NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
[1.] Universal Spectator, and Weekly Journal, No. 98 (22 August 1730).
[2.] To Des Maizeaux (5 May 1717): B. M. Sloane MSS. 4282, ff. 129-130.
[3.] To Des Maizeaux (9 February 1716): B. M. Sloane MSS. 4282, f. 123.
[4.] The title page of the Scheme is dated 1726. It was not advertised in the newspapers or journals of that year—a strange silence for any of Collins’s work. Its first notice appeared in the Monthly Catalogue: Being a General Register of Books, Sermons, Plays, Poetry, Pamphlets, &c. Printed and Publish’d in London, or the Universities, during the Month of May, 1727 (see No. 49). Yet we know that the Scheme had been remarked upon as early as March when on the 10th of that month Samuel Chandler published his Reflections on the Conduct of the Modern Deists in their late Writings against Christianity. (For the dating of Chandler’s work, see the Daily Courant [10 March 1727].) We know also that the Scheme went to a second edition late in 1727 and was frequently advertised in the Daily Post between 2 January and 20 January 1728.
[5.] For the statement about the Letter to Dr. Rogers, see B. M. Sloane MSS. 4282, f. 220 (15 August 1727). For that on the use of “personal matters” in controversy, see B. M. Sloane MSS. 4282, f. 170 (27 December 1719); cf. The Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered (London, 1726), pp. 422-438.
[6.] The Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion was published in London within the first four days of January 1724; see the advertisement in the Daily Post (4 January 1724). A Discourse concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing was published on or close to 17 March 1729; see the advertisement in the Daily Journal for that date.
[7.] We can generally fix the date of Rogers’s Eight Sermons within the first two months of 1727 because it was answered early by Samuel Chandler’s Reflections on the Conduct of the Modern Deists. (See [note 4].) For the dating of Collins’s rebuttal, see the Monthly Catalogue, No. 49 (May 1727).