to be done towards the gods” (see Aristotle, Pol., vi. 8), and remunerated from the revenues of the temple, or by the gifts of worshippers and sacrificial dues. The position was often lucrative and always honourable, and the priests were under the special protection of the gods they served. But their purely ritual functions gave them no means of establishing a considerable influence on the minds of men, and the technical knowledge which they possessed as to the -way in which the gods could be acceptably approached was neither so intricate nor so mysterious as to give the class a special importance. The funds of the temples were not in their control, but were treated as public moneys. Above all, where, as at Athens, the decision of questions of sacred law fell not to the priests but to the college of Ιξηγηταί, one great source of priestly power was wholly lacking. There remains, indeed, one other sacred function of great importance in the ancient world in which the Greek priests had a share. As man approached the gods in sacrifice and prayers, so too the gods declared themselves to men by divers signs and tokens, which it was possible to read by the art of Divination (q.υ.). In many nations divination and priesthood have always gone hand in hand; at Rome, for example, the augurs and the XVviri sacrorum, who interpreted the Sibylline books, were priestly colleges. In Greece, on the other hand, divination was not generally a priestly function, but it did belong to the priests of the Oracles (see Oracle). The great oracles, however, were of Panhellenic celebrity and did not serve each a particular state, and so in this direction also the risk of an independent priestly power within the state was avoided.

In Rome, again, where the functions of the priesthood were politically much more weighty, where the technicalities of religion were more complicated, where priests interpreted the will of the gods, and where the pontiffs had a most important jurisdiction in sacred things, the state was much too strong to suffer these powers to escape from its own immediate control: the old monarchy of the king in sacred things descended to the inheritors of his temporal power; the highest civil and religious functions met in the same persons (comp. Cic., De Dom., i. 1); and every priest was subject to the state exactly as the magistrates were, referring all weighty matters to state decision and then executing what the one supreme power decreed. And it is instructive to observe that when the plebeians extorted their full share of political power they also demanded and obtained admission to every priestly college of political importance, to those, namely, of the pontiffs, the augurs, and the X Vviri sacrorum. The Romans, it need hardly be said, did not have hereditary priests.

The same close connexion between state and religion meets us, under the forms of Oriental despotism, in the great civilizations of Egypt and Babylonia. Here all civil and religious power has its source in the king, and he is therefore himself the centre and head of the priesthood. Nowhere is religion more thoroughly a part of statecraft than in ancient Egypt; the official religion of the united monarchy is plainly an artificial structure built up by priestly fable and speculation out of the old religions of the several nomes and dedicated to the service of the monarchy. The priesthood accordingly has large functions, including, besides the service of the temples, astrology and divination, and the development and preservation of a sort of official theology and ritual theory, by which the conflict ing elements of local religion and mythology were reconciled. It has a strict bureaucratic organization, like any other branch of the administration; the higher priests are great officers of state, with civil and even military power; under Smendes (XXIst Dynasty) the priests of Amon at Thebes actually ascended the throne. An absolute monarchy, in which the king is revered as himself a divine person and in which the ministers of religion are the organs of a comprehensive and mysterious statecraft, obviously offers to sacerdotalism a far greater career than was possible among the free peoples of Greece and Rome; and the priests held in their hands the whole wisdom of the Egyptians, and so kept all parts of culture in such strict subservience, alike to the gods and to the monarchy, as to make the empire of the Nile the ideal type of absolutism based on divine right. In this respect, however, the Babylonian system, of which we have less ample details, probably fell little short of the Egyptian. Here also we find, as in Egypt, a state religion built on a priestly fusion of older cults, and therefore also a mythological theology which is not folk-lore but priest-lore. The older elements of religion are worked into a theoretic system of astral powers, and this in turn gives rise to a priestly study of astrology containing elements of real science. This complicated and many-sided lore gave to the priesthoods of Chaldaea and the Nile the character of a learned class, which is quite wanting in Greece and Rome, and it also produced a sacred and sacerdotal literature quite different in range and importance from such Western analogues as the Sibylline books or the libri augurales.

