Joseph Priestley’s Discourses Relating to the Evidences of Revealed Religion collects sermons he preached in Philadelphia in the 1790s, published there in 1796 with a dedication to John Adams. Priestley—the English chemist and dissenting minister driven from England by persecution—used the pulpit to defend Christianity against the fashionable unbelief of his age, above all Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason and the speculative atheism he associated with revolutionary France. The book is expository throughout: a sequence of connected arguments drawing on ancient history, philosophy, and scripture to show that revelation is both credible and rationally defensible.
Its spine is a single cumulative case, and the parts follow the logic of that case rather than any abstract scheme. Priestley moves from the moral value of religion, through the corruption of the heathen world and the superior character of the Mosaic and Christian systems, to the nature of miracles, the credibility of testimony, the fulfillment of prophecy, and finally the internal evidence that Jesus could not have been an impostor.
How the Case for Revelation Is Built
A Dedication to John Adams
Priestley opens the volume by addressing it to John Adams, then Vice-President of the United States, recalling their friendship and correspondence stretching back to Adams’s time as envoy in England and their shared regard for Dr. Price, “the ardent friend of liberty and of America.” He praises Adams’s steady attachment to Christianity and his wish that these discourses, heard when first delivered, should see print. Few statesmen, Priestley remarks, firmly profess Christianity at all, and fewer still embrace a rational faith whose evidences and doctrines will bear the test of reason, surrounded as the age is by unbelief on one side and an enthusiasm that disclaims reason on the other. He expects that he and Adams will both be written off as enthusiasts by men who reached their unbelief without any just investigation of revelation, and he counts such contempt, whatever the rank of those who hold it, itself contemptible. Serious inquirers ought to respect one another despite differences; censure will seem small to those who look to the impartial Judge and remember Christ’s warning against being ashamed of him or his cause. Both men are advancing in life, watching this world recede and another approach, and whatever they value they should commend to others. Priestley counts it a happiness that in America religion has no connection with civil power, giving truth every advantage, though religion remains as useful to statesmen as to anyone, since Christian principles best enable men to devote time, talents, and life itself to the public good. Eminence exposes a man to envy and calumny—the lot of the Saviour himself and part of providence’s wise order, since unmixed praise injures no human mind. Only Christian principles let a man consult the real good of his fellow citizens without being swayed by their opinion, satisfied with his own mind’s approbation and his Maker’s, despising calumny, and waiting for final retribution; such principles formed the truly disinterested patriot. He closes with satisfaction at the government that gave him asylum from the persecution that drove him from England, persuaded its fundamentally good principles tend toward continual improvement, and wishing to live among them as a stranger, attending his favorite pursuits while hoping the interests of his native country and this one remain inseparable and their peace perpetual. The dedication is dated Philadelphia, 1796.
The Preface and the Case of Thomas Paine
The discourses, Priestley explains, supplement those delivered in England just before his departure and reprinted here. Asked to preach in Philadelphia, he chose subjects touching the evidences of revealed religion in an age abounding with unbelievers, many of them so only for want of better information. He avoided repeating his former ground, though some observations appear in both sets. Never intending publication, he took no notes of authorities—improper, he thinks, to recite them from the pulpit—and, far from his library, cannot supply them now; they are such as no one acquainted with the subjects will question, most frequently quoted and never disputed, his task being to collect, arrange, and apply them. Most will be found in Leland’s Necessity of Revelation, Young’s Discourses on Revelation the Cure of Superstition, and the Letters of some Jews to Voltaire, all recommended. The doctrines of the heathen philosophers he copies almost verbatim from Brucker’s History of Philosophy as abridged by Dr. Enfield; the account of the Grecian oracles and superstitions comes from Potter’s Antiquities of Greece.
The second part of Paine’s Age of Reason appeared in the city while these discourses were being delivered, and Priestley turns to the passages most deserving notice. He had once thought of answering the first part at large but judged assertions so extravagant and ill founded may be left to work their full effect, since only the extremely ignorant and prejudiced would pay no attention to refutation—pearls thrown before swine. Paine’s ignorance shows plainly: he maintains that Job bears “all the circumstantial evidences of being an original book of the Gentiles,” chiefly because it mentions Orion, Arcturus, and the Pleiades, which are Greek words—when those terms occur only in translations, the originals being quite different. Paine proceeds with an air of insolent triumph, as though every advocate of revelation lay prostrate, whereas they look down on him with pity for himself and his deluded followers, the blind led by the blind. Some unbelievers are more ignorant still: Volney, Laquinio, and others in France say there never was such a person as Jesus Christ, so, Priestley concludes, they cannot have read the New Testament—such ignorance does not mark an Age of Reason. He has observed that disbelief of revelation makes belief in God of no practical use, and in France has led to speculative atheism. He quotes a Paris tract of 1793, A Letter to a Sensible Woman, which calls theism respectable for the genius and virtues of its adherents, naming Socrates and Rousseau, but only a first step from which none would stop if frankly yielding to the impulse received; no one remains in this intermediate system but through want of reflection, timidity, passion, or obstinacy, and time and impartial examination will undeceive us—Voltaire himself, long the apostle of theism, professed doubt toward life’s close and repented being too confident. If anyone is shocked at absolute atheism, let him pause before abandoning revelation; but let no obstruction be laid in the way of free enquiry—with the apostle, prove all things and hold fast.
