the Great Plague, roused the superstitious fears of the people, and the House of Commons embodied the general feeling in a bill against atheism and profaneness. On the 17th of October it was ordered that the committee to which the bill was referred "should be empowered to receive information touching such books as tend to atheism, blasphemy and profaneness, or against the essence and attributes of God, and in particular the book published in the name of one White,[20] and the book of Mr Hobbes called the _Leviathan_, and to report the matter with their opinion to the House." Hobbes, then verging upon eighty, was terrified at the prospect of being treated as a heretic, and proceeded to burn such of his papers as he thought might compromise him. At the same time he set himself, with a very characteristic determination, to inquire into the actual state of the law of heresy. The results of his investigation were first announced in three short Dialogues added (in place of the old "Review and Conclusion," for which the day had passed) as an Appendix to his Latin translation of _Leviathan_ (_L.W._ iii.), included with the general collection of his works published at Amsterdam in 1668. In this appendix, as also in the posthumous tract, published in 1680, _An Historical Narration concerning Heresy and the Punishment thereof_ (_E.W._ iv. 385-408), he aimed at showing that, since the High Court of Commission had been put down, there remained no court of heresy at all to which he was amenable, and that even when it stood nothing was to be declared heresy but what was at variance with the Nicene Creed, as he maintained the doctrine of _Leviathan_ was not.