, in the third of which six other persons were involved upon the charge of conspiring to blaspheme. Two of these indictments are still hanging over your Petitioner; he hath upon one of them been convicted, and was sentenced upon the seventh of February last, to be imprisoned for one year in his Majesty's Gaol of Oakham, in the county of Rutland, and at the end of that time, to find securities for his good behaviour, himself in £500, and two sufficient persons in £250 each, for five years. It being well known, that such persons as would he judged to be sufficient must necessarily be unwilling to give the required security, seeing that for much less indication of good-will to your petitioner, six other persons are already under prosecution: and it being absolutely impossible, that a man, having the proper spirit of a man, and being conscious that he hath never said or done any thing worthy of punishment, should consent to accept liberty upon so degrading and unjust a condition, that liberty being kept from him, only by a continued crime.

The Judge himself who passed this sentence upon him bearing testimony at the same time in favour of your Petitioner, that he was for "reverence to God, and had inculcated the duties and obligations of moral righteousness.' Your Petitioner therefore prays, that your honourable house will take his hard case into consideration, and put an end to this barbarous persecution, by deterging from English Law, the disgrace of punishing a man for his religious opinions, and of treating as a felon and a culprit, one whose case is in so many points analogous to His, of whom the Chief Priests said, "He hath spoken Blasphemy," and the people said, "Let him be crucified," and Pilate said, "I find in him no fault at all," though Pilate "gave sentence that it should be as they desired." And your Petitioner shall, as in duty bound,

Oakham Gaol,

Monday, March 31, 1828.

ROBERT TAYLOR.

On the presentation of this Petition, the following report is made in the Morning Chronicle.

RELIGIOUS PROSECUTIONS.

Mr. HUME rose to present a Petition from the Rev. Robert Taylor, confined in Oakham Gaol, on a sentence upon a prosecution for blasphemy. The Petitioner was prosecuted at the instance of a Dissenter-an Alderman Browne-who was then Lord Mayor of London. The Petitioner maintained that it was disgraceful to the age, and contrary to justice, to prosecute any man merely because he differed on speculative points of religion from the mass of the community. He had been sentenced, at the end of his imprisonment of one year, to be bound himself in £500, and two sureties of £250 each, which he thought excessive bail. He thought it wrong on the part of Mr. Anthony Browne, who was himself a Dissenter, to institute such a prosecution.

The Petition was brought up and read.

On the question that the Petition do lie on the Table,

Mr. W. SMITH was surprised that such a prosecution should have been instituted by Alderman Browne, who was himself a Dissenter; but perhaps he felt that, as a Magistrate, it was his duty to do so.

Mr. LESLIE FOSTER thought the Lord Mayor had acted rightly in prosecuting a person who gloried in being not only a Deist, but an Atheist, and who published his opinions in violation of the law of the land.

Mr. Alderman WooD said, that the prosecution had been instituted by the then Lord Mayor, and not by the Court of Aldermen. He believed it had been instituted by that Gentleman, because there appeared no disposition in the Secretary for the Home Department to bring the subject forward. He thought it would be better to let such prosecutions alone, as by doing so the doctrines and opinions of that person would be prevented from getting into circulation.

Mr. Secretary PEEL observed, that the Hon. Alderman had correctly stated that there was no wish to interfere on the part of Government, not because the impropriety of that person's conduct was not felt, but because prosecutions on such subjects involved a very difficult and delicate question. That person had, however, been guilty of a shameful violation of the law, and the then Mayor felt it his duty to proceed against him. He repeated that he thought prosecutions ought to be seriously considered before they were instituted.

After a few words from Mr. HUME, the Petition was ordered to lie on the Table.

