A student of eighteen, named Thomas Aikenhead, whose habits were studious and whose morals were irreproachable, had, in the course of his reading, met with some of the ordinary arguments against the Bible.  He fancied that he had lighted on a mine of wisdom which had been hidden from the rest of mankind, and, with the conceit from which half educated lads of quick parts are seldom free, proclaimed his discoveries to four or five of his companions.  Trinity in unity, he said, was as much a contradiction as a square circle.  Ezra was the author of the Pentateuch.  The Apocalypse was an allegorical book about the philosopher’s stone.  Moses had learned magic in Egypt.  Christianity was a delusion which would not last till the year 1800.  For this wild talk, of which, in all probability, he would himself have been ashamed long before he was five and twenty, he was prosecuted by the Lord Advocate.  The Lord Advocate was that James Stewart who had been so often a Whig and so often a Jacobite that it is difficult to keep an account of his apostasies.  He was now a Whig for the third if not for the fourth time.  Aikenhead might undoubtedly have been, by the law of Scotland, punished with imprisonment till he should retract his errors and do penance before the congregation of his parish; and every man of sense and humanity would have thought this a sufficient punishment for the prate of a forward boy.  But Stewart, as cruel as he was base, called for blood.  There was among the Scottish statutes one which made it a capital crime to revile or curse the Supreme Being or any person of the Trinity.  Nothing that Aikenhead had said could, without the most violent straining, be brought within the scope of this statute.  But the Lord Advocate exerted all his subtlety.  The poor youth at the bar had no counsel.  He was altogether unable to do justice to his own cause.  He was convicted, and sentenced to be hanged and buried at the foot of the gallows.  It was in vain that he with tears abjured his errors and begged piteously for mercy.  Some of those who saw him in his dungeon believed that his recantation was sincere; and indeed it is by no means improbable that in him, as in many other pretenders to philosophy who imagine that they have completely emancipated themselves from the religion of their childhood, the near prospect of death may have produced an entire change of sentiment.  He petitioned the Privy Council that, if his life could not be spared, he might be allowed a short respite to make his peace with the God whom he had offended.  Some of the Councillors were for granting this small indulgence.  Others thought that it ought not to be granted unless the ministers of Edinburgh would intercede.  The two parties were evenly balanced; and the question was decided against the prisoner by the casting vote of the Chancellor.  The Chancellor was a man who has been often mentioned in the course of this history, and never mentioned with honour.  He was that Sir Patrick Hume whose disputatious and factious temper