Hayley wrote to Cowper, whom until then he had not known, and there was established friendly fellowship between them. Visits were exchanged, and Cowper spent six weeks with Hayley at Eartham. The best English translations of the Latin poems of Milton were the produce of this fellowship. But Mrs. Unwin became worse. Cowper sank again into insanity. The king granted him a pension of £300, when the sufferer hardly knew what it meant. October, 1796, they removed to East Dereham, where Mrs. Unwin died. For the rest of his life Cowper's only chance of health was in the sustained care of his friends to support his mind by occupation of it. In March, 1799, he finished the revision of his Homer, and he died on the 25th of April, 1800.

CHAPTER XIII.

In

FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE ACCESSION OF QUEEN VICTORIA.-PRIESTLEY, PALEY, HEBER, CHALMERS, WORDSWORTH, KEBLE, AND OTHERS. -A.D. 1789 TO A.D. 1837.

JOSEPH, the son of Jonas Priestley, who was a clothdresser at Birstal Fieldhead, near Leeds, was born in 1733. His mother died when he was six years old, and he was adopted by Mrs. Keighley, a sister of his father's. He learnt Latin and Greek at the local grammar-school, and Hebrew in the holidays. He worked also at Chaldee, Syriac, and Arabic, besides French, German, and Italian. His health was delicate; while he was a schoolboy his lungs were not sound. When nineteen he joined the academy at Daventry, now incorporated with New College, London. He was to enter the ministry, and had been trained in Calvinistic opinions, but as a youth inclined rather to the different opinions of Harmensen (Arminius). The minister of the congregation in which he attended with his aunt had refused young Priestley the communion, because he had doubts on the subject of original sin and on eternity of punishment. At the Daventry Academy, where he was trained for the ministry under the successor of Dr. Doddridge,1 young men were required to study both sides of each argument; on many subjects there was division of opinion, and the side usually taken by Priestley was not the orthodox. As a student he began to write his "Institutes of Natural and Re

vealed Religion," of which the four parts were published in 1772-3-4, seventeen or eighteen years after he had left the Training College. Priestley began the ministry at Needham Market, in Suffolk, with a stipend of £30 a year, and sought pupils at half-aguinea a quarter, who might be boarded for £12 a year. He was not orthodox enough for his congregation, and was the less successful as a preacher, because he had an impediment of speech. After three

1 Dr. Philip Doddridge, who died at the age of forty-nine, in 1751, was a close friend of Dr. Samuel Clarke. "The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul" was the most popular of his works, and some of the Hymns written by him are very good. His influence was great as a trainer of young men for the dissenting ministry, and several of his pupils abandoned the doctrine of the Trinity.

years at Needham Market, Priestley moved in 1758 to Nantwich, where he had another congregation, and succeeded better in obtaining pupils. At Nantwich his interest in scientific inquiry deepened, and he saved money enough to buy an air-pump and an electrical machine. In 1761, Priestley, aged twentyeight, left Nantwich to become teacher of languages and belles lettres in the academy at Warrington. At Warrington he married Miss Wilkinson, the daughter of a Welsh ironmaster. In 1767, Priestley, who had for his interest in science just been made a Fellow of the Royal Society, visited London, and was introduced to Benjamin Franklin, who aided him with books for his "History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments," which appeared before the close of the same year. He obtained also at this time the degree of LL.D. from the University of Edinburgh. It was in the same year 1767 that Priestley left Warrington, and was engaged for Mill-hill Chapel, Leeds. At Leeds, in the next year, he began the course of investigations that led to his discovery, in 1774, of oxygen gas, which he called dephlogisticated air. Other important discoveries followed. In 1773 Dr. Priestley had become librarian and literary companion to the Earl of Shelburne, with £250 a year and a house. He travelled with Lord Shelburne, and at Paris was introduced to the chief men of science, who told him he was the only sensible man they knew who believed in Christianity. In 1780 Lord Shelburne parted from Priestley, giving him an annuity of £150 a year, and Priestley then became minister to the chief Dissenting congregation at Birmingham. He was still publishing from time to time the results of his scientific inquiries, and in 1780 there appeared an answer to such arguments against religion as he had heard at Paris, in his "Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, containing an Examination of the Principal Objections to the Doctrines of Natural Religion, and especially those contained in the writings of Mr. Hume." In 1787, Priestley added a treatise on the "State of the Evidence of Revealed Religion, with Animadversions on the two last chapters of the first volume of Mr. Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Fifty-six years old, and the author of many scientific and religious books, this was Priestley's position at Birmingham at the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.

