dismissal of revelation and his reduction of Christianity to what he
called its "natural" and hence incontrovertible basis carried with it a
corollary, that of man's absolute right to religious enquiry and
profession. Here he became specific, borrowing from Lockean empiricism his
conditions of intellectual assent. "Evidence," he said, "ought to be the
sole ground of Assent, and Examination is the way to arrive at Evidence;
and therefore rather than I wou'd have Examination, Arguing and Objecting
laid aside, I wou'd chuse to say, That no Opinions whatever can be
dangerous to a Man that impartially examines into the Truth of
Things."[14] The church leadership saw in this statement and others like
it not an epistemological premise but a deliberate subterfuge, an
insidious blind to vindicate his attacks upon an organized priesthood. We
can recognize now that his opponents oversimplified his intention, that
they blackened it to make his villainy at once definitive and vulnerable.
At the same time we must admit that he often equated the ideas of
repression and clerical authority, even as he coupled those of freedom and
the guide of private conscience.

The Anglican church was infuriated by these correlations, angered as much
by their manner of expression as by their substance. For the faithful were
frequently thrown off balance by a strategy of ironical indirection.
Sometimes this took the form of omission or the presentation of an
argument in so fragmentary or slanted a fashion that Collins's "Enemies"
could debate neither his implications nor his conclusions. At other times
he used this artful circumlocution to create his favorite mask, that of
the pious Christian devoted to scripture or of the moralist perplexed by
the divisions among the orthodox clergy. Finally, his rhetoric was shaped
by deistic predecessors who used sarcasm and satire to mock the gravity of
church authority. So much was their wit a trademark that as early as 1702
one commentator had noted, "when you expect an argument, they make a
jest."[15] Collins himself resorted to this practice with both instinctive
skill and deliberate contrivance.

All these methods, though underhanded, he silently justified on the
assumption that he was dealing with a conspiracy of priests: hence, he
professed that he had to fight fraud and deception with their like, and
that such craftiness, suitable "to his particular genius and temper," was
"serviceable to his cause." For t