Against the genuine intellectual achievements of the Chaldaean and Egyptian priests must be set the incorporation of magic and sorcery in the circle of priestly sciences. The ordinary functions of religion are directed to conciliate or persuade the gods, but magic pretends to constrain the supernatural powers, and belongs, as we have seen, to superstition rather than to religion. But in Egypt and Baby Ionia the state religion was an artificial mosaic of old beliefs, in which the crassest superstitions had their place, and thus magical arts received a state recognition and were part of the business of the state priests in a way unknown in the West. Occult arts, in fact, are part of the machinery of government. Now when we go still farther east to the Aryans of India we again find the idea prominent that certain formulas have the power of constraining the gods, but in a form somewhat different from that of mere sorcery, and less primitive. All ancient peoples sought victory from the gods, and they sought it by sacrifice and prayer; but nowhere is the power of sacrifice more strongly felt than among the ancient Aryans; it was Agni, the sacrificial flame, as ancient legend has it, that led the conquerors of India from victory to victory. But there were also bloody struggles among the Aryans themselves, between men who invoked the same deity, and here the issue was not whether Indra was stronger than the gods of the non-Aryans, but which of the rival sacrifices he would accept. Now the priests accompanied sacrifice with songs of invocation, and so it became essential to have the most powerful song, which the god could not resist. The knowledge of these songs and of all that accompanied their use was handed down in priestly families, whose aid became indispensable to every sovereign, and at last out of these families there grew up the great and privileged caste of Brahmans. For further details as to the development of the priestly caste and wisdom in India the reader must refer to Brahmanism ; here it is enough to observe that among a religious people a priesthood which forms a close and still more an hereditary corporation, and the assistance of which is indispensable in all religious acts, must rise to practical supremacy in society except under the strongest form of despotism, where the sovereign is head of the church as well as of the state.

Among the Zoroastrian Iranians, as among the Indian Aryans, the aid of a priest to recite the sacrificial liturgy was necessary at every offering (Herod., i. 132), and the Iranian priests (âthravans, later Magi) claimed, like the Brahmans, to be the highest order of society; but a variety of conditions were lacking to give them the full place of their Indian brethren. Zoroastrianism is not a nature religion, but the result of a reform which never, under the old empire, thoroughly penetrated the masses; and the priesthood, as it was not based on family tradition, did not form a strict hereditary caste. Under the Sâsânians, however, Zoroastrianism was a state religion in the strictest sense, and the priests attained very great power, their assistance being absolutely necessary not only in the public ritual of the fire-temple but for the constant guidance of every individual in the minute details of ceremonial observance, which make up the chief body of the religious system of the sacred books, and every breach of which involved penance. It is thus easily understood that the clergy formed a compact hierarchy not inferior in influence to the clergy of the Christian Middle Ages, had great power in the state, and were often irksome even to the great king. But the best established hierarchy is not so powerful as a caste, and the monarchs had one strong hold on the clergy by retaining the patronage of great ecclesiastical places, and another in the fact that the Semitic provinces on the Tigris, where the capital lay, were mainly inhabited by men of other faith.

In this rapid glance at some of the chief priesthoods of antiquity we have hitherto passed over the pure Semites, whose priesthoods call for closer examination because of the profound influence which one of them—that of the Jews—has exercised on Christianity, and so on the whole history of the modern world. But before we proceed to this it may be well to note one or two things that come out by comparison of the systems already before us. Priestly acts—that is, acts done by one and accepted by the gods on behalf of many—are common to all antique religions, and cannot be lacking where the primary subject of religion is not the individual but the natural community. But the origin of a separate priestly class, distinct from the natural heads of the community, cannot be explained by any such broad general principle; in some cases, as in Greece, it is little more than a matter of convenience that part of the religious duties of the state should be confided to special ministers charged with the care of particular temples, while in others the intervention of a special priesthood is indispensable to the validity of every religious act, so that the priest ultimately becomes a mediator and the vehicle of all divine grace. This position, we see, can be reached by various paths: the priest may become indispensable through the growth of ritual observances and precautions too complicated for a layman to master, or he may lay claim to special nearness to the gods on the ground, it may be, of his race, or it may be of habitual practices of purity and asceticism which cannot be combined with the duties of ordinary life, as, for example, celibacy was required of priestesses of Vesta at Rome. But the highest developments of priestly influence are hardly separable from something of magical superstition; the opus operatum of the priest has the power of a sorcerer’s spell. The strength of the priesthood in Chaldaea and in Egypt stands plainly in the closest connexion with the survival of a magical element in the state religion, and Rome, in like manner, is more priestly than Greece because it is more superstitious. In most cases, however, where an ancient civilization shows us a strong priestly system we are unable to make out in any detail the steps by which that system was elaborated; the clearest case perhaps is the priesthood of the Jews, which is not less interesting from its origin and growth than from the influence exerted by the system long after the priests were dispersed and their sanctuary laid in ruins.

