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 Paley's "View of the Evidences of Christianity" is directed against that form of doubt which had its ablest expression among us in David Hume's argument against the credibility of miracles. Hume died in 1776. In the "Preparatory Considerations" to his “Evidences," Paley wrote: 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 Corrup tions 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 I 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, high as his place was among discoverers, avoided him; and in April, 1794, Dr. Priestley, with the wife 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. he was dying he had his grandchildren about him. In the evening, says their father, "after prayers When 1 From a photograph kindly lent for engraving by the sculptor, F. J. Williamson, of Esher, room. they wished him a good night, and were leaving the He desired them to stay, spoke to each of them separately. He exhorted them all to continue to love each other. "And you, little thing," little thing," speaking to Eliza, "remember the hymn you learned, Birds in their little nests agree.' I am going to sleep as well as you; for death is only a good, long, sound sleep in the grave, and we shall meet again." John Wesley himself did not insist more than Joseph Priestley upon love as the vital air without which Christianity could not exist. The best answer to scepticism was the endeavour really to set up the Christian life within the Christian Church. The young men at Oxford who were influenced like the Wesleys by William Law's "Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life," and endeavoured against all ridicule of the world to carry it out to the full extent of Law's interpretation of a Christian's duty, placed love in the centre of their system. "If religion," said William Law, "teaches us anything concerning eating and drinking, or spending our time and money; if it teaches us how we are to use and contemn the world; if it tells us what tempers we are to have in common life, how we are to be disposed towards all people, how we are to behave towards the sick, the poor, the old, and destitute; if it tells us whom we are to treat with a particular love, whom we are to regard with a particular esteem; if it tells us how we are to treat our enemies, and how we are to mortify and deny ourselves; he must be very weak that can think these parts of religion are not to be observed with as much exactness as any doctrines that relate to prayers. It is very observable that there is not one command in the Gospel for public worship; and perhaps it is a duty that is least insisted on in Scripture of any other. The frequent attendance at it is never so much as mentioned in all the New Testament; whereas that religion or devotion which is to govern the ordinary actions of our life is to be found in almost every verse of Scripture." Law suggested three daily periods of private prayer besides the first morning and last evening devotions, and a theme for each. At nine o'clock the prayer should seek to quicken the spirit of humility. At noon the duty dwelt on should be universal love; and at three it should be resignation to the will of God. When dwelling upon this duty of love, Law wrote, "You will perhaps say, How is it possible to love a good and a bad man in the same degree? Just as it's sible to be as just and faithful to a good man as to an evil man. Now are you in any difficulty about performing justice and faithfulness to a bad man? Are you in any doubts whether you need be so just and faithful to him as you need be to a good man? Now why is it that you are in no doubt about it? "Tis because you know that justice and faithfulness are founded upon reasons that never vary or change, that have no dependence upon the merits of men, but are founded in the nature of things, in the laws of God, and therefore are to be observed with an equal exactness towards good and bad men. Now do but think thus justly of charity, or love to your neighbour, that it is founded upon reasons that vary not, that have no dependence upon the merits of men, and then you will find it as possible to perform the same exact pos charity as the same exact justice to all men, whether good or bad." This note had been taken up by the Wesleys and Whitefield, and its music was felt by Cowper and by many an earnest soul within and without the churches. Thousands whose forefathers had been Puritans of the Old Testament were now Puritans of the New. We have seen how John Wesley was influenced early in his career as a reformer, by the New Testament Puritanism of the Moravian Brethren. John Cennick, a fellow-worker with Wesley and Whitefield in the Methodist school among the colliers at Kingswood, near Bristol, joined the Moravians and went to Ireland in 1746, where he founded a settlement of Moravian Brethren, called Grace Hill, at Ballymena, in the county of Antrim. Here he kindled a like zeal in the heart of a young man of the village, John Montgomery, who in 1757, at the age of twenty-three, was received into communion by the Moravians at Grace Hill, and became a preacher among them. He married, in 1768, Mary Blackley, daughter of another member of the same community, and the eldest son of this marriage, born in November, 1771, three months after the death of the first child, a daughter, was James Montgomery, the poet. When he was born, his father had just settled at Irvine, in Ayrshire, as pastor of a small Moravian congregation there, the first that had been formed in Scotland. When James Montgomery was little more than four years old, his parents returned with him and their newly-born second