ENGLISH
MEN OF SCIENCE

EDITED BY
J. REYNOLDS GREEN, D.Sc.

JOSEPH PRIESTLEY

All Rights Reserved

PREFACE

In the following account of the life and work of that “hero and type of the intellectual energy of the eighteenth century”—the “honest heretic”—Joseph Priestley, I have, to a considerable extent, made the subject of it tell his own story. After Priestley’s death there was found among his papers a short autobiography, dealing with the main events of his life up to the time of his settlement in America. This was subsequently published, with additions and explanatory notes, by his eldest son. Of this biography I have made full use, considering it, of course, as the best authority on the matters to which it refers.

For the account of the Warrington Academy, with which institution Priestley was connected for some years, and which connection profoundly affected his career, I am mainly indebted to Mr Henry A. Bright’s paper in the Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1858-59.

The Yates papers in the possession of the Royal Society have also afforded me much assistance, and have been freely drawn upon.

I am also indebted to the late Mr Henry Carrington Bolton’s collection for certain letters and for information concerning the Lunar Society of Birmingham.

For the graphic account of the Birmingham Riots of 1791, when Priestley’s house was wrecked, and his library and laboratory destroyed, as described by an eye-witness, Miss Martha Russell, I have to express my obligations to her relative, Dr W. J. Russell, who first made me acquainted with her narrative. I am also indebted to Dr Russell for a copy of the print from which has been prepared the illustration showing the destruction of Priestley’s house.

I desire also to acknowledge my indebtedness to Dr Aikin for permission to publish certain of Priestley’s letters to his distinguished connection, Mrs Barbauld.

I am further under obligations to Lady Priestley, Lady Roscoe and Mr Sydney Lupton for much useful assistance.

The portrait of Priestley, which forms the frontispiece, has been reproduced in photogravure from the painting by Artaud, now in Dr Williams’ Theological Library in Gordon Square. I have to thank the Trustees of the Library for their kindness in allowing the copy to be made.

T. E. T.

London: May 1906.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Chapter I 1

Birth—Parentage—Home Life—Early Education.

Chapter II 17

Enters the Daventry Academy to be trained for the Ministry—Goes to Needham Market—His Life, Work and Privations there.

Chapter III 30

Goes to Nantwich—Starts a School—Is appointed a Tutor in the Warrington Academy—Life at Warrington.

Chapter IV 45

Priestley marries—Is ordained—His Essay on Education—Lectures on History and General Policy—His Chart of Biography—Becomes a Doctor of Laws of the University of Edinburgh—His visits to London—Makes the acquaintance of Dr Price, Canton and Benjamin Franklin—Writes the History of Electricity—Is elected into the Royal Society.

Chapter V 66

Goes to Leeds as minister of the Mill Hill Chapel—Resumes his studies in Speculative Theology—The Theological Repository—Becomes a Unitarian—Priestley as a controversialist—His Theory and Practice of Perspective—His literary characteristics—Begins his inquiries on Pneumatic Chemistry—His invention of soda-water—Receives the Copley Medal of the Royal Society.

Chapter VI 82

Becomes literary companion to Lord Shelburne—Goes abroad—His visit to Paris—His scientific work at Calne and in London—Continues his theological and metaphysical studies—His growing unpopularity—Leaves Lord Shelburne.

Chapter VII 89

Removes to London—Declines a pension—Renews his acquaintance with Franklin—Goes to Birmingham—Becomes a member of the Lunar Society.

Chapter VIII 103

Priestley at Birmingham—His theological work there—His love of literature—His catholicity—His personal characteristics.

Chapter IX 120

The Birmingham riots of 1791.

Chapter X 145

Determines to leave England—His arrival in America—Settles in Northumberland—His closing days—His death.

Chapter XI 167

Priestley as a man of science—His characteristics as a philosopher—Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air—His discovery of the influence of vegetation on vitiated air—Atmospheric air not elementary—His researches on nitric oxide—Eudiometry—Nitrous oxide—Discovers hydrogen chloride—Prepares oxygen from nitre (1771)—Isolates ammonia gas—Discovers sulphur dioxide—Dephlogisticated air (oxygen)—Discovers silicon fluoride—Intra-diffusion of gases—Respiration—Priestley’s opinions of the value of experimental science in education—Discovers nitrosulphuric acid—Notes the constancy of composition of the atmosphere—Prepares chlorine—Sound in “air”—Experiments relating to phlogiston—The seeming conversion of water into air—Watt and the compound nature of water—Discovers sulphuretted hydrogen—Priestley’s confession of faith in phlogiston.

Index 225

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Joseph Priestley, from the portrait in Dr Williams’ Library by Artaud (Photogravure) Frontispiece

Birthplace of Priestley, from a drawing by J. A. Symington after a photograph page 5

The Pillaging of Priestley’s House during the Birmingham Riots facing page 120

Joseph Priestley

CHAPTER I

Birth—Parentage—Home Life—Early Education

“If,” says Mr Frederic Harrison, “we choose one man as a type of the intellectual energy of the eighteenth century we could hardly find a better than Joseph Priestley, though his was not the greatest mind of the century. His versatility, eagerness, activity and humanity; the immense range of his curiosity in all things, physical, moral or social; his place in science, in theology, in philosophy and in politics; his peculiar relation to the Revolution, and the pathetic story of his unmerited sufferings, may make him the hero of the eighteenth century.”

