126 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY. [LECT. 



men's assent ; and you will have a faint image of the 

 astounding difference in this respect between the nine- 

 teenth century and the eighteenth. 



If we ask what is the deeper meaning of all these 

 vast changes, I think there can be but one reply. 

 They mean that reason has asserted and exercised her 

 primacy over all provinces of human activity : that 

 ecclesiastical authority has been relegated to its proper 

 place ; that the good of the governed has been finally 

 recognised as the end of government, and the com- 

 plete responsibility of governors to the people as its 

 means; and that the dependence of natural pheno- 

 mena in general, on the laws of action of what we call 

 matter has become an axiom. 



But it was to bring these things about, and to 

 enforce the recognition of these truths, that Joseph 

 Priestley laboured. If the nineteenth century is other 

 and better than the eighteenth, it is, in great measure, 

 to him and to such men as he, that we owe the change. 

 If the twentieth century is to be better than the nine- 

 teenth, it will be because there are among us men 

 who walk in Priestley's footsteps. 



Such men are not those whom their own generation 

 delights to honour ; such men, in fact, rarely trouble 

 themselves about honour, but ask, in another spirit 

 than Falstaff's, " What is honour ? Who hath it ? 

 He that died o' Wednesday. " But whether Priestley's 

 lot be theirs, and a future generation, in justice and 

 in gratitude, set up their statues ; or whether their 

 names and fame are blotted out from remembrance, 

 their work will live as long as time endures. To all 



