questions to reason. He complained of the general intolerance which
prevailed; but the same facts which testify to intolerance testify also
to the spread of unbelief.

Collins escaped with comparative impunity, but Thomas Woolston, a Fellow
of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, who wrote six aggressive Discourses
on the Miracles of our Saviour (1727—1730) paid the penalty for his
audacity. Deprived of his Fellowship, he was prosecuted for libel, and
sentenced to a fine of £100 and a year’s imprisonment. Unable to pay, he
died in prison. He does

[142] not adopt the line of arguing that miracles are incredible or
impossible. He examines the chief miracles related in the Gospels, and
shows with great ability and shrewd common sense that they are absurd or
unworthy of the performer. He pointed out, as Huxley was to point out in
a controversy with Gladstone, that the miraculous driving of devils into
a herd of swine was an unwarrantable injury to somebody’s property. On
the story of the Divine blasting of the fig tree, he remarks: “What if a
yeoman of Kent should go to look for pippins in his orchard at Easter
(the supposed time that Jesus sought for these figs) and because of a
disappointment cut down his trees? What then would his neighbours make
of him? Nothing less than a laughing-stock; and if the story got into
our Publick News, he would be the jest and ridicule of mankind.”

Or take his comment on the miracle of the Pool of Bethesda, where an
angel used to trouble the waters and the man who first entered the pool
was cured of his infirmity. “An odd and a merry way of conferring a
Divine mercy. And one would think that the angels of God did this for
their own diversion more than to do good to mankind. Just as some throw
a bone among a kennel of hounds for the pleasure of seeing them