went deeper in reality than in appearance, but there is even less reason for denying his sincere Deism than in the case of Voltaire.
Dr. John Hunt, in his candid Religious Thought in England, (vol. ii., p. 399), says, “Collins’s intellect was as cold as it was clear, but it was thoroughly honest. To examine freely and to judge fairly was his religion. . . . . As a magistrate he bore a high character. His worst enemies, it is said, could never charge him with any vice or immorality. He is described as amiable, prudent, virtuous, and humane in all domestic duties and relations; of a benevolence towards all men worthy of the character of the citizen of the world.” Dr. Hunt would fain give him the title of Christian, and evidently endorses the observation recorded in the Autobiography of Alexander Carlyle, one who knew Collins well once said that if he was not saved in the ship he would certainly get ashore on a plank.
The Philosophical Inquiry was republished with a preface by Priestley at Birmingham in 1790. Priestley considered it superior to the renowned work by Jonathan Edwards on the Freedom of the Will. It is curious, indeed, how far the New England Calvinist (certainly the ablest American metaphysician), whose work was first published in 1754, followed the work of the English Freethinker. Dugald Stewart says, “The coincidence is so perfect that the outline given by the former of the plan of his work, might have served with equal propriety as a preface to that of the latter.” Indeed, if the argument of Collins can be looked on as a demonstration of the non-existence of God, so must that of the great Puritan divine. But Edwards, like Collins, argues that the scheme of free will, by affording an exception to the dictum that everything has a cause, would destroy the proof for the being of God. Professor Fraser, in his smaller work on Berkeley in Philosophical Classics, gives his testimony that Collins “states the arguments against human freedom with a logical force unsurpassed by any Necessitarian.”
In 1718 Collins was chosen Treasurer for the County of Essex, to the delight, it is said, of tradesmen and others, who had, owing to the defalcations of a former treasurer, large sums of money due to them from the county. Collins supported the poorest of them with his private cash and paid
