interest to others, till in 1722 all the debts were discharged by his integrity, care and management. These duties appear to have taken up Collins’s attention, for it was not till 1724 that his next work appeared. This was entitled A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion. It was the most powerful attack upon orthodoxy which had then appeared. With unerring aim he went to the weakest point of Christian Evidences. He maintained, what is indeed indisputable, that Christianity was founded on Judaism, and that the Apostles derive and prove Christianity from the Old Testament. But an examination of the Old Testament prophecies alleged to be fulfilled in the New Testament shows that they do not literally correspond. For example, Matt i., 22-23: “Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet [or rather, as the Revised Version gives it, by the Lord through the prophet], saying. Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel.” The words as they stand in Isaiah vii., 14, in their obvious and literal sense, refer to a young woman in the reign of Ahaz, king of Judah, and the context shows that the child was Isaiah’s own son, the prophet in this matter leaving nothing to the labors of his successors. The only resource is to say that the prophecy was typical, and this Collins explains as such a sense as no one could have discovered in the passages quoted in the New Testament simply as they stand in the Old; so that prophecy was verily a light in a dark place, but not overcoming the darkness, and God must have been in the habit of talking to his prophets in riddles. Collins does not expressly draw the natural inferences from the New Testament misquotations and misinterpretations. He writes as a Christian, and on this, as on many other points, the broad Christians of to-day have come to occupy the ground taken up by the Deists of last century.
Dr. John Hunt says: “Whatever error Collins may have made in detail, his great principle was fairly established, that the evidence for the truth of Christianity from prophecy rests in secondary or typical fulfilments.” The real purport of this admission is made plain in Leslie Stephen’s acute statement that Collins’s true meaning may be brought out by everywhere substituting “nonsense” for “allegory.”
