"I believe under such circumstances not only the motives, the springs of action, but the probable mental processes of the witness are to be taken into account. I ask your Honor what a defendant involved in the mesh of circumstantial evidence here presented would probably do under these circumstances. Your own judgment answers with mine that he would probably lie, and exactly as this defendant has lied!"
Again Searle turned and shook his long arm with insulting undulations in the direction of the defendant, after which he continued:
"Turning from probabilities to experience, I ask your Honor out of his memory of years of service upon the bench, what does the arrested thief—taken like this one, with the loot in his possession—what does he do? Why, he either confesses his crime, or he tells you that he is not the thief but an innocent third party, who unwittingly received the loot from the man of straw, whom his imagination and his necessities have created. That latter alternative is the defense of this alleged minister of the Gospel! He had not the honesty to confess, but tells instead that same old lie which criminals and felons have been telling in that same witness chair since this Court was first established.
"Yet this defendant's story has not even the merit of a pretense to ignorance that the goods he held were stolen goods. He boldly admits that he knew they were stolen; that he was personally acquainted with the owner; that he knew the distress of her mind; knew the police departments of half a dozen cities were searching for the jewels, and that the newspapers were giving the widest publicity to the facts and thus joining in the chase for loot and looter. And yet he calmly permits these diamonds to repose in his vault with never a word or hint to calm the distress of his friend or relieve the peace officers of burdensome labors in which they were engaging and the unnecessary expense which they were thus putting upon the taxpayers who support them!
"Why, your Honor, if the witness's own story is true, he has given this Court an abundant ground for holding him to answer to the Superior Court, not indeed upon the exact charge named in that complaint, but as an accessory after the fact to said charge.
"But it is not true. To use his own phrase, it is wickedly and damnably false! So palpably false that it collapses upon the mere examination of your Honor's mind without argument from me.
"Yet I cannot close without calling attention to the sheer recklessness with which this thief and perjurer has heightened the infamy of his position by an act of brazen sacrilege. He has sought to make plausible his weak, unimaginative lie that he received these goods instead of stealing them, by pretending that he received them in his capacity as a religious confessor, under conditions that bound him to a silence which the voice of God alone could break.
"That, in itself, is a claim that should bring the blush of shame to the cheek and rouse the hot resentment of every honest minister and of every honest priest, and make them join with the outraged feelings of honest laymen and of citizens generally in demanding that justice descend upon this man and strike him from the pedestal of self-righteous egotism upon which he stands.
"Turning again for a moment to the question of probabilities: I ask your Honor if it is probable, even thinkable, that any minister, standing in the position of regard in which this minister stood last Sunday morning before the eyes of his people, would deem a crisis like this insufficient to unseal his lips and absolve him from his confessional vows? His very duty to his God and to his congregation, to the poor dupes of his hypocrisy, to say nothing of his duty to himself, would compel him to go upon the witness stand voluntarily and reveal the name of the alleged thief!
"Such a consideration again forces upon any unbiased mind the conviction that this man is not speaking the truth. View him as a thief, and you suspect that his story is a lie. Try to view him as a minister, acting honestly and in good faith, and you no longer suspect, but you deeply and unalterably know that his story is a lie!"