JOSEPH PRIESTLEY. 101 



of man, respectable folks look upon him as an unsafe neighbor of a cash- 

 box, as an actualor 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 ren- 

 dering him substantial help, in. all the crises of his career. 



The unspotted purity of Priestley's life, the strictness of his per- 

 formance 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 o-ood 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 na'ive 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, what- 

 ever 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 resurrec- 

 tion 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 



1 First Series. " On Some of the Peculiarities of the Christian Religion." Essay I. 

 Revelation of a Future State. 



