Note 271 — Chapter IX

There is a full account of this horrible affair in Arnot’s State Trials, xiii. An eminent advocate of the period remarked, respecting the unhappy young man, whose name was Thomas Aikenhead, “I do think he would have proven an eminent Christian had he lived; but the ministers, out of a pious, though I think ignorant zeal, spoke and preached for cutting him off” (p. 930). A book was published in England in 1697, by one John Gailhard, entitled, The Blasphemous Heresy Disproved, in which he says, “Blasphemy and idolatry, by God’s express command, ought to be destroyed out of the land.”