In these few lines Mr Harrison has indicated, in terms sufficiently precise, the leading features in the character and life-history of one of the most remarkable men of the eighteenth century. To what extent he may be regarded as a hero and as a type of the intellectual energy of that century it is the purpose of the following pages to make clear.

Joseph Priestley was born at Fieldhead, in the parish of Birstall, near Leeds, on March 13 (Old Style), 1733.[1] He was named after his paternal grandfather, “an eminent tradesman, as much famed for his heavenly conduct as his grandson (Joseph) has since been for natural abilities.”

“The Priestleys,” writes Madame Belloc, the great-granddaughter of the subject of this memoir, in her charming essay, “Joseph Priestley in Domestic Life” (Contemporary Review, October 1894), “were of an old Presbyterian stock; one branch of the family acquired wealth and lived at Whiteways, but his (Joseph’s) own immediate ancestors were farmers and clothiers, people of substance in the yeoman class. We can trace them accurately as far as the middle of the seventeenth century, when one Phœbe Priestley, after wrestling with fever in her household, was herself stricken, and ‘lay like a lamb before the Lord’ on her deathbed. Her husband wrote a long and touching account of all she said and did, that her children might know what manner of mother they had lost. These people were presumably of the same stock as the Priestleys of Soylands, who ran back into the Middle Ages.

“The children of the Priestley families were all named after scriptural characters. They were Josephs, Timothys and Sarahs from one generation to another. The Bible was stamped into them, and from it they drew all the inspiration of their lives.”

Joseph Priestley the elder was born in 1660, and died on August 2, 1745. He married Sarah Healey and had by her eight children, five sons and three daughters, of whom Jonas, the father of Joseph Priestley the younger, born about 1700, was the seventh child and fourth son. Jonas Priestley married Mary, a daughter of Joseph Swift, a farmer and maltster of Shafton, near Wakefield, and had by her six children, four sons and two daughters, of whom Joseph was the eldest and Timothy the second; Martha, the elder girl, who died in 1812, married John Crouch, and was left a widow in poor circumstances in 1786. Another member of the Priestley family who requires mention for the purpose of this narrative is Sarah, the sister of Jonas and second daughter of Joseph Priestley the elder. She was born in 1692 and married John Keighley—“a man who had distinguished himself for his zeal for religion and for his public spirit.” She was left a widow in 1745. Three years before this she took her nephew Joseph, the subject of this memoir, to live with her, and “was fond of him in the extreme.” She died in 1764. Her brother John, Joseph Priestley the younger’s uncle, died on February 28, 1786, aged ninety-two. “He was a remarkable man and of a singularly happy constitution, both of body and mind.”

This happy constitution of body and mind seems indeed to have been a characteristic of many members of the family, the several branches of which were remarkably healthy and long-lived.

Priestley says of his father Jonas that he had uniformly better spirits than any man he ever knew, and by this means was as happy towards the close of life, when reduced to poverty and dependent upon others, as in his best days. These facts are not without interest as serving to account for much that we shall have occasion to note in the character and temperament of the subject of this biography.

Fieldhead, the house in which he first saw the light, had been occupied by the family for several generations. It was a small two-storey building, built of stone and slated with flag, similar in character to many of the houses still standing in the district, the long, low windows in the upper storeys betokening that they were formerly occupied by weavers. It was last lived in by Martha Priestley (Mrs Crouch), but on the death of her husband in 1786 was abandoned by the family, and, falling into decay, was pulled down about fifty years ago.

The Priestleys were a simple, sober, honest, God-fearing folk, staunch Calvinists, and deeply religious. Jonas Priestley was a manufacturer of “home-spun”—a weaver and cloth dresser—two trades now distinct but then practised in common—who took his week’s work on ass-back, on roads little better than bridle-paths, to the Sunday market in Leeds. He was of a class characteristic of the district.

These hand-loom weavers, who lived in the hill country lying to the west of Leeds, were generally men of small capitals; they often annexed a small farm to their business, or possessed a field or two on which to support a horse and cow, and were for the most part blessed with the comforts without the superfluities of life. During five or six days of the week they dwelt in their own little village, among trees and fields, taking no thought of the outside world and contenting themselves with the homely gossip of their farmstead or hamlet. On market day they came into the town in shoals, clad in their quaint corduroy breeches, broad-brimmed hats, and brass-buttoned coats of antique cut, bringing their produce on pack-horses, to await the visits of the merchants—the commercial aristocracy of Leeds, then a town of some 16,000 or 17,000 inhabitants—who were the agents through which the outer world received its supply of Yorkshire woollen goods. They were a shrewd, careful race, somewhat stolid and slow of speech and not given to great mental briskness or activity, keenly appreciative of the blessings of liberty and usually in sympathy with the political party to whom the cause of liberty was for the moment entrusted; sober, godly souls for the most part; regular in their attendance at public worship, and upon the whole preferring the plebeian zeal of the Chapel to the aristocratic repose of the Church.[2]

And what a world it was in which they thus serenely dwelt apart.

