Profane cursing and swearing were prohibited by an Act passed the 28th of June, with a curiously graduated scale of penalties, arranged according to the rank of the offender. A lord was to be fined thirty shillings; a baronet or knight, twenty; an esquire, ten; a simple gentleman was to pay six and eight-pence, and people of inferior quality, three and fourpence. A double fine followed a second offence; and after a tenth instance of transgression the culprit was to give a bond for good behaviour. The law made no distinction between men and women, and gave charge to all constables vigilantly to hunt out all offenders.[19] There followed, on the 9th of August, a statute against certain atheistical, blasphemous, and execrable opinions derogatory to the honour of God, and destructive to human society, the enumeration of which includes the most monstrous opinions, such even as the following:--that a human being might proclaim himself to be God, to be infinite, to be almighty; that the blasphemy of the Most High, and other horrible acts are not in themselves shameful; that murder, adultery, and the like, are in their own nature as righteous as the duties of prayer; that happiness consists in sensual indulgence; that there is no such thing as sin, or salvation, or damnation, or heaven, or hell. Persons holding such opinions were to be punished by six months' imprisonment, or, on a second conviction, by banishment out of the Commonwealth. A return without licence incurred the consequences attendant on felony.[20] [Sidenote: _Moral Legislation._] We have given this specification of opinions as we find it in the Act, because no general description of it could convey an idea of the extraordinary vagaries of thought to which it points. Taken as they nakedly appear in this unique schedule, they must have been of an ultra-fanatical kind, such as we should suppose only madmen would entertain. But, upon a little reflection, it appears not unlikely that some of the opinions pronounced execrable were, by those charged with holding them, expressed in a different form of words from that given in the Act, and that they really consisted only in those wild pantheistic speculations to which transcendental thinkers of a certain description have always been addicted. Amidst excitements which moved human nature to the loftiest heights and the lowest depths, which brought out conspicuously what was in man, both of good and evil, it was not strange that the ignorant should bluntly say some of the same absurd things which the learned have been wont to convey in specious phrase and polished diction. At all events, there must have been a large amount of very objectionable, and even monstrous teaching in those days, to have called forth such minute notice and such terrible denunciation. [Sidenote: 1650.]