The "Letters to Serena," written in a bold, honest, unflinching manner, were the next performances of Toland. The first letter is on "The Origin and Force of Prejudices." It is founded on a reflection of Cicero, that all prejudices spring from moral, and not physical sources, and while all admit the power of the senses to be infallible, all strive to corrupt the judgment, by false metaphor and unjust premises. Toland traces the progress of superstition from the hands of a midwife to those of a priest, and shows how the nurse, parent, schoolmaster, professor, philosopher, and politician, all combine to warp the mind of man by fallacies from his progress in childhood, at school, at college, and in the world. How the child is blinded with an idea, and the man with a word. The second letter is "A History of the Soul's Immortality Among the Heathens." A lady had been reading Platers "Phædo," and remarked as to how Cato could derive any consolation from the slippery and vague suppositions of that verbiant dialogue. Toland, therefore, for her edification, drew up a list of the specifications of the ancients on the subject, analysing (in its progress) the varying phases of the fables of the Elysian fields, the Charons, the Styx, etc., deriving them all from the ancient Egyptians. Toland thought the idea had arisen among the people, like our witches, ghosts, and fairy stories, and subsequently defended by the philosophers, who sought to rule their passions by finding arguments for their superstitions, and thus the rise of their exoteric and esoteric doctrines were the first foundations of the belief in the immortality of the soul. The third letter is on "The Origin of Idolatry," or, as it might rather be called, a history of the follies of mankind. He traces the causes, the origin, and the science of superstition--its phenomena and its devotees, proving that all the sacrifices, prayers, and customs of idolatry are the same in all ages, they only differ in language and adaptability of climate, and that with the fall of judicial astrology, idolatry received its greatest blow, for while men thought that priests could control destiny, they feared them--but this idea destroyed, it removed the terror which so long had existed as an immediate object betwixt the man and this sacerdotal tyrant.