24: JOSEPH nilESTLEY i 



strictness of his performance of every duty, his 

 transparent sincerity, the unostentatious and deep- 

 seated piety wliich breathes through all his corre- 

 spondence, are in themselves a sufhcient 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 naive 

 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 doc- 

 trine to know that views, substantially identical 

 with Priestley's, have been advocated, since his 

 time, by two prelates of the xYnglican Church: by 

 Dr. Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, in his well- 

 known " Essays "; * and by Dr. Courtenay, Bishop 

 of Kingston in Jamaica, the first edition of whose 

 remarkable book '^ On the Future States,'' dedi- 

 cated to Archbishop Whately, was published 



* First Sorios. On Some of the Ppnilinrifies of the 

 Christian Religion. Essay I. " Revelation of a Future 

 State." 



