Mr. Locke, in return, says:—"For the man I wish very well, and could give you, if it needed, proofs that I do so. And therefore I desire you to be kind to him: but I must leave it to your prudence in what way and how far. For it will be his fault alone, if he proves not a very valuable man, and have not you for his friend." To this, Mr. Molyneux writes to Mr. Locke—"I look upon Mr. Toland as a very ingenuous man, and I should be very glad of any opportunity of doing him service, to which I think myself indispensably bound by your recommendation." Soon after this, Mr. Molyneux describes the treatment Toland underwent in Ireland. In another letter to Locke—"He has had his opposers here, as you will find by a book which I have sent to you. The author (Peter Brown) is my acquaintance, but two things I shall never forgive in his book: the one is the foul language and opprobrious names he gives Mr. Toland; the other is upon several occasions, calling in the aid of the civil magistrate, and delivering up Mr. Toland to secular punishment. This, indeed, is a killing argument, but some will be apt to say, that where, the strength of his reason failed him, then he flies to the strength of his sword; and this reminds me of a business that was very surprising to many, the presentment of some pernicious books and their authors by the grand jury of Middlesex. This is looked upon as a matter of dangerous consequence, to make our civil courts judges of religious doctrines; and no one knows upon a change of affairs whose turn it may be next to be condemned. But the example has been followed in this country, and Mr. Toland and his book have been presented here by a grand jury, not one of whom I am persuaded ever read one leaf in 'Christianity not Mysterious.'
"Let the Sorbonne forever now be silent; a learned grand jury, directed by as learned a judge, does the business much better. The Dissenters here were the chief promoters of this matter, but, when I asked one of them 'What if a violent Church of England jury should present Mr. Baxter's books as pernicious, and condemn them to the flames by the common executioner,' he was sensible of the error, and said he wished it had never been done." Mr. Locke, in his reply, coincides with his friend, and says, "The Dissenters had best consider; but they are a sort of men which will always be the same." A remark which 150 years has not failed in its truthfulness. Mr. Molyneux concludes his remarks in reference to Toland, as follows:—"Mr. Toland is at length driven out of our kingdom; the poor gentleman at last wanted a meal's meat, and the universal outcry of the clergy ran so strong against him, that none durst admit him to their tables. The little stock of money which he had was soon exhausted, he fell to borrowing, and to complete his hardships, the Parliament fell on his book, voted it to be burnt by the common hangman, and ordered the author to be taken into custody by the Serjeant-at-Arms, and to be prosecuted by the Attorney General. Hereupon he is fled out of this kingdom, and none here knows where he has directed his course." From this correspondence we glean the following facts:—
1. That John Locke and Mr. Molyneux were favorable to Freethought.
2. That (on Locke's authority) Toland possessed abilities of no common order.
3. That Toland was unjustly persecuted, and he met with the sympathy of the Liberals.
Toland, having received a foretaste of his country's vengeance, retired for two years to Germany, where he was welcomed by the first scholars of the age. Hearing that the House of Convocation, in London, was about to denounce two of his works as heretical ("Christianity not Mysterious," and "Amyntor,") he hastened to England, and published two letters to the Prolucutor, which were never laid before Convocation. He insisted that he should be heard in his own defence before sentence was passed on his works; but as usual this wish was denied him. A legal difficulty prevented the bishops from prosecuting the works, and Toland gave the world a full account in his "Vindicius Liberius."
The "Letters to Serena," written in a bold, honest, unflinching manner, were the next performances of Toland. The first letter is on "The Origin and Force of Prejudices." It is founded on a reflection of Cicero, that all prejudices spring from moral, and not physical sources, and while all admit the power of the senses to be infallible, all strive to corrupt the judgment, by false metaphor and unjust premises. Toland traces the progress of superstition from the hands of a midwife to those of a priest, and shows how the nurse, parent, schoolmaster, professor, philosopher, and politician, all combine to warp the mind of man by fallacies from his progress in childhood, at school, at college, and in the world. How the child is blinded with an idea, and the man with a word. The second letter is "A History of the Soul's Immortality Among the Heathens." A lady had been reading Platers "Phædo," and remarked as to how Cato could derive any consolation from the slippery and vague suppositions of that verbiant dialogue. Toland, therefore, for her edification, drew up a list of the specifications of the ancients on the subject, analysing (in its progress) the varying phases of the fables of the Elysian fields, the Charons, the Styx, etc., deriving them all from the ancient Egyptians. Toland thought the idea had arisen among the people, like our witches, ghosts, and fairy stories, and subsequently defended by the philosophers, who sought to rule their passions by finding arguments for their superstitions, and thus the rise of their exoteric and esoteric doctrines were the first foundations of the belief in the immortality of the soul. The third letter is on "The Origin of Idolatry," or, as it might rather be called, a history of the follies of mankind. He traces the causes, the origin, and the science of superstition—its phenomena and its devotees, proving that all the sacrifices, prayers, and customs of idolatry are the same in all ages, they only differ in language and adaptability of climate, and that with the fall of judicial astrology, idolatry received its greatest blow, for while men thought that priests could control destiny, they feared them—but this idea destroyed, it removed the terror which so long had existed as an immediate object betwixt the man and this sacerdotal tyrant.
