are to cry havoc, and let slip the brands of their vengeance upon the objects of their suspicion or their hate, who of us is safe? What one man is there in this House, or in this whole State, who may not be glad that such a precedent has been established? If, Sir, we are to be warned out of our beds at midnight, and our wives and children sent shivering from beneath our blazing roofs, who is there that does not pray God that he may be able to point to a precedent somewhere, which shall ensure him a covering from the storm?

In stating my views of this question, Mr. Speaker, I have thus far made little allusion to the particular character of the institution in question. I have no partiality for the Roman Catholic creed. I have no fondness for convents, or monastic institutions of any kind. I wish sincerely that not an inch of ground on the whole continent of America was covered by them. But this is no part of this question. Justice is no respecter of persons. Equity is blind and bandaged to all distinctions of creed as well as of condition.

But, as there are doubtless some members of the House who cannot rid themselves of the prejudice which the peculiar tenets of these petitioners are calculated to excite, I put to them one simple question. Do intolerance and persecution tend to eradicate heresy? Is this the maxim which history has taught us? No! Persecution, if it does not crush at once, creates new strength; if it does not kill, it gives fresh life; and I call upon every individual in this assembly, who deprecates the spread of Roman Catholicism in this country, to disarm its propagators of the powerful weapon which persecution has now placed in their hands.

Mr. Speaker, I cannot conclude without presenting one more consideration to all who hear me. This act it is too late to prevent. It is already upon the records of the irrevocable past. And wherever the name of Massachusetts shall be known or heard in all ages to come, wherever the story of the Pilgrims, the struggles of the Colonists, or the great battles of Independence shall be described, there, also, this dreadful deed, with all its circumstances of cowardice and cruelty, will bear them company.

It is of a character never to be lost sight of by those who perpetuate the memory of human events. The poet will embalm it in deathless song. The novelist will embody it in immortal story. Will, do I say? He has already done so. Who is there, henceforth, who can read again the Abbot of Walter Scott, without thinking that the same spirit of superstition and bigotry, which revelled and rioted in that scene of moral and religious darkness, has risen again from its sleep of ages, and having found no foothold among its ancient haunts, has crossed the wide-spread ocean to find, on the soil of free and enlightened Massachusetts, a stage for the reënactment of its terrible tragedies? And even on the page of history, sober and truth-telling history, softened and palliated as it may be by some fond and filial hand, it will still overtop the level of ordinary incident, and cast a deep shade over our brightest and proudest achievements.

In behalf, then, of this ancient Commonwealth, unused to any association but with the great and generous of the earth;in behalf of her living children, and in behalf of her dead fathers, whose names will be alike bound up with that of the State itself, for honor or dishonor, for glory or shame, in all future time;-I invoke this House to do something to rescue her from this otherwise inevitable reproach.

THE TESTIMONY OF INFIDELS.

A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF MASSACHUSETTS, FEBRUARY 11, 1836.

ALLOW me, Mr. Speaker, before entering upon the discussion. of the general merits of the bill under consideration, to set the House right with regard to the laws of Connecticut upon this subject. That State has long enjoyed a most enviable reputation for holding fast to that which is good. And it was not, I confess, without some alarm that I heard her example appealed to in favor of the bill. But upon subsequent investigation, I am entirely willing that her example should be followed. She has passed no such law. Her last statute upon the subject, the statute of 1830, has carried her not a jot beyond the point at which our common law now stands. It declares every man to be a competent witness who believes in a Supreme Being, and our courts have declared the same.

But I wish not to rest my opposition to this bill upon either example or authority; much less am I disposed to defend the present rule of law, merely because it happens to be an ancient rule. I agree with the gentleman from Gloucester, (Mr. Rantoul,) that principles are none the better for their antiquity. But let me remind him, too, that they are none the worse either. Let me remind him that there are at least two classes of minds in this House, with reference to this matter of antiquity. And that, while some may be disposed to adhere too blindly and cling too closely to whatever is old or established, adopting, as he says, the maxim of the poet-"Whatever is, is right,".

there are others who leap a little too easily to the opposite of whatever is old and established, adopting, as their motto, the very reverse of that maxim-"Whatever is, is wrong." Sir, there are men here who seem to find their sole and sufficient reason for attacking any principle or any practice, in the mere fact that it did not originate in their day, or was not the offspring of their own brain;— who, while they profess great respect for the wisdom of their fathers, place no dependence upon any but their own;-who seem to consider our Government, its institutions and its principles, free, prosperous, and pure though they be, as the subjects, — not of the whole people's sober enjoyment, but of their own fanciful experiments; and who hunt out the imperfections which are inseparable from all human works, with the same eagerness and zeal with which sportsmen run down their game, not for any advantage to others, but only to enjoy their own agility and skill.

For one, Sir, I care not in what age, before the flood or since, any practice or any principle drew breath, or with what barbarous systems it was once intermingled; if it be good in itself, and works well in our own system, it is all that can be asked. Our own Massachusetts Bill of Rights contains more than one article from an instrument more than six hundred years old, and almost in the very words in which it was extorted from the lips of King John at Runnymede by his brave though barbarous barons. But do we rely on those articles any the less confidently on that account, or sleep any the less soundly under their protecting influence?

But there is one thing which antiquity affords, which even the gentleman himself must acknowledge to be valuable, — experience — experience experience a teacher compared with which the brainspun theories of men are but stumbling-blocks and foolishness; and let me say that neither industry nor ingenuity have been able to torture from her any response in favor of this bill.

And now, Mr. Speaker, I beg leave to recall the attention of the House to the real reason of the existing rule of law as to this inquiry into a man's religious belief, as it is falsely called. Gentlemen seem to regard it as an independent and arbitrary rule, established for no other purpose than to exclude atheists

from the witness-stand. This is wholly false. An atheist is not excluded simply because he is an atheist. There is another most material and massy link in the chain which shuts him out. The rule of law is now, and has been for centuries, that no testimony shall be received in courts of justice except under the sanction of an oath; a rule which has never been relaxed except in favor of the Quakers, whose conscientious scruples about oaths have stood the test of two centuries of trial, and, during a part of the time, of the sharpest persecution. But an atheist cannot take an oath, and that, not because he has any conscientious scruples about swearing, but because he has no God to swear by. There is nothing in his breast upon which the obligations of an oath can take hold. Its terms are wholly unmeaning to him- its sanctions wholly unbinding upon him. He cannot, therefore, as he must, if he give it at all, give testimony under oath. It is the oath, then, and not his religious belief, which excludes him.

And here, Sir, I advance this proposition, that so long as oaths are administered in our courts, so long it is essential to the ends of justice that this right of inquiry should be maintained; and so long it is the religious duty of society to maintain it. Why, what is an oath, and in what consists the taking of an oath? Is it the mere stepping upon a stand to be seen of men, the assumption of an arbitrary attitude, and the repetition of a formula of words to render one liable to the pains and penalties of perjury? I fear it is too often considered so. I have often regretted the hasty and careless manner in which oaths are administered and taken. I have often desired that some change might be made, which would assign to the taker something more than a mere raising of the hand and a bending of the head. But what is an oath? It is a religious obligation, and, in taking it, a man is supposed to lift himself above the level of men, and to speak, as it were, in the presence of God, to raise, not only his hand, but his heart, to heaven, — to invoke the attestation of God to truth, and to imprecate his vengeance upon falsehood.

Seriously considered, Sir, there is no more awful act performed by man on earth than this. No form of prayer or of