PRIESTLEY. 419 



procure a pension from the Government, " wishing to 

 preserve himself independent of every thing connected 

 with the Court." We must on this be content to 

 remark, that different men entertain different notions 

 of independence. 



Settled at Birmingham, he continued, however, his 

 controversial writings, and engaged eagerly in conflict 

 with Gibbon upon his celebrated chapters respecting 

 the Early History of Christianity, and with Bishop 

 Horsley upon the Socinian doctrines. In the latter 

 controversy the Episcopal and the Sectarian tempe- 

 rature, both high, were not very unequal ; but in the 

 former the minister of the Gospel had all the heat to 

 himself at least in the layman it was latent, if it 

 existed at all. He was desirous of drawing his 

 adversary into a controversy, and, failing in this, lost 

 his temper, and had the vulgar recourse to calling 

 names and imputing motives. Mr. Gibbon may have 

 shown some superciliousness in his treatment of this 

 angry polemic ; but he certainly had a good right to 

 marvel at the intolerance of one whose heterodoxy was 

 so universal as to "condemn by circumscribing the 

 inspiration of the Evangelists, and to condemn the reli- 

 gion of every Christian nation as a fable less innocent, 

 not less absurd, than Mahomet's journey to the third 

 heaven." How fortunate it was that Priestley lived in 

 an age when the use of actual fire is withheld from 

 theological disputants, as a mode of argumentation, 

 must appear from the wonder he expresses at David 

 Hume's monument having been so long suffered to 

 offend the pious eyes of the Edinburgh people an ex- 

 pression which might seem to convey a hint that he 



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