A discourse concerning ridicule and irony in writing (1729)

Between 1710 and 1729 Anthony Collins was lampooned, satirized, and gravely denounced from pulpit and press as England’s most insidious defiler of church and state. Yet within a year of his death he became the model of a proper country gentleman,
During those five years Collins concentrated upon a single opponent in each work and made it a rhetorical practice to change his “Adversary” in successive essays. He created in this way a composite victim whose strength was lessened by deindividualization; in this way too he ran no risk of being labelled a hobbyhorse rider or, more seriously, a persecutor. Throughout the Grounds and Reasons he laughed at, reasoned against, and satirized William Whiston’s assumption that messianic prophecies in the Old Testament were literally fulfilled in the figure and mission of Jesus. Within two years and in a new work, he substituted Edward Chandler, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, for the mathematician. It need not have been the Bishop; any one of thirty-four others could have qualified for the role of opponent, among them people like Clarke, and Sykes, and Sherwood, and even the ubiquitous Whiston. Collins rejected them, however, to debate in the Scheme with Bishop Chandler, the author of A Defence of Christianity from the Prophecies of the old Testament , with one who was, in short, the least controversial and yet the most orthodox of his many assailants.
1. That universal liberty be established in respect to opinions and practises not prejudicial to the peace and welfare of society: by which establishment, truth must needs have the advantages over error and falsehood , the law of God over the will of man , and true Christianity tolerated ; private judgment would be really exercised; and men would be allowed to have suffered to follow their consciences, over which God only is supreme:...
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 :