hese reasons even William Warburton, who
had vainly struggled to be judicious, described him as "a Writer, whose
dexterity in the arts of Controversy was so remarkably contrasted by his
abilities in reasoning and literature, as to be ever putting one in mind
of what travellers tell us of the genius of the proper Indians, who,
although the veriest bunglers in all the fine arts of manual operation,
yet excel everybody in slight of hand and the delusive feats of
activity."[16] Whatever may be said of Collins and his achievement, one
fact remains constant. He was a brilliant and persistent trickster whose
cunning in the techniques of polemic often silenced an opponent with every
substantive right to win the debate.

He seized any opportunity to expose the diversity of ethical and
theological opinion which set one Anglican divine against another, "to
observe"--as Jenkin put it--"how the gladiators in dispute murder the
cause between them, while they so fiercely cut and wound one another." For
Collins such observation was more than oratorical artifice; it was one of
the dogmas of his near-nihilism. He commented once to Des Maizeaux upon
the flurry of critics who replied to his statement of necessitarianism in
the _Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty_:

I was extreamly pleasd with BP Hoadley, ... as it was upon the true
and only point worth disputing with ye Preists, viz whether we the
laity are the Calves and Sheep of the Preist. And I am not less
pleasd to see them manage this controversy with ye same vile arts
against one another, as they always use towards the laity. It must
open the eyes of a few and convince them, that the Preists mean
nothing but wealth and power, and have not the least ... of those
qualitys for wch the superstitious world admires them.[17]

He applied this principle of divisive attack in _A Discourse of
Free-Thinking_. There in fifty-three pages he transparently ridiculed
contradictions which hedged three areas of fundamental religious belief:
_"The Nature and Attributes of the Eternal Being or God, ... the Authority
of Scriptures, and ... the Sense of Scripture."_ In accordance with one of
his favorite tricks--the massing of eminent authority--his exposition
rings with hallowed Anglican names: South, Bull, Taylor, Wallis, Carlton,
Davenant, Edwards, More, Tillotson, Fowler, Sherlock, Stillingfleet,
Sacheverell, Beveridge, Grabe, Hickes, Lesley.[18]