authority," is convicted, he shall for the first offence be
adjudged incapable to hold any public offices or employments, and on the
second shall lose his civil rights and be imprisoned for three years.
This Statute expressly states as its motive the fact that "many persons
have of late years openly avowed and published many blasphemous and
impious opinions contrary to the doctrine and principles of the
Christian religion."

As a matter of fact, most trials for blasphemy during the past two
hundred years fall under the second head. But the new Statute of 1698
was very intimidating, and we can easily understand how it drove
heterodox writers to ambiguous disguises. One of these disguises was
allegorical interpretation of Scripture. They showed that literal
interpretation led to absurdities or to inconsistencies with the wisdom
and justice of God, and pretended to infer that allegorical
interpretation must be substituted. But they meant the reader to reject
their pretended

[141] solution and draw a conclusion damaging to Revelation.

Among the arguments used in favour of the truth of Revelation the
fulfilment of prophecies and the miracles of the New Testament were
conspicuous. Anthony Collins, a country gentleman who was a disciple of
Locke, published in 1733 his Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the
Christian Religion, in which he drastically exposed the weakness of the
evidence for fulfilment of prophecy, depending as it does on forced and
unnatural figurative interpretations. Twenty years before he had written
a Discourse of Free-thinking (in which Bayle's influence is evident)
pleading for free discussion and the reference of all religious
questions to reason. He complained of the general intolerance which
prevailed; but the same facts which testify to intolerance testify also
to the spread of unbelief.

Collins escaped with comparative impunity, but Thomas Woolston, a Fellow
of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, who wrote six aggressive Discourses
on the Miracles of our Saviour (1727--1730) paid the penalty for his
audacity. Deprived of his Fellowship, he was prosecuted for libel, and
sentenced to a fine of L100 and a year's imprisonment. Unable to pay, he
died in prison. He does

[142] not adopt the line of arguing that miracles are incredible or
impossible. He examines the chief miracles related in the Gospels, and
shows with great ability and shrewd common sense that they are absurd or
unworthy of the