“It was,” writes Madame Belloc, “the time of Louis the Fifteenth in France and of George the Second in England, and the nephews and nieces of Charlotte Princess Palatine were still living, and her letters, whose name is legion, yet lay stored in the cabinets of her correspondents, full of inexpressible details discussed in most expressive language. It was the time when Jeanie Deans walked from Scotland to beg her sister’s life of Queen Caroline, and met Madge Wildfire in the way. It was the time when the polite world was composed of ‘men, women and Herveys’; when Squire Pendarves was found dead in his bed in Greek Street, Soho, leaving his young widow to be courted by John Wesley and wedded by Dr Delany; when statesmen bribed, and young blades drank, and Sir Harbottle carried off Harriet Byron, whose shrieks brought Sir Charles Grandison to the rescue, sword in hand. It was the period when the Jacobite Rebellion flamed up and expired; when the Young Pretender marched to Derby and the heads of the decapitated lords were exposed on Temple Bar; tragedies, agonies, highway robberies, Dick Turpin, Jack Sheppard, smugglers, the press-gang; Frederick Prince of Wales quarrelling in Leicester Square; Queen Caroline on her death-bed telling her weeping little George, ‘que l’un n’empêche pas l’autre’; Horace Walpole making the grand tour; Dean Swift dying in agonised misery. Merciful Heavens! What an England, of which we possess the daily diary! We can see Hogarth at his easel, and Sir Joshua taking his first stiff portraits, and Garrick going on pilgrimage to Stratford, and the young king courting Hannah Lightfoot and marrying his little bride from Mecklenburg. Without too much verifying of dates it is certain that all this was happening before Dr Priestley was thirty years of age, and that of none of it is there the faintest mention in the account he has drawn up of his own childhood, youth and young manhood, though he was himself destined to be one of the principal illustrations of the Georgian era. For anything which appears to the contrary, he and his friends might have dwelt in some far-distant planet whose inhabitants were wholly given up to study and to prayer.”

Priestley says of his father that he had a strong sense of religion, praying with his family morning and evening, and carefully teaching his children and servants the Assembly’s Catechism, which was all the system of which he had any knowledge.

“In the latter part of his life he became very fond of Mr Whitfield’s writings and other works of a similar kind, having been brought up in the principles of Calvinism, and adopting them, but without ever giving much attention to matters of speculation, and entertaining no bigoted aversion to those who differed from him on the subject.”

We may well imagine that Jonas, with his “strong sense of religion,” was one of that earnest band of “several hundreds of plain people” who listened, spellbound, to the eloquence of John Wesley on that memorable day of May 1742, on which, on Birstall Hill, began the great Yorkshire “Revival.”

Of his wife, “a woman of exemplary piety,” the mother of the future philosopher, little has been recorded beyond the fragmentary notice in her son’s autobiography. He says of her:—

“It is but little that I can recollect of my mother. I remember, however, that she was careful to teach me the Assembly’s Catechism, and to give me the best instructions the little time that I was at home. Once in particular, when I was playing with a pin, she asked me where I got it; and on telling her that I found it at my uncle’s, who lived very near to my father, and where I had been playing with my cousins, she made me carry it back again; no doubt to impress my mind, as it could not fail to do, with a clear idea of the distinction of property and of the importance of attending to it. She died in the hard winter of 1739,[3] not long after being delivered of my youngest brother; and having dreamed a little before her death that she was in a delightful place, which she particularly described and imagined to be heaven, the last words which she spake, as my aunt informed me, were, ‘Let me go to that fine place.’”

During some considerable portion of his mother’s short period of married life, Joseph Priestley, together with his brother Timothy, was committed to the care of his grandfather Swift, with whom he remained with little interruption until his mother’s death. From this we may infer that the domestic circumstances of his parents were far from easy, or that the accommodation at Fieldhead was unequal to the support of the cloth-dresser’s rapidly-increasing family.

Timothy, who, after following his father’s business as a cloth-dresser for a time, became an Independent minister, and died in London, has left us reminiscences of his brother’s boyhood. He seems to have been particularly impressed with his ability to repeat the Assembly’s Catechism “without missing a word,” and by being made to kneel down with him while he prayed. “This was not at bed-time, which he never neglected, but in the course of the day.”

On the death of his mother, the eldest boy, then barely six years old, was taken home and sent to school in the neighbourhood. Luckily for him, his Aunt Sarah, Mrs Keighley, “a truly pious and excellent woman, who knew no other use of wealth, or of talents of any kind, than to do good, and who never spared herself for this purpose,” being childless, offered, in 1742, to relieve her brother Jonas of all care for his eldest son by taking entire charge of him. “From this time,” says her nephew, “she was truly a parent to me, till her death in 1764.”

John Keighley was a man of considerable property, and at his death, which occurred when Priestley was about twelve years of age, the widow was left with the greater part of his fortune for life, and much of it at her disposal after her death.

