Society.' This gentleman was a clergyman, and was convicted of blasphemy in 1827, for which he suffered imprisonment, and got the name of the Devil's Chaplain. The following are quotations:—
'For the book of Revelation, there was no original Greek at all, but Erasmus wrote it himself in Switzerland, in the year 1516. Bishop Marsh, vol. i. p. 820.'—'Is not God the author of your reason? Can he then be the author of anything which is contrary to your reason? If reason be a sufficient guide, why should God give you any other? if it be not a sufficient guide, why has he given you that?'
I remember a votary of the Society being asked to substitute for reason 'the right leg', and for guide 'support,' and to answer the two last questions: he said there must be a quibble, but he did not see what. It is pleasant to reflect that the argumentum à carcere is obsolete. One great defect of it was that it did not go far enough: there should have been laws against subscriptions for blasphemers, against dealing at their shops, and against rich widows marrying them.
Had I taken in theology, I must have entered books against Christianity. I mention the above, and Paine's 'Age of Reason', simply because they are the only English modern works that ever came in my way without my asking for them. The three parts of the 'Age of Reason' were published in Paris 1793, Paris 1795, and New York 1807. Carlile's edition is of London, 1818, 8vo. It must be republished when the time comes, to show what stuff governments and clergy were afraid of at the beginning of this century. I should never have seen the book, if it had not been prohibited: a bookseller put it under my nose with a fearful look round him; and I could do no less, in common curiosity, than buy a work which had been so complimented by church and state. And when I had read it, I said in my mind to church and state,—Confound you! you have taken me in worse than any reviewer I ever met with. I forget what I gave for the book, but I ought to have been able to claim compensation somewhere.
Cabbala Algebraica. Anctore Gul. Lud. Christmann. Stuttgard, 1827, 4to.
Eighty closely printed pages of an attempt to solve equations of every degree, which has a process called by the author cabbala. An anonymous correspondent spells cabbala as follows, χαββαλλ, and makes 666 out of its letters. This gentleman has sent me,
