But the strangest outcome of Collins’s famous book was the work of Woolston, an eccentric writer who is generally classed among the Deists, but who was in fact sui generis.  In the Collins Controversy, Woolston appears as a moderator between an infidel and an apostate, the infidel being Collins, and the apostate the Church of England, which had left the good old paths of allegory to become slaves of the letter.  In this, as in previous works, he rides his hobby, which was a strange perversion of patristic notions, to the death; and a few years later he returned to the charge in one of the wildest, craziest books that ever was written by human pen.  It was entitled ‘Six Discourses on the Miracles,’ and in it the literal interpretation of the New Testament miracles is ridiculed with the coarsest blasphemy, while the mystical interpretations which he substitutes in its place read like the disordered fancies of a sick man’s dream.  He professes simply to follow the fathers, ignoring the fact that the fathers, as a rule, had grafted their allegorical interpretation upon the literal history, not substituted the one for the other.  Woolston was the only Deist—­if Deist he is to be called,—­who as yet had suffered anything like persecution; indeed, with one exception, and that a doubtful one, he was the only one who ever did.  He was brought before the King’s Bench, condemned to pay 25_l._ for each of his Six Discourses, and to suffer a year’s imprisonment; after which he was only to regain his liberty upon finding either two securities for 1,000_l._ or four for 500_l._; as no one would go bail for him, he remained in prison until his death in 1731.  The punishment was a cruel one, considering the state of the poor man’s mind, of the disordered condition of which he was himself conscious.  If he deserved to lose his liberty at all, an asylum would have been a more fitting place of confinement for him than a prison.  But if we regard his writings as the writings of a sane man, which, strange to say, his contemporaries appear to have done, we can hardly be surprised at the fate he met with.  Supposing that any blasphemous publication deserved punishment—­a supposition which in Woolston’s days would have been granted as a matter of course—­it is impossible to conceive anything more outrageously blasphemous than what is found in Woolston’s wild book.  The only strange part of the matter was that it should have been treated seriously at all. 30,000 copies of his discourses on the miracles were sold quickly and at a very dear rate; whole bales of them were sent over to America.  Sixty adversaries wrote against him; and the Bishop of London thought it necessary to send five pastoral letters to the people of his diocese on the subject.