son Robert to the settlement at Grace Hill; and there was another infant brother, named Ignatius, when James, not seven years old, was taken to Yorkshire and put to school in the Moravian settlement, called, after a town in Moravia, Fulneck, about six miles from Leeds. Six years afterwards, in 1783, the younger boys, Robert and Ignatius, were also left at Fulneck, because John Montgomery was going with his wife as missionary to the slave-drivers and slaves of Barbadoes. Moravians are remarkable for the pure devotion of their missionaries, who have gone out alone and unpaid to Greenland, to the huts of the American Indians, or of the negro slave, and to the far wilds of Tartary. The James Montgomery, who was destined by his parents for his father's calling, received his first impulse towards poetry when he was with some of the boys at Fulneck, who sat under a hedge and heard one of the Brothers read Blair's "Grave." Devotion to poetry grew in him with little to feed it, because works of imagination are seldom admitted into a Moravian school. He began, indeed, by imitating hymns of the Moravian collection. Montgomery became occupied with his own thoughts, seemed indolent, and was at last held to be probably unfit for the ministry. For a time, at least, he should be put to a business, and in 1787, at the age of sixteen, he was placed with a Moravian who kept a small retail shop as a fine bread baker, at Mirfield, near Fulneck. Here James Montgomery wrote verse for a year and a half, having plenty of leisure, and from this place he departed with all his MSS. and a single change of linen. New clothes had been given to him, but as he did not think he had fairly earned them, he went away in his old clothes, and had three shillings and sixpence in his pocket. When he had got as far as Wentworth, he found service again in a general store at Wath, with the consent of the kind-hearted Moravian he had left, who gave him a good character, supplied him with some money, and sent him the clothes he had left behind. James Montgomery was then a grave youth of eighteen, never absent from his duty in the shop, but filling up all leisure time with the production of MSS. His chief friend was a neighbouring stationer who had book parcels sometimes from Paternoster Row. He represented literature, approved of Montgomery's poems, and sent a parcel of them to "the Row" with recommendations of their author, who was following to find a publisher. Montgomery left Wath in 1790 for Paternoster Row, where Mr. Harrison, to whom he had been introduced, declined to publish his poems, but kindly offered him a situation in his shop. The poet still wrote. Advised to try prose, he tried a novel, tried an Eastern tale, failed, parted from the shelter he had found in Paternoster Row, and went back to the general store at Wath. His parents meanwhile were suffering hard fortunes at Barbadoes and Tobago. At Tobago there was, in the summer of 1790, a mutiny of soldiers, who set the town on fire, and in the following August a great hurricane. In October, the poor missionary's wife died of fever, after seven days' illness. In the following June, John Montgomery followed her, and the young poet in England became fatherless and motherless. Of the last days of the missionary in Tobago a comrade of the mission wrote home: "You may easily believe that our late brother's illness, which lasted sixteen weeks, put us to no small inconvenience. The room in which the negroes meet was the only place in which we could lodge him, and we have no other dining-room." In March, 1792, Montgomery, who was twenty-one years old, read in the Sheffield Register an advertisement for a clerk in a counting-house. He answered it, and went in April to Sheffield as a clerk in the employment of Joseph Gales, publisher of the Sheffield Register, who was an enterprising printer, bookseller, and auctioneer. Montgomery was soon an active writer in the Sheffield Register, and shared the best hopes of young and ardent minds that saw in the French Revolution a great means for the regeneration of society. At a meeting of the "Friends of Peace and Reform" gathered in Sheffield on the Fast Day, in February, 1794, this hymn, written for the occasion by young James Montgomery, was distributed, and sung by the assembled thousands : Her rivers bleed like mighty veins, O Thou, whose awful word can bind The roaring waves, the raging wind, Mad tyrants tame, break down the high Whose haughty foreheads beat the sky, Make bare Thine arm, great King of Kings! That wonder-working arm which broke Burst every dungeon, every chain! On the In July, 1794, Joseph Gales left Sheffield to escape James prosecution for a letter in the Register. Montgomery, with help of money from a gentleman whom he had not before known, and who became a sleeping partner, bought the presses, types, and goodwill of the printing business, which was continued by the firm of James Montgomery and Co. 4th of July the Sheffield Register was born again, with an emblem of the world's hope in its new title, the Sheffield Iris. In January, 1795, Montgomery was tried at Doncaster, charged with printing, for a street-hawker, "A Patriotic Song, by a Clergyman of Belfast," which contained the stanza HYMN. O God of Hosts, Thine ear incline, Regard our prayers, our cause be Thine: When orphans cry, when babes complain, When widows weep, canst Thou refrain? Now red and terrible, Thine hand Scourges with war our guilty land; Europe Thy flaming vengeance feels, And from her deep foundations reels. JAMES MONTGOMERY. (From a Portrait taken in 1806.) Montgomery was sentenced for this to three months' imprisonment in York Castle, and a fine of £20. In |