24 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY I 



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 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," dedi- 

 cated 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 

 for ever UNLESS the Creator should interfere." 



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

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



