Lest this should be found too hard a doctrine there is added, àpropos of Joshua's staying of the sun and moon, a literary solution which has often done duty in later times. "To interpret Scripture-miracles, and to understand from the narrations of them how they really happened, 'tis necessary to know the opinions of those who first reported them ... otherwise we shall confound ... things which have really happen'd with things purely imaginary, and which were only prophetic representations. For in Scripture many things are related as real, and which were also believ'd to be real even by the relators themselves, that notwithstanding were only representations form'd in the brain, and merely imaginary--as that God, the Supreme Being, descended from heaven ... upon Mount Sinai...; that Elias ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot ... which were only representations accommodated to their opinions who deliver'd them down to us." [425] Such argumentation had to prepare the way for Hume's Essay Of Miracles, half a century later; and concerning both reasoners it is to be remembered that their thought was to be "infidelity" for centuries after them. It needed real freethinking, then, to produce such doctrine in the days of the Rye House Plot. Meanwhile, during an accidental lapse of the press laws, the deist Charles Blount [426] (1654-1693) had produced with his father's help his Anima Mundi (1679), in which there is set forth a measure of cautious unbelief; following it up (1680) by his much more pronounced essay, Great is Diana of the Ephesians, a keen attack on the principle of revelation and clericalism in general, and his translation [from the Latin version] of Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana, so annotated [427] as to be an ingenious counterblast to the Christian claims, and so prefaced as to be an open challenge to orthodoxy. The book was condemned to be burnt; and only the influence of Blount's family, [428] probably, prevented his being prosecuted. The propaganda, however, was resumed by Blount and his friends in small tracts, and after his suicide [429] in 1693 these were collected as the Oracles of Reason (1693), his collected works (without the Apollonius) appearing in 1695. By this time the political tension of the Revolution of 1688 was over; Le Clerc's work on the inspiration of the Old Testament, raising many doubts as to the authorship of the Pentateuch, had been translated in 1690; Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) had been translated into English in 1689, and had impressed in a similar sense a number of scholars; his Ethica had given a new direction to the theistic controversy; the Boyle Lecture had been established for the confutation of unbelievers; and after the political convulsion of 1688 has subsided it rains refutations. Atheism is now so fiercely attacked, and with such specific arguments--as in Bentley's Boyle Lectures (1692), Edwards's Thoughts concerning the Causes of Atheism