Nevertheless, it is as certain as anything can be, that Joseph
Priestley was no gloomy fanatic, but as cheerful and kindly a soul as
ever breathed, the idol of children; a man who was hated only by those
who did not know him, and who charmed away the bitterest prejudices in
personal intercourse; a man who never lost a friend, and the best
testimony to whose worth is the generous and tender warmth with which
his many friends vied with one another in rendering him substantial
help, in all the crises of his career.

The unspotted purity of Priestley's life, the strictness of his
performance of every duty, his transparent sincerity, the
unostentatious and deep-seated piety which breathes through all his
correspondence, are in themselves a sufficient refutation of the
hypothesis, invented by bigots to cover uncharitableness, that such
opinions as his must arise from moral defects. And his statue will do
as good service as the brazen image that was set upon a pole before the
Israelites, if those who have been bitten by the fiery serpents of
sectarian hatred, which still haunt this wilderness of a world, are
made whole by looking upon the image of a heretic who was yet a saint.

Though Priestley did not believe in the natural immortality of man, he
held with an almost naive realism that man would be raised from the
dead by a direct exertion of the power of God, and thenceforward be
immortal. And it may be as well for those who may be shocked by this
doctrine to know that views, substantially identical with Priestley's,
have been advocated, since his time, by two prelates of the Anglican
Church: by Dr. Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, in his well-known
"Essays"; [13] and by Dr. Courtenay, Bishop of Kingston in Jamaica,
the first edition of whose remarkable book "On the Future States,"
dedicated to Archbishop Whately, was published in 1843 and the second