William Paley was ten years younger than Joseph borough, where his father was a minor canon. Priestley. He was born in July, 1743, at Peter

William Paley the elder presently resigned his minor canonry to become head-master of the school of Giggleswick, in Yorkshire. There William, his eldest son, was taught until November, 1758, when, at the age of fifteen, he was admitted to Christ's College, Cambridge, as a sizar. He did not go into residence at once, but studied mathematics under a private tutor, and joined his college in October, 1759. In the following December he was appointed to a scholarship from Giggleswick school, and was also elected scholar on the college foundation, and appointed to the exhibition founded by Sir Walter Mildmay. In May, 1761, he was also elected to the Buntry Scholarship. For two years he was a somewhat idle student; then

I spent the first two years of my undergraduateship happily, but unprofitably. I was constantly in society, where we were not immoral, but idle and rather expensive. At the commencement of my third year, however, after having left the usual party at rather a late hour in the evening, I was awakened at five in the morning by one of my companions, who stood at my bedside and said, "Paley, I have been thinking what a d-d fool you are. I could do nothing, probably, were I to try, and can afford the life I lead; you could do everything, and cannot afford it. I have had no sleep during the whole night on account of these reflections, and am now come solemnly to inform you, that if you persist in your indolence, I must renounce your society." I was so struck with the visit and the visitor, that I lay in bed great part of the day, and formed my plan. I ordered my bed-maker to prepare my fire every evening, in order that it might be lighted by myself. I arose at five, read during the whole of the day, except such hours as chapel and hall required, allotting to each portion of time its peculiar branch of study; and just before the closing of the gates (nine o'clock) I went to a neighbouring coffeehouse, where I constantly regaled upon a mutton chop and a dose of milk-punch. And thus, on taking my bachelor's

degree, I became senior wrangler.

This was in 1763, when Paley's age was twenty. As he was too young to take orders, he became assistant at Greenwich in a school which prepared pupils for the army and navy. He practised very strict economy to enable himself to pay some college debts that he brought with him. After three years of work in the academy, he left it and took deacon's orders; but he remained in Greenwich as private tutor to a widow's son, and became assistant-curate to the vicar. In 1766, Paley obtained a fellowship on the foundation of his college, and completed the degree of M.A., his age then being twenty-three. In October, 1767, when his pupil at Greenwich went to Cambridge, Paley returned to his college, took private pupils in Cambridge, was ordained priest, and in 1768 was made one of the two assistant-tutors of his college (the other being John, son of Edmund Law, the Bishop of Carlisle), under the sole tutor, Dr. Shepherd. In 1771 he was appointed one of the Whitehall preachers. In 1775 Paley was presented by his friend, Dr. Edmund Law, Bishop of Carlisle, to the rectory of Musgrave, in Westmoreland, a living of £80 a year. In 1776 he vacated his fellowship by marrying Miss Jane Hewitt, of Carlisle, and was presented in December to the vicarage of Dalston, in Cumberland, worth £90 a year, holding Musgrave

still.

In 1777 he resigned Musgrave on being presented by the Dean and Chapter of Carlisle to the vicarage of Appleby, in Westmoreland, worth about £300 a year. He then resided for six months of the year at Appleby, and six at Dalston. In 1780 there was an addition of £400 a year to his income by his collation to the fourth prebendal stall in the church of Carlisle. His old fellow-tutor, John Law, had been presented by his father to the vicarage of Warkworth and to a prebendal stall at Carlisle, and in 1777 had been made Archdeacon of Carlisle. In 1782 Archdeacon Law became an Irish bishop, and

archdeacon at the age of thirty-nine. His time was now spent partly at Dalston, and partly at Carlisle, where, in 1785, the office of chancellor of the diocese was added to his preferments.

It was in this year, 1785, that Paley published his "Elements of Moral and Political Philosophy," a book formed by the recasting of lectures that he had formerly given at Christ's College. It provoked much controversy. One of its lines of thought was developed in 1788, when Archdeacon Paley wrote a letter advocating abolition of the slave-trade; and in 1789 he addressed to the committee formed to secure its abolition, "Arguments against the unjust pretensions of slave-dealers and holders to be indemnified by pecuniary allowances at the public expense in case the slave-trade should be abolished." This was not published.

In 1790 William Paley published his argument for the authenticity of the Scriptures, entitled, "Horæ Paulina; or, the Truth of the Scripture History of St. Paul evinced by a Comparison of the Epistles which bear his Name with the Acts of the Apostles, and with one another." In 1792 he was instituted to

the vicarage of Addingham, near Great Salkeld, worth about £140. He had at this time eight children, and had lost his wife in the preceding year.

