JOSEPH PRIESTLEY. 123 



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 im- 

 mortality of man, he held with an almost nai've 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 doctrine to know that views, substan- 

 tially 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 remark- 

 able book " On the Future States," dedicated to Arch- 

 bishop "Whately, was published in 1843 and the second 

 in 1857. According to Bishop Courtenay, 



" The death of the bodj 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 spellbound, 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 man, are results of our 

 blessed Lord's victory over sin and death ; that the resurrection of 



* First series. " On Some of the Peculiarities of the Cliristian Relig- 

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



