Anthony Collins's Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons sets sprightly and audacious prose over a clutter of footnotes. The material reason for the footnotes was Collins's large library ‘in a very commodious room upstairs’ in his house at Great Baddow in Essex (BM Addit. MSS 4282. f. 222). He was an avid and famous book collector and bought books for his friend John Locke. The library numbered 6906 items at his death and included nearly everything of importance in biblical criticism: Grotius, Hobbes, Spinoza, Simon, Le Clerc, Whiston – and of course, Locke. While the footnotes are a rhetorical device, parading his reading, the reading was wide and deep. He knew what the questions were and, with such a collection at his disposal, can claim to be a gathering point of biblical studies up to his time.

Yet he wrote with a tendentious energy which, in spite of the footnotes, was impatient of scholarly precision. Bentley had bitten him hard for this after the publication of his Discourse of Free Thinking, and a clear-eyed view of Collins's axe-grinding is necessary to the reader of the present text. His Christian theism was dominated, even overlaid, by an optimistic passion for free enquiry fed by Locke but outstripping his master; and a hatred of religious officialdom, particularly of priests, and Roman Catholics.

Collins's tendency is revealed by uncovering the route to the use of Surenhusius which makes the tour de force of his argument here.