Among the nomadic Semites, to whom the Hebrews belonged before they settled in Canaan, there has never been any developed priesthood. The acts of religion partake of the general simplicity of desert life; apart from the private worship of household gods and the oblations and salutations offered at the graves of departed kinsmen, the ritual observances of the ancient Arabs were visits to the tribal sanctuary to salute the god with a gift of milk first-fruits or the like, the sacrifice of firstlings and vows (see N azarite and Passover), and an occasional pilgrimage to discharge a vow at the annual feast and fair of one of the more distant holy places (see Mecca). These acts required no priestly aid; each man slew his own victim and divided the sacrifice in his own circle; the share of the god was the blood which was smeared upon or poured out beside a stone (nosb, ghabghab) set up as an altar or perhaps as a symbol of the deity. It does not appear that any portion of the sacrifice was burned on the altar, or that any part of the victim was the due of the sanctuary. We find therefore no trace of a sacrificial priesthood, but each temple had one or more doorkeepers (sädin, häjib), whose office was usually hereditary in a certain family and who had the charge of the temple and its treasures. The sacrifices and offerings were acknowledgments of divine bounty and means used to insure its continuance; the Arab was the “slave” of his god and paid him tribute, as slaves used to do to their masters, or subjects to their lords; and the free Bedouin, trained in the solitude of the desert to habits of absolute self-reliance, knew no master except his god, and acknowledged no other will before which his own should bend. Hence the other side of Arab religion was to look for divine direction in every grave or difficult concern of life; what could not be settled in the free council of the tribesmen, or by the unenforced award of an umpire, was referred to the command of the god, and the oracle was the only authority by which dissensions could be healed, lawsuits determined, and judgment authoritatively spoken. The voice of the god might be uttered in omens which the skilled could read, or conveyed in the inspired rhymes of soothsayers, but frequently it was sought in the oracle of the sanctuary, where the sacred lot was administered for a fee by the sädin. The sanctuary thus became a seat of judgment, and here too compacts were sealed by oaths and sacrificial ceremonies. These institutions, though known to us only from...

Mr Kirkley, a Dissenting minister. On the removal of the clergyman Mr Kirkley opened a school of his own, and Priestley became entirely his pupil. From the age of sixteen to nearly twenty his health was unsatisfactory, and he attended neither school nor college, but still continued his studies in private with occasional assistance. It was thought that his constitution would be better adapted to an active than to a sedentary life, and with a view to commerce he learned French, Italian, and German without assistance. But the aunt, Mrs Keighley, had sei her heart on making a minister of him, and young Priestley’s own aspirations took the same form. When, therefore, his health improved, the offer of a mercantile situation in Lisbon was surrendered, and Priestley in his twentieth year (1752) was sent to Daventry, where there existed a Nonconformist academy, originally founded by Dr Doddridge at Northampton, and removed after his incapacitation by illness or on his death in 1751.

