COLLIER, JEREMY English nonjuring di vine, was born at Cambridgeshire, on Sept. 23 1650. He was educated at Ipswich free school, of which his father was master, and at Caius college, Cambridge, He was appointed in 167g to the small rectory of Ampton, near Bury St. Edmunds, and in i685 he was made lecturer of Gray's Inn. He was a nonjuror, and at the Revolution he was sent to Newgate for writing in favour of James II. a tract entitled The Desertion discuss'd in a Letter to a Country Gentleman (1688), in answer to Bishop Burnet's defence of King William's position. He was released after some months of imprisonment, without trial, but in 1692 he was again in prison under suspicion of treasonable cor respondence with James. His scruples forbade him to acknowl edge the jurisdiction of the court by accepting bail, but he was soon released. In 1696 for his boldness in granting absolution on the scaffold to Sir John Friend and Sir William Parkyns, who had attempted to assassinate William, he was obliged to flee, and for the rest of his life continued under sentence of outlawry.
When the storm had blown over, he returned to London. In 1697 appeared the first volume of his Essays on Several Moral Subjects, to which a second was added in 1705, and a third in 1709. In 1698 Collier produced his famous Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. . . . He at tacked the immorality of the contemporary stage, supporting his contentions by references to the comparative decency of Latin and Greek drama, the profane language of the plays, the abuse of the clergy common in the drama, the encouragement of vice by representing the vicious characters as admirable and ful; and supported his general position by the analysis of par ticular plays, Dryden's Amphitryon, Vanbrugh's Relapse and D'Urfey's Don Quixote. Collier had no artistic appreciation of the subject he discussed, and he mistook cause for effect in asserting that the decline in public morality was the result of the flagrant indecency of the stage. He owed a good deal to Thomas Rymer's Tragedies of the Lost Age printed zo years before. Dryden contented himself with protesting against Col lier's insolence; but Congreve made an angry reply; Vanbrugh and others followed. Collier defended himself in numerous tracts: a Defence (16gg ), a Second Defence (I700), and Mr. Collier's Dissuasive from the Playhouse, in a Letter to a Person of Quality (1703), and a Further Vindication (1708). The fight lasted in all about ten years. The actual effect on the stage of Collier's onslaught has been much exaggerated by historians. The drama tists were incensed, but they did not mend their ways.
From 1701 to 1721 Collier was employed on his Great His torical, Geographical, Genealogical, and Poetical Dictionary, founded on, and partly translated from, Louis Moreri's Diction naire historique, and in the compilation and issue of the two volumes folio of his own Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain from the first planting of Christianity to the end of the reign of Charles II. (1708-14). The latter work was attacked by Burnet and others, but the author showed himself as keen a controver sialist as ever. Many attempts were made to shake his fidelity to the lost cause of the Stuarts, but he continued indomitable to the end. In 1712 George Hickes was the only survivor of the nonjuring bishops, and in the next year Collier was consecrated. He had a share in an attempt made towards union with the Greek Church. He had a long correspondence with the Orthodox authorities, his last letters on the subject being written in 1725. Collier preferred the version of the Book of Common Prayer issued in 1549, and regretted that certain practices and petitions there enjoined were omitted in later editions. His first tract on the subject, Reasons for Restoring some Prayers (1717), was followed by others. In 1718 was published a new Communion Office taken partly from Primitive Liturgies and partly from the first English Reformed Common Prayer Book ... which em bodied the changes desired by Collier. The controversy that ensued made a split in the nonjuring communion. His last work was a volume of Practical Discourses, published in 1725. He died April 26 1726.