the Pharisees, who were a religious sect, ascribed all things to fate, or to God’s appointment, and it was the first article of their creed that fate and God do all [1]; and consequently they do not assert a true liberty, when they asserted a liberty together with this fatality and necessity of all things. And the Essenes, who were the most religious sect among the Jews, and fell not under the censure of our Savior for their hypocrisy as the Pharisees did, were asserters of absolute fate and necessity. St. Paul,[2] who was a Pharisee, and the son of a Pharisee, is supposed by the learned Dodwell,[3] to have received his doctrine of fate from the masters of that sect, as they received it from the Stoics. And he observes further, that the Stoic philosophy is necessary for the explication of Christian theology; that there are examples in the holy scriptures of the Holy Ghost’s speaking according to the opinions of the Stoics, and that in particular the apostle St. Paul in what he has disputed concerning predestination and reprobation, is to be expounded according to the Stoics’ opinion concerning fate. So that Liberty is both the real foundation of popular Atheism, and has been the professed principle of the Atheists themselves; as on the other side, Fate, or the necessity of events, has been esteemed a religious opinion and been the professed principle of the religious, both among heathens and Jews, and also of that great convert to Christianity and great converter of others, St. Paul.[4]
- ↑ Jud. l. 2, c. 7.
- ↑ Acts xxiii., 6.
- ↑ Proleg. ad Stearn, de Obstin. sect. 40 and 41.
- ↑ This treatment of the Jewish sects shows that Collins was a shrewd polemist. By pressing religion into the service of his argument in this way he was wounding his adversaries in a vital place. The reference to St. Paul is extremely effective, besides proving that Collins had a sly humor. But, at this time of day, it must be said that the Jewish sects were really divided over predestination, and not over the doctrine of moral causation. Between them, as between the Epicureans and Stoics, it was the direction of human affairs by God or the gods that was in dispute, and by no means whether volition was determined by motives. Now that the real question of Free Will versus Determinism is
