"[7]This might have prevented the execution of Aikenhead, as Stewart states: "The jury could not, without being guilty of perjury, have convicted him of obstinately persisting to deny the Trinity, which the statute required.
"[8] Historian Humberto Garcia notes Aikenhead's trial in the context of witch hunt against Socinians, which were associated with Islam at the time.
[9] Garcia cites William Cobbett's work on the published proceedings of the trial in which Aikenhead was accused of preferring Islam over Christianity and that he publicly claimed that Christendom will eventually be extinguished by Mohammedanism.
You called the "Old Testament Ezra's Fables... which were an allusion of Aesop's Fables, and that Ezra was... a cunning man who convinced a number of Babylonian slaves to follow him, for whom he made up a feined genealogy as if they had been descended of kings and princes in the land of Canaan, and thereby imposed upon Cyrus who was a Persian and stranger, persuading him by the device of a pretend prophecy concerning himself."
[13] The case was prosecuted by the Lord Advocate, Sir James Stewart, who demanded the death penalty in order to set an example to others who might otherwise express such opinions.
On 24 December 1696, the jury found Aikenhead guilty of cursing and railing against God, denying the incarnation and the Trinity, and scoffing at the Scriptures.
Thomas Aikenhead, in his end speech of the trial, said:"It is a principle innate and co-natural to every man to have an insatiable inclination to the truth and to seek for it as for hid treasure, which indeed have an effect upon me, and my reason was... that I might build my faith upon uncontroverable grounds... so I proceeded until the more I thought thereon, the further I was from finding the verity I desired.
The Church of Scotland's General Assembly, sitting in Edinburgh at the time, urged "vigorous execution" to curb "the abounding of impiety and profanity in this land".
"[17] Aikenhead said of the letter: "Enclosed, will give satisfaction to you in particular, and the world in general, and after I am gone [for you to] produce more charity than has been my fortune... and remove the apprehensions, which I hear are various with many about my case, being the last words of a dying person, and proceeding from the sincerity of my heart.
"[17] Aikenhead may have read this letter outside the Tolbooth, before making the long walk, under guard, to the gallows on the road between Edinburgh and Leith.