By Mrs Keighley’s direction he was sent, he tells us, to several schools in the neighbourhood, especially to a large free school under the care of a clergyman, Mr Hague, under whom, at the age of twelve or thirteen, he first began to make progress in Latin and acquired the elements of Greek. His brother Timothy records that “from eleven to about thirteen he had read most of Mr Bunyan’s works and other authors on religion, besides the common Latin authors.”

How a well-ordered school was conducted in the middle of the eighteenth century may be gleaned from the following regulations in force in Mr Canton’s well-known academy in 1745:—

1. That the School hours are from 7 o’clock in the morning till 12, and from 2 to 5 in the afternoon: except the winter half-year, when they begin at 8 in the morning.

2. That all the Scholars come decently, that is, with their Hands and Faces wash’d, their Hair or Perriwigs Comb’d, and their Shoes black’d.

3. That they bow at Coming in and going out, and when any Thing is given or rec’d; and never wear their Hats in the House or School.

4. That they loiter not, but go immediately to their own seats and move not thence, without Leave, till School is done.

5. That if any Person come into the School whom they know, they are to get up, make a bow, and sit down in their places again.

6. That if the Master be discoursing with, or reading to any Person, they shall not stare Confidently on them or hearken to their Talk, unless required to be present.

7. That they shall not interrupt the Master while a Stranger is talking with him, with any Question, request, or complaint whatsoever, but stay till he is at Leisure.

8. That they shall not presume to talk loud nor make any noise in getting their lessons. A Boy’s Tongue should never be heard, but in saying his Lesson, asking or Answering a Question.

9. That there be no buying, selling, changing, laying Wagers or Gaming in School-time, on the forfeiture of the whole so bought or sold, etc.

10. That those who learn French shall not speak English to any that learn French, on the Forfeiture of ye Bill, or one Hour’s Exercize after School Time.

11. That such as learn Latin are also oblig’d not to speak other Language to those that learn it, during School time, on the Penalty last mentioned.

12. That all perform their Lessons and Exercises in fair Writing and true Spelling, and likewise prepare themselves for their Examinations in French, Latin, Accounts and Catechisms every week, both in School times and all Vacations.

13. That such as perform well, shall be prefer’d according to their Merit, and shall have liberty to leave School before the usual Time; but such as are Negligent herein, shall have their Exercizes to write over again after School.

14. That none presume to call any Party or Nick-names nor give any ill or reproachful Language, much less Curse, Sware, or Lye, but in all things behave in a quiet, peaceable, and civil manner.

15. That the Boarders shall not go beyond y^e bounds belonging to y^e House on any pretence whatsoever without leave, on the forfeiture of 6d. or two Hours’ Exercize after School for Every such Offence.

16. That one Scholar is not to strike another, or challenge him to fight; but in case of any Difference shall acquaint the Master therewith and be satisfied with his Determination.

Whilst acquiring Greek at the public school, Priestley learned Hebrew on holidays of the Dissenting minister of the place, Mr Kirkby, under whose care he eventually came.

The weakly, consumptive habit into which he now fell necessitated his withdrawal from school. His fondness for books had led his aunt to encourage the hope that he might be trained for the ministry, and he readily entered into her views.

“But,” he says, “my ill health obliged me to turn my thoughts another way, and, with a view to trade, I learned the modern languages, French, Italian and High Dutch [German], without a master; and in the first and last of them I translated and wrote letters for an uncle of mine who was a merchant, and who intended to put me into a counting-house in Lisbon.”

Indeed, he says a house was actually engaged to receive him there, and everything was nearly ready for his undertaking the voyage when his health so far improved that the idea of the ministry was resumed. During the two years in which he had been kept away from school the boy was thrown almost entirely upon his own resources. It says much for the activity and eagerness of his mind, his diligence and his power of mental acquisitiveness, that he should have neglected no opportunity of gaining knowledge from the various heretical divines who came to drink a dish of tea with his aunt. He tells us that from Mr Haggerstone, a Dissenting minister in the neighbourhood, who had been educated under Maclaurin, and whom he visited twice a week, he learned geometry, algebra and various branches of mathematics, theoretical and practical. He also read, with but little assistance from him, Gravesend’s Elements of Natural Philosophy, Watts’s Logic, and Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding. “He also gave lessons in Hebrew to a Baptist minister at Gildersome, a village about four miles from Leeds, and by that means made himself ‘a considerable proficient in that language.’” “At the same time I learned Chaldee and Syriac, and just began to read Arabic.”

As his knowledge increased, and the powers of his intellect strengthened, he began to exercise his reason upon the many problems of doctrine and religious belief which could not fail to be uppermost in his mind when his upbringing and the environment in which circumstances had placed him are considered. His aunt, although a strict Calvinist, was a large-minded woman, and, as her nephew says, “far from confining salvation to those who thought as she did on religious subjects.”

“Her home,” he says, “was the resort of all the dissenting ministers in the neighbourhood, without distinction, and those who were the most obnoxious, on account of their heresy, were almost as welcome to her, if she thought them honest and good men (which she was not unwilling to do), as any others.”

