moves inexorably to a single, negative conclusion. “Christianity pretends to derive itself from Judaism. JESUS appeals to the religious books of the Jews as prophesying of his Mission. None of these Prophecies can be understood of him but in a

    typical allegoric

   sense. Now that sense is absurd, and contrary to all scholastic rules of interpretation. Christianity, therefore, not being really predicted in the Jewish Writings, is consequently false.”

     [22]

   Collins continued his attack upon Christian revelation in the

    Scheme

   . In the two years which separated this work from the earlier

    Grounds and Reasons

   , there occurred no change in the author’s argument. What does occur, however, is a perceptive if snide elaboration upon the mask. This is in many ways the same persona who barely suppressed his guffaws in the earlier work. Now he is given an added dimension; he is made more decisively

   rational than his predecessor and therefore more insightful in his knowledge of rhetorical method. As a disciple of certain Protestant polemicists and particularly of Grotius, whose “integrity,” “honor,” and biblical criticism he supports, he is the empirical-minded Christian who knows exactly why the literalists have failed to persuade the free-thinkers or even to have damaged their arguments. “For if you begin with Infidels by denying to them, what is evident and agreeable to common sense, I think there can be no reasonable hopes of converting or convincing them.”

     [23]

   The irony is abrasive simply because it unanswerably singles out the great rhetorical failure of orthodoxy, its inability to argue from a set of principles as acceptable to the deists as to themselves.

   Many of the clergy chafed against Collins’s manipulation of this tongue-in-cheek persona. They resented his irreverent wit which projected, for example, the image of an Anglican God who “talks to all mankind from corners” and who shows his back parts to Moses. They were irritated by his jesting parables, as in “The Case of Free-Seeing,” and by the impertinence of labelling Archbishop Tillotson as the man “whom all

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