Locke, "to stop the translation and impression of the papers as soon as you can, for I desire to suppress them." Le Clerc thought more nobly and more justly that "one ought to risk a little in order to be of service to those honest folk who err only through ignorance, and who, if they get a chance, would gladly be disabused of their false notions." The letter was not published till after its author's death, and at first it appeared only in an imperfect form. In Bishop Horsley's edition of Newton it is printed complete. Newton's unpublished writings leave no doubt that he did not accept the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, and it may have been his consciousness of this fact which made him so afraid of being known to be the author of what was merely a critical exercitation. But we must recollect that at this time Biblical criticism was unfamiliar to the majority of divines, and that to question the authenticity of a text was generally regarded as identical with doubting the doctrine which it was supposed to illustrate. One of the other subjects on which Locke and Newton corresponded was a parcel of red earth which had been left by Boyle, who died on Dec. 30, 1691, to Locke and his other literary executors, with directions for turning it into gold. Locke seems to have had some faith in the alchemistic process, but it is plain that Newton had none. He was satisfied that "mercury, by this recipe, might be brought to change its colours and properties, but not that gold might be multiplied thereby." Some workmen of whom he had heard as practising the recipe had been forced to other means of living, a proof that the multiplication of gold did not succeed as a profession. Occasionally, owing to Newton's nervous and irritable temper, which at one time threatened to settle down into a fixed melancholy, there seems to have been some misunderstanding of Locke on his part, but it is satisfactory to know that the two greatest literary men of their age in England, if not in Europe, lived, almost without interruption, in friendly and even intimate relations with each other. The close intercourse between Boyle and Locke, which dated from their Oxford days, seems to have been kept up till the time of Boyle's death. Locke made a special journey to London to visit him on his death-bed, and was, as we have seen, left one of his literary executors. The editing of Boyle's _General History of the Air_ had already been committed to Locke, and seems to have occupied much of his time during the year 1691.