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.