What united these men,
he insinuated, was not a Christian commitment but a talent to disagree
with one another and even to repudiate themselves--as in the case of
Stillingfleet. In effect, the entire _Discourse_ bubbles with a carelessly
suppressed snicker.

The clergy could not readily reply to this kind of incriminating exposure
or deny its reality. They therefore overreacted to other judgments that
Collins made, particularly to his attacks upon Christian revelation. These
they denigrated as misleading, guileful, sinister, contrived, deceitful,
insidious, shuffling, covert, subversive. What they objected to was,
first, the way in which he reduced the demonstration of Christian
revelation to only the "puzzling and perplexing" argument from prophecy,
the casual ease with which he ignored or dismissed those other "clear"
proofs derived from the miracles of Jesus and the resurrection itself.[19]
But even more the orthodox resented the masked point of view from which
Collins presented his disbelief.

For example, the _Grounds and Reasons_ is the deist's first extended
attack upon revelation. Ostensibly it is, as we have seen, an answer to
Whiston's _Essay Towards Restoring the True Text of the Old Testament; and
for Vindicating the Citations Made Thence in the New Testament_ (1722). In
it the mathematician argued that the Hebraic prophecies relating to the
messiah had been literally fulfilled in Jesus. But this truth, he
admitted, had been obscured "in the latter Ages," only because of those
"Difficulties" which "have [almost wholly] arisen from the Corruptions,
the unbelieving _Jews_ introduc'd into the Hebrew and Greek copies of the
Old Testament, [soon after] the Beginning of the Second Century." These
conspiratorial corruptions he single-handedly planned to remove, returning
the Old Testament to a state of textual purity with emendations drawn from
sources as varied as the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Greek Psalms, the
Antiquities of Josephus, the Chaldee Paraphrases, the books of Philo. His
pragmatic purpose was to nullify the biblical criticism of historical
minded scholars as reputable as Grotius, to render useless the allegorical
interpretation of messianic prophecies. That is, he saw in the latter a
"pernicious" absence of fact, a "weak and enthusiastical" whimsy,
unchristian adjustments to the exigencies of the moment.[20]

Collins fought not to destroy Whiston's position, which was all too easily
destructible, b