The stir caused in England by the French Revolution led Paley to publish as a separate pamphlet the chapter on the British Constitution from his "Moral and Political Philosophy." Although it had been written ten years before the fall of the Bastille, and only set forth the doctrines illustrated by the English Constitution, there were many who regarded this reprint as a sign of sympathy with disorder. But Paley was not an enthusiast. He was an amiable, clear-headed Englishman, who had made the Church his profession, and was glad to rise in it; whose bent of mind was opposed to an undue exercise of authority

in politics and religion; who had no leaning towards technical theology, but sought in his writings, as far as his light served, to meet the deniers of God, who in his day abounded, by argument from Nature and by evidences of the truth of Revelation. He published in 1794 his "Evidences of Christianity," and was made sub-dean of Lincoln. In the following year he took his degree of D.D., and was presented to the valuable rectory of Bishop Wearmouth. then divided his time between Lincoln and Bishop Wearmouth. He suffered much from ill health while writing his "Natural Theology; or, Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the appearances of Nature." This appeared in 1802, and Paley died in 1805, aged sixty-two.

He

Mr. Hume states the case of miracles to be a contest of opposite improbabilities, that is to say, a question whether it be more improbable that the miracle should be true, or the testimony false; and this I think a fair account of the controversy. But herein I remark a want of argumentative justice, that, in describing the improbability of miracles, he suppresses all those circumstances of extenuation which result from our knowledge of the existence, power, and disposition of the Deity, his concern in the creation, the end answered by the miracle, the importance of that end, and its subserviency to the plan pursued in the work of nature. As Mr. Hume has represented the question, miracles are alike incredible to him who is previously assured of the constant agency of a Divine Being, and to him who believes that no such Being exists in the universe. They are equally incredible, whether related to have been wrought upon occasions the most deserving, and for purposes the most beneficial, or for no assignable end whatever, or for an end confessedly trifling or pernicious. This surely cannot be a correct statement. In adjusting also the other side of the balance, the strength and weight of testimony, this author has provided an answer to every possible accumulation of historical proof, by telling us that we are not obliged to explain how the story or the evidence arose. Now I think that we are obliged; not, perhaps, to show by positive accounts how it did, but by a probable hypothesis how it might so happen. The existence of the testimony is a phenomenon. The truth of the fact solves the phenomenon. If we reject this solution, we ought to have some other to rest in; and none even by our adversaries can be admitted, which is not consistent with the principles that regulate human affairs and human conduct at present, or which makes men then to have been a different kind of beings from what they are now.

But the short consideration which, independently of every other, convinces me that there is no solid foundation in Mr. Hume's conclusion is the following. When a theorem is proposed to a mathematician, the first thing he does with it is to try it upon a simple case; and if it produce a false result, he is sure that there must be some mistake in the demonstration. Now to proceed in this way with what may be called Mr. Hume's theorem. If twelve men, whose probity and good sense I had long known, should seriously and circumstantially relate to me an account of a miracle wrought before their eyes, and in which it was impossible that they should be

deceived; if the governor of the country, hearing a rumour of this account, should call these men into his presence, and offer them a short proposal, either to confess the imposture, or submit to be tied up to a gibbet; if they should refuse with one voice to acknowledge that there existed any falsehood or imposture in the case; if this threat were communicated to them separately, yet with no different effect; if it was at last executed; if I myself saw them, one after another, consenting to be racked, burnt, or strangled, rather than give up the truth of their account; still, if Mr. Hume's rule be my guide, I am not to believe them. Now, I undertake to say that there exists not a sceptic in the world who would not believe them, or who would defend such incredulity.

Instances of spurious miracles supported by strong apparent testimony undoubtedly demand examination. Mr. Hume has endeavoured to fortify his argument by some examples of this kind. I hope in a proper place to show that none of them reach the strength or circumstances of the Christian evidence. In these, however, consists the weight of his objection. In the principle itself I am persuaded there is

none.

Paley's argument is divided into three parts. The first part treats "of the direct historical Evidence of Christianity, and wherein it is distinguished from the evidence alleged for other miracles;" and it argues for two propositions:

1. That there is satisfactory evidence that many, professing to be original witnesses of the Christian miracles, passed their lives in labours, dangers, and sufferings, voluntarily undergone in attestation of the accounts which they delivered, and solely in consequence of their belief of those accounts; and that they also submitted, from the same motives, to new rules of conduct.

2. That there is not satisfactory evidence that persons professing to be original witnesses of other miracles, in their nature as certain as these are, have ever acted in the same manner, in attestation of the accounts which they delivered, and properly in consequence of their belief of those accounts.

