[143] quarrel for it, or as others cast a piece of money among a company of boys for the sport of seeing them scramble for it, so was the pastime of the angels here.” In dealing with the healing of the woman who suffered from a bloody flux, he asks: “What if we had been told of the Pope’s curing an haemorrhage like this before us, what would Protestants have said to it? Why, ‘that a foolish, credulous, and superstitious woman had fancied herself cured of some slight indisposition, and the crafty Pope and his adherents, aspiring after popular applause, magnified the presumed cure into a miracle.’ The application of such a supposed story of a miracle wrought by the Pope is easy; and if Infidels, Jews, and Mahometans, who have no better opinion of Jesus than we have of the Pope, should make it, there’s no help for it.” Woolston professed no doubts of the inspiration of Scripture. While he argued that it was out of the question to suppose the miracles literally true, he pretended to believe in the fantastic theory that they were intended allegorically as figures of Christ’s mysterious operations in the soul of man. Origen, a not very orthodox Christian Father, had employed the allegorical method, and Woolston quotes him in his favour. His [144] vigorous criticisms vary in value, but many of them hit the nail on the head, and the fashion of some modern critics to pass over Woolston’s productions as unimportant because they are “ribald” or coarse, is perfectly unjust. The pamphlets had an enormous sale, and Woolston’s notoriety is illustrated by the anecdote of the “jolly young woman” who met him walking abroad and accosted him with “You old rogue, are you not hanged yet?” Mr. Woolston answered, “Good woman, I know you not; pray what have I done to offend you?” “You have writ against my Saviour,” she said; “what would become of my poor sinful soul if it was not for my dear Saviour?” About the same time, Matthew Tindal (a Fellow of All Souls) attacked Revelation from a more general point of view. In his Christianity as old as the Creation (1730) he undertook to show that the Bible as a revelation is superfluous, for it adds nothing to natural religion, which God revealed to man from the very first by the sole light of reason. He argues that those who defend Revealed religion by its agreement with Natural religion, and thus set up a double government of reason and authority, fall between the two. “It ’s an odd jumble,” he observes, “to prove the truth of a book by the truth