idden faction, to misrepresent us. The few
additions I have made are for no other use than to help the transition,
which could not otherwise be kept in an abstract; but I have not
presumed to advance anything of my own; which besides would be needless
to an author who hath so fully handled and demonstrated every
particular. I shall only add, that though this writer, when he speaks of
priests, desires chiefly to be understood to mean the English clergy,
yet he includes all priests whatsoever, except the ancient and modern
heathens, the Turks, Quakers, and Socinians.

THE LETTER.

SIR,

I send you this apology for Freethinking,[3] without the least hopes of
doing good, but purely to comply with your request; for those truths
which nobody can deny, will do no good to those who deny them. The
clergy, who are so impudent to teach the people the doctrines of faith,
are all either cunning knaves or mad fools; for none but artificial,
designing men, and crack-brained enthusiasts, presume to be guides to
others in matters of speculation, which all the doctrines of
Christianity are; and whoever has a mind to learn the Christian
religion, naturally chooses such knaves and fools to teach them. Now the
Bible, which contains the precepts of the priests' religion, is the most
difficult book in the world to be understood; it requires a thorough
knowledge in natural, civil, ecclesiastical history, law, husbandry,
sailing, physic, pharmacy, mathematics, metaphysics, ethics, and
everything else that can be named: And everybody who believes it ought
to understand it, and must do so by force of his own freethinking,
without any guide or instructor.

[Footnote 3: The chief strain of Collins's "Discourse" is an eulogium
upon the necessity and advantage of Freethinking; in which it is more
than insinuated that the advocates of revealed religion are enemies to
the progress of enlightened inquiry. This insidious position is
ridiculed in the following parody. [S.]]

How can a man think at all, if he does not think freely? A man who does
not eat and drink freely, does not eat and drink at all. Why may not I
be denied the liberty of freeseeing, as well as freethinking? Yet nobody
pretends that the first is unlawful, for a cat may look on a king;
though you be near-sighted, or have weak or sore eyes, or are blind, you
may be a free-seer; you ought to see for yourself, and not trust to a
guide to choose the colour of your stockings, or save y