It was while the public mind was excited by the complicated evils of famine and threatened invasion, that an importation of atheistical books was found to have been made into Edinburgh, and several young men were denounced to the authorities as having become infected with heterodox opinions. At a time when every public evil was attributed to direct judgment for sins, we may in some faint degree imagine how even an incipient tendency to irreligion would be looked upon by the more serious-minded people, including the clergy, and how just and laudable it would appear to take strong measures for the repression of such wickedness. We have to remember, too, the temper of Sir James Steuart, the present public prosecutor. One delinquent—John Fraser—had, upon timely confession and penitence, been lightly dealt with; but there was another youthful offender, who, meeting accusation in a different frame of mind, at least at first, was to have a different fate. Thomas Aikenhead, a youth of eighteen, ‘son to the deceest James Aikenhead, chirurgeon in Edinburgh,’ was now tried by the High Court of Justiciary for breach of the 21st act of the first parliament of Charles II., ‘against the crime of blasphemy,’ which act had been ratified by the 11th act of the fifth session of the parliament of the present reign. It was alleged in the indictment that the young man had, for a twelvemonth past, been accustomed to speak of theology as ‘a rhapsody of feigned and ill-invented nonsense,’ calling the Old Testament _Ezra’s fables_, [Sidenote: 1696.] and the New _the history of the Impostor Christ_, further ‘cursing Moses, Ezra, and Jesus, and all men of that sort.’ ‘Likeas,’ pursued this document, ‘you reject the mystery of the blessed Trinity, and say it is not worth any man’s refutation, and you also scoff at the mystery of the incarnation of Jesus Christ ... as to the doctrine of redemption by Jesus, you say it is a proud and presumptuous device ... you also deny spirits ... and you have maintained that God, the world, and nature, are but one thing, and that the world was from eternity.... You have said that you hoped to see Christianity greatly weakened, and that you are confident it will in a short time be utterly extirpat.’