DISCOURSES ON THE Evidence of Revealed Religion. That thou mightest know the certainty of these things wherein thou hast been instructed. ACTS i. 4. ΤΟ The REV. THOMAS BELSHAM, Tutor in Divinity in the New College, Hackney.* Dear Sir, AFFECTION aud esteem join with a sense of propriety in leading me to dedicate this work to you. To your friendship and society I owe a very great part of the satisfaction I have enjoyed during my residence at Clapton; not many days having ever intervened without our having had some intercourse, since I have been settled in your neighbourhood; and the interruption of it, as the breaking of any other habit, will for a long time be sensibly and painfully felt by me. It has also been an intercourse as improving as it has been pleasing to me. And without the seasonable aid of impressions from the knowledge and virtue of others, no man can tell how much his own mind might have suffered; man being the great instrument in the hand of Providence, of forming men for the best or the worst purposes. But what, I hope, attaches me to you more than any thing of this nature, are the important services you are daily rendering to the great cause which we have both at heart, viz. the training up of youth in the principles of liberal and useful knowledge, and especially of rational Christianity and virtue. The immediate object of these Discourses is one to which you have long given the greatest attention. No person educated under you, can be ignorant either of what Christianity really is, or of the rational evidence on which its truth is founded; and the effect of your judicious labours is very conspicuous. I have no where known, or heard of, such studious and orderly young men as those of the New College at Hackney, and to this, your immediate inspection, as the resident tutor, and your judicious treatment, have eminently contributed. Nor have the rational Dissenters ever had ministers who, by their ability and zeal, promise to distinguish themselves more * See Mr. Belsham's Memoirs of Lindsey, pp. 293, 294. VOL. XV. by their labours for the good of mankind, than those who have been trained by you. To them, as I am going off the stage, I shall principally look for that rechristianizing of the world, which is now become absolutely necessary, if Christianity is to subsist at all. The wretched forms under which Christianity has long been generally exhibited, and its degrading alliance with, or rather its subjection to, a power wholly heterogeneous to it, and which has employed it for the most unworthy purposes, has made it appear contemptible and odious in the eyes of all sensible men, who are now every where casting off the very profession, and every badge, of it. Enlightened Christians must, themselves, in some measure, join with unbelievers, in exposing whatever will not bear examination in or about religion. But when it shall, by this means, be divested of all its foreign incumbrances, it will be found to be something on which neither their arguments nor their ridicule will have any effect. It is a farther satisfaction to me to reflect, that you and I not only agree in entertaining the same views of this subject, but that from a similar unfavourable outset, we have both gradually, and by similar means, been led to entertain them. I think myself peculiarly happy in leaving my congregation, and especially my classes of young persons, under your care, as I know no person whose views in these respects coincide so exactly with my own. As far as they have been satisfied with me, I am confident they will be with you; and candour and good-will in the hearers is a sure earnest of their improvement under any teacher. Happy shall I 'think myself, if, in any future destination, I can find, or form, a sphere of exertion of a similar kind; that I may be in America, what I shall leave you here; that we may communicate our respective plans for the improvement of ourselves, and the instruction of others, in whatever is most interesting to man; and that, by the discipline and experience that we acquire here, we may be prepared for a sphere of superior usefulness, and what will surely accompany it, superior happiness, in a better state. With the greatest affection and esteem, I am, Dear Sir, Clapton, March, 1794. Yours sincerely, J. PRIESTLEY. PREFACE. THE subject of these Discourses is one on which I have addressed the public several times before, as in my Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion,* several parts of my History of the Christian Church, my Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever,† those to the Philosophers and Politicians of France, and those to the Jews; besides the first part of the Conclusion of my History of the Corruptions of Christianity, addressed to Mr. Gibbon,‡ my Discourse on the Resurrection of Jesus, and the large Preface to my Philososophical Works, in three volumes. But the subject being of the greatest importance, and especially at this time, I have thought it not superfluous to compose and publish these Discourses, intended more particularly to illustrate the evidence arising from the miracles that have been wrought in favour of the divine mission of Moses and of Christ; so that, though my object be ultimately the same, the ground that I have taken is considerably different from any that I have been upon before. The late revolution in France, attended with the complete overthrow of the civil establishment of Christianity, and the avowed rejection of all revealed religion, by many persons of the first character in that country,§ and by great numbers also in this, calls the attention of persons of reflection in a very forcible manner to the subject. It now more than ever behoves all the friends of religion to shew that they are not chargeable with a blind, implicit faith, believing what their fathers, mothers, or nurses, believed before them, merely because they believed it; but that their faith is the offspring of reason: that Christianity is no cunningly devised fable, but that the evidence of the facts on which it is built, is the same with that of any other facts of ancient date; so that we must abandon all faith in history, and all human testimony, before we can disbelieve them. The great problem to be solved is, how to account for present appearances, and such facts in ancient history as no person ever did, or can deny, viz. the actual existence of pp. 72-230. * Part II. See Vol. II. + Part II. See Vol. IV. § See Vol. X. p. 471. pp. 453-548. |