ideal of life, acted up to it consistently, is worthy of the deepest respect, whatever opinion may be entertained as to the real value of the tenets which he so zealously propagated and defended.
But I am sure that I speak not only for myself, but for all this assemblage, when I say that our purpose to-day is to do honor, not to Priestley, the Unitarian divine, but to Priestley, the fearless defender of rational freedom in thought and in action; to Priestley, the philosophic thinker; to that Priestley who held a foremost place among "the swift runners who hand over the lamp of life,"[1] and transmit from one generation to another the fire kindled, in the childhood of the world, at the Promethean altar of Science.
The main incidents of Priestley's life are so well known that I need dwell upon them at no great length.
Born in 1733, at Fieldhead, near Leeds, and brought up among Calvinists of the straitest orthodoxy, the boy's striking natural ability led to his being devoted to the profession of a minister of religion; and, in 1752, he was sent to the Dissenting academy at Daventry—an institution which authority left undisturbed, though its existence contravened the law. The teachers under whose instruction and influence the young man came, at Daventry, carried out to the letter the injunction to "try all things; hold fast that which is good," and encouraged the discussion of every imaginable proposition with complete freedom, the leading professors taking opposite sides; a discipline which, admirable as it may be from a purely scientific point of view, would seem to be. calculated to make acute rather than sound divines. Priestley tells us, in his "Autobiography," that he generally found himself on the unorthodox side: and as he grew older, and his faculties attained their maturity, this native tendency toward heterodoxy grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength. He passed from Calvinism to Arianism; and finally, in middle life, landed in that very broad form of Unitarianism by which his craving after a credible and consistent theory of things was satisfied.
On leaving Daventry, Priestley became minister of a congregation, first at Needham Market and secondly at Nantwich; but whether on account of his heterodox opinions, or of the stuttering which impeded his expression of them in the pulpit, little success attended his efforts in this capacity. In 1761 a career much more suited to his abilities became open to him. He was appointed "tutor in the languages" in the Dissenting academy at Warrington, in which capacity, besides giving three courses of lectures, he taught Latin, Greek, French, and Italian, and read lectures on the Theory of Language and Universal Grammar, on Oratory, Philosophical Criticism, and the Civil Law. And it is interesting to observe that, as a teacher, he encouraged and cherished, in those whom he instructed, the freedom which he had
- ↑ "Quasi cursores vitaï, lampada tradunt."—Lucretius, "De Rerum Nat.," ii., 78.
