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rected till he is subdued. The discipline of a school is military. There must be either unbounded licence, or absolute authority. The master, who punishes, not only consults the future happiness of him who is the immediate subject of correction, but propagates obedience through the whole school; and establishes regularity by exemplary justice. The victorious obstinacy of a single boy would make his future endeavours of reformation or instruction totally ineffectual. Obstinacy, therefore, must never be victoriYet it is well known, that there sometimes occurs a sullen and hardy resolution, that laughs at all common degrees of pain. Correction must be proportioned to occasions. The flexible will be reformed by gentle discipline, and the refractory must be subdued by harsher methods. The degrees of scholastic, as of military punishment, no stated rules can ascertain. It must be enforced till it overpowers temptation; till stubbornness becomes flexible, and perverseness regular.

ous.

Custom and reasun have, indeed, set some bounds. to scholastic penalties. The school-master inflicts no capital punishments; nor enforces his edicts by either death or mutilation. The civil law has wisely determined, that a master who strikes at a scholar's eye shall be considered as a criminal. But punishmeuts, however severe, that produce no lasting evil, may be just and reasonable, because they may be necessary. Such have been the punishments used by the respondent. No scholar has gone from him either blind or lame, or with any of his limbs or powers injured or impaired. They were irregular and he punished them; they were obstinate, and he enforced his punishment, But, however provoked, he never exceeded the limits of moderation, for he inflicted nothing beyond present pain; and how much of that was required, no man is so little able to determine, as those who have determined against him ;-the parents of the offenders. It has been said, that he used unprecedented and improper instruments of correction.

Of this accusation the meaning is not very easy to be found. No instrument of correction is more proper than another, but as it is better adapted to produce present pain, without lasting mischief. Whatever were his instruments, no lasting mischief has ensued; and therefore, however unusual, in hands so cautious they were proper.

In a place like Campbell-town, it is easy for one of the principal inhabitants to make a party. It is easy for that party to heat themselves with imaginary grievances. It is easy for them to oppress a man poorer than themselves, and natural to assert the dignity of riches, by persisting in oppression. The argument which attempts to prove the impropriety of restoring the respondent to the school, by alledging that he has lost the confidence of the people, is not the subject of juridical consideration; for he is to suffer, if he must suffer, not for their judgment, but for his own actions. It may be convenient for them to have another master, but it is a convenience of their own making. It would be likewise convenient for him to find another school; but this convenience he cannot obtain.-The question is not what is now convenient, but what is generally right. If the people of Campbell-town be distressed by the restoration of the respondent, they are distressed only by their own fault; by turbulent passions and unreasonable desires; by tyranny, which law has defeated, and by malice, which virtue has surmounted.

Section IV.

PART OF THE SPEECH OF THE HONOURABLE THOMAS

(NOW LORD) ERSKINE, FOR THE PROSECUTION AGAINST WILLIAMS, PUBLISHER OF PAINE'S AGE OF REASON.

GENTLEMEN,

How any man can rationally vindicate the publi cation of such a book, in a country where the chris W

tian religion is the very foundation of the law of the land, I am totally at a loss to conceive, and have no ideas for the discussion of? How is a tribunal, whose whole jurisdiction is founded upon the solemn belief and practice of what is denied as falsehood, and reprobated as impiety, to deal with such an anomalous defence? Upon what principle is it even offered to the court, whose authority is contemned and mocked at? If the religion proposed to be called in question, is not previously adopted in belief and solemnly acted upon, what authority has the court to pass any judgment at all of acquittal or condemnation? Under what sanction are the witnesses to give their evidence, without which there can be no trial? Under what obligation can I call upon you, (the jury representing your country) to administer justice? Surely upon no other than that you are sworn to administer it under the oaths you have taken.

The whole judicial fabric from the king's sovereign authority to the lowest office of magistracy, has no other foundation. The whole is built both in form and substance, upon the same oath of every one of its ministers, to do justice, as God shall help them hereafter. What God? and what hereafter? That God undoubtedly, who has commanded kings to rule, and judges to decree justice; who has said to witnesses not only by the voice of nature, but in revealed commandments-thou shalt not bear false testimony against thy neighbour; and who has enforced obedience to them by the revelation of the unutterable blessings which shall attend their observances, and the awful punishments which shall wait upon their transgressions.

But it seems this is an age of reason, and the time and the persons are at last arrived, that are to dissipate the errors which have overspread the past generations of ignorance. The believers in christianity are many, but it belongs to the few that are wise to correct their credulity. Belief is an act of reason, and superior reason may, therefore, dictate to the weak.

In running the mind along the long list of sincere and devout christians, I cannot help lamenting that Newton had not lived to this day, to have had his shallowness filled up with this new flood of light.But the subject is too awful for irony. I will speak plainly and directly. Newton was a christian! Newton, whose mind burst forth from the fetters cast by nature upon our finite conceptions-Newton, whose science was truth, and the foundation of whose knowledge of it was philosophy; not those visionary and arrogant presumptions which too often usurp its name, but philosophy resting on the basis of mathematics, which, like figures, cannot lie-Newton, who carried the line and rule to the utmost barriers of creation, and explored the principles by which, no doubt, all created matter is held together and exists. But this extraordinary man, in the mighty reach of his mind, overlooked, perhaps, the errors which a minuter investigation of the created things on this earth might have taught him of the essence of his creator.

What then shall be said of the great Mr. Boyle, who looked into the organic structure of all matter, even to the brute inanimate substances which the foot treads on? Such a man may be supposed to have been equally qualified with Mr. Paine to look up through nature to nature's God. Yet the result of all his contemplations was the most confirmed and devout belief of all which the other holds in contempt, as despicable and drivelling superstition.-But this error might, perhaps, arise from a want of a due attention to the foundations of human judgment, and the structure of that understanding which God has given us for the investigation of truth.-Let that question be answered by Mr. Locke, who was, to the highest pitch of devotion and adoration, a christian. Mr. Locke, whose office was to detect the errors of thinking, by going up to the foundation of thought, and to direct into the proper track of reasoning the devious mind. of man, by shewing him its whole process, from the first perceptions of sense to the last eonclusions of ra

tiocination, putting a rein besides upon false opinion, by practical rules for the conduct of human judgment. But these men were only deep thinkers, and lived in their closets, unaccustomed to the traffic of the world and to the laws which practically regulate mankind. Gentlemen! in the place where we now sit to administer the justice of this great country, above a century ago, the never to be forgotten sir Matthew Hale presided; whose faith in christianity is an exalted commentary upon its truth and reason, and whose life was a glorious example of its fruits in man, administering human justice with a wisdom and purity drawn from the pure fountain of the christian dispensation, which has been, and will be, in all ages, a subject of the highest reverence and admiration. But it is said by the author that the christian fable is but the tale of the more ancient superstitions of the world, and may be easily detected by a proper understanding of the mythologies of the heathens. Did Milton understand those mythologies? Was he less versed than Mr. Paine in the superstitions of the world? No, they were the subjects of his immortal song; and though shut out from all recurrence to them, he poured them forth from the stores of a memory rich with all that man ever knew; and laid them in their order as the illustration of that real and exalted faith, the unquestionable source of that fervid genius, which cast a sort of shade upon all the other works of man

"He passed the bounds of flaming space,
Where angels tremble while they gaze;
He saw till blasted with excess of light,
He closed his eyes in endless night.'

But it was the light of the body only that was extinguished: "The celestial light shone inward, and enabled him to justify the ways of God to man."The result of his thinking was nevertheless not the same as the author's. The mysterious incarnation of our blessed Saviour (which this work blasphemes in

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