There is no mention of any hesitation on the part of Priestley or his friends as to whether he should enter the established church or not. But there was certainly nothing in his theological creed at this period to have prevented his taking orders. The hindrance, therefore, must have been his adherence to the Nonconformist tradition on questions of ecclesiastical polity and ritual. There were, however, in his early associations some elements which not only help to explain his after career but throw a curious light on the fluid condition of Nonconformist denominations in those days as compared with their sectarian fixedness now. He was brought up in the principles of Calvinism. But he tells us his aunt’s house “was the resort of all the Dissenting ministers in the neighbourhood without distinction; and those who were most obnoxious on account of their heresy were almost as welcome to her, if she thought them honest and good men—which she was not unwilling to do—as any others.” Notwithstanding the comparative freedom of the conversations to which he listened, young Priestley at seventeen was strictly orthodox, and anxiously endeavoured to realize the experiences he supposed to be necessary to conversion. His chief trouble was that he could not repent of Adam’s transgression, a difficulty he never surmounted. The pressure of this impossibility forced his candid mind to the conclusion that there must be a mistake somewhere, and he began to doubt whether he was really so much entangled in Adam’s guilt as he had been taught. Accordingly he was refused admission into the communion of the Independent church which his aunt attended. His adhesion to Calvinism was now considerably relaxed. But this did not interfere with his entrance at Daventry. Dr Doddridge had not confined his educational aims to students for the ministry, and he not only refused to impose theological tests but he incurred reproach by resolutely refusing to press his own orthodox creed on the heterodox pupils occasionally received. Priestley’s intellectual preparation previous to his entrance is noteworthy. Besides being a fair classic, he had improved his Hebrew by giving lessons in that language. He had acquired three modern languages. He had “learned Chaldee and Syriac, and just begun to read Arabic”; nor was he disproportionately backward in mathematics. He had also mastered ’s Gravesande’s Elements of Natural Philosophy, and various text-books of the time in logic and metaphysics. It cannot surprise us that he “was excused all the studies of the first year and a great part of those of the second. ’ At Daventry he stayed three years, taking a prominent part in the singularly free discussions that seem to have formed a considerable part of the academical exercises. “In this situation,” he says, “I saw reason to embrace what is generally called the heterodox side of almost every question.” His chief tutors

were Dr Ashworth of conservative and the Rev. Samuel Clark of decidedly liberal tendencies. Priestley’s speculations at this time were philosophical rather than scientific. Under the influence of Hartley’s Observations on Man and Collins’s Philosophical Enquiry he exchanged his early Calvinism for a system of “necessarianism,”—that is, he learned to hold that the invariable connexion of cause and effect is as inviolable in the moral as in the material world. During these early years he began his enormous industry as a writer, and in particular laid down the lines of his Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion.

From Daventry he went in 1755, at twenty-two years of age, to take charge of a small congregation at Needham Market in Suffolk. This church was halting between Presbyterianism and Independency, being subsidized by both. Priestley insisted on dropping the Independent connexion. As a consequence he had to content himself with a salary of <£30, and succeeded in living on less. His studies had not in the least chilled his devotion to the sacred work, which indeed to the end of his life he counted his highest honour. He was diligent in preaching and teaching, but his intellectual freedom, together with a physical difficulty in speech, prevented his attaining popularity. To cure the defect in speech he paid twenty guineas, given by his aunt, to a London specialist or quack. But this difficulty turned out to be as irremediable as his intellectual unconformability; and the only permanent advantage derived from his visit to the metropolis was an introduction to various scholars of the day, such as Dr Price, also Dr Benson and Dr Kippis, friends of Lardner. Later on he made the acquaintance of the last also through some manuscript notes on the doctrine of atonement, which attracted the great scholar’s attention.

In 1758 Priestley removed to Nantwich, obtaining a more congenial congregation; and there he established a school, which increased his income but lessened his literary activity. Always bringing his best intelligence to bear on everything he undertook, he varied his elementary lessons with instruction in natural philosophy, illustrated by experiments, for which he could now afford the needful instruments. “These,” he says, “I taught my scholars in the highest class to keep in order, and to make use of; and by entertaining their parents and friends with experiments, in which the scholars were generally the operators, and sometimes the lecturers too, I considerably extended the reputation of my school.” Up to this time his studies had been entirely literary and theologico-philosophical. It is noteworthy that his efforts to liberalize education turned his attention to science. He was probably one of the very first teachers to appreciate the importance of physical science to early culture.

In 1761 he was appointed classical tutor in a Nonconformist academy, then recently established at Warrington on the same liberal principles as the institution at Daventry. In this position he passed six of his happiest years, pursuing his scientific studies, especially in chemistry and electricity, enjoying congenial intercourse with Dr Turner of Liverpool, also with Wedgwood’s partner Mr Bentley, Dr Enfield, and various Manchester men whose sons or grandsons helped to form the “Manchester school.” In 1762 he married the daughter of Mr Isaac Wilkinson, an ironmaster of Wrexham. At Warrington Priestley received the complimentary degree of LL.D, from Edinburgh, apparently in recognition of his Chart of History. On a visit to London he made the acquaintance of Dr Franklin, and his researches in electricity procured his election to the Royal Society in 1766.