Paley's second part treats of "the Auxiliary Evidences of Christianity in Prophecy, the Morality of the Gospel, the Candour of the Writers of the New Testament, the Identity and Originality of Christ's Character, the conformity of the facts occasionally referred to with the state of things in those times, undesigned coincidences, and the history of the Resurrection." The third part considers some popular objections.

Joseph Priestley, at the time of the fall of the Bastille, was settled in Birmingham as pastor of a congregation known as the New Meeting; he cultivated science and maintained the religious life, but with great boldness and acuteness of reasoning questioned doctrines that the Church held to be vital. In 1782 he had published at Birmingham, in two volumes, "An History of the Corruptions of Christianity," dedicated to the Rev. Theophilus Lindsey. Theophilus Lindsey, born in Cheshire in 1723, and educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, resigned the vicarage of Catterick in 1773, because he could no longer teach the doctrine of the Trinity. He came to London, and established in Essex Street, Strand, a Unitarian Chapel, in which he conducted service with use of a liturgy altered by Dr. Samuel Clarke from that of

the Established Church. In this chapel Lindsey preached when Priestley dedicated to him his work on the "Corruptions of Christianity," and he was minister there until a few years before his death in 1808. In 1802 Lindsey published "Conversations on the Divine Government," showing that everything is from God, and for the good of all. His successor in the pulpit at Essex Street Chapel was Dr. Disney, another clergyman who had left the Established Church because he could not teach the doctrine of the Trinity; and in 1805 Dr. Disney was followed by Thomas Belsham, born in 1750, the son of a Presbyterian minister at Bedford. Thomas Belsham

JOSEPH PRIESTLEY. (From Charles Knight's "Gallery of Portraits.")

was trained for the Presbyterian ministry, and appointed tutor in its college at Daventry, but was convinced by the arguments of Priestley, and seceded in 1789. He was founder in 1791 of a "Unitarian Society for promoting Christian Knowledge and the Practice of Virtue." In 1794 he succeeded Priestley as Unitarian minister at Hackney, but left Hackney for Essex Street in 1805, and continued pastor there for twenty-one years. He was an active religious writer, and lived to the age of seventy-nine.

In the dedication of his "History of the Corruptions of Christianity" to Theophilus Lindsey, Priestley wrote:

Dear Friend,-Wishing as I do that my name may ever be connected as closely with yours after death as we have been connected by friendship in life, it is with peculiar satisfaction that I dedicate this work (which I am willing to hope will be one of the most useful of my publications) to you. To your example of a pure love of truth, and of the most fearless integrity in asserting it, evidenced by the sacrifices you have made to it, I owe much of my own wishes to imbibe the same spirit; though a more favourable education and situation in life, by not giving me an opportunity of distinguishing myself as you have done, has likewise not exposed me to the temptation of acting otherwise; and for this I wish to be truly thankful. For since so very few of those who profess the

same sentiments with you have had the courage to act consistently with them, no person, whatever he may imagine he might have been equal to, can have a right to presume that he would have been one of so small a number.

No person can see in a stronger light than you do the mischievous consequence of the corruptions of that religion which you justly prize as the most valuable of the gifts of God to man: and therefore I flatter myself it will give you some pleasure to accompany me in my researches into the origin and progress of them, as this will tend to give all the friends of pure Christianity the fullest satisfaction that they reflect no discredit on the revelation itself; since it will be seen that they all came in from a foreign and hostile quarter. It will likewise afford a pleasing presage that our religion will, in due time, purge itself of everything that debases it, and that for the present prevents its reception by those who are ignorant of its nature, whether living in Christian countries, or among Mahometans and heathens.

The more opposition we meet with in these labours, the more honourable it will be to us, provided we meet that opposition with the true spirit of Christianity; and to assist us in this we should frequently reflect that many of our opponents are probably men who wish as well to the Gospel as we do ourselves, and really think they do God service by opposing

us.

Even prejudice and bigotry, arising from such a principle, are respectable things, and entitled to the greatest candour. If our religion teaches us to love our enemies, certainly we should love, and, from a principle of love, should endeavour to convince, those who, if they were only better informed, would embrace us as friends.

The time will come when the cloud which, for the present, prevents our distinguishing our friends and our foes, will be dispersed, even that day in which the secrets of all hearts will be disclosed to the view of all. In the meantime, let us think as favourably as possible of all men, our particular opponents not excepted; and therefore be careful to conduct all hostility with the pleasing prospect that one day it will give place to the most perfect amity.

You, my friend, peculiarly happy in a most placid, as well as a most determined mind, have nothing to blame yourself for in this respect. If, on any occasion, I have indulged too much in asperity, I hope I shall, by your example, learn to correct myself, and without abating my zeal in the common

cause.

