Toland pretends to prove that “there is nothing in the Christian Religion, not only which is contrary to reason, but even which is above it.”—He made use of some arguments (says Le Clerc) that were drawn from Locke’s Treatise on the Human Understanding. I have seen in MS. a finished treatise by Locke on Religion, addressed to Lady Shaftesbury; Locke gives it as a translation from the French. I regret my account is so imperfect; but the possessor may, perhaps, be induced to give it to the public. The French philosophers have drawn their first waters from English authors; and Toland, Tindale, and Woolston, with Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, and Locke, were among their earliest acquisitions.
In examining the original papers of Toland, which are preserved, I found some of his agreements with booksellers. For his description of Epsom he was to receive only four guineas in case 1000 were sold. He received ten guineas for his pamphlet on Naturalising the Jews, and ten guineas more in case Bernard Lintott sold 2000. The words of this agreement run thus: “Whenever Mr. Toland calls for ten guineas, after the first of February next, I promise to pay them, if I cannot show that 200 of the copies remain unsold.” What a sublime person is an author! What a misery is authorship! The great philosopher who creates systems that are to alter the face of his country, must stand at the counter to count out 200 unsold copies!
Des Maiseaux frees Toland from this calumny, and hints at his own personal knowledge of the author—but he does not know what a foreign writer authenticates, that this blasphemous address to Bacchus is a parody of a prayer in the Roman ritual, written two centuries before by a very proper society of Pantheists, a club of drunkards!
Warburton has well described Des Maiseaux: “All the Life-writers we have had are, indeed, strange insipid creatures. The verbose tasteless Frenchman seems to lay it down as a principle that every life must be a book, and what is worse, it proves a book without a life; for what do we know of Boileau, after all his tedious stuff?”
One of these philosophical conferences has been preserved by Beausobre, who was indeed the party concerned. He inserted it in the “Bibliothèque Germanique,” a curious literary journal, in 50 volumes, written by L’Enfant, Beausobre, and Formey. It is very copious, and very curious, and is preserved in the General Dictionary, art. Toland. The parties, after a warm contest, were very wisely interrupted by the Queen, when she discovered they had exhausted their learning, and were beginning to rail at each other.