The unorthodoxy of the Bishop's "Apology" does not rest on the judgment of the present writer alone. If Gilbert Wakefield presently had to reflect on his denunciations of Paine from the inside of a prison, the Bishop of Llandaff had occasion to appreciate Paine's ideas on "mental lying" as the Christian infidelity. The Bishop, born in the same year (1737) with the two heretics he attacked--Gibbon and Paine--began his career as a professor of chemistry at Cambridge (1764), but seven years later became Regius professor of divinity there. His posthumous papers present a remarkable picture of the church in his time. In replying to Gibbon he studied first principles, and assumed a brave stand against all intellectual and religious coercion. On the episcopal bench he advocated a liberal policy toward France. In undertaking to answer Paine he became himself unsettled; and at the very moment when unsophisticated orthodoxy was hailing him as its champion, the sagacious magnates of Church and State proscribed him. He learned that the king had described him as "impracticable"; with bitterness of soul he saw prelates of inferior rank and ability promoted over his head. He tried the effect of a political recantation, in one of his charges; and when Williams was imprisoned for publishing the "Age of Reason," and Gilbert Wakefield for rebuking his "Charge," this former champion of free speech dared not utter a protest. But by this servility he gained nothing. He seems to have at length made up his mind that if he was to be punished for his liberalism he would enjoy it. While preaching on "Revealed Religion" he saw the Bishop of London shaking his head. In 18111, five years before his death, he writes this significant note: "I have treated my divinity as I, twenty-five years ago, treated my chemical papers: I have lighted my fire with the labour of a great portion of my life."* * Patrick Henry's Answer to the "Age of Reason" shared the like fate. "When, during the first two years of his retirement, Thomas Paine's 'Age of Reason' made its appearance, the old statesman was moved to write out a somewhat elaborate treatise in defence of the truth of Christianity. This treatise it was his purpose to have published. 'He read the manuscript to his family as he progressed with it, and completed it a short time before his death' (1799). When it was finished, however, 'being diffident about his own work,' and impressed also by the great ability of the replies to Paine which were then appearing in England, 'he directed his wife to destroy' what he had written. She 'complied literally with his directions,' and thus put beyond the chance of publication a work which seemed, to some who heard it, 'the most eloquent and unanswerable argument in defence of the Bible which was ever written.'"--Fontaine MS. quoted in Tyler's "Patrick Henry."