The report of The Times agrees with this of the Morning Chronicle; but the report of the Morning Herald makes Mr. William Smith and Mr. Alderman Wood, to be the defenders of the late Lord Mayor Browne and the advocates of the prosecution; so that it is impossible to comment fairly on the subject, unless one had been in the gallery of the House of Commons to have reported on his own responsibility. Mr. Hume is not reported to have stated any thing more than the heads of the petition; but Mr. Peel's observations are interesting, inasmuch as they exhibit the effusion of a mind that has been beaten out of a darling object. Infidelity is a very bad sort of thing, a daring violation of the law; but it had better not be prosecuted, cries Mr. Peel. This is the language of a minister! He has laws which he thinks should not be enforced. Then repeal them, and get out of the anomaly of administering, or professing to administer, that which is not fit to be administered. But the fact is, Mr. Peel, there are no laws of the kind to be administered or to be repealed, and I charge you with the utterance of a falsehood, when you stated in the House of Commons, that Mr. Taylor had wantonly or sufficiently offended the law to justify the prosecution. You know better. You know, you have no law but that of prejudice, no custom but that of religious persecution, no right but that of might in your case. If you have law, I am an offender of that law, and I call upon you, as a minister of the crown and the law, to put that law in force against me.

that

Talk not of your delicacy or your expediency. The whole question is one of verbal discussion, of truth or falsehood, of right or wrong. Is your Christian religion founded in physical, historical, and moral truths? If it be, your law is not wanted to show it to be so; if it be not, your law cannot make it to be what

it is not; your law cannot make wrong to be right, nor falsehood to be truth. We have beaten you, Mr. Peel, at your own game; we have turned your own foul weapons upon you, and you are prostrate on the score of prosecuting infidels; you have been a bitter persecutor to us; you have done your worst to us, so we have nothing for which to thank or to applaud you. We have beaten you, and that is the true cause of your altered tone, and until you learn to make honest confessions upon the subject of infidelity toward the Christian religion, we will teaze you with these reminiscences, and with defiances to your shelved law. We will beat the city magistrates on their interference in this matter. A few months hence, and you will find Mr. Taylor producing three-fold his former effect through town and country. You will find him publicly attacking the Christian religion as he before attacked it. I will engage to be at once his bail, and to find him a public room wherein he may attack the Christian religion in the way that shall best please him. In one of the papers which I have seen, you are reported to have said, that, to prosecutions, you or the government have preferred to let the offending parties grow ashamed of their own proceedings. What indications have you had to justify such an imputation? Has it been in any case that I have exhibited? Or has such a case been exhibited by any other person who was of the least weight in the advocacy of infidelity? Two persons have turned their backs upon us, among the many who have been prosecuted; but one of these, William Haley, was so very profligate as a Christian, that he came to us incurable of that profligacy, and we were glad to throw him back upon you; the other is William Tunbridge, who, though possessing a great deal of moral integrity, and good disposition, really never had any sentiment of his own on which to form a fixed principle. He is not to be classed with William Haley. Haley had talent, but was a profligate. Tunbridge was moral without any pretensions to talent, and changed sides from mere peevishness and irritability increased by imprisonment and no prospect of release, from a want of patient firmness. So, your imputations were, on this head, as unwarrantable as were your paltry observations on the assumed law of the case.

In all the papers that I have seen, Mr. Leslie Foster is reported to have made himself a blundering and impudent fool, on the subject of this petition, and to have talked about points in the case of which he is evidently ignorant. One paper stated, that Mr. Foster objected to the observation, that Mr. Taylor was the victim of religious opinions; because he, Mr. Taylor, was a Deist or an Atheist, and had no religious opinions; and that a deist or an atheist ought to be prosecuted. Now Mr. Taylor's complaint is, not that he is not allowed to enjoy his own, but that he is the victim or martyr to, or persecuted sufferer from, the religious

opinions of others; and that the christian religion is essentially a persecuting religion.

In all the matters on which I have a little knowledge, I find, when I contrast that knowledge with the views which members of parliament take of it, that they are deplorably ignorant: and I conclude, that they are equally ignorant on matters to which I do not turn my attention. I feel nothing but contempt for the mental or moral character of the parliament, as at present constituted; so I have nothing but contempt of which to make an honest expression concerning it and as to political fear in doing it, I have none remaining. On the presentation of this petition from Mr. Taylor, there is not one sentence of sense offered in comment upon it, as reported; but much nonsense, some misapprehensions and some scandalous falsehoods.

