he spent his life in allaying the alarm of those who like himself
felt alarmed at its effect on the question of verbal inspiration. And it
was the disproof of the genuineness of the Epistles of Phalaris by the
learned Bentley,(410) which first threw solid doubts on the value
attaching to traditional titles of books, and showed the irrefragable
character belonging to an appeal to internal evidence; a department which
has been called the higher criticism. This latter branch, so abundantly
developed in German speculation, is only hinted at by the English deists
of the eighteenth age, as by Hobbes and Spinoza earlier; but we shall soon
see the use which Collins and others made of the former inquiry.

The form, though not the spirit, of Toland and Shaftesbury, might by a
latitude of interpretation be made compatible with Christianity; but
Collins and Woolston, of whom we next treat, mark a much further advance
of free thought. They attack what has always been justly considered to be
an integral portion of Christianity, the relation which it bore to Jewish
prophecy, and the miracles which were wrought for its establishment.

Collins(411) must be studied under more than one aspect. He not only wrote
on the logic of religion, the method of inquiry in theology, but also on
the subject of scripture interpretation, and the reality of prophecy.(412)

It was in 1713 that he published "A discourse of free-thinking, occasioned
by the rise and growth of a sect called Free-thinkers." This is one of the
first times that we find this new name used for Deists; and the object of
his book is to defend the propriety of unlimited liberty of inquiry, a
proposition by which he designed the unrestrained liberty of belief, not
in a political point of view merely, but in a moral. His argument was not
unlike more modern ones,(413) which show that civilization and improvement
have been caused by free-thinking; and he adduces the growing disbelief in
the reality of witchcraft, in proof of the way in which the rejection of
dogma had ameliorated political science, which until recently had visited
the supposed crime with the punishment of death.(414) After thus showing
the duty of free-thinking,(415) he argued that the sphere of it ought to
comprehend points on which the right is usually denied; such as the divine
attributes, the truth of the scriptures, and their meaning;(416)
establishing this by laying a number of charges against priests, to show
that