V.] JOSEPH PRIESTLEY. 115 



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 thence- 

 forward 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 ;" * 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 pub- 

 lished 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 

 for ever 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 spell- 

 bound, 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 



1 First Series. "On Some of the Peculiarities of the Christian 

 Religion." Essay I. Revelation of a Future State. 



