WHILE some are usefully and commendably employed in celebrating the various merits and talents of a Priestley; in describing and discriminating with accuracy and skill the capacities and resources of his fertile and comprehensive mind, which, without perplexity or confusion, could embrace a variety of objects, and excel in experimental philosophy, metaphysics, philology, historical disquisitions, and speculations on civil government; be it my task (as far as my abilities can enable me to accomplish it) to trace and mark his progress as a Theologian, and to exhibit a brief, but faithful view, of those numerous productions that flowed from his pen, on subjects (as he justly thought) the most important and interesting of all others.

Intended and set apart, as he was, in the counsels of his nearest and best friends at an early period, for the Gospel Ministry, his own serious and devotional mind excited him to coincide with their views, and carried him forward with alacrity in the pursuit and attainment of his favourite employment, notwithstanding the embarrassments arising from a weak and delicate constitution, and the still greater difficulties that came in his way from the bigotry and hostility of those whose apprehensions of divine truth were different from his own.

Having thought It right to leave behind me some account of my friends and benefactors, it is in a manner necessary that I also give some account of myself; and as the like has been done by many persons, and for reasons which posterity has approved, I make no farther apology for following their example. If my writings in general have been useful to my cotemporaries, I hope that this account of myself will not be without its use to those who may come after me, and especially in promoting virtue and piety, which I hope I may say it has been my care to practice myself, as It has been my business to inculcate them upon others.

My father, Jonas Priestley, was the youngest son of Joseph Priestley, a maker and dresser of woollen cloth. His first wife, my mother, was the only child of Joseph Swift, a farmer at Shafton, a village about six miles south east of Wakefield. By this wife he had six children, four sons and two daughters. I, the oldest, was born on the thirteenth of March, old style 1733, at Fieldhead about six miles south west of Leeds in Yorkshire. My mother dying in in 1740, my father married again in 1745, and by his second wife had three daughters.

Dr. priestley has given a general though brief account of what had been done by his predecessors in this department of experimental Philosophy, and Sir John Pringle in his discourse before the Royal Society on occasion of presenting Dr. Priestley with the Copley Medal in 1772 has entered expressly, and more fully into the history of pneumatic discoveries. The same subject was taken up about three years after by Mr. Lavoisier still more at large, in the introduction to his first Vol. of Physical and Chemical Essays, of which a translation was published by Mr. Henry of Manchester in 1776. It is unnecessary to detail here what they have written on the history of these discoveries. It may be observed that no mention is made by any of these gentlemen of an experiment of Mr. John Maud, in July 1736, who procured (and confined) inflammable air from a solution of Iron in the vitriolic acid. Inflammable air had been procured from the White Haven coal mines, and exhibited to the Royal Society by Mr. James Lowther, but I do not recollect any notice of its having been collected from a solution of metals in acids, and its character ascertained before Mr. Maud's experiment; for Hales, though he procured both inflammable and nitrous air, did not examine their properties.

THESE consist principally of his Grammar and Lectures on the Theory of Language, his Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, and those on General History and Civil Policy.

The Grammar was first published in 1761. A month after the second edition of it, Dr. Lowth's Grammar came out. The third and last edition of Dr. Priestley's was in 1772. I do not observe any peculiarity in this work. It seems like all Dr. Priestley's writings and compilations, sensible, plain, and intelligible. Dr. Lowth had at that time more reputation in the world than Dr. Priestley; his lectures de sacrà poesi Hebrœorum, having deservedly procured him the respect of the literary part of the public. His grammar therefore seems to have interfered with the circulation of Dr. Priestley's.

The Lectures on the Theory of Language and Universal Grammar were printed at Warrington in 1762 in one volume duodecimo. I believe though printed and delivered to the students, it was never fully published; I shall therefore give an account of the subjects treated in this small work, more at length, than if the treatise itself had been generally known.

The first lecture after the introduction is on Articulation, or the power of modulating the voice. This is peculiar, as Dr. Priestley thinks, to the human species. Brute animals, emit sounds, and varieties of sound, the effect and expression of passions and sensations; they have also gestures to make known their wants and feelings: but the superior capability of the organs of speech is perhaps the most important characteristic of humanity.

It has already been mentioned that it was once the intention of Dr. Priestley to draw up a brief statement of his Theological opinions; not only to prevent misconception and misrepresentation, of which in his case there has been more than a common portion, but also to exhibit a system of Faith, plain, rational and consistent, such as common sense would not revolt at, and philosophy might adopt without disgrace.