The Consolations and Enlargement of Religion
The argument then turns to the superiority of revealed religion over natural. Religion’s consolations suit ordinary human feelings, balancing present evil against distant good. It does not ask people to surrender ease, fortune, or life for nothing but for sufficient recompense—”Thou shalt be recompensed,” said the Saviour, “at the resurrection of the just.” What is needed is a stretch of thought enabling men to contemplate a certainly future thing as present and give it proper value against present things that hold undue advantage; the future’s loss in vividness is balanced by its real magnitude. The apostle says things seen are temporal, things unseen eternal; firm faith and steady contemplation make their just estimation possible, as thousands and millions have cheerfully abandoned everything, even life, when incompatible with prospects beyond the grave.
Religion enlarges and ennobles minds by habituating them to great and distant objects, advancing men beyond children, who are affected only by things immediately present, and beyond the bulk of mankind who look before them but not far—who sow and plant for next year’s return, buy goods for a distant market, or take disgusting medicines hoping for cure. This falls far short of looking to a world beyond the grave, laying up treasure in heaven, making friends of the mammon of unrighteousness to be received into everlasting habitations.
The God of the Hebrews Against the Gods of the Nations
Priestley takes up Voltaire’s charge that the Hebrews were an ignorant, barbarous, superstitious people and turns the Old Testament itself into the rebuttal. Moses never presents the sun, moon, and stars—the chief objects of heathen worship—as gods, but as creatures of the one supreme Being, and the earth likewise, another idol of the nations. The Hebrew writers subject everything to this single God: He does whatever He pleases in the armies of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; heaven is His throne and earth His footstool. Among the wisest heathens, by contrast, matter or the visible system was eternal, and the popular gods, arising out of matter, came after it; the tradition of one creating God had been lost, so He was no object of their worship. Against this, the Hebrew scriptures declare His supremacy in the strongest terms—Nehemiah’s solemn fast after the captivity, for instance, blessing His glorious name and confessing that He alone is Lord. Priestley asks whether such sentiments bespeak the ignorant and superstitious nation Voltaire describes.
The heathen gods were limited in knowledge and power, each confined to a province; the God of the Hebrews is everywhere represented as omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. Isaiah, Solomon’s dedication prayer, Jeremiah, and the hundred and thirty-ninth Psalm are marshalled to show it, and Priestley asks where in the Greek or Latin poets any such idea of a god is to be found. The prophets, moreover, ridicule heathen worship outright: Isaiah’s Bel bowing down and Nebo stooping, idols carried off as burdens into captivity; Jeremiah’s description of the vain custom of cutting a tree, decking it with silver and gold, and fastening it with nails so that it cannot move, unable to do evil or good.
Because heathen rites were mockingly cruel and abominable, such worship was strictly forbidden to the Israelites, and preserving the knowledge and worship of the one true God was the great object of Moses’ institutions. Moses directed the destruction of every place where the nations served their gods—on high mountains, on hills, under green trees—overthrowing altars, breaking pillars, burning groves, hewing down graven images, destroying their names. No idolater was permitted to live in the Hebrews’ country, and every Jew conforming to heathen worship was to die without mercy. Yet the Israelites were not directed to propagate religion by the sword; their conquests and extirpation of idolatry were confined to Canaan, promised to Abraham. David, with more zeal than any king of Israel, conquered neighbouring nations but compelled none to change religion.
The characters of the heathen gods were stained with gross vices, with abominable rites practised in groves and temples; Moses and the prophets always represent the reverse as the disposition of the God of the Hebrews. Nothing impure or indecent was admitted into His worship, and the great object of the Hebrew religion was to form men to moral perfection, all rites being insignificant without it: “Be ye holy, for the Lord your God is holy.” The Psalmist describes the acceptable man as walking uprightly, working righteousness, and speaking truth in his heart; vice is the sole object of God’s displeasure. Isaiah and Micah express the insignificance of mere ritual compared with moral virtue—God rejects sacrifices, new moons, feasts, and many prayers from hands full of blood; wash, cease to do evil, learn to do well, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow; though sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow. What does the Lord require but to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God?