In the following year (1767) Dr Priestley removed to Leeds to take charge of Mill Hill chapel; and in the same year was published his History of Electricity, a work suggested by Dr Franklin, and contributing greatly to the author’s fame. Now, however, he turned once more to speculative theology, and surrendered the Arianism he had hitherto loosely held, adopting instead definite Socinian views. In addition to preaching and teaching diligently in his congregation he carried on his chemical researches with results considered at the time startling. Chemistry was hardly in its infancy; it was unborn. “The vast science,” says Mr Huxley, “which now passes under that name had no existence.” Living next door to a brewery Dr Priestley amused himself with experiments on the “fixed air” (carbonic acid) produced there, and succeeded in forcing it into water. Thus commenced his researches on “different kinds of air,” remarkable rather for the impulse they gave to controversy and experiment than for any mature scientific results. He had a keen instinct for surmise, but no adequate method of research and verification. On this point Roscoe and Schorlemmer observe in their treatise on Chemistry (vol. i. p. 18) that “Priestley’s notion of original research, which seems quite foreign to our present ideas, may be excused, perhaps justified by the state of science in his day. He believed that all discoveries are made by chance, and he compares the investigation of nature to a hound, wildly running after, and here and there chancing on game (or, as James Watt called it, ‘his random haphazarding’), whilst we would rather be disposed to compare the man of science to the sportsman, who having, after persistent effort, laid out a distinct plan of operations, makes reasonably sure of his quarry.” At this time also he wrote various political tracts and papers, always in favour of popular rights, and in particular hostile to the attitude of the Government towards the American colonies.

In 1771 he was nearly appointed to accompany Captain Cook to the South Seas. But the Government of the day was shocked at the idea of giving official position to a Socinian minister, and Priestley was disappointed. Shortly afterwards he accepted the somewhat anomalous situation of “literary companion” and librarian to Lord Shelburne. With this nobleman he travelled in Holland and Germany, returning by Paris, where he spent a month in 1774. The position gave him ample leisure for his scientific and literary pursuits. But on the completion of his most noteworthy philosophical treatise, Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, the connexion was dissolved. It has been surmised that the patron feared to share the unpopularity of his client’s views. Those views Priestley himself considered to be “materialistic.” It is a question of words. Seeing that he denied impenetrability to matter, it is difficult to say why the substance he left might not as well be called spirit as anything else.

In 1780 he removed to Birmingham, where he enjoyed the friendship of James Watt and his partner Boulton, also of Dr Darwin, grandfather of the illustrious man in whom the honours of the name culminated. Here Dr Priestley again took charge of a congregation, and resumed his theological efforts in a controversy with the bishop of Waterford, and in a laborious History of the Corruptions of Christianity. But bad times were at hand. The French Revolution excited passionate controversy, and Priestley was naturally on the side of the revolutionists. In 1791 the anniversary of the capture of the Bastille was observed in Birmingham by a dinner at which he was not present, and with which he had nothing to do. But the mob wished to testify by some signal deed their abhorrence of the un-English notions propounded at the dinner, and therefore burned down Priestley’s chapel and house. Before the deed was done they waded knee deep in torn manuscripts, and amused themselves with futile efforts to make an electric machine avenge its owner’s impiety by firing the papers with a spark. The blow was a terrible one. Priestley and his family had escaped violence by timely flight, but every material possession he valued was destroyed and the labours of years annihilated. But neither despair nor bitterness possessed him. He left Birmingham, and for three years preached in Hackney, then a suburban village, and in 1794 he went out to the young States whose cause he had advocated, to spend the last ten years of his life in the land of the future. He resided at Northumberland in Pennsylvania, eager as ever for controversy and research. His materialism, so-called, never dimmed his hope of immortality. His religion to the end was characterized by a childlike simplicity of spirit. On his deathbed he would have his grandchildren to kneel by his side for their daily prayers, and listened with pleasure to the hymns they lisped. On the 6th of February 1804 he clearly and audibly dictated a few alterations he wished to make in some of his publications. “That is right,” he said, “I have now done”; and within an hour he quietly expired.

