He informs them that, as they have had an opportunity of hearing the gospel preached, and might, but for their own perverseness, have received episcopalian baptism, God will, by an extraordinary act of power, bestow immortality on them in order that they may be tormented for ever and ever, [475] No man abhorred the growing latitudinarianism of those times more than Dodwell.

Yet no man had more reason to rejoice in it.

For, in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, a speculator who had dared to affirm that the human soul is by its nature mortal, and does, in the great majority of cases, actually die with the body, would have been burned alive in Smithfield.

Even in days which Dodwell could well remember, such heretics as himself would have been thought fortunate if they escaped with life, their backs flayed, their ears clipped, their noses slit, their tongues bored through with red hot iron, and their eyes knocked out with brickbats.

With the nonjurors, however, the author of this theory was still the great Mr.Dodwell; and some, who thought it culpable lenity to tolerate a Presbyterian meeting, thought it at the same time gross illiberality to blame a learned and pious Jacobite for denying a doctrine so utterly unimportant in a religious point of view as that of the immortality of the soul, [476] Two other nonjurors deserve special mention, less on account of their abilities and learning, than on account of their rare integrity, and of their not less rare candour.