Although all the religious books that came in his way tended to confirm him in the principles of Calvinism, he was led by the natural vigour of his mind, and by an innate spirit of philosophical optimism, which strengthened with advancing years, to feel a repugnance to its gloomy tenets, and to question the sufficiency and reasonableness of much of its doctrine. The conversation of the heretical divines in whose company he was thrown served, moreover, to awaken inquiry and to increase his doubts. These divines were for the most part men who, in liberality of thought, were far in advance of the congregations they served, and this was especially the case of those for whose attainments and character the discerning boy had most respect.

The youth, who as a child had lisped at his mother’s knee, “without missing a word,” the formularies of the Assembly’s Catechism, was now tortured with doubt and misgiving as he strove to penetrate into and to realise the meaning of the phrases his memory so tenaciously retained. And the more he read and the more he pondered the more disquieted he became.

“Having,” he says, “read many books of experiences, and, in consequence, believing that a new birth, produced by the immediate agency of the Spirit of God, was necessary to salvation, and not being able to satisfy myself that I had experienced anything of the kind, I felt occasionally such distress of mind as it is not in my power to describe, and which I still look back upon with horror. Notwithstanding I had nothing very material to reproach myself with, I often concluded that God had forsaken me, and that mine was like the case of Francis Spira, to whom, as he imagined, repentance and salvation were denied. In that state of mind I remember reading the account of the man in the iron cage in the Pilgrim’s Progress with the greatest perturbation.”

“I imagine,” he continues, “that even these conflicts of mind were not without their use, as they led me to think habitually of God and a future state. And though my feelings were then, no doubt, too full of terror, what remained of them was a deep reverence for divine things, and in time a pleasing satisfaction which can never be effaced, and I hope was strengthened as I have advanced in life and acquired more rational notions of religion. The remembrance, however, of what I sometimes felt in that state of ignorance and darkness gives me a peculiar sense of the value of rational principles of religion, and of which I can give but an imperfect description to others.”

At the time he was greatly distressed that he could not feel a proper repentance for the sin of Adam, taking it for granted, he says, that without this it could not be forgiven him. The fact was that, under the influence of his friends, Haggerstone and Walker, he was insensibly following Baxter in attempting to reconcile the doctrines of Arminius and Calvin, and he ended by embracing those of Arminius. It was repugnant to his sense of equity and justice that, in the words of his Catechism, “All mankind, by the fall of our first parents, lost communion with God, are under his wrath and curse, and so made liable to all miseries in this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell for ever.”

His first trial of faith came when he applied for admission as a communicant in the congregation which he had always attended. The old minister was willing enough to receive him, but the elders, who had the government of the church, discovering this unsoundness on the subject of the sin of Adam, stoutly refused to sanction his admission.

Whilst the taint of heresy appears not to have greatly distressed the worthy Mrs Keighley, it doubtless added to her difficulties in shaping his course towards the ministry. In the natural order of things he was to have been sent to the academy at Mile End, a hot-bed of Calvinism, then under the care of Dr Cawder.

“But,” he says, “being at that time an Arminian, I resolutely opposed it, especially upon finding that if I went thither, besides giving an experience, I must subscribe my assent to ten printed articles of the strictest Calvinistic faith, and repeat it every six months.”

It now looked as if the idea of the ministry was to be given up for good and all, and given up it probably would have been but for the intercession of Mr Kirkby, who strongly recommended that he should be placed under the care of the good and learned Dr Doddridge.

“Mr Kirby,” says Priestley, “had received a good education himself, was a good classical scholar, and had no opinion of the mode of education among the very orthodox Dissenters, and being fond of me, he was desirous of my having every advantage that could be procured for me. My good aunt, not being a bigoted Calvinist, entered into his views.”

Priestley had another ally in his step-mother, for his father had married again. She was a woman of good sense as well as of religion, and had been sometime housekeeper to Dr Doddridge, of whom she had a high opinion, and had always recommended his academy.

To Dr Doddridge, however, he was not destined to go. That eminent divine was in the last stages of the malady to which he eventually succumbed, and he died at Lisbon in the October of 1751.

CHAPTER II

Enters the Daventry Academy to be trained for the Ministry—Goes to Needham Market—His Life, Work and Privations there.

Accordingly, in 1752, he was sent to Daventry, then under the charge of Mr Ashworth. He was now nineteen. Although of a weakly constitution, his health was sufficiently re-established to enable him to stand the strain of preparation for the calling to which he now assiduously devoted himself. In mental equipments he was so much in advance of his fellows that he was excused all the studies of the first year and a great part of those of the second. He remained at the Academy three years.

No student ever dwelt more fondly on the memory of his Alma Mater than did Priestley on Daventry and all that it meant to him. Its atmosphere was wholly congenial to him, steadying, stimulating and strengthening the naturally vigorous powers of his mind. It was, he says, peculiarly favourable to the serious pursuit of truth, and every question of much importance, such as liberty and necessity, the sleep of the soul, and all the articles of theological orthodoxy and heresy were the subjects of continual discussion between the teachers and the taught. The general plan of studies was exceedingly favourable to free inquiry: the students were referred to authors on both sides of every question and were required to give an account of them, abridging the more important for future use.

