Joseph Priestley

by T. E. Thorpe

In this work Priestley attempted to trace every “corruption”—that is every innovation or departure from what he conceives to be the original scheme—to its proper source and “to show what circumstances in the state of things, and especially of other prevailing opinions and prejudices, made the alteration, in doctrine or practice, sufficiently natural, and the introduction and establishment of it easy.” Priestley hoped as a true rationalist that this historical method would be found to be one of the most satisfactory modes of argumentation, in order to prove that what he objected to was no part of the original scheme.

“For after the clearest refutation of any particular doctrine that has been long established in Christian churches it will still be asked, how, if it be no part of the scheme, it ever came to be thought so, and to be so generally acquiesced in; and in many cases the mind will not be perfectly satisfied till such questions be answered.”

We are mainly concerned with this remarkable work as illustrating the character and attributes of its author, and it is not within our province to give any analysis of its contents. It must be remembered in connection with it that Priestley was no longer an Arian; he was not even a Socinian, as that term was understood by the immediate followers of Faustus Socinus, who thought it their duty as Christians, and, indeed, essential to Christianity, to pray to Jesus Christ, notwithstanding they believed him to be, in Priestley’s phrase, a mere man. Priestley was at this time what he remained until his death—a strict Humanitarian, although he believed in the supernatural power and divine mission of Christ.

Of the reception which awaited his book he could not be altogether unprepared. It was received by the orthodox with a storm of disapproval, and a dozen pens were immediately set to work to demolish its doctrine and to defend the principles he so boldly assailed. Among those who entered the lists the most formidable was Dr Horsley, then Archdeacon of St Albans, whose Animadversions were described as “at once nervous, animated and evangelical, but in some passages too sarcastic.”

It says something for Priestley’s position and influence in the theological world that his book should have met with the sternest disapprobation in Lutheran, and especially Calvinistic, circles abroad. It was ordered to be burnt by the hands of the common hangman at Dordrecht, in 1785—a sign that the spirit of the Synod of Dort had survived even two centuries.

Priestley thereupon undertook to collect from the original writers the state of opinion on the subject in the age succeeding that of the apostles, and he published the results of his investigation in his “History of Early Opinion concerning Jesus Christ.” In four volumes. 8vo.

This bringing him still more antagonists he retaliated by writing a pamphlet annually in defence of the Unitarian doctrine, until it appeared to himself and his friends that his antagonists produced nothing to which it was of any consequence to reply. The pains that he took to ascertain the state of early opinions concerning Jesus Christ, and the great misapprehensions that he says he perceived in all the ecclesiastical historians, led him to undertake a General History of the Christian Church to the Fall of the Western Empire.

“If you ask me,” says the Rev. Alexander Gordon, “what I should reckon Priestley’s greatest service to theological science, I should say that it is to be found in his adoption of the historical method of investigating the problems of doctrine and in his special handling of that method. The faith of Priestley was the precursor of the modern theme of theological development, though I do not think he used the term. His term was ‘corruption,’ a term which, it may be said, begs a very important question. At any rate it throws into strong relief the fact, on which all are agreed, that there is, and must be, some primitive nucleus whence developments proceed. Now it is the object of all who, for any reason, are interested in the origin of Christianity to reach this primitive nucleus at its first, undeveloped and uncorrupted stage. Where are we to seek it? By universal consent we must go to the New Testament. There, if anywhere, we shall come upon its traces. Here the agreement begins and ends. The New Testament is in all hands. But one man finds the Trinity in it; another the simplest Monotheism; a third, the papacy; a fourth, the supremacy of the illuminating spirit. The same words yield opposite results, because the principles of interpretation differ. The New Testament is to be interpreted by the voice of the Church; or by the testimony of the Creeds; or by the opinions of the Fathers of the first centuries before the age of dogmatic creeds began at Nicæa. These had been the expedients proposed by the Catholic, the Anglican, the Arian respectively. Socinus had rejected them all. It cannot matter to me (so, in effect, he contended) what any Church, or any Creed, or any Father may have said; I go to the New Testament myself, to read it with my own eyes, to understand it with my own mind.

“This was not the position of Priestley. He thought this as irrational a proceeding as any of those which it superseded. Even if, by good luck, the true sense were reached, there was no means of proving it to be such. The New Testament, in Priestley’s view, is not to be construed as a book of enigmas which might belong to any age. It is not dropped straight out of heaven into the hands of the man of to-day for him to make what he will of it. It belongs to a specific period; it was written for a given class of persons; it was written to be understood. ‘Therefore,’ said Priestley, ‘it will be an unanswerable argument a priori against any particular doctrine being contained in the Scriptures, that it was never understood to be so by those persons for whose immediate use the Scriptures were written, and who must have been much better qualified to understand them, in that respect at least, than we can pretend to be at the present day.’ (Works, vi. 7.)

“Accordingly it is the whole object of Priestley’s histories of doctrine to get at the mind of the common Christian people in the first age; to make their primary understanding of Scripture the norm for its true interpretation; and then to trace the process by which this first impression, this real meaning, suffered transmutation by the speculative genius of philosophising divines. Of the Nicene Council he quaintly says, ‘there was no House of Commons in that assembly.’ It ‘represented the Christian Church in no other sense than the House of Lords might be said to represent the English nation.’ He conceived that he could penetrate to this unsophisticated sense of the primitive believers through the very writings of the Fathers whereby it had been overlaid and obscured. Their admissions, their rebukes, their appeals, their laboured arguments, their surviving conservatisms: all were materials to his purpose.

“The plan was novel, the conception original, the whole endeavour strictly scientific in its method and basis. And I do not think that Priestley’s work in this department has received the full recognition which it rightly claims from us, whether we regard its spirit or its execution. The progress of biblical knowledge implies, no doubt, a readjustment of his argument and a revision of his conclusions. But the readjustment and revision are effected by the use of principles which he was the first to set forth and apply. We now go behind the New Testament just as he went behind the Fathers. The New Testament itself is, to us, largely a record by help of which we may reach the first impression made by the life, and work, and word of Christ. In so doing we do but carry out his suggestions and carry on his method. He is the genuine precursor of the properly historic treatment of biblical and theological questions.”

Priestley’s action with respect to the Sunday school movement was another rock of offence to the Established clergy. This movement began in Birmingham in 1784, and was supported by all denominations. The High Church party, however, insisted that all children, irrespective of the religious persuasion of their parents, should attend the worship of the Established Church and no other. After some time, and mainly at the instigation of Priestley, the Dissenters opened their separate Sunday schools, the Old Meeting in 1787, and the New Meeting in 1788, and Priestley preached the first sermon on behalf of the New Meeting Schools in November 1789, and with his son Joseph took an active share in the teaching.

Priestley was a sincere lover of literature, and no man was more sensible of its value to the moral and intellectual life of communities. In his own case he had derived so much benefit from a ready access to books which were beyond his means to purchase that he was ever willing to lend himself to any well-considered attempt to open the storehouses of literature, in its widest sense, as freely as possible, and to do all in his power to foster the love of reading and the spirit of inquiry among all classes of persons. In each succeeding situation—Needham, Nantwich, Warrington, Leeds—he left evidences of his efforts to make books as accessible as possible to the community of which he was for the time a member. Leeds still enjoys a striking example of these efforts in its proprietary library, and much of its reputation and character is owing to the wise and enlightened spirit which he infused into its administration.