Thomas Woolston, the English divine, religious controversialist, freethinker, and deist, was born in Northampton, the son of a successful tradesman. After schooling there and at Daventry, he entered Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1685, the same college from which the deist William Wollaston had graduated a few years earlier. Woolston received the BA in 1689 and the MA in 1692. In 1691 he was made fellow of the college and proceeded to take orders, achieving the BD in 1699. The study of Origen early led him to an allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures. He was subsequently accused of derangement of the mind and in 1720 was deprived of his fellowship. Two years later he retaliated by printing and dedicating to the master of the college The Exact Fitness of the Time in Which Christ Was Manifested in the Flesh, Demonstrated by Reason, Against the Objections of the Old Gentiles, and...