, in which he repeated his ideas about
immaterial substances, and argued that matter and motion were the
foundation of thought in man and brutes. The House of Commons
called him to its bar, and burnt his books; a proceeding which
conferred such additional popularity upon them that the Doctor
was enabled the very same year to bring out a second edition of
his _Second Thoughts_. Certainly no other treatment could have
made the books popular. They are perfectly legitimate, but rather
dry, metaphysical disquisitions; and Parliament might quite as
fairly have burnt Locke's famous essay on the _Human
Understanding_.

For Parliament thus to constitute itself Defender of the Faith
was not merely to trespass on the office of the Crown, but to sin
against the more sacred right of common sense itself. We cannot
be surprised, therefore, since the English Parliament sinned in
this way (as it does to this day in a minor degree), that the
Irish Parliament should have sinned equally, as it did about the
same time, in the case of a book whose title far more suggested
heresy than its contents substantiated it. I refer to Toland's
_Christianity not Mysterious_ (1696), which was burnt by the
hangman before the Parliament House Gate at Dublin, and in the
open street before the Town-House, by order of the Committee of
Religion of the Irish House of Commons, one member even going so
far as to advocate the burning of Toland himself. It is difficult
now to understand the extreme excitement caused by Toland's book,
seeing that it was evidently written in the interests of
Christianity, and would now be read without emotion by the most
orthodox. It was only the superstructure, not the foundation,
that Toland attacked; his whole contention being that
Christianity, rightly understood, contained nothing mysterious or
inconsistent with reason, but that all ideas of this sort, and
most of its rites, had been aftergrowths, borrowed from Paganism,
in that compromise between the new and old religion which
constituted the world's Christianisation.[150:1] Although this
fact is now generally admitted, Toland puts the case so well that
it is best to give his own words:--

"The Christians," he says, "were careful to remove all obstacles
lying in the way of the Gentiles. They thought the most effectual
way of gaining them over to their side was by compounding the
matter, which led them to unwarrantable compliances, till at
length they likewise set up for m