Woolston, THOMAS, an ultra-heterodox and eccentric Deist, was born at Northampton in 1669, entered Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1685, became a fellow, and took orders. The study of Origen and his allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures seems to have turned his head, and in 1705 he published the Old Apology for the Truth of the Christian Religion against the Jews and Gentiles revived. Here Woolston maintained that Moses was only an allegorical personage, and all his history typical of that of Christ; that the miracles of the Pentateuch were allegorical, and the miracles attributed to Christ and the apostles pure allegory too; and he stigmatised as atheists and apostates all who received the Scripture narratives as literally, historically true. In subsequent publications he went further in the same direction; also maintaining that the Quakers approached more nearly in doctrine and organisation to the primitive church than any other religious body; and denouncing clergymen, because they made a profession of the pastorate, as 'hireling priests,' worshippers of the Beast, and ministers of Antichrist. In 1721 he published The Moderator between the Infidel and the Apostate, dialogues tending to show that the gospel miracles by themselves could not prove Christ to be the Messiah. This work occasioned great scandal, and it was only through the intervention of Whiston that the author escaped a prosecution. In 1721 his college deprived him of his fellowship. The views set forth in his last work Woolston developed more fully in The Moderator between an Infidel and an Apostate (1725), the former being Collins, the latter the modern Anglican clergy who had fallen away from the allegorical method of the Fathers and become priests of the letter. His famous series of six Discourses on the Miracles of Christ appeared from 1727 to 1729, with two Defences in 1729 and 1730. Here he maintained with much vulgar and offensive iteration that Christ's miracles in themselves were open to the gravest doubts; that in fact the gospel narratives, if they were to be taken literally, were only a tissue of absurdities; yet he loudly claimed to be a sincere Christian holding fast by the allegorical residuum of the miraculous history, and even Lechler takes him at his own valuation, but Trench, Strauss, and Cairns are more likely correct in counting this profession a mere blind. No less than sixty answers were made to the Discourses; but what was much worse, an indictment for blasphemy was brought against the writer. He was tried before Chief-justice Raymond at Guildhall, sentenced to be imprisoned for a year, to pay a fine of £100, and find securities to the amount of £2000 that he would not repeat his offence. He was imprisoned in the King's Bench, and the remainder of his life was spent within its rules. Here he died, 21st January 1731.
His works were collected in 1733 in 5 vols. with a Life. See Leslie Stephen's History of English Thought in the 18th Century (1880), and the works on Deism by Leland, Lechler, and Sayous.