Concerning this small seminary for the training of Dissenting ministers, the Rev. Mr Hargrove in his account of Priestley in the Inquirer of 1904, says:[4]—

“A miserable little place it must have seemed to the eyes of neighbouring clergy, with nothing in it of the venerable traditions, the ancestral wealth, the beauty and the dignity of the old colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. There was nothing grand about this building, nor did any sacred associations hallow its homeliness. But while the lamp of learning burnt low in the ancient universities during the eighteenth century, their gates kept fast closed against all who were too intelligent not to doubt the doctrines of the Established Church, or too honest to conceal their doubts, it burnt bright and clear, tiny though the flame might be, in obscure and poor haunts like this of Daventry. As Priestley proudly, and not untruly, boasted, at a later time, to the Prime Minister of England:

“‘Shutting the doors of the universities against us, and keeping the means of learning to yourselves, you may think to keep us in ignorance and so less capable to give you disturbance. But though ignominiously and unjustly excluded from the seats of learning, and driven to the expedient of providing at a great expense for scientific education among ourselves, we have had this advantage, that our institutions, being formed in a more enlightened age, are more liberal and therefore better calculated to answer the purpose of a truly liberal education. Thus while your universities resemble pools of stagnant water secured by dams and mounds, ours are like rivers which, taking their natural course, fertilise a whole country.’”

The manner in which he occupied his time, the range of his studies, and the miscellaneous nature of his reading at Daventry, may be seen from his following extract from his journal for 1755:—

BUSINESS DONE IN JANUARY, FEBRUARY AND MARCH

Practical

Howe’s Blessedness of the Righteous; Bennel’s Pastoral Care; Norris’s Letters and Some Sermons.

Controversial

Taylor on Atonement; Hampton’s Answer; Sherlock’s Discourse, vol. i.; Christianity not founded in Argument; Doddridge’s Answer; Warburton’s Divine Legation; Benson on the First Planting of Christianity; King’s Constitution of the Primitive Church.

Classics

Josephus, vol. i. from p. 39 to 770; Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to p. 139; Tacitus’s History, Life of Agricola, and Manners of the Germans.

Scriptures

John the Evangelist; The Acts of the Apostles; The Epistles to the Romans, Galatians, Ephesians; 1 and 2 Corinthians, in Greek; Isaiah to the 8th chapter, in Hebrew.

Mathematics

Maclaurin’s Algebra, to part ii.

Entertaining

Irene; Prince Arthur; Ecclesiastical Characters; Dryden’s Fables; Peruvian Tales; Voyage round the World; Oriental Tales; Massey’s Travels; Life of Hai Ebn Yokdam; History of Abdallah.

Composition

A Sermon on the Wisdom of God; An Oration on the Means of Virtue; 1st vol. of the Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion.

With one of his classmates he engaged to rise early and so “dispatched many articles of business every day. One of them, which continued all the time we were at the academy, was to read every day ten folio pages in some Greek author, and generally a Greek play in the course of the week besides. By this means we became very well acquainted with that language and with the most valuable authors in it.... My attention was always more drawn to mathematical and philosophical studies than his was.”

Throughout the whole of his time at the academy, and despite the attractions which scholarship and literary studies had for him, and notwithstanding his eagerness to satisfy “the immense range of his curiosity in all things, physical, moral or social,” he never, he says, lost sight of the great object of his studies, which was the duties of a Christian minister.

“There it was that I laid the general plan which I have executed since. Particularly I there composed the first copy of my Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion, Mr Clark, to whom I communicated my scheme, carefully perusing every section of it and talking over the subject of it with me.”

What three years of this mental, moral and intellectual discipline meant to the young Arminian may be summed up in his own words: he saw reason to embrace what he says is usually called the heterodox side of almost every question. And this notwithstanding that Dr Ashworth was earnestly desirous of making him as orthodox as possible.

“Notwithstanding the great freedom of our speculations and debates, the extreme of heresy among us was Arianism; and all of us, I believe, left the academy with a belief, more or less qualified, of the doctrine of atonement.”

Priestley, even at this early stage in his career, gave abundant proof of that resolute regard for truth which constituted the motive power of his life. His sturdy independence of thought, and his almost passionate resentment of dogmatic authority—among the most significant of his intellectual traits—were plainly manifested in his youth and early manhood. They continued to the end to be the dominant notes of his character and to be the springs of his action. They were at once the sources of his strength and the causes of his misfortunes.

Priestley had now finished with Daventry. He was twenty-two years of age, and ready, and indeed eager, to minister in all the glory of a full-bottomed wig to any congregation that might solicit his services.

The young divines at the academy were an unworldly set, taking but little thought of their future situations in life. They often, indeed, amused themselves, as Priestley tells us, with the idea of their dispersion in all parts of the kingdom, after living so happily together, and with the camaraderie of youth used to propose plans of meeting at certain times, and smile at the different appearances they would probably make after being ten or twenty years settled in the world.

