human
: [738] and the argumentation consists in alleging that a good God must reveal himself, and that if the miracle stories of the New Testament had been false the Jews would have exposed and discarded them. Against such nugatory traditionalism, the criticism of Collins shone with the spirit of science. Not till 1723 did he publish his next work, A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, a weighty attack on the argument from prophecy, to which the replies numbered thirty-five; on which followed in 1727 his Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered, a reply to criticisms. The former work was pronounced by Warburton one of the most plausible ever written against Christianity, and he might well say so. It faced the argument from prophecy not merely with the skepticism of the ordinary deist, but with that weapon of critical analysis of which the use had been briefly shown by Hobbes and Spinoza. Apparently for the first time, he pointed out that the
gpt
in Isaiah had a plain reference to contemporary and not to future events; he showed that the