Page:A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (Foote).djvu/10

 highly extolled by Naigeon in the Encyclopædie Methodique which devotes over a hundred columns to the article “Collins.” Prof. Huxley, in his paper on “The Metaphysics of Sensation,” published in Critiques and Addresses says: “I do not think that anyone can read the letters which passed between Clarke and Collins, without admitting that Collins, who writes with wonderful power and closeness of reasoning, has by far the best of the argument, so far as the possible materiality of the soul goes; and that in this battle the Goliath of Freethinking overcame the champion of what was considered Orthodoxy.”

Priestcraft in Perfection followed in 1709. In this little treatise Collins shows that the clause in the twentieth Article of the Church of England, declaring that “the Church hath power to decree rites and ceremonies, and authority in controversies of faith” is not contained in the Articles as sanctioned by law, and was fraudulently foisted in afterwards. This pamphlet went through three editions by 1710, and was reprinted in 1865, without any indication of its authorship, but with a preface by the Rev. F. Saunderson, an agitator for the revision of the Book of Common Prayer. The work was anonymous, like all the rest of Collins’s productions, but the authorship was pretty well known. He followed this pamphlet up with another, in which he sought to carry the matter further and show that the consent of law had only been given to those Articles which confirmed the confession of the true Christian faith and the doctrine of the sacraments. This engendered a smart controversy, now happily buried in the great rubbish-heap of the past. As late as 1724 Collins returned to the subject in An Historical and Critical Essay on the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England.

In 1710 appeared A Vindication of the Divine Attributes, in answer to a sermon preached by Archbishop King at Dublin, which bore the title Divine Predestination and Foreknowledge Consistent with the Freedom of Man’s Will. The Archbishop contended that “the nature of God as it is in itself, is incomprehensible by human understanding.” His powers and methods are indeed “of a nature altogether different from ours,” so that when we speak of his predetermination, it does not follow that this is inconsistent with the contingency of events or free will. Such theological jugglery Collins was able to expose on Theistic