About the time of the publication of the Principia, James II., bent on re-establishing the Romish Faith, had, among other illegal acts, ordered by mandamus, the University of Cambridge to confer the degree of Master of Arts upon an ignorant monk. Obedience to this mandate was resolutely refused. Newton was one of the nine delegates chosen to defend the independence of the University. They appeared before the High Court;—and[Pg 39] successfully: the king abandoned his design. The prominent part which our author took in these proceedings, and his eminence in the scientific world, induced his proposal as one of the parliamentary representatives of the University. He was elected, in 1688, and sat in the Convention Parliament till its dissolution. After the first year, however, he seems to have given little or no attention to his parliamentary duties, being seldom absent from the University till his appointment in the Mint, in 1695. Newton began his theological researches sometime previous to 1691; in the prime of his years, and in the matured vigour of his intellectual powers. From his youth, as we have seen, he had devoted himself with an activity the most unceasing, and an energy almost superhuman to the discovery of physical truth;—giving to Philosophy a new foundation, and to Science a new temple. To pass on, then, from the consideration of the material, more directly to that of the spiritual, was a natural, nay, with so large and devout a soul, a necessary advance. The Bible was to him of inestimable worth. In the elastic freedom, which a pure and unswerving faith in Him of Nazareth gives, his mighty faculties enjoyed the only completest scope for development. His original endowment, however great, combined with a studious application, however profound, would never, without this liberation from the dominion of passion and sense, have enabled him to attain to that wondrous concentration and grasp of intellect, for which Fame has as yet assigned him no equal. Gratefully he owned, therefore, the same Author in the Book of Nature and the Book of Revelation. These were to him as drops of the same unfathomable ocean;—as outrayings of the same inner splendour;—as tones of the same ineffable voice;—as segments of the same infinite curve. With great joy he had found himself enabled to proclaim, as an interpreter, from the hieroglyphs of Creation, the existence of a God: and now, with greater joy, and in the fulness of his knowledge, and in the fulness of his strength, he laboured to make clear, from the utterances of the inspired Word, the far mightier confirmations of a Supreme Good, in all its glorious amplitude of Being and of Attribute; and to bring the infallible workings thereof plainly home to the understandings and the[Pg 40] affections of his fellow-men; and finally to add the weight of his own testimony in favour of that Religion, whose truth is now, indeed, "girded with the iron and the rock of a ponderous and colossal demonstration."