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Updated: June 1, 2025
I remember that, in the assembly of these distinguished men, amongst whom Mr. Priestley entered after him, that the glory of the one was terrestrial, that of the other celestial; and utterly far as I am removed from a belief in the sufficiency of Dr. Priestley's theological creed, I cannot but here record this evidence of the eternal power of any portion of the truth held in its vitality."
I do not think lightly of Paley's works on the Evidences, or of Miall's Bases of Belief, or of Dr. Hopkins', or Dr. Channing's, or Dr. Priestley's Evidences of Christianity; but the Bible, and especially the story of Christ, was the principal instrument of my conversion. I believed first with my heart rather than my head.
I am not here either to defend or to attack Priestley's philosophical views, and I cannot say that I am personally disposed to attach much value to episcopal authority in philosophical questions; but it seems right to call attention to the fact, that those of Priestley's opinions which have brought most odium upon him have been openly promulgated, without challenge, by persons occupying the highest positions in the State Church.
But the chain somehow snapped between them, and the issue has been that nobody now cares about either any more than about Hartley's, Darwin's, or Priestley's contemporaneous doings in England. The judgment goes to the root of the matter. The method of Reid inevitably led to this result.
They rendered to the priests the things that were Priestley's, as they were reminded by a facetious paper published at the time.
But he has little or nothing of Priestley's utilitarianism and the whole argument is upon the abstract basis of right. Liberty means self-government, and self-government means the right of every man to be his own legislator. Price, with strict logic, follows out this doctrine to its last consequence.
He rummaged over Tovey and Ockley; and "Priestley's Letters to the Jews," and "The Letters of certain Jews to M. de Voltaire," were books which he now continually quoted in conversation.
He has been occasionally employed as a bully at elections by the Tory party, and he may serve us in the same capacity. The fellow comes of a good stock; I heard him say that his father headed the High Church mob who sacked and burnt Priestley's house at Birmingham, towards the end of the last century. 'A disgraceful affair, said I.
No man, however, who is endowed with a fair share of common sense, and not more than a fair share of vanity, will identify either contemporary or posthumous fame with the highest good; and Priestley's life leaves no doubt that he, at any rate, set a much higher value upon the advancement of knowledge, and the promotion of that freedom of thought which is at once the cause and the consequence of intellectual progress.
Madan has his reward, three quarters of a column in the Dictionary of National Biography. But to-day Priestley's statue stands in a public square of Birmingham opposite the Council House. Thus do matters get themselves readjusted in this very interesting world. Some of them are stilted and dull, but they are actual 'documents, and the words in them are alive with the passion of that day.
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