Priestley set out on his career with the highest ideal of his calling; indeed to him the office of a Christian minister was the most honourable of any on earth, and he had no other ambition than to distinguish himself by his application to the studies proper to that profession. That he laboured unselfishly and with no idea of place and preferment is certain from the circumstance that he suffered from a physical disability which he must have recognised could not but tell strongly against his chance of worldly success. He had an inveterate stammer which, at times, made preaching as irksome to him as it was trying to those who had to listen to him. In spite of many and repeated attempts he never wholly overcame this trial. And yet nothing is more characteristic of him than, as he reviewed his career in the evening of his life, he should see that, like St Paul’s thorn in the flesh, his impediment had not been without its use.

“Without some such check as this,” he says, “I might have been disputatious in company, or might have been seduced by the love of popular applause as a preacher; whereas, my conversation and my delivery in the pulpit having nothing in them that was generally striking, I hope I have been more attentive to qualifications of a superior kind.”

The thorn in the flesh was probably not without its use in other ways. It probably drove him to literature. If he had none of the graces of pulpit oratory, he had at least the gift of facile composition. If he could not hope to move men’s minds by oral appeals, he might aspire to sway them by the power of the pen.

His first call came from an inconsiderable congregation at Needham Market in Suffolk. It was a poor and needy place, nominally under the charge of a superannuated minister, the prospects bounded by the possibilities attaching to a stipend of forty pounds a year. And these prospects, limited as they were, were still further curtailed by Priestley’s own action. He found that his congregation had been used to receive assistance from both Presbyterian and Independent funds. Priestley was no longer in the mood to receive assistance from the Independents, and told his congregation that he “did not choose to have anything to do” with that body. That little difference between the elders and himself concerning the sin of Adam and its consequence, together with his three years’ sojourn at Daventry, were beginning to bear fruit. The congregation readily consented to give up the Independent fund and promised to make good the deficiency themselves. Priestley, however, quickly realised that they deceived themselves either as to their ability or their willingness to redeem this promise, for the most, he says, he ever received from them was in the proportion of about thirty pounds per annum. They also deceived him in another sense. Their readiness in consenting to do without the assistance of the Independents disposed him to think “they could not have much bigotry among them.” Although he made it a rule to introduce nothing in the pulpit that could, or should, lead to controversy, he made no secret of his real opinions in conversation, or in his lectures on the theory of religion which he had composed at the academy and which he proceeded to give to all persons, without distinction of sex or age, who chose to come and listen to him. He then found that when he came to treat of the Unity of God merely as an article of religion his hearers were attentive to nothing but the soundness of his faith in the doctrine of the Trinity, and they quickly discovered, what he was at no pains to conceal, that he was a very pronounced Arian. From the time of this discovery, he says, his hearers fell off apace, especially as the old minister, as might have been expected, took a decided part against him. To add to his difficulties his aunt stopped his remittances. This was in part due to the ill offices of his orthodox, i.e., Independent, relations, but mainly because the worthy Mrs Keighley had largely exhausted her liberality in supporting others of her needy dependants, and in particular a deformed niece, her constant companion, and who could not, Priestley thinks, have subsisted without the greatest part, at least, of all she had to bequeath. He himself was the first to recognise that, being apparently settled in the world, he ought to be no longer burdensome to her. She had spared no expense in his education, and that, he says, was doing more for him than giving him an estate. Whatever the world might have thought as to his being settled in it, it had little to offer him beyond the dignity of his profession, and it is difficult to live on dignity alone. The respectable and agreeable families in the place, to whom he had flattered himself he would be useful, were not very prompt to support that dignity, and eventually it had to sustain itself on the wages of an agricultural labourer. Indeed, he says, had it not been for the good offices of Dr Benson and Dr Kippis, eminent eighteenth century divines, who procured him “now and then an extraordinary five pounds from different charities,” he believed he should have starved.[5]

“At Needham” he says, “I felt the effect of a low, despised situation, together with that arising from the want of popular talents. There were several vacancies in congregations in that neighbourhood where my sentiments would have been no objection to me, but I was never thought of. Even my next neighbour, whose sentiments were as free as my own, and known to be so, declined making exchanges with me, which, when I left that part of the country, he acknowledged was not owing to any dislike his people had to me as heretical, but for other reasons, the more genteel part of his hearers always absenting themselves when they heard I was to preach for him. But visiting that country some years afterwards, when I had raised myself to some degree of notice in the world, and being invited to preach in that very pulpit, the same people crowded to hear me, though my elocution was not much improved, and they professed to admire one of the same discourses they had formerly despised.”

The iron would have entered the soul of a weaker man, but Priestley, true to himself, never lost hope or faltered in his courage. However short his commons, Providence had endowed him with the continual feast of a contented mind. He firmly believed, even during the darkest hours of that Suffolk time, that this same wise Providence was disposing everything for the best. Notwithstanding his unfavourable circumstances, “I was,” he says, “far from being unhappy at Needham.” He boarded with a family for whose kindness he was always grateful. He had free access to one or two private libraries in the district, in particular one belonging to Mr Alexander, a Quaker.

