“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.