of church authority. So much was their wit a trademark that as early as 1702 one commentator had noted, “when you expect an argument, they make a jest.”

     [15]

   Collins himself resorted to this practice with both instinctive skill and deliberate contrivance.

   All these methods, though underhanded, he silently justified on the assumption that he was dealing with a conspiracy of priests: hence, he professed that he had to fight fraud and deception with their like, and that such craftiness, suitable “to his particular genius and temper,” was “serviceable to his cause.” For these 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 B

     P

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