religious questions. Then the various objections to
Freethinking are considered, and the treatise ends with a list and
description of wise and virtuous Freethinkers--nineteen in number--from
Socrates to Tillotson.

In estimating the merits of this little book, and in accounting for the
excitement which it produced, we must not forget that what may now
appear to us truisms were 170 years ago new truths, even if they were
recognised as truths at all. At the beginning of the eighteenth century
it was not an unnecessary task to vindicate the right of every man to
think freely; and if Collins had performed the work which he had taken
in hand fully and fairly he might have done good service. But while
professedly advocating the duty of thinking freely, he showed so obvious
a bias in favour of thinking in a particular direction, and wrested
facts and quoted authorities in so one-sided a manner, that he laid
himself open to the just strictures of many who valued and practised
equally with himself the right of freethinking. Some of the most famous
men of the day at once entered into the lists against him, amongst whom
were Hoadly,[154] Swift, Whiston, Berkeley, and above all Bentley. The
latter, under the title of 'Phileleutherus Lipsiensis,' wrote in the
character of a German Lutheran to his English friend, Dr. Francis Hare,
'Remarks on a Discourse on Freethinking.' Regarded as a piece of
intellectual gladiatorship the Remarks are justly entitled to the fame
they have achieved. The great critic exposed unmercifully and
unanswerably Collins's slips in scholarship, ridiculed his style, made
merry over the rising and growing sect which professed its competency to
think _de quolibet ente_, protested indignantly against putting the
Talapoins of Siam on a level with the whole clergy of England, 'the
light and glory of Christianity,' and denied the right of the title of
Freethinkers to men who brought scandal on so good a word.

Bentley hit several blots, not only in Collins, but in others of the
'rising and growing sect.' The argument, _e.g._, drawn from the variety
of readings in the New Testament, is not only demolished but adroitly
used to place his adversary on the horns of a dilemma. Nothing again,
can be neater than his answer to various objections by showing that
those objections had been brought to light by Christians themselves. And
yet the general impression, when one has read Collins and Bentley
carefully, is that there