English Free-Thinkers

   own as their Head.”

     [24]

   But most of all they gagged upon Collins’s use of satire in religious controversy. As we have already seen, there were complex reasons for his choice of technique. He was a naturally witty man who, sometimes out of fear and sometimes out of malice, expressed himself best through circuitous irony. In 1724, when he himself considered his oratorical practice, he argued that his matter determined his style, that the targets of his belittling wit were the “saint-errants.” We can only imagine the exasperation of Collins’s Anglican enemies when they found their orthodoxy thus slyly lumped with the eccentricities of Samuel Butler’s “true blew” Presbyterians. It would be hard to live down the associations of those facetious lines which made the Augustan divines, like their unwelcome forebear Hudibras, members

    Of that stubborn Crew

   Of Errant Saints, whom all men grant

   To be the true Church Militant.

   Those dignified Anglican exteriors were further punctured by Collins’s irreverent attack upon their cry of religious uniformity, a cry which was “ridiculous, romantick, and impossible to succeed.” He saw himself, in short, as an emancipated Butler or even Cervantes; and like his famous predecessors he too would laugh quite out of countenance the fool and the hypocrite, the pretender and the enthusiast, the knave and the persecuter, all those who would create a god in their own sour and puny image.

   By 1727 several of the orthodox felt that they could take no more of Collins’s laughter, his sneering invectives against the clergy, or his designs to make religion “a Matter purely personal; and the Knowledge of it to be obtain’d by personal Consideration,

    independently of any Guides, Teachers, or Authority

   .” In the forefront of this group was John Rogers, whose hostility to the deist was articulate and compulsive. At least it drove him into a position seemingly at odds with the spirit if not the law of English toleration. He urged, for example, that those like Collins be prosecuted in a civil court for a persuasion “which is manifestly subversive of all Order and Polity, and can no more consist with civil, than with religious, Society.”

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