all symbols which give peace and comfort to our fellow-creatures. But
the value of the new-born child's passive consent to the ceremony is
null, as testimony to the truth of a doctrine. The automatic closing of
a dying man's lips on the consecrated wafer proves nothing in favor of
the Real Presence, or any other doctrine. And, speaking generally, the
evidence of dying men in favor of any belief is to be received with
great caution.

They commonly tell the truth about their present feelings, no doubt. A
dying man's deposition about anything _he knows_ is good evidence. But
it is of much less consequence what a man thinks and says when he is
changed by pain, weakness, apprehension, than what he thinks when he is
truly and wholly himself. Most murderers die in a very pious frame of
mind, expecting to go to glory at once; yet no man believes he shall
meet a larger average of pirates and cutthroats in the streets of the
New Jerusalem than of honest folks that died in their beds.

Unfortunately, there has been a very great tendency to make capital of
various kinds out of dying men's speeches. The lies that have been put
into their mouths for this purpose are endless. The prime minister,
whose last breath was spent in scolding his nurse, dies with a
magnificent apothegm on his lips,--manufactured by a reporter. Addison
gets up a _tableau_ and utters an admirable sentiment,--or somebody
makes the posthumous dying epigram for him. The incoherent babble of
green fields is translated into the language of stately sentiment. One
would think, all that dying men had to do was to say the prettiest
thing they could,--to make their rhetorical point, and then bow
themselves politely out of the world.

Worse than this is the torturing of dying people to get their evidence