but cannot bring his
passions to follow. Not that we would by any means observe that Toland
was comparatively behind his age, but that even in his more daring works
he still had a vague idea of Scripture being partly inspired, although
overlaid with a mass of ecclesiastical verbiage.

It also seems a mystery how the works of Woolston could be condemned,
his person seized, while in the case of Toland we hear of nothing
but his works being burnt. Why was Convocation so idle? Why make idle
threats, and let their victim ramble at large! Was it because the one
had powerful friends and the other had none? or was it that in
the earlier portion of the career of Toland, the invisible hand of
Bolingbroke stayed the grasp of persecution? Or was Shaftesbury's memory
so esteemed, that hid friend was untouched! Those particulars we cannot
learn, but they will take rank with other parallel cases, as when the
same government prosecuted Paine, and gave Gibbon a sinecure, or nearer
our own times when a series of men were imprisoned for Atheism, and Sir
William Moles worth published similar sentiments without hindrance.

In the "History of the Soul's Immortality," Toland thus gives
the explanation respecting the exoteric and esoteric doctrines of
Pythagoras:--"Pythagoras himself did not believe the transmigration
which has made his name so famous to posterity; for in the internal or
secret doctrine he meant no more than the eternal revolution of forms
in matter, those ceaseless vicissitudes and alterations which turn
everything into all things, and all things into anything; as vegetables
and animals become part of us, we become part of them, and both become
parts of a thousand other things in the universe, each turning into
water, water into air, etc., and so back again in mixtures without end
or number. But in the external or popular doctrine he imposed on the
mob by an equivocal expression that they should become various kinds
of beasts after death, thereby to deter them the more effectually
from wickedness.... Though the poets embellished their pieces with the
opinion of the soul's immortality, yet a great number of them utterly
rejected it for Seneca was not single in saying:--

'Naught's after death, and death itself is naught,
Of a quick race, only the utmost goal;
Then may the saints lose all their hope of heaven,
And sinners quit their racky fears of hell.'"

We now dismiss John Toland from our view. He wa