of man, respectable folks look upon him as an unsafe neighbor of a cashbox, as an actual or potential sensualist, the more virtuous in outward seeming, the more certainly loaded with secret "grave personal sins."
Nevertheless, it is as certain as any thing can be, that Joseph Priestley was no gloomy fanatic, but as cheerful and kindly a soul as ever breathed, the idol of children; a man who was hated only by those who did not know him, and who charmed away the bitterest prejudices in personal intercourse; a man who never lost a friend, and the best testimony to whose worth is the generous and tender warmth with which his many friends vied with one another in rendering him substantial help, in all the crises of his career.
The unspotted purity of Priestley's life, the strictness of his performance of every duty, his transparent sincerity, the unostentatious and deep-seated piety which breathes through all his correspondence, are in themselves a sufficient refutation of the hypothesis, invented by bigots to cover uncharitableness, that such opinions as his must arise from moral defects. And his statue will do as good service as the brazen image that was set upon a pole before the Israelites, if those who have been bitten by the fiery serpents of sectarian hatred, which still haunt this wilderness of a world, are made whole by looking upon the image of a heretic, who was yet a saint.
Though Priestley did not believe in the natural immortality of man, he held with an almost naïve realism, that man would be raised from the dead by a direct exertion of the power of God, and thenceforward be immortal. And it may be as well for those who may be shocked by this doctrine to know that views, substantially identical with Priestley's, have been advocated, since his time, by two prelates of the Anglican Church: by Dr. Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, in his well-known "Essays;"[1] and by Dr. Courtenay, Bishop of Kingston in Jamaica, the first edition of whose remarkable book, "On the Future States," dedicated to Archbishop Whately, was published in 1843, and the second in 1857. According to Bishop Courtenay—
"The death of the body will cause a cessation of all the activity of the mind by way of natural consequence; to continue forever unless the Creator should interfere."
And again:
"The natural end of human existence is the 'first death,' the dreamless slumber of the grave, wherein man lies spellbound, soul and body, under the dominion of sin and death that whatever modes of conscious existence, whatever future states of 'life' or of 'torment' beyond Hades are reserved for man, are results of our blessed Lord's victory over sin and death; that the resurrection of the dead must be preliminary to their entrance into either of the future states, and that the nature and even existence of these states, and even the mere
- ↑ First Series. "On Some of the Peculiarities of the Christian Religion." Essay I. Revelation of a Future State.
