He applied this principle of divisive attack in _A Discourse of Free-Thinking_. There in fifty-three pages he transparently ridiculed contradictions which hedged three areas of fundamental religious belief: _"The Nature and Attributes of the Eternal Being or God, ... the Authority of Scriptures, and ... the Sense of Scripture."_ In accordance with one of his favorite tricks--the massing of eminent authority--his exposition rings with hallowed Anglican names: South, Bull, Taylor, Wallis, Carlton, Davenant, Edwards, More, Tillotson, Fowler, Sherlock, Stillingfleet, Sacheverell, Beveridge, Grabe, Hickes, Lesley.[18] What united these men, he insinuated, was not a Christian commitment but a talent to disagree with one another and even to repudiate themselves--as in the case of Stillingfleet. In effect, the entire _Discourse_ bubbles with a carelessly suppressed snicker. The clergy could not readily reply to this kind of incriminating exposure or deny its reality. They therefore overreacted to other judgments that Collins made, particularly to his attacks upon Christian revelation. These they denigrated as misleading, guileful, sinister, contrived, deceitful, insidious, shuffling, covert, subversive. What they objected to was, first, the way in which he reduced the demonstration of Christian revelation to only the "puzzling and perplexing" argument from prophecy, the casual ease with which he ignored or dismissed those other "clear" proofs derived from the miracles of Jesus and the resurrection itself.[19] But even more the orthodox resented the masked point of view from which Collins presented his disbelief. For example, the _Grounds and Reasons_ is the deist's first extended attack upon revelation. Ostensibly it is, as we have seen, an answer to Whiston's _Essay Towards Restoring the True Text of the Old Testament; and for Vindicating the Citations Made Thence in the New Testament_ (1722). In it the mathematician argued that the Hebraic prophecies relating to the messiah had been literally fulfilled in Jesus. But this truth, he admitted, had been obscured "in the latter Ages," only because of those "Difficulties" which "have [almost wholly] arisen from the Corruptions, the unbelieving _Jews_ introduc'd into the Hebrew and Greek copies of the Old Testament, [soon after] the Beginning of the Second Century." These conspiratorial corruptions he single-handedly planned to remove, returning the Old Testament to a state of textual purity with emendations drawn from sources as varied as the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Greek Psalms, the Antiquities of Josephus, the Chaldee Paraphrases, the books of Philo. His pragmatic purpose was to nullify the biblical criticism of historical minded scholars as reputable as Grotius, to render useless the allegorical interpretation of messianic prophecies. That is, he saw in the latter a "pernicious" absence of fact, a "weak and enthusiastical" whimsy, unchristian adjustments to the exigencies of the moment.[20]