gradually gave way to a rage for metaphysics, occasioned by the essays
on Liberty and Necessity in Cato's Letters, and more by theology.
After I had read Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, I sported
infidel! but my infidel vanity never touched my heart:"

nor ever with his lips did he for a few months only support the new
light given him by Voltaire.

"With my heart," says he, "I never did abandon the name of Christ."

This reached Bowyer's ears, and he sent for him: not to reason with him,
as teachers and parents do too often, and by this means as often
increase the vanity of these tyro-would-be-philosophers; but he took the
surest mode, if not of curing, at least of checking the disease. His
argument was short and forcible.

"So, sirrah, you are an infidel, are you? then I'll flog your
infidelity out of you;"

and gave him the severest flogging he had ever received at his hands.
This, as I have often heard Coleridge say, was the only just flogging he
had ever given him: certainly, from all I ever heard of him, Bowyer was
strictly a flogging master. Trollope, in his History of Christ's
Hospital, page 137, says of him,

"His discipline was exact in the extreme, and tinctured, perhaps, with
more than due severity." [8]

Coleridge, in his 'Biographia Literaria', after paying a just compliment
to Bowyer as a teacher, says,