Page:A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (Foote).djvu/11

 grounds. Truth, goodness and justice in God are meaningless unless the same as in ourselves. The Archbishop, he declared, gave up the question of Manicheeism to Bayle. “Only Mr. Bayle continues to believe God is good and wise against the force of all human reasoning; and his grace supposes God is neither wise nor good: which two do not much, if at all, differ, but in words; for Mr. Bayle’s good and wise against evidence and argument is much the same with being neither good nor wise.” The following year Collins visited Holland, where he became acquainted with Le Clerc, and other learned men, and after his return, he published, Feb. 1713, A Discourse of Freethinking, occasioned by the Rise and Growth of a sect called Freethinkers. The very title was as the unfurling of a flag presaging battle to theological authority and supernaturalism. Two years before Toland had written of “we Freethinkers.” They were a sect and growing. Collins’s Discourse was the manifesto of a new cause, a plea for exercising the Protestant principle of private judgment on the Protestant fetish of revelation. To us the duty and necessity of free inquiry seem truisms. At the beginning of last century this plea was a necessary one. Only a century previously Legate and Wightman had been burnt to death for Anti-Trinitarianism, and, as late as 1697 Thomas Aitkenhead was hung for blasphemy at Edinburgh, for calling the books of Moses, Ezra’s fables. In the controversy that ensued upon the publication of the Discourse Collins was unfortunate. There was a host of replies. The Whigs disclaimed him with loud abhorrence. The Church champions attacked him violently. Even the “Socinian bishop,” Hoadly, felt it necessary to controvert the Freethinker. Against such as Hoadly, Hare or Whiston, Collins, had he chosen, might have held his own, but his anonymous treatise had the singularly infelicitous fortune of eliciting two anonymous adversaries, one the prince of critics, the other the king of satirists.

Bully Bentley, in the guise of “Phileleutherus Lipsiensis,” fiercely attacked the Discourse. In truth, while the arguments of Collins were sound his illustrations were faulty. The Freethinking bantling was healthy, but it was so badly dressed that it was almost smothered with contempt. Collins made