e in issue
between Protestants and Papists, Blount was perfectly impartial. He was
an infidel, and the head of a small school of infidels who were troubled
with a morbid desire to make converts. He translated from the Latin
translation part of the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, and appended to it
notes of which the flippant profaneness called forth the severe censure
of an unbeliever of a very different order, the illustrious Bayle. [385]
Blount also attacked Christianity in several original treatises, or
rather in several treatises purporting to be original; for he was
the most audacious of literary thieves, and transcribed, without
acknowledgment, whole pages from authors who had preceded him. His
delight was to worry the priests by asking them how light existed
before the sun was made, how Paradise could be bounded by Pison, Gihon,
Hiddekel and Euphrates, how serpents moved before they were condemned
to crawl, and where Eve found thread to stitch her figleaves. To his
speculations on these subjects he gave the lofty name of the Oracles of
Reason; and indeed whatever he said or wrote was considered as oracular
by his disciples. Of those disciples the most noted was a bad writer
named Gildon, who lived to pester another generation with doggrel and
slander, and whose memory is still preserved, not by his own voluminous
works, but by two or three lines in which his stupidity and venality
have been contemptuously mentioned by Pope. [386]

Little as either the intellectual or the moral character of Blount may
seem to deserve respect, it is in a great measure to him that we must
attribute the emancipation of the English press. Between him and the
licensers there was a feud of long standing. Before the Revolution one
of his heterodox treatises had been grievously mutilated by Lestrange,
and at last suppressed by orders from Lestrange's superior the Bishop
of London. [387] Bohun was a scarcely less severe critic than Lestrange.
Blount therefore began to make war on the censorship and the censor.
The hostilities were commenced by a tract which came forth without any
license, and which is entitled A Just Vindication of Learning and of the
Liberty of the Press, by Philopatris. [388] Whoever reads this piece,
and is not aware that Blount was one of the most unscrupulous plagiaries
that ever lived, will be surprised to find, mingled with the poor
thoughts and poor words of a thirdrate pamphleteer, passages so elevated
in sentiment a