McGuinness quotes John Hewitt on Toland’s ‘no[t] unfrequented legacy of excellently disputatious prose’ (Ancestral Voices, 1987, p.71).

Quotes Molyneux’s letter to Locke: ‘I do not think His management since he came into this Citty has been so prudent: He has raised againsst him the clamour of all Partys; and this not so much by his Difference in Opinion as by his Unseasonable Way of discoursing, propagating and Maintaining it, Coffee-houses and Public Tables are not proper Places for serious Discourses relating to the most Important Truths’. (Stephen H. Daniel, John Toland, His Methods, Manners and Mind, McGill-Queen’s UP 1984, p.246.)

Gives an account of the Presbyterian New Light movement incl. Samuel Haliday, Thomas Drennan, and Francis Hutcheson, considered as analogous to Toland’s stance the words of Linda Colley:

‘it was their common investment in Protestantism that first allowed the English, the Welsh and the Scots to become fused together, and to remain so, despite their many cultural divergences. And it was Protestantism that helped to make Britain’s successive wars against France after 1689 so significant in terms of national formation. A pwoerful and persistently threatening France became the haunting embodiment of that Catholic Other which Britons had been taught tofear since the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Confronting it encouraged them to bury their internal differences in the struggle for survival, victory, or booty.’ (Colley, Forging the Nation, 1707-1837, Vintage 1992, p.387)

Quotes Toland on the entitlement of Britain to Empire: ‘The whole Variety of things whereith the Earth is stock’d had bin principally design’d for our profit and delight, and no more of ’em allowed to the rest of Men, than what they must necessarily use as our Purveyors or Labourers. [London is] a new Rome in the West [deserving] like the old one, to become the Sovereign Mistress of the Universe.’ (Toland, [Pref.], The Oceana of James Harrington, 1700, pp.ii-iv [sic]);

Toland’s Nazarenus makes reference to the Pope as having ‘betrayed the country to the English’ (Letter II); also quotes Toland on the dangers of intolerance within Protestantism: ‘Since Religion is calculated for reasonable Creatures, ’tis conviction and not authority that should bear Weight with them. A wise and good man ... knows no Difference between Popish Infallibility, and being oblig’d blindly to acquiesce in the Decisions of fallible Protestants.’

Further: ‘there may very well be such a thing as Protestant Popery’ (Christianity Not Mysterious, pp.xv-xvi; ‘A Memorial for the Earl of Oxford’, 1711, in Collection, Vol. 2, p.230.

Bibl. cites additionally Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (Allen & Unwin 1981), espec. pp.267-72, arguing that Toland was a key figure in the spread of radical Masonry, and suggesting that a document in his manuscripts outlining a meeting of Pantheists (Knights of Jubilation), at the Hague in 1710, actually describes a Masons’ meeting.

Also cites Kenneth Craven, Jonathan Swift and the Millenium of Madness: The Information Age in Swift’s Tale of a Tub (E. J. Brill 1992), as arguing that Toland’s works were the chief targets of Swift’s satire, esp. his Christianity not Mysterious, his edition of Oceana, his Life of Milton, and his unauthorised publication of Shrewsbury’s An Inquiry Concerning Virtue.