Swedenborgians if there had been no Freethought, while Whiston would have been an Atheist had there been no representative of that school. We do not consider Toland, then, as an absolute Deist. At that time the age was not so far progressed as to admit a Biblical scholar into the extreme advanced list; and when a man has spent the whole of his childhood in a sectarian family, and his youth and early manhood in a University, it is an impossibility to throw off at one struggle the whole of his past ideas; he may be unfettered in thought, and valiant in speech, still there is the encyclopædia of years hanging upon him as a drag to that extreme development which he wishes, but cannot bring his passions to follow. Not that we would by any means observe that Toland was comparatively behind his age, but that even in his more daring works he still had a vague idea of Scripture being partly inspired, although overlaid with a mass of ecclesiastical verbiage. It also seems a mystery how the works of Woolston could be condemned, his person seized, while in the case of Toland we hear of nothing but his works being burnt. Why was Convocation so idle? Why make idle threats, and let their victim ramble at large! Was it because the one had powerful friends and the other had none? or was it that in the earlier portion of the career of Toland, the invisible hand of Bolingbroke stayed the grasp of persecution? Or was Shaftesbury's memory so esteemed, that hid friend was untouched! Those particulars we cannot learn, but they will take rank with other parallel cases, as when the same government prosecuted Paine, and gave Gibbon a sinecure, or nearer our own times when a series of men were imprisoned for Atheism, and Sir William Moles worth published similar sentiments without hindrance. In the "History of the Soul's Immortality," Toland thus gives the explanation respecting the exoteric and esoteric doctrines of Pythagoras:--"Pythagoras himself did not believe the transmigration which has made his name so famous to posterity; for in the internal or secret doctrine he meant no more than the eternal revolution of forms in matter, those ceaseless vicissitudes and alterations which turn everything into all things, and all things into anything; as vegetables and animals become part of us, we become part of them, and both become parts of a thousand other things in the universe, each turning into water, water into air, etc., and so back again in mixtures without end or number. But in the external or popular doctrine he imposed on the mob by an equivocal expression that they should become various kinds of beasts after death, thereby to deter them the more effectually from wickedness.... Though the poets embellished their pieces with the opinion of the soul's immortality, yet a great number of them utterly rejected it for Seneca was not single in saying:--