As we are now both of us past the meridian of life, I hope we shall be looking more and more beyond it, and be preparing for that world where we shall have no errors to combat, and consequently where a talent for disputation will be of no use; but where the spirit of love will find abundant exercise; where all our labours will be of the most, friendly and benevolent nature, and where our employment will be its own reward.

Let these views brighten the evening of our lives, that evening which will be enjoyed with more satisfaction as the day shall have been laboriously and well spent. Let us then, without reluctance, submit to that temporary rest in the grave which our wise Creator has thought proper to appoint for all the human race, our Saviour himself not wholly excepted, anticipating with joy the glorious morning of the resurrection, when we shall meet that Saviour whose precepts we have obeyed, whose spirit we have breathed, whose religion we have defended, whose cup also we may, in some measure, have drank of, and whose honours we have asserted, without making them to interfere with those of His Father and our Father, His God and our God, that supreme, that great and awful Being to whose will He was always most

perfectly submissive, and for whose unrivalled prerogative he always showed the most ardent zeal.

Priestley's "History of the Corruptions of Christianity," written as a sequel to his "Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion," was supplemented in 1787 with more detailed evidence, in four volumes, of "An History of Early Opinion concerning Jesus Christ, compiled from original writers; proving that the Christian Church was at first Unitarian." He gathered the material for this work by first reading the original writers from whom evidence was to be drawn, "without looking into any modern author whatever." Then, he says, "having collected and arranged these materials, furnished by these original authors, I applied myself to the reading of all the modern writers of any reputation for learning in ecclesiastical history, whether their opinions were the same with mine or not. But the addition that I made to my own collection of authorities by this means amounted to very little-not more than about twenty or thirty, and those, in general, of no great consequence."

In 1791, a mob at Birmingham, excited by denunciations against Priestley, upon occasion of a celebration of the fall of the Bastille, on the 14th of July, showed its "talent for disputation" by burning the meeting-house in which he preached, then another meeting-house of the Dissenters, then Priestley's dwelling-house, with his library and his MSS., his laboratory, and his philosophical instruments, and then burning or damaging the houses of some other Dissenters. William Cowper wrote from Weston on the 2nd of August following, to a clergyman, the Rev. W. Bagot, "You live, I think, in the neighbourhood of Birmingham, what must you have felt on the late alarming occasion? You, I suppose, could see the fires from your windows. We, who only heard the news of them, have trembled. Never, sure, was religious zeal more detestably manifested, or more to the prejudice of its own cause." The fury passed, and Birmingham has since paid honour to the memory of Priestley, by raising to him a graceful statue which was uncovered with every circumstance that could be held to mark an emphatic recognition of his genius and worth.

Thus driven from Birmingham in 1791, Priestley went to London, and succeeded Dr. Richard Price as pastor of the Gravel-pit Meeting-house, at Hackney. Dr. Price had died in the preceding March. He was born in Glamorganshire, in 1723, and had distinguished himself not only as a preacher, but as a contributor to the "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society." He was a friend of the Americans when they were forced into the war that led to Independence, and took deep interest, as his life closed, in the hopes awakened by the fall of the Bastille. As successor to Dr. Price, Priestley remained scarcely three years in London. Persecuted for his religious as well as for his political doctrines, Priestley, after coming to London, still battled with the scepticism that had spread from France. He published a series of "Letters to the Philosophers and Politicians of France on the subject of Religion," and a set of "Discourses on the Evidences of Revealed Religion."

But the spirit of controversy was fierce, even among men of science; for some Priestley believed too much, for some too little. Scientific friends dropped from him. Most of the members of the Royal Society, him; and in April, 1794, Dr. Priestley, with the wife high as his place was among discoverers, avoided and children who had always maintained peace and love within their home, left England for America. The last words of his last sermon at Hackney were addressed to the strangers present, and thus he closed: "Whether, then, you come as friends or as

enemies, whether we shall ever see one another's faces again or not, may God, whose providence is over all, bless, preserve, and keep us. Above all, may we be preserved in the paths of virtue and piety, that we may have a happy meeting in that world where error and prejudice will be no more; where all the ground of the party distinctions which subsist here will be taken away; where every misunderstanding will be cleared up, and the reign of truth and of virtue will be for ever established." Dr. Priestley's home thenceforth was at Northumberland, in Pennsylvania, until his death in February, 1804. When he was dying he had his grandchildren about him. In the evening, says their father, "after prayers

1 From a photograph kindly lent for engraving by the sculptor, F. J. Williamson, of Esher.