Toland ran away from school and Popery. When in after-life he was reproached with native obscurity, he ostentatiously produced a testimonial of his birth and family, hatched up at a convent of Irish Franciscans in Germany, where the good Fathers subscribed, with their ink tinged with their Rhenish, to his most ancient descent, referring to the Irish history! which they considered as a parish register, fit for the suspected son of an Irish Priest!
Toland, from early life, was therefore dependent on patrons; but illegitimate birth creates strong and determined characters, and Toland had all the force and originality of self-independence. He was a seed thrown by chance, to grow of itself wherever it falls.
This child of fortune studied at four Universities; at Glasgow, 157 Edinburgh, and Leyden; from the latter he passed to Oxford, and, in the Bodleian Library, collected the materials for his after-studies.
He loved study, and even at a later period declares that “no employment or condition of life shall make me disrelish the lasting entertainment of books.” In his “Description of Epsom,” he observes that the taste for retirement, reading, and contemplation, promotes the true relish for select company, and says,
“Thus I remove at pleasure, as I grow weary of the country or the town, as I avoid a crowd or seek company.—Here, then, let me have books and bread enough without dependence; a bottle of hermitage and a plate of olives for a select friend; with an early rose to present a young lady as an emblem of discretion no less than of beauty.”
At Oxford appeared that predilection for paradoxes and over-curious speculations, which formed afterwards the marking feature of his literary character. He has been unjustly contemned as a sciolist; he was the correspondent of Leibnitz, Le Clerc, and Bayle, and was a learned author when scarcely a man. He first published a Dissertation on the strange tragical death of Regulus, and proved it a Roman legend. A greater paradox might have been his projected speculation on Job, to demonstrate that only the dialogue was genuine; the rest being the work of some idle Rabbin, who had invented a monstrous story to account for the extraordinary afflictions of that model of a divine mind. Speculations of so much learning and ingenuity are uncommon in a young man; but Toland was so unfortunate as to value his own merits before those who did not care to hear of them.
Hardy vanity was to recompense him, perhaps he thought, for that want of fortune and connexions, which raised duller spirits above him. Vain, loquacious, inconsiderate, and daring, he assumed the dictatorship of a coffee-house, and obtained easy conquests, which he mistook for glorious ones, over the graver fellows, who had for many a year awfully petrified their own colleges. He gave more violent offence by his new opinions on religion. An anonymous person addressed two letters to this new Heresiarch, solemn and monitory.[111] Toland’s answer is as honourable as that of his monitor’s. This passage is forcibly conceived:—
“To what purpose should I study here or elsewhere, were I an atheist or deist, for one of the two you take me to be? What a condition to mention virtue, if I believed there was no God, or one so impotent that could not, or so malicious that would not, reveal himself! Nay, though I granted a Deity, yet, if nothing of me subsisted after death, what laws could bind, what incentives could move me to common honesty? Annihilation would be a sanctuary for all my sins, and put an end to my crimes with myself. Believe me I am not so indifferent to the evils of the present life, but, without the expectation of a better, I should soon suspend the mechanism of my body, and resolve into inconscious atoms.”
This early moment of his life proved to be its crisis, and the first step he took decided his after-progress. His first great work of “Christianity not Mysterious,” produced immense consequences. Toland persevered in denying that it was designed as any attack on Christianity, but only on those subtractions, additions, and other alterations, which have corrupted that pure institution. The work, at least, like its title, is “Mysterious.”[112] Toland passed over to Ireland, but his book having got there before him, the author beheld himself anathematized; the pulpits thundered, and it was dangerous to be seen conversing with him. A jury who confessed they could not comprehend a page of his book, condemned it to be burned. Toland now felt a tenderness for his person; and the humane Molyneux, the friend of Locke, while he censures the imprudent vanity of our author, gladly witnessed the flight of “the poor gentleman.” But South, indignant at our English moderation in his own controversy with Sherlock on some doctrinal points of the Trinity, congratulates the Archbishop of Dublin on the Irish persecution; and equally witty and intolerant, he writes on Toland, “Your Parliament presently sent him packing, and without the help of a fagot, soon made the kingdom too hot for him.”