Author. Little is known of his early life and his parents are unknown. He took the name John at the encouragement of a school teacher. At sixteen, he was awarded a scholarship to study theology at the University of Glasgow. In 1690, at nineteen years of age, he earned a Masters Degree in Theology from the University of Edinburgh. He later was given a scholarship to spend two years studying at the University of Leiden in Holland, and subsequently nearly two years (1694-1695) at Oxford in England. His first book, Christianity not Mysterious (1696) argues that the divine revelation of the Bible contains no true mysteries, but rather that all dogmas of the faith can be understand and demonstrated by properly trained reason from natural principles. For this argument he was prosecuted by a grand jury in London. As he was a subject of the Kingdom of Ireland, members of the Irish parliament proposed that he should be burnt at the stake, and in his absence three copies of the book were burnt by the public hangman in Dublin as the content was contrary to the core doctrines of the Church of Ireland. Toland bitterly compared the Protestant legislators to "Popish Inquisitors who performed that Execution on the Book, when they could not seize the Author, whom they had destined to the Flames". After his departure from Oxford Toland resided in London for most of the rest of his life, but was also a somewhat frequent visitor to the European continent, particularly Germany and the Netherlands. He lived on the Continent from 1707 to 1710. Toland died in Putney on 10 March 1722. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica says of him that at his death in London at age 51 "he died... as he had lived, in great poverty, in the midst of his books, with his pen in his hand." Just before he died, he composed his own epitaph: "He was an assertor of liberty, a lover of all sorts of learning... but no man's follower or dependent. Nor could frowns or fortune bend him to decline from the ways he had chosen." John Toland's grave is located in St. Mary's Churchyard, Putney, in the London Borough of Wandsworth, where he was buried in an unmarked grave on March 13, 1722.