 The Discourse received a good number of replies. Steele commented that the author of the Discourse deserved “to be denied the common benefits of air and water” (quoted in O’Higgins 1970: 78). The Guardian campaigned against the Discourse. Among the articles it published were some by the young George Berkeley. There is a certain amount of scholarly debate about how effective these replies were. From early on, historians have often claimed that Richard Bently in his Remarks about a late Discourse of Freethinking delivered a crushing rejoinder to Collins. James O’Higgins in his book-length study of Collins probably gives the most balanced assessment. O’Higgins admits that Bently, on the whole, makes a strictly ad hominem attack on Collins. He attacked Collins’ scholarship and accused him of atheism. O’Higgins thinks that Bently succeeded in showing that “Collins was not the man to produce a critical edition of the Bible” (O’Higgins 1970: 84). O’Higgins also remarks that Bently correctly points out that Collins did not understand the role of textual variants in reducing (rather than increasing) our uncertainty about the meaning of a text. Since Collins is maintaining that everyone capable of doing so should reason about religious matters, claims that he failed to reason correctly may have more bite to them than other ad hominem arguments. But while these are good points, set against the fact that Bently completely failed to address the main issue of religious authority, this can hardly amount to a crushing rejoinder.