Born at Northampton, England, 1669; died in London, 1732; was educated at Cambridge, and obtained a fellowship there. After attracting an unenviable attention by some other writings, he published, London, 1727–1729, six discourses “On the Miracles of our Saviour,” which, on account of their tone of ridicule, gave so much offence that he was prosecuted by the attorney-general, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to one year’s imprisonment and to pay a fine of £100. Being unable to pay the fine, he remained in prison and died there shortly after. There is some reason, however, for believing his mind was diseased.

General

  He might at the same rate of arguing have undertaken to prove that there was no such person as Jesus Christ, or his apostles, or that they were only allegorical persons, and that Christianity was never planted or propagated in the world at all.

  The letters [“Discourses”] were written with a coarseness and irreverence so singular, even in the attacks of that age, that it were well if they could be attributed to insanity. They contain the most undisguised abuse which had been uttered against Christianity since the days of the early heathens…. In classifying Woolston with later writers against miracles, he may be compared in some cases, though with striking differences of tone, with those German rationalists, like Paulus, who have rationalized the miracles, but in more cases with those who, like Strauss, have idealized them. His method, however, is an appeal to general probability, rather than to literary criticism.

  No man was ever more thoroughly refuted than Thomas Woolston. It seems a pity that such men as Pearce, Sherlock and Lardner should have been under the necessity of defending Christianity against one who, it is charitable to suppose, was not really sane. It was a pity in many respects that the Deist controversy reached its climax in a madman. Woolston’s mind was typical of the minds of a large class which is fairly divided between believers and unbelievers. They can only be Christians while they can lean upon a book, a Church, Primitive antiquity, or some external authority. When this prop fails, they are unbelievers. So long as Woolston could believe in the Fathers, he was a Christian. When he found it impossible to believe Christianity on their authority, he was no more a believer. He had no eye to see the everlasting harmonies. He had no soul to feel that there is a Divine Christ in the miracles, whatever else we may know about them. That spirit which giveth life was more dead to him than the letter which he despised. He wrote against the clergy; perhaps they deserved it. He wrote much against the Gospels, and he could have written much more of the same kind. It is easy to raise a thousand plausible and ingenious objections to anything whatever, and as easy to make a thousand answers as plausible and ingenious, while the thing itself remains where it was.

  Woolston’s discourses, written to prove the miracles of the new testament are as mythical and allegorical as the prophecies of the old, appeared at the same time, and had an enormous sale. Voltaire was much struck by this writer’s coarse and hardy way of dealing with the miraculous legends, and the article on miracles in the Philosophical Dictionary shows how carefully he had read Woolston’s book.

  Through six straggling discourses, Woolston attempts to make fun of the miracles. There are, at intervals, queer gleams of distorted sense, and even of literary power, in the midst of his buffoonery. Occasionally he hits a real blot; more frequently he indulges in the most absurd quibbles, and throughout he shows almost as little approximation to a genuine critical capacity as to reverential appreciation of the beauty of many of the narratives. He is a mere buffoon jingling his cap and bells in a sacred shrine; and his strange ribaldry is painful even to those for whom the supernatural glory of the temple has long utterly faded away. Even where some straggling shreds of sense obtrude themselves, the language is obtrusively coarse, and occasionally degenerates into mere slang.

  The discussion in regard to miracles, which immediately followed that as to prophecy, and made, in one sense the most flagrant and noted passages of the Deistical controversy, was unhappily connected with a leader who wanted every quality that could give it a solid and a permanent interest, being either so blunted in his moral perceptions, or, what is more probable, so near to madness in his mental condition, and in any case so destitute of judgment and learning, that the deniers of Christianity in our day would as little consent to be represented by him as his antagonists. This was Thomas Woolston.

  He bore the repute of a sound scholar, a good preacher, a charitable and estimable man. His reading led him to study the works of Origen, from whom he adopted the idea of interpreting the scripture as allegory…. The vigour of the discourses is undeniable, and it has been said with some truth that they anticipate the mythical theory of Strauss.