In passing sentence at the close of Raleigh's trial for treason in 1603, in which his guilt is at least no clearer than the inequity of the proceedings, Lord Chief Justice Popham unscrupulously taunted him with his reputation for heresy. "You have been taxed by the world with the defence of the most heathenish and blasphemous opinions, which I list not to repeat, because Christian ears cannot endure to hear them, nor the authors and maintainers of them be suffered to live in any Christian commonwealth. You know what men said of Harpool." [42] If the preface to his History of the World, written in the Tower, be authentic, Raleigh was at due pains to make clear his belief in deity, and to repudiate alike atheism and pantheism. "I do also account it," he declares, "an impiety monstrous, to confound God and Nature, be it but in terms." [43] And he is no more tolerant than his judge when he discusses the question of the eternity of the universe, then the crucial issue as between orthodoxy and doubt. "Whosoever will make choice rather to believe in eternal deformity [=want of form] or in eternal dead matter, than in eternal light and eternal life, let eternal death be his reward. For it is a madness of that kind, as wanteth terms to express it." [44] Inasmuch as Aristotle was the great authority for the denounced opinion, Raleigh is anti-Aristotelean. "I shall never be persuaded that God hath shut up all light of learning within the lantern of Aristotle's brains." [45] But in the whole preface there is only one, and that a conventional, expression of belief in the Christian dogma of salvation; and as to that we may note his own words: "We are all in effect become comedians in religion." [46] Still, untruthful as he certainly was, [47] we may take him as a convinced theist of the experiential school, standing at the ordinary position of the deists of the next century. Notably enough, he anticipates the critical position of Hume as to reason and experience: "That these and these be the causes of these and these effects, time hath taught us and not reason; and so hath experience without art." [48] Such utterance, if not connected with professions of piety, might in those days give rise to such charges of unbelief as were so freely cast at him. But the charges seem to have been in large part mere expressions of the malignity which religion so normally fosters, and which can seldom have been more bitter than then. Raleigh is no admirable type of rectitude; but he can hardly have been a worse man than his orthodox enemies. And we must estimate such men in full view of the low standards of their age.