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Untitled Article
9 tiot to take up his opinions amid the maddening excitement which , in the eagerness to enthrone reason , thrust her from her seat ; calmer moments had been devoted to the task , and in the retrospect of his own mind he saw an epitome of the mental revolution whose rapid transitions were hurrying by . Hence the steady posture which he assumed amid all the revelry of speculation
which he tvitnessed : hence , with all his exultation in the nevr prospect which seemed to open upon society , he appeared as a . conservator , no less frequently than as an assailant , of existing opinions . It would indeed be difficult to select from the benefactors of mankind , one who was less acted upon by his age , who . e
convictions were more entirely independent of sympathy ; in the whole circle of whose opinions you can set down so little to the prejudgments of education , to the attractions ^ of friendship , to the perverse love of opposition , to the contagion of prevailing taste ; or to any of the irregular moral causes which , independently of evidence , determine the course of human belief . We do not
assert that he was not precipitate : we do not say that he cast away no gems of truth in clearing from the sanctuary the dust of ages ; we do not deny that , in his passion for simplification , he did sometimes run too rapidly through a mystery , and propound inconsiderate explanations of things deeper than his philosophy . But we maintain that his sources of fallacy , whatever they were , were within , and not from without ; that he was no man for the
second-hand errors of indolent or imitative intellects ; that his faults were all those of a searching , copious , and original mind . We have said that Dr . Priestley ' s theological inquiries followed the order of his doubts : his conversion followed the order of his inquiries ; his publications , the order of his conversion ; and his influence , the order of his publications . Hence in part has arisen among Unitarians a conventional arrangement of their theological peculiarities , always beginning with the question respecting the person of Christ , and ending with Universal Restoration . Every complete published defence of their tenets , and almost every systematic course of public lectures in their chapels , exhibits this particular sequence of faith . It was not unnatural that the order
of investigation should become , in Dr . Priestley ' s mind , the order of importance : in each succeeding inquiry he would use , in addition to its independent evidence , the conclusion established in the preceding ; and , at the end of the process , the first step would seem to be more purely and directl y drawn from Scripture , and the next to be of a more inferential character . The order of
discovery , however , is seldom the best order of proof ; nor are either the best order for popular exposition ; and we think it , on some accounts , unfortunate that Unitarian ism has disposed itself so inflexibly along the graduated scale marked out by the steps of its modern explorers . Whether we regard it as the negation of
Untitled Article
On the Life , Character , end World of fit . Priestley . 27
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1833, page 27, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2606/page/27/
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