An official picture of the situation is formally drawn in A Representation of the Present State of Religion, with regard to the late excessive growth of infidelity, heresy, and profaneness, drawn up by the Upper House of Convocation of the province of Canterbury in 1711. [729] This sets forth, as a result of the disorders of the Rebellion, a growth of all manner of unbelief and profanity, including denial of inspiration and the authority of the canon; the likening of Christian miracles to heathen fables; the treating of all religious mysteries as absurd speculations; Arianism and Socinianism and scoffing at the doctrine of the Trinity; denial of natural immortality; Erastianism; mockery of baptism and the Lord's Supper; decrying of all priests as impostors; the collecting and reprinting of infidel works; and publication of mock catechisms. It is explained that all such printing has greatly increased "since the expiration of the Act for restraining the press"; and mention is made of an Arian work just published to which the author has put his name, and which he has dedicated to the Convocation itself. This was the first volume of Whiston's Primitive Christianity Revived, the work of a devout eccentric, who had just before been deprived of his professorship at Cambridge for his orally avowed heresy. Whiston, whose cause was championed, and whose clerical opponents were lampooned, in an indecorous but vigorous sketch, The Tryal of William Whiston, Clerk, for defaming and denying the Holy Trinity, before the Lord Chief Justice Reason (1712; 3rd ed. 1740), always remained perfectly devout in his Arian orthodoxy; but his and his friends' arguments were rather better fitted to make deists than to persuade Christians; and Convocation's appeal for a new Act "restraining the present excessive and scandalous liberty of printing wicked books at home, and importing the like from abroad" was not responded to. There was no love lost between Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury; but the government in which the former, a known deist, was Secretary of State, could hardly undertake to suppress the works of the latter.
Deism had been thus made in a manner fashionable [730] when, in 1713, Anthony Collins (1676-1729) began a new development by his Discourse of Freethinking. He had previously published a notably freethinking Essay Concerning the Use of Reason (1707), albeit without specific impeachment of the reigning creed; carried on a discussion with Clarke on the question of the immateriality of the soul; and issued treatises entitled Priestcraft in Perfection (1709, dealing with the history of the Thirty-nine Articles) [731] and A Vindication of the Divine Attributes (1710), exposing the Hobbesian theism of Archbishop King on lines followed twenty years later by Berkeley in his Minute Philosopher. But none of these works aroused such a tumult as the Discourse of Freethinking, which may be said to sum up and unify the drift not only of previous English freethinking, but of the great contribution of Bayle, whose learning and temper influence all English deism from Shaftesbury onwards. [732] Collins's book, however, was unique in its outspokenness. To the reader of to-day, indeed, it is no very aggressive performance: the writer was a man of imperturbable amenity and genuine kindliness of nature; and his style is the completest possible contrast to that of the furious replies it elicited. It was to Collins that Locke wrote, in 1703: "Believe it, my good friend, to love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues; and, if I mistake not, you have as much of it as I ever met with in anybody." [733] The Discourse does no discredit to this uncommon encomium, being a luminous and learned plea for the conditions under which alone truth can be prosperously studied, and the habits of mind which alone can attain it. Of the many replies, the most notorious is that of Bentley writing as Phileleutherus Lipsiensis, a performance which, on the strength of its author's reputation for scholarship, has been uncritically applauded by not a few critics, of whom some of the most eminent do not appear to have read Collins's treatise. [734] Bentley's is in reality pre-eminent only for insolence and bad faith, the latter complicated by lapses of scholarship hardly credible on its author's part.