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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
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