This merit at least, (no common one) Dr. Priestley is fairly entitled to in relation to the tenets he ultimately adopted. The prejudices of his youth were to be surmounted in the first instance. He had to encounter, not these only, but the prejudices of his early and most valued connections. Every change of his opinion, was at the time, in manifest hostility with his interest; and every public avowal on his part of what he deemed genuine Christianity, put in jeopardy the attachment of his friends, the support of his family, and his public reputation; nor was this all: for it subjected him with fearful certainty, to the hue and cry which bigotry never fails to raise against those who in their search after truth, are hardy enough to set antient errors, and established absurdity at defiance.

The Writings of Dr. Priestley however enable his readers to do that, which it is much to be regretted he did not find opportunity to do for himself.

The Analysis of my father's Theological writings mentioned in the Preface to this work, is in the press and will be printed in the same manner as the Memoirs now presented to the public, and may be purchased with the Catalogue of his writings separately to bind with the present Volume, or may be had bound up with four Sermons which my father desired me to print, making therewith a second volume.

I had an expectation of presenting the public with an Engraving of a striking likeness of my father, to be prefixed to the present volume. In this expectation I have been disappointed. I hope however to be able to do it, by the time the second Volume will make its appearance.

DR. PRIESTLEY'S literary character may be viewed in the different lights of a natural philosopher, of a metaphysician, of an ecclesiastical historian, of a defender of religion in general, and of unitarianism in particular, and as an author in the wide field of miscellaneous literature. But there is another aspect in which he may be considered; the result of a few pages indeed, but of equal importance in my opinion with any or with all of these, viz. as a writer on the theory of politics: a subject in which the developement of a simple truth in such a manner as to impress it on the mind of the public, may influence to a boundless extent the happiness of millions. I well know the obloquy and the sarcasm attached to political reformers, and I am ready to acknowledge, it is possible that the melancholy theories of the present day, which judge of the future lot of mankind upon earth, from the history of past facts, may be too well founded; that war, pestilence and famine, and vice and misery in all its hideous forms may be necessary to counteract the over increase of the human species, and make up for the difference between the arithmetical progression of subsistence, and the geometrical ratio of accumulating population. Still the philosopher will have motives to labour in devising methods for the diminution and the cure of moral and physical cal evils, at least as well founded as those of a patient, who reasonably applies the known remedies for the disease by which he is oppressed.

THE principal source of objection to Dr. Priestley in England, certainly arose from his being a dissenter; from his opposition to the hierarchy, and to the preposterous alliance, between Church and State: an alliance, by which the contracting parties seem tacitly agreed to support the pretensions of each other, the one to keep the people in religious, and the other in civil bondage. His socinian doctrines in theology, and the heterodoxy of his metaphysical opinions, though they added much to the popular outcry raised against him, were not less obnoxious to the generality of Dissenters, than to the Clergy of the Church of England. Nor is it a slight proof of the integrity of his character, and his boldness in the pursuit of truth, that he did not hesitate to step forward the avowed advocate of opinions, which his intimate and most valuable friends, and the many who looked up to him as the ornament of the dissenting interest, regarded with sentiments of horror, as equally destructive of civil society and true religion.

The extreme difference observable between the apparent properties of animal and inanimate matter, easily led to the opinion of something more as necessary to thought, and the phenomena of mind, than mere juxta position of the elements, whereof our bodies are composed. The very antient opinion also of a state of existence after death, prevalent in the most uncivilized as well as enlightened states of society, confirmed this opinion of a separate and immortal part of the human system: for it was sufficiently evident, that no satisfactory hopes of a futurity after death, could be founded on the perishable basis of the human body.

Thus far the narrative is from my father's manuscript, and I regret extremely, with the reader, that It falls to my lot to give an account of the latter period of his valuable life.

I entertained hopes at one time, that he would have continued it himself; and he was frequently requested to do so, by me and many of his friends in the course of the year preceding his death. He had then nearly compleated all the literary works he had in view, he had arrived at that period of life when, in imitation of his friend Mr. Lindsey, he had determined not to preach again in public, and beyond which he probably would not have ventured to publish any work without first subjecting it to the inspection of some judicious friend.

He was requested also, in imitation of Courayer, to add at the close of his Memoirs a summary of his religious opinions. This would have counteracted the suspicions entertained by some, that they had undergone a considerable change since his coming to America; and it was thought by his friends, that such a brief and simple statement of all that appeared to him essential to the Christian belief, and the Christian character, would attract the attention of many readers previously indisposed to religion altogether, from not understanding its real nature, and judging of it only from the corrupt, adulterated, and complicated state, in which it is professed in all countries called Christian.