which Providence has bestowed on you, and your virtues entitled you to. I know you loved me living, and will preserve my memory now I am dead.” Locke evidently looked on Collins as the man who would carry on the torch of truth when it had fallen from his own hand. And this position Collins endeavored to fulfil, though it may be doubted if the master would have approved of the direction taken by the disciple.
Locke, in his Reasonableness of Christianity, published in 1695, had raised the question which underlay the theological questions of the eighteenth century, the right of reason to be heard upon religion. To this question Collins directed himself in his first important work, published in 1707. It was entitled An Essay Concerning the Use of Reason in Propositions, the Evidence whereof depends upon Human Testimony. A second edition, corrected, appeared in 1709. Collin’s work throughout was that of a sapper and miner of the citadel of Christian superstition, and in this work he seeks to secure ample ground as the base of the rationalists’ operations. He lays it down that perception must be every man’s criterion to distinguish truth from falsehood. The argument Archbishop Tillotson had advanced against transubstantiation—that no miracle can prove a doctrine to be divine which is repugnant to our natural ideas—was adroitly turned against the orthodox, with the conclusion that as revelation was not immediate but dependent upon testimony, we are at liberty to reject it if it contradicts our reason. The essay, in fact, contains in germ Hume’s famous Essay on Miracles, and also incidentally deals with the anthropomorphism of the Bible, and the evidences of late date found in the Pentateuch.
In this essay, too, Collins deals incidentally with the question of Liberty and Necessity. He says (p. 34): “I know very well that divines put such an idea to the term Liberty as is directly inconsistent with the divine prescience; for they suppose Liberty to stand for a power in man to determine himself, and consequently that there are several actions of man absolutely contingent, since they depend as to their existence on man, who determines their existence from himself without regard to any extrinsical cause.” This idea, he proceeds to argue, “is not only inconsistent with the supposition of the Divine Prescience, but inconsistent with Truth.”
