Note 117 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Lest this should be found too hard a doctrine there is added, àpropos of Joshua’s staying of the sun and moon, a literary solution which has often done duty in later times. “To interpret Scripture-miracles, and to understand from the narrations of them how they really happened, ’tis necessary to know the opinions of those who first reported them ... otherwise we shall confound ... things which have really happen’d with things purely imaginary, and which were only prophetic representations. For in Scripture many things are related as real, and which were also believ’d to be real even by the relators themselves, that notwithstanding were only representations form’d in the brain, and merely imaginary—as that God, the Supreme Being, descended from heaven ... upon Mount Sinai...; that Elias ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot ... which were only representations accommodated to their opinions who deliver’d them down to us.”117 Such argumentation had to prepare the way for Hume’s Essay Of Miracles, half a century later; and concerning both reasoners it is to be remembered that their thought was to be “infidelity” for centuries after them. It needed real freethinking, then, to produce such doctrine in the days of the Rye House Plot.