John Toland

Among the many delightful character sketches in Paul Hazard’s The European Mind, 1680-1715 is this Chestertonian riff on John Toland (notorious author of Christianity not mysterious ): “He had taken his M. A. at Glasgow; he had studied at Edinburgh, Leyden and Oxford. He had delved into ancient history, only to discover that it was one colossal imposture and that its chroniclers were, one and all, a pack of deceivers. The Scriptures he had gone into, only to inform us that they were apocryphal, and that the so-called miracles they recorded were susceptible of a perfectly natural explanation, laying about him right and left, slashing, dashing, foaming at the mouth, trumping up all manner of things and, altogether, making confusion worse confounded. He acquainted himself with polite letters, poetry, great oratory, only to report that the utterances of the sanctified humbugs of every religion were merely their way of deceiving people, and leading them by the nose. He was a born mischief-maker and scandal-monger, puffed up with vanity, fond of creating an uproar, very cock-a-hoop when fortune favoured, yet not averse to being pelted at because the brick-bats at least made a clatter about him.”

He was not original: “His head was crammed with things he had read, and the ideas of his predecessors keep cropping up in little shred and patches in everything he wrote. No; for originality in the man we shall look in vain, but what we shall find in him is a sort of morbid mental excitement, uncontrollable rage: the explosion of feelings longed damned up by Irish Catholicism and English Puritanism, to say nothing of respect for common decency - all these shackles one day burst asunder and the report sounded like a mighty shout of defiance.”