driven from his native country, in his old age he found an asylum in the United States, where Mr. Jefferson, then President, received him with kindness and distinction, and in America he died.
In relating this melancholy but instructive story, we cannot but remark how Priestley forgot that the experience of all nations and of thousands of years has proved the utter impossibility of any one man convincing the whole human race, and converting them all to his views. He shut his eyes to that anarchy of opinion infesting the world, brought on in no small degree by such polemics as those in which he delighted. In an exact science, like chemistry, he could describe some new discovery, and every man in Europe at once admitted its truth. He never realized how different it is in politics and theology. The library of volumes he wrote on these topics has already dropped into that gulf of oblivion which has received all the works of the authors of the early and middle ages, and no man cares to learn what he wrote or what he thought of the matter. But not so with his philosophical labors; they stand out clear and distinct, monuments of the advance of the human mind in knowledge and power during the eighteenth century. His discovery of oxygen gas will last as long as the world endures.
From the life of this remarkable man we may draw a lesson, a lesson which the highest authority, with brief emphasis, has given us—"Study to be quiet, and mind your own business." We here see a great man effecting his own shipwreck on the shoals of politics and controversial theology. To what an eminence might Priestley have attained, if he had limited himself to those objects for which Providence had so well fitted him, and abandoned the vain pursuits in which he delighted, to men of less intellect and force! How is it possible, in our times, for a man to be at once a great philosopher, physician, theologian, politician? He must make his selection of one pursuit and stand by it. Not that I would wish an intelligent man, whose opinions must always control or guide those of a large circle around him, to shut himself up from public affairs of great interest. If he perceives, in those to whom the authority of government is committed, a disposition to jeopardize national interests, and pursue an obvious career of profligacy, let him resist them with whatever influence he has, and give his support to those who are the upholders of the peace, prosperity, and happiness of the nation. I would have him set his face against all social disorganizers, and give no countenance to religious disputants.
In thus freely criticising, for your benefit, a character historic in science, I trust I have not infringed in an unkind spirit on the generous maxim, "Say nothing but good of the dead." I join in the dying exclamation of Crœsus, the King of Lydia: "Judge not of the life of a man until you have witnessed his death." And what can there be more touching, or even more beautiful, than the last scene of
