For I am sensible that nothing would more contribute to “the continuance of the war” and the restoration of the late ministry, than to have the doctrines delivered in this treatise well infused into the people.  I have therefore compiled them into the following Abstract, wherein I have adhered to the very words of our author, only adding some few explanations of my own, where the terms happen to be too learned, and consequently a little beyond the comprehension of those for whom the work was principally intended, I mean the nobility and gentry of our party.  After which I hope it will be impossible for the malice of a Jacobite, highflying, priestridden faction, to misrepresent us.  The few additions I have made are for no other use than to help the transition, which could not otherwise be kept in an abstract; but I have not presumed to advance anything of my own; which besides would be needless to an author who hath so fully handled and demonstrated every particular.  I shall only add, that though this writer, when he speaks of priests, desires chiefly to be understood to mean the English clergy, yet he includes all priests whatsoever, except the ancient and modern heathens, the Turks, Quakers, and Socinians.

THE LETTER.

SIR,

I send you this apology for Freethinking,[3] without the least hopes of doing good, but purely to comply with your request; for those truths which nobody can deny, will do no good to those who deny them.  The clergy, who are so impudent to teach the people the doctrines of faith, are all either cunning knaves or mad fools; for none but artificial, designing men, and crack-brained enthusiasts, presume to be guides to others in matters of speculation, which all the doctrines of Christianity are; and whoever has a mind to learn the Christian religion, naturally chooses such knaves and fools to teach them.  Now the Bible, which contains the precepts of the priests’ religion, is the most difficult book in the world to be understood; it requires a thorough knowledge in natural, civil, ecclesiastical history, law, husbandry, sailing, physic, pharmacy, mathematics, metaphysics, ethics, and everything else that can be named:  And everybody who believes it ought to understand it, and must do so by force of his own freethinking, without any guide or instructor.

[Footnote 3:  The chief strain of Collins’s “Discourse” is an eulogium upon the necessity and advantage of Freethinking; in which it is more than insinuated that the advocates of revealed religion are enemies to the progress of enlightened inquiry.  This insidious position is ridiculed in the following parody. [S.]]

How can a man think at all, if he does not think freely?  A man who does not eat and drink freely, does not eat and drink at all.  Why may not I be denied the liberty of freeseeing, as well as freethinking?  Yet nobody pretends that the first is unlawful, for a cat may look on a king; though you be near-sighted, or have weak or sore eyes, or are blind, you may be a free-seer; you ought to see for yourself, and not trust to a guide to choose the colour of your stockings, or save you from falling into a ditch.