“Here it was,” he says, “that I was first acquainted with any person of that persuasion; and I must acknowledge my obligation to many of them in every future stage of my life. I have met with the noblest instances of liberality of sentiment and the truest generosity among them.”

There can be little doubt, however, in spite of his robust optimism and the courage with which he confronted the world, the young divine led a cheerless and solitary existence at Needham. And it is no less certain that it was during this dark and troubled time that he sowed the seed—the wheat and the tares—which in the fulness of time was to furnish the harvest of good and evil he eventually garnered—fame, obloquy, insult, persecution, respect, affection and his position among the immortals.

Although the account which Priestley has left us of his life and work at Needham is somewhat meagre, it is sufficiently full to enable us to trace in it the initial stages of his evolution as a theological thinker. Indeed, he says his studies at this period were chiefly theological, theology being the business of his life and the vocation to which he had been called. He had left the academy with a qualified belief in the doctrine of atonement, and as he was desirous of getting some more definite ideas on the subject he set himself to peruse the whole of the Old and New Testament and to collect from them, with the greatest care, all the texts that appeared to him to have any relation to the subject, and to arrange them under a great variety of heads.

“The consequence of this was,” he says, “what I had no apprehension of when I began the work, viz., a full persuasion that the doctrine of atonement, even in its most qualified sense, had no countenance either from Scripture or reason.”

He then proceeded to digest his observations into a regular treatise, a part only of which was at that time published, under the title of the Doctrine of Remission. The portion omitted had reference to an examination of the writings of the Apostle Paul, whose reasoning, he was satisfied, was in many places far from being conclusive. This examination grew into a separate work, in which he tested every passage in which the reasoning appeared to him to be defective or the conclusions ill-supported; and, as he says, he thought them to be pretty numerous.

His friend Kippis advised him to publish this treatise under the character of an unbeliever, in order to draw the more attention to it.

“This” he says, “I did not choose, having always had a great aversion to assume any character that was not my own, even so much as disputing for the sake of discovering truth. I cannot ever say that I was quite reconciled to the idea of writing to a fictitious person, as in my Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, though nothing can be more innocent, or sometimes more proper, our Saviour’s parables implying a much greater departure from strict truth than those letters do. I therefore wrote the book with great freedom indeed, but as a Christian and an admirer of the Apostle Paul, as I always was in other respects.”

When nine sheets of the work were printed off, Dr Kippis dissuaded him from proceeding, or indeed from publishing anything of the kind, until he should be more known and his character better established, and accordingly he desisted. All that he considered of consequence in this work he subsequently inserted in the Theological Repository, “in order to its being submitted to the examination of learned Christians.”

Another task that he imposed on himself at Needham, and in part executed, was an accurate comparison of the Hebrew text of the Hagiographa and the Prophets with the version of the Septuagint, noting all the variations.

It was, perhaps, in connection with this inquiry that his name appears in the second list of subscribers to Taylor’s Hebrew Concordance, the second volume of which was published in 1757. The subscription was three guineas, a very considerable sum to the young divine in those days. The fact that he should have entered his name at all is an indication of the ardour and spirit of self-sacrifice with which he invariably pursued his inquiries, whether theological or scientific.

Priestley, to the end of his days, cared little for money except as the means of procuring the material for his investigations, and he was always ready to part with it, to the extent of his opportunity, in any cause in which his sympathies were enlisted.

His circumstances were now so straitened that, despite the great aversion which he conceived he had to the business of a schoolmaster—having often said that he would have recourse to anything else for a maintenance in preference to it—he was at length compelled to make some attempt that way. He therefore printed and distributed proposals to teach classics, mathematics, etc., for half a guinea a quarter, and to board the pupils in the house with himself for twelve guineas a year. It was recognised that he was not unqualified for this work, but although there was no obvious connection between Arianism and arithmetic it was enough that he was tainted with heresy, and not a pupil was entrusted to his care.

He then proposed to give lectures to grown persons on such branches of science as he could procure the means of illustrating, and began with a course of twelve lectures on the use of “A New and Correct Globe of the Earth.” His one course of ten hearers did little more than pay for his globes.

At this juncture a distant relative procured him an opportunity of preaching as a candidate at Sheffield, but his trial sermon was not approved: his manner was thought “too gay and airy.” One of the ministers at Sheffield had, however, more discrimination, and by his good offices he was recommended to a congregation at Nantwich, in Cheshire, who gave him an invitation to preach there for a year certain. Accordingly, he put together his few worldly possessions—his globes, his beloved books, his stock of sermons, and the manuscripts of the theological treatises he was too poor or too diffident to give to the world—and took the Ipswich packet to London as the least expensive way of getting down to Cheshire.

The chapel in which Priestley preached at Needham was taken down and rebuilt in 1837. When Rutt was preparing his edition of Priestley’s Memoirs, his daughter, Mrs Notcutt, who lived in Ipswich, made inquiries respecting Priestley, but with no result.

No reminiscences of him could be found at Needham. He was evidently thought too poor and too obscure for his memory to be treasured.