ng. After a brilliant school career at Gloucester, he went
to Magdalen College, Oxford, where, says his biographer, "he did
so philosophise, as it might be observed, he was determined more
by Reason than Authority"; and this dangerous beginning he
shortly followed up, when master of the Free School at
Gloucester, by the still more dangerous conclusion that the
common doctrine of the Trinity "was not well grounded in
Revelation, much less in Reason." For this he was brought before
the magistrates at Gloucester on the charge of heresy (1644); and
from that time till his death from gaol-fever in 1662, at the age
of forty-two, Bidle seldom knew what liberty was. It was soon
after his first imprisonment that he published his _Twelve
Arguments_. Though the House had this burnt by the hangman, it
was so popular that it was reprinted the same year. The year
following (1648) the House passed an ordinance making a denial of
the Trinity a capital offence; in spite of which Bidle published
his _Confession of Faith touching the Holy Trinity, according to
Scripture_, and his _Testimonies of Different Fathers_ regarding
the same, the last of which manifests considerable learning. The
Assembly of Divines then appealed to Parliament to put him to
death; yet, strange to say, Parliament did not do so, but soon
after released their prisoner. In 1654 he published his _Twofold
Catechism_, for which he was again committed to the Gatehouse,
and debarred from the use of pens, ink, and paper; and all his
books were sentenced to be burnt (December 13th, 1654). After a
time, his fate being still uncertain, Cromwell procured his
release, or rather sent him off to the Scilly Isles. But his
enemies got him into prison again at last, and there a blameless
and pious life fell a victim to the power of bigotry. One may
regret a life thus spent and sacrificed; but only so has the
cause of free thought been gradually won.

Bidle has also been thought to have been the translator of the
famous _Racovian Catechism_, first published in Polish at Racow
in 1605, and in Latin in 1609. In it two anti-Trinitarian divines
reduced to a systematic form the whole of the Socinian doctrine.
A special interest attaches to it from the fact that Milton, then
nearly blind, was called before the House in connection with the
Catechism, as though he had had a share in its translation or
publication. It was condemned to be burnt as blasphemous (April
1st, 1652). In the Journa