the Rev. W. Turner , Jun. , MA., Lives of the eminent Unitarians

[70] were bound in £ 800 for his appearance. The indictment, after having been three several times altered before it could be finally settled, occasioned the trial to be postponed till June 14, 1703. On that day, before the court sat, Mr. Emlyn was apprised by an eminent counsel that he would not be permitted to speak freely, but that it was determined to run him down like a wolf, without law, or game; and he soon found that this was not said without sufficient reason. Six or seven bishops were present, including the Archbishops of Armagh and Dublin, who took their seats upon the bench. ‘If,’ says Mr. E., ‘they had used arguments with me, or had informed the court how unfit a jury of tradesmen were to judge of abstruse points of divinity, or had protested, as holy bishops of old did, against that strange and unheard — of impiety, that a spiritual or church affair should come before a secular judicature, I should have thought it would have been to their praise.’

There was no little difficulty in procuring legal evidence that Mr. Emlyn was the author of the book; and it was not so much proved at last, as taken for granted on the presumptive ground of a conformity between the opinions maintained in it, and those which he had professed in conference with Mr. Boyse and his brother ministers. And the main question still remained, whether what was quoted from the book was blasphemy. But this was never spoken to at all. ‘I intended,’ says Mr. E., ‘after the matter of fact was over, to have spoken on this head; and to have shewn how unreasonable it was to account that blasphemy which, for the manner of it, had not been uttered with any token of a designed contempt; ’