pistolary document addressed to a noble Lord. His acquaintance with
Locke, Shaftesbury, Collins, Molesworth, and Molyneux, must have
proceed-. ed from other causes than his genius, or why was Toland
exalted when Mandeville, Chubb, and the brave Woolston are never so much
as alluded to? We consider that there is a strong probability that
he was wealthy--or at least possessed of a moderate competence. His
abilities were of a curious order. He seemed to be one of a school which
rose about his time to advocate Freethought, but shackled by a
dogma. His collegiate education gave him an early liking for the dead
languages, and he carried out the notion of the ancients, that the
exoteric or esoteric methods were still in force. From a careful
perusal of the works of the "Fathers," and the contemporary books of the
heathens, he fancied that all the superstitions in the world differed
but in degree--that religion was but the organic cause of superstition,
the arguments made for it by the philosophers to propitiate the vulgar.
This idea (in the main) was agreed to by Woolston, although his violent
"Discourses," which were addressed to the unlearned, contained within
them the germ of their intrinsic popularity. Yet even Woolston's works,
notwithstanding their bluff exterior, had something more within them
than what the people could appreciate, or even the present race of
Freethinkers can always understand; for underneath that unrivalled
vein of sarcasm, there was in every instance an esoteric view, which
comprehended the meaning by which the earlier Christians understood
the gospels, and rendered them on the same scale as the works of the
ancients. The renowned William Whiston was another who interpreted
Scripture in a similar manner. All those writers would have been
Swedenborgians if there had been no Freethought, while Whiston would
have been an Atheist had there been no representative of that school.
We do not consider Toland, then, as an absolute Deist. At that time the
age was not so far progressed as to admit a Biblical scholar into
the extreme advanced list; and when a man has spent the whole of his
childhood in a sectarian family, and his youth and early manhood in
a University, it is an impossibility to throw off at one struggle the
whole of his past ideas; he may be unfettered in thought, and valiant in
speech, still there is the encyclopaedia of years hanging upon him as
a drag to that extreme development which he wishes,