130 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY. 



pervaded the land, from the highest to the lowest classes 

 of society. The Established Church was torpid, so far 

 as it was not a scandal ; but those who dissented from 

 it came within the meshes of the Act of Uniformity, 

 the Test Act, and the Corporation Act. By law, such a 

 man as Priestley, being a Unitarian, could neither teach 

 nor preach, and was liable to ruinous fines and long im- 

 prisonment.* In those days, the guns that were pointed 

 by the Church against the Dissenters were shotted. The 

 law was a cesspool of iniquity and cruelty. Adam Smith 

 was a new prophet whom few regarded, and commerce 

 was hampered by idiotic impediments, and ruined by 

 still more absurd help, on the part of government. 



Birmingham, though already the centre of a consid- 

 erable industry, was a mere village as compared with 

 its present extent. People who travelled went about 

 armed, by reason of the abundance of highwaymen and 

 the paucity and inefficiency of the police. Stage coaches 

 had not reached Birmingham, and it took three days to 

 get to London. Even canals were a recent and much 

 opposed invention. 



Newton had laid the foundation of a mechanical con- 

 ception of the physical universe: Hartley, putting a 

 modern face upon ancient materialism, had extended 

 that mechanical conception to psychology ; Linnaeus and 

 Haller were beginning to introduce method and order 

 into the chaotic accumulation of biological facts. But 

 those parts of physical science which deal with heat ? 



* In 1732 Doddridge was cited for teaching without the Bishop's 

 leave, at Northampton. 



