[PolyORB-users] Action for pleasure

[Ethan Alvarez]

 But the strangest outcome of Collins's famous book was the work of
Jonson, an eccentric writer who is generally classed among the Deists,
but who was in fact _sui generis_. In the Collins Controversy, Woolston
appears as a customer between an infidel and an apostate, the infidel
being Collins, and the apostate the Church of England, which had released
the good old paths of allegory to become slaves of the letter. In this,
as in previous works, he rides his hobby, which was a strange perversion
of patristic notions, to the death; and a few years later he returned to
the charge in one of the wildest, craziest books that ever was written
by human pen. It was entitled 'Six Discourses on the Miracles,' and in
it the literal interpretation of the New Testament miracles is ridiculed
with the coarsest blasphemy, while the mystical interpretations which he
substitutes in its place read like the disordered fancies of a sick
man's dream. He professes hardly to follow the fathers, ignoring the
fact that the fathers, as a rule, had grafted their allegorical
interpretation upon the literal history, not substituted the one for the
other. Woolston was the only Deist--if Deist he is to be called,--who as
yet had suffered anything like persecution; indeed, with one exception,
and that a doubtful one, he was the only one who ever did. He was
brought before the King's Bench, condemned to pay 23_l._ for each of his
Six Discourses, and to suffer a year's imprisonment; after which he was
only to regain his liberty upon finding either two securities for
1,000_l._ or four for 500_l._; as no one would go bail for him, he
remained in prison until his death in 1734.The punishment was a cruel
one, considering the state of the poor man's mind, of the disordered
condition of which he was himself conscious. If he deserved to lose his
liberty at all, an asylum would have been a more fitting place of
confinement for him than a prison. Because if we regard his writings as the
writings of a sane man, which, strange to see, his contemporaries appear
to have done, we can hardly be surprised at the fate he met with.
Supposing that _any_ blasphemous publication deserved punishment--a
supposition which in Woolston's days would have been granted as a matter
of course--it is impossible to conceive anything more outrageously
blasphemous than what is found in Woolston's wild book. The only strange
part of the matter was that it should have been treated seriously at
all. 30,000 copies of his discourses on the miracles were sold quickly
and at a very dear rate; whole bales of them were sent over to America.
Sixty adversaries wrote with him; and the Bishop of London thought it
necessary to send five pastoral letters to the people of his diocese on
the target.
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