Mr. Leslie Foster says, that a man without religious opinions is a proper subject for prosecution. I proudly tell him that I have no religious opinions-that there is not in me a particle or shade of that principle which is called religion; and I proclaim myself the equal, if not the superior of Mr. Leslie Foster, in all that constitutes the moral duties of man; and I proudly defy him, or any one else, to prosecute me for having no religious opinions, and for the expression of contempt for all religious opinions, Jew, Gentile, Christian, or Mahometan.

Darings and defiances of this kind are absolutely necessary to beat down the persecuting disposition of all religious opinions, and that is my apology for being thus offensive. I am, and always will be, ready to join any man, or sect of men, mildly, for the purposes of mutual instruction; but I know religion to be a vicious error, and when it meets me with hostility, I will repel it with hostility. RICHARD CARLILE.

LETTER XXII.—FROM THE REV. ROBERT TAYLOR,

THE RIVAL UNIVERSITIES.

DEAR MR. CARLILE.-I suppose you have purposely left the important movement in Israel, which distinguishes the last month, to my animadversion, since I observe your noble LION hasn't so much as wagged his tail upon the subject. You couldn't doubt but that I should be wide awake to such an ominous "shaking of the powers of Heaven." A pair of universities for you! Orthodoxy versus Latitudinarianism, alias, Anythingarianism. It never rains but it pours. You'll have your metropolis deluged with learning-King's College and Dieu et mon Droit, against the London University and Astra Castra.* The market for learning will be over-stocked, and professors will have to go canvassing for pupils to come and hear their lectures.

* The Stars my Camp! a Scotch Deistical motto.

Old Mother Church, who ever moves so slowly, and never moves at all but upon the needs-must of the Devil's driving; that is, when her own interest, or the apprehension of danger to her suspiciously-held influence, stings her into action, at length betrays her jealousy, and discovers the thorough penetration of her keen observance through the thin veil of affected liberality, that covers the latitant infidelity of Brougham's prayerless, creedless, graceless University.

Drowsy as the old cat in her dotage may seem to be, she was not going to let the rats exactly run over her back-she wasn't going to dream that there was no mischief in mischief. A church founded on the principle of controlling all the actions of the human mind, and "bringing down every thought to the obedience of faith," and necessarily existing so long and no longer than, as delusion shall exist, was not likely to let the master-key of education be tickled out of its hands, and to suffer a generation of scholars to grow up, unwarped by a sufficiently early engrafting of those habits of hypocrisy, or impressions of superstition, which, if not early engrafted, can never afterwards get hold on the mind. Nature is too well known, to admit of even churchmen being ignorant, that if the child were not imposed on, the man would never be so. Though the Missionaries may boast of making converts of the West Indian savages, of vulgar kerns and illiterate boors, a well educated infidel is an animal too untameable for their manage. The whole world's history presents not a single instance of an individual of the human race, who ever came to believe the Christian religion, or ever could do so, who could say the multiplication table first.

“Train up a child in the way he should go," was ever a necessary axiom for the knaves who had but too good reason to be aware that none but a child or men of childish understandings would go in that way. So all that is to be of learning in the world, is to be trammelled and broken into the yoke of subserviency to the established superstition. King's College, London, is founded on the avowed principle of that of Maynooth, and all other Catholic Universities, those styes for learned pigs, from which all Protestant books are excluded, and which, (I wish it were not also true of the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Dublin,) exist as standing demonstrations to the world, how desperately ignorant and measurelessly stupid a man may be, though his brain were a Greek Lexicon, and his tongue a Polyglot, if that brain be enforced to render service to a folly, and that tongue to varnish falsehood. It is not more physically than it is morally true, that the existence of a depression on any one point of the intellectual organization, will render all advantages that its developement in every other respect might command, utterly nugatory and abortive. 'Tis true the trammelled and