and his Sanhedrim, in that foulest act of judicial murder, did not venture to set aside the sacred law which required two witnesses.”  “Even Jezebel,” said another orator, “did not dare to take Naboth’s vineyard from him till she had suborned two men of Belial to swear falsely.”  “If the testimony of one grave elder had been sufficient,” it was asked, “what would have become of the virtuous Susannah?” This last allusion called forth a cry of “Apocrypha, Apocrypha,” from the ranks of the Low Churchmen.760

Over these arguments, which in truth can scarcely have imposed on those who condescended to use them, Montague obtained a complete and easy victory.  “An eternal law!  Where was this eternal law before the reign of Edward the Sixth?  Where is it now, except in statutes which relate only to one very small class of offences.  If these texts from the Pentateuch and these precedents from the practice of the Sanhedrim prove any thing, they prove the whole criminal jurisprudence of the realm to be a mass of injustice and impiety.  One witness is sufficient to convict a murderer, a burglar, a highwayman, an incendiary, a ravisher.  Nay, there are cases of high treason in which only one witness is required.  One witness can send to Tyburn a gang of clippers and comers.  Are you, then, prepared to say that the whole law of evidence, according to which men have during ages been tried in this country for offences against life and property, is vicious and ought to be remodelled?  If you shrink from saying this, you must admit that we are now proposing to dispense, not with a divine ordinance of universal and perpetual obligation, but simply with an English rule of procedure, which applies to not more than two or three crimes, which has not been in force a hundred and fifty years, which derives all its authority from an Act of Parliament, and which may therefore be by another, Act abrogated or suspended without offence to God or men.”

It was much less easy to answer the chiefs of the opposition when they set forth the danger of breaking down the partition which separates the functions of the legislator from those of the judge.  “This man,” it was said, “may be a bad Englishman; and yet his cause may be the cause of all good Englishmen.  Only last year we passed an Act to regulate the procedure of the ordinary courts in cases of treason.  We passed that Act because we thought that, in those courts, the life of a subject obnoxious to the government was not then sufficiently secured.  Yet the life of a subject obnoxious to the government was then far more secure than it will be if this House takes on itself to be the supreme criminal judicature in political cases.”  Warm eulogies were pronounced on the ancient national mode of trial by twelve good men and true; and indeed the advantages of that mode of trial in political cases are obvious.  The prisoner is allowed to challenge any number of jurors with cause, and a considerable number without cause.