An account of the Death of Philip Jolin / who was executed for the murder of his father, in the Island of Jersey, October 3, 1829

Transcribed from the 1830 Hatchard and Son edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
BY FRANCIS CUNNINGHAM, A. M. RECTOR OF PAKEFIELD.
LONDON: HATCHARD AND SON, PICCADILLY; SEELEY AND SONS, FLEET STREET; AND J. NESBITT, BERNERS STREET.
1830.
LONDON: IBOTSON AND PALMER, PRINTERS, SAVOY STREET, STRAND.
To determine the real state of mind in a criminal manifesting, for the first time, when under sentence of death, signs of repentance, is plainly a work of much difficulty. If ever dissimulation may be expected, it must be in the case of a person probably long habituated, and, in his present circumstances, additionally excited to it by the fear of death: and the experience of every minister of religion conversant in such cases, must teach him that professions of religion, under such circumstances, are far oftener the language of alarm, than of real conversion. Every one, therefore, would earnestly covet, with Mr. Newton, to know rather how the man lived, than how he had died. But here the life and the death may offer the most conflicting evidence. How difficult it is then so to decide as not, on the one hand, to make “the heart of the righteous sad, whom God has not made sad;” upon the other, to say “peace” to the soul, “when there is no peace.”
Most of the cases of religious communication with dying criminals, recorded in the public prints, are in the highest degree painful. The chaplain goes through the forms of instruction, the sermon is preached, and then, without one proof being assigned of the fitness of the criminal for that solemn ordinance of religion, the sacrament is administered. All the requisitions of our church, as to “those who come to the Lord’s supper,” are passed by. The deep workings of repentance, and longing for amendment, the exercise of a lively faith in Christ, the thankful remembrance of his death, the feeling of universal charity so difficult in such circumstances; in short, every evidence of an awakened and converted heart is neglected, and the man forced upon a hypocritical avowal of truth, to which he is in reality utterly a stranger. He dies, in fact, with “a lie in his right hand”—a lie, the guilt of which is surely divided between himself and the minister who urges him to the rash reception of the sacrament.