The interest of Dr Priestley’s life lies not so much in any splendid achievements, either literary or scientific, but rather in the character of the man. His career also affords a typical illustration of the mutual relation and interaction of several great factors of human progress at a very critical period. As a Nonconformist minister, born into a Calvinistic circle, educated in an Independent academy, developing into a Socinian divine, yet maintaining always the most friendly relations with clergymen, priests, and orthodox ministers, he gives us a curious insight into the condition of English religion just before its sectarian divisions had hardened into their modern form. As a pioneer in the investigation of gases and the discoverer of oxygen he helped—but, it must be admitted, as often by his mistakes as by his successes—to erect chemistry into a science. As a professed materialist whose doctrines seemed at the same time to merge matter in force he, amongst others, prepared the way for the modern agnosticism, which declines to look behind phenomena. As a politician he anticipated nineteenth-century radicalism. In general, as an exceptionally single-eyed and fearless searcher after truth he bore the brunt of persecution by vulgar ignorance, and in his disappointments illustrated how little can be practically accomplished by isolated enlightenment apart from popular education.

The works of Dr Priestley, as collected and edited by John Towill Rutt, fill twenty-five octavo volumes, one of which, however, consists of memoirs and correspondence. The date of this collected edition is 1832. It contains upwards of 130 separate works, varying in size from brief pamphlets to treatises in four volumes, and his labours range over almost all possible subjects of human knowledge or speculation. Mathematics, chemistry, physiology, grammar, logic, mental and moral philosophy, history, theology, interpretation of prophecy, politics, and sociology, all alike furnished themes for Priestley’s untiring pen, and if he did not write on any of them with striking originality he treated all with freedom and intelligence. In 1761 he issued his first published works, a treatise on the Scripture Doctrine of Remission and The Rudiments of English Grammar. From that date till 1767 he was content with publishing something every alternate year. But from 1767 to 1804 he allowed only two years to go by unmarked by one or more publications, many of them remarkable as monuments of conscientious and laborious industry. His first scientific work, The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments, was published in 1767. The rapid advance of science has left to this and similar works of his little more than an antiquarian interest. But the treatise illustrates his prophetic spirit, inasmuch as it shows how far he was in advance of his contemporaries in appreciation of the prospects of physical research. In 1774 he issued his first volume of Experiments and Observations on Different Branches of Air, Ac. In this volume he announced his discovery of “dephlogisticated air,” now known as oxygen. The then prevalent theory of phlogiston, or the combustible principle in matter, betrayed him into great confusion, evident enough in the very name he gave to his new “branch of air.” Nevertheless it is said of him in Roscoe and Schorlemmer’s Chemistry (vol. i. p. 16) that “no one obtained more important results or threw more light upon the chemical existence of a number of different gases than Joseph Priestley.” These Experiments and Observations were continued through five volumes, of which the last appeared in 1780. Perhaps the limit of Priestley’s power of growth is illustrated by the persistency with which he clung to phlogiston notwithstanding the discoveries of Black, Lavoisier, and Cavendish. In 1800 he issued a treatise called The Doctrine of Phlogiston established, and that of the Composition of Water ref uted. In a letter of that year to the Rev. T. Lindsay he says, “I have well considered all that my opponents have advanced, and feel perfectly confident of the ground I stand upon. In this definitive treatise I insert all that is contained in my former publications on the subject, with many new experiments. Though nearly alone, I am under no apprehension of defeat.” Dr Priestley clearly failed to appreciate the progress of the science he had done so much to promote. But the attempt made by Lavoisier to claim for himself a concurrent discovery oι oxygen at the same time as Priestley’s was certainly unjustifiable. This achievement, together with the first preparation of nitric oxide, nitrous oxide, hydrochloric acid, and other important gases, constitutes the true ground of his fame as a scientific pioneer (see Roscoe and Schorlemmer, l.c.).

Priestley’s chief theological works were the Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion, A History of the Corruptions of Christianity, and A General History of the Christian Church to the Fall of the Western Empire. Bishop Horsley’s criticisms on the second of these works produced letters in reply, “with additional evidence that the primitive church was Unitarian.” His principal metaphysical writings were Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit and various essays and letters on necessarianism. A complete list of his works will be found in vol. i. part ii. of Rutt’s collected edition. (J. A. P., jr.)