Charles Blount, after a side thrust at Christianity in his _Notes on Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius Tyanæus_, left behind him papers, which were published in a book, entitled, _The Oracles of Reason_, containing desultory attacks on revelation, chiefly in a covert form. Indeed, Blount quaintly observes: “Undoubtedly, in our travels to the other world, the common road is the safest; and though Deism is a good manuring of a man’s conscience, yet certainly, if sowed with Christianity, it will produce the most plentiful crop.” It is a curious fact that the editor and publishers of these posthumous essays afterwards became convinced of their true character, and, with a view to counteracting their effect, issued the _Deist’s Manual_. John Toland--who, after being educated a Roman Catholic, whilst still a boy rushed out of gross superstition into what was to him the more congenial region of scepticism--began his career as an author by writing his _Christianity not Mysterious_, a discourse showing that there is nothing in the Gospel contrary to reason nor above it, and that no Christian doctrine can be properly called a mystery. In this work he does not appear as an antagonist of Christianity; perhaps he had not yet begun to regard himself otherwise than as a Christian; yet the tendency of his opinions is to undermine the authority of revelation. His book, which attracted wide attention, and was, as we have seen, condemned by the Lower House of Convocation, engaged the pen of the Bemerton Rector, John Norris, whose extraordinary metaphysical genius found scope for its exercise in examining Toland’s lucubrations. His _Account of Reason and Faith, in Relation to the Mysteries of Christianity_, is one of the ablest books of the period, and displays a power of analysis, and a determination to reduce the powers of the human mind to their simplest form, such as reminds one of the subtle originality of Dr. Thomas Browne. [Sidenote: WORKS ON CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES.]