e habits were
studious and whose morals were irreproachable, had, in the course of his
reading, met with some of the ordinary arguments against the Bible. He
fancied that he had lighted on a mine of wisdom which had been hidden
from the rest of mankind, and, with the conceit from which half educated
lads of quick parts are seldom free, proclaimed his discoveries to four
or five of his companions. Trinity in unity, he said, was as much a
contradiction as a square circle. Ezra was the author of the Pentateuch.
The Apocalypse was an allegorical book about the philosopher's stone.
Moses had learned magic in Egypt. Christianity was a delusion which
would not last till the year 1800. For this wild talk, of which, in all
probability, he would himself have been ashamed long before he was five
and twenty, he was prosecuted by the Lord Advocate. The Lord Advocate
was that James Stewart who had been so often a Whig and so often a
Jacobite that it is difficult to keep an account of his apostasies. He
was now a Whig for the third if not for the fourth time. Aikenhead
might undoubtedly have been, by the law of Scotland, punished with
imprisonment till he should retract his errors and do penance before the
congregation of his parish; and every man of sense and humanity would
have thought this a sufficient punishment for the prate of a forward
boy. But Stewart, as cruel as he was base, called for blood. There was
among the Scottish statutes one which made it a capital crime to revile
or curse the Supreme Being or any person of the Trinity. Nothing that
Aikenhead had said could, without the most violent straining, be brought
within the scope of this statute. But the Lord Advocate exerted all his
subtlety. The poor youth at the bar had no counsel. He was altogether
unable to do justice to his own cause. He was convicted, and sentenced
to be hanged and buried at the foot of the gallows. It was in vain that
he with tears abjured his errors and begged piteously for mercy. Some
of those who saw him in his dungeon believed that his recantation was
sincere; and indeed it is by no means improbable that in him, as in many
other pretenders to philosophy who imagine that they have completely
emancipated themselves from the religion of their childhood, the near
prospect of death may have produced an entire change of sentiment. He
petitioned the Privy Council that, if his life could not be spared, he
might be allowed a short respite to make his peace