maximum term of six months, for atheism, blasphemy, heresy, and damnable opinions. (2) The common law as interpreted by Lord Chief Justice Hale in 1676, when a certain Taylor was charged with having said that religion was a cheat and blasphemed against Christ.  The accused was condemned to a fine and the pillory by the Judge, who ruled that the Court of King’s Bench has jurisdiction in such a case, inasmuch as blasphemous words of the kind are an offence against the laws and the State, and to speak against Christianity is to speak in subversion of the law, since Christianity is “parcel of the laws of England.” (3) The statute of 1698 enacts that if any person educated in the Christian religion “shall by

[140] writing, printing, teaching, or advised speaking deny any one of the persons in the Holy Trinity to be God, or shall assert or maintain there are more gods than one, or shall deny the Christian religion to be true, or shall deny the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be of divine authority,” is convicted, he shall for the first offence be adjudged incapable to hold any public offices or employments, and on the second shall lose his civil rights and be imprisoned for three years.  This Statute expressly states as its motive the fact that “many persons have of late years openly avowed and published many blasphemous and impious opinions contrary to the doctrine and principles of the Christian religion.”

As a matter of fact, most trials for blasphemy during the past two hundred years fall under the second head.  But the new Statute of 1698 was very intimidating, and we can easily understand how it drove heterodox writers to ambiguous disguises.  One of these disguises was allegorical interpretation of Scripture.  They showed that literal interpretation led to absurdities or to inconsistencies with the wisdom and justice of God, and pretended to infer that allegorical interpretation must be substituted.  But they meant the reader to reject their pretended

[141] solution and draw a conclusion damaging to Revelation.

Among the arguments used in favour of the truth of Revelation the fulfilment of prophecies and the miracles of the New Testament were conspicuous.  Anthony Collins, a country gentleman who was a disciple of Locke, published in 1733 his Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, in which he drastically exposed the weakness of the evidence for fulfilment of prophecy, depending as it does on forced and unnatural figurative interpretations.  Twenty years before he had written a Discourse of Free-thinking (in which Bayle’s influence is evident) pleading for free discussion and the reference of all religious questions to reason.  He complained of the general intolerance which prevailed; but the same facts which testify to intolerance testify also to the spread of unbelief.

Collins escaped with comparative impunity, but Thomas Woolston, a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, who wrote six aggressive Discourses on the Miracles of our Saviour (1727—­1730) paid the penalty for his audacity.  Deprived of his Fellowship, he was prosecuted for libel, and sentenced to a fine of L100 and a year’s imprisonment.  Unable to pay, he died in prison.  He does