In letter fourth, addressed "To a Gentleman in Holland, showing Spinoza's System of Philosophy to be without any principle or foundation," and in the concluding article, Toland argues that "motion is essential to matter, in answer to some remarks by a noble friend on the above." In the fifteenth section of this argument, Toland thus rebuts the allegation that were motion indissolubly connected with matter, there must be extension without surface for motion or matter to exert their respective powers upon. It is often used as an argument, that if a vase was filled with any commodity to the utmost extent, where would be the space for motion? We know that in a kettle of water, if there is no outlet for the steam (which is the motion of the water,) the kettle will burst. Toland says, "'You own most bodies are in actual motion, which can be no argument that they have been always so, or that there are not others in actual repose.' I grant that such a consequence does not necessarily follow, though the thing may itself be true. But, however, it may not be amiss to consider how far this actual motion reaches, and is allowed, before we come to treat of rest. Though the matter of the universe be everywhere the same, yet according to its various modifications it is conceived to be divided into numberless particular systems, vortices or whirlpools of matter; and these again are subdivided into other systems greater or less, which depend oh one another, as every one on the whole, in their centres, textures, frame, and coherence. Our sun is the centre of one of the larger systems, which contains a great many small ones within the sphere of its activity, as all the planets which move about it; and these are subdivided into lesser systems that depend on them, as his satelites wait upon Jupiter, and the moon on the earth; the earth again is divided into the atmosphere, ground, water, and other principal parts; these again into the vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms. Now, as all these depend in a link on one another, so their matter is mutually resolved into each other, for earth, air, fire, and water are not only closely blended and united, but likewise interchangeable, transformed in a perpetual revolution: earth becoming water, water air, air ether, and so back again in mixtures without end or number. The animals we destroy contribute to preserve us, till we are destroyed to preserve other things, and become parts of grass, or plants, or water, or air, or something else that helps to make other animals, and they one another, or other men, and these again into stone, or wood, or metals, or minerals, or animals again, or become parts of all these and of a great many other things, animals, or vegetables, daily consuming and devouring each other—so true it is that everything lives by the destruction of another. All the parts of the universe are in this constant motion of destroying and begetting, of begetting and destroying, and the greater systems are acknowledged to have their ceaseless movements as well as the smallest particles, the very central globes of the vortices revolving on their own axis, and every particle in the vortex gravitating towards the centre. Our bodies, however we may flatter ourselves, do not differ from those of other creatures, but like them receive increase or diminution by nutrition or evacuation, by accretion, transpiration, and other ways, giving some parts of ours to other bodies, and receiving again of theirs, not altogether the same yesterday as to-day, nor to continue the same to-morrow, being alive in a perpetual flux like a river, and in the total dissolution of our system at death to become parts of a thousand other things at once, our bodies partly mixing with the dust and the water of the earth, partly exhaled and evaporated into the air, flying to so many different places, mixing and incorporating with numerous things.
"No parts of matter are bound to any one figure or form, losing and changing their figures and forms continually, that is being in perpetual motion, dipt, or worn, or ground to pieces, or dissolved by other parts, acquiring their figures, and these theirs, and so on incessantly: earth, air, fire, and water, iron, wood, and marble, plants and animals, being rarefied, condensed, liquified, congealed, dissolved, coagulated, or any other way resolved into one another. The whole face of the earth exhibits those mutations every moment to our eyes, nothing continuing one hour numerically the same; and these changes being but several kinds of motion, are therefore the incontestable effects of universal action. But the changes in the parts make no change in the universe; for it is manifest that the continual alterations, successions, revolutions, and transmutations of matter, cause no accession or diminution therein, no more than any letter is added or lost in the alphabet by the endless combinations and transpositions thereof into so many different words and languages, for a thing no sooner quits one form than it puts on another, leaving as it were the theatre in a certain dress, and appearing again in a new one, which produces a perpetual youthfulness and vigor, without any decay or decrepitness of the world, as some have falsely imagined, contrary to reason and experience; the world, with all the parts and kinds thereof, continuing at all times in the same condition."