Whitby’s defense might well have settled the issue had it not been taken up by those who used Mill’s thirty thousand places of variation precisely to the end that Whitby feared, to argue that the text of scripture could not be trusted because it was in itself so insecure. Chief among those who argued the point was the English deist Anthony Collins, a friend and follower of John Locke, who in 1713 wrote a pamphlet called Discourse on Free Thinking.
