every man has a right to think freely on all religious as well as other subjects, and that the exercise of this right is the sole remedy for the evil of superstition.  The necessity of freethinking is shown by the endless variety of opinions which priests hold about all religious questions.  Then the various objections to Freethinking are considered, and the treatise ends with a list and description of wise and virtuous Freethinkers—­nineteen in number—­from Socrates to Tillotson.

In estimating the merits of this little book, and in accounting for the excitement which it produced, we must not forget that what may now appear to us truisms were 170 years ago new truths, even if they were recognised as truths at all.  At the beginning of the eighteenth century it was not an unnecessary task to vindicate the right of every man to think freely; and if Collins had performed the work which he had taken in hand fully and fairly he might have done good service.  But while professedly advocating the duty of thinking freely, he showed so obvious a bias in favour of thinking in a particular direction, and wrested facts and quoted authorities in so one-sided a manner, that he laid himself open to the just strictures of many who valued and practised equally with himself the right of freethinking.  Some of the most famous men of the day at once entered into the lists against him, amongst whom were Hoadly,[154] Swift, Whiston, Berkeley, and above all Bentley.  The latter, under the title of ‘Phileleutherus Lipsiensis,’ wrote in the character of a German Lutheran to his English friend, Dr. Francis Hare, ‘Remarks on a Discourse on Freethinking.’  Regarded as a piece of intellectual gladiatorship the Remarks are justly entitled to the fame they have achieved.  The great critic exposed unmercifully and unanswerably Collins’s slips in scholarship, ridiculed his style, made merry over the rising and growing sect which professed its competency to think de quolibet ente, protested indignantly against putting the Talapoins of Siam on a level with the whole clergy of England, ’the light and glory of Christianity,’ and denied the right of the title of Freethinkers to men who brought scandal on so good a word.

Bentley hit several blots, not only in Collins, but in others of the ‘rising and growing sect.’  The argument, e.g., drawn from the variety of readings in the New Testament, is not only demolished but adroitly used to place his adversary on the horns of a dilemma.  Nothing again, can be neater than his answer to various objections by showing that those objections had been brought to light by Christians themselves.  And yet the general impression, when one has read Collins and Bentley carefully, is that there is a real element of truth in the former to which the latter has not done justice; that Bentley presses Collins’s arguments beyond their logical conclusion; that Collins is not what Bentley would have him to be—­a mere Materialist—­an