Heathen festivals were seasons of rioting and lewdness; Israelite ones were scenes of innocent rejoicing joined with devotion, everything in the tabernacle and temple service conducted with decency, and the utmost abhorrence expressed for heathen customs. Moses forbids inquiring after their gods, saying, “how did those nations serve their gods, even so will I do likewise”—every abomination, even burning sons and daughters in fire, was done by them. Yet Voltaire says human sacrifices were practised by the Jews. Priestley asks whether effrontery can go farther, except his maintaining that the Jews were cannibals, and notes that Voltaire speaks without evidence, contrary to the heathen writers themselves, who describe heathen festivals as perfectly innocent festivity; justly or unjustly, everything not Jewish must be harmless, and their religion “a detestable superstition.” The Hebrew religion was free from impurity yet contained nothing of unnecessary austerity: no painful rite except circumcision, performed on children of eight days old, a trifling inconvenience; only one fast, of a single day in the year, but three festivals of some continuance. In the principal heathen festivals there was first solemn mourning—tearing hair, shaving heads, mangling flesh—all expressly forbidden to Israelites, who are told, “Ye are the children of the Lord your God.”
Priestcraft, the Hebrew Republic, and the Charge of Cruelty
Whatever influence the Hebrew priests had depended on keeping the people strictly observant of their religion, and in this they notoriously failed—proof that their influence was not great—because of the Israelites’ strong predilection for neighbouring religions. Under Ahab, the priests of Baal, including the eight hundred and fifty of the groves, had far more influence than the priests or prophets of Jehovah; Elijah was then the only prophet appearing, and not more than seven thousand in the country were not worshippers of Baal. Court and nobles favoured the foreign religion, the priests of Jehovah go unmentioned in the transactions of those times, and so any “priestcraft” then lay with the priests of Baal.
Religion and political institutions were closely connected in all ancient states, and with peculiar reason among the Hebrews: separated from all nations solely to preserve the knowledge and worship of the one true God amid universal defection, depending immediately on God’s providence, God being their proper King or supreme civil magistrate—their God and they his people peculiarly. Their request for a king was treated as rejecting God’s government. Under God’s immediate government theirs was an equal republic while neighbours were governed arbitrarily by kings; Moses could have seen nothing resembling it.
Priestley then defends the Hebrew civil system against Voltaire and other unbelievers. Its object was agriculture, not offensive war or conquest; foreign commerce was discouraged for religion’s sake; interest was forbidden between Hebrews; lands reverted to the original proprietors’ families at the Jubilee every half century, dissolving servitude contracts, preventing permanent excessive landed property, and preserving reasonable equality, liberty, and love of country. Conquest beyond Canaan was forbidden; wars were defensive; peace terms were proposed first; no unnecessary injury was permitted, no cutting of fruit trees, and non-combatants were spared. Proclamations excused newly married men, house-builders, vineyard-planters, and the faint-hearted. Celibacy was deemed a misfortune, barrenness a reproach, and many children the greatest blessing—contrasted with Vestal Virgins and monk and nun systems.
Miracles Before Hostile Witnesses
The case for the Gospel miracles rests partly on the character of the witnesses. They were not exhibited before a credulous people eager to believe, but before enemies predisposed to cavil and reject. History offers no other instance of a nation voluntarily abandoning the religion of its ancestors until the promulgation of Christianity. The Babylonian captivity, its exact duration foretold by the Hebrew prophets, and the overthrow of idolatrous Babylon cured the returning Jews of any taste for foreign gods, yet left them no more disposed to receive the miracles of Jesus. Before he appeared there had been no pretensions to miracle-working in the country at all—a fact that sits badly with the charge that the Jews were a credulous people. When Jesus came, the nation lay under Roman subjection, which it ill brooked, and was in anxious expectation of a Messiah its prophets had announced: a temporal prince who would break the Roman yoke and give the Jews dominion of the world. Jesus bore no resemblance to that figure. His free censure of the priests and leading men made them bitter enemies who never rested until they had compassed his death, and even the most virtuous Jews were attached to the idea of a temporal prince. After the resurrection the apostles were still asking whether he would then restore the kingdom to Israel, and their minds were not fully enlightened until Pentecost. The resurrection itself was an event the disciples had never expected; only the most undeniable evidence of their own senses brought them to believe it. Thomas, absent at the first appearance, declared he would not believe unless he saw the prints of the nails and put his finger into them and his hand into his side; Jesus granted him the satisfaction he demanded. The rest were at first of the same mind, so even the disciples may be counted as prejudiced against the great miracle rather than chargeable with credulity.
The apostles met the same violent opposition from the Jewish body as their master had. Paul’s conversion is the most remarkable instance: nothing less than the appearance of Jesus himself could overcome the extreme prejudice of even the better kind of Jews. His chosen companions, men as zealous as himself against the new religion and probably still enemies to it, witnessed the miraculous circumstances—a light surpassing the noon-day sun and the sound of a voice, though they did not distinguish the words—and to them Paul afterwards appealed.
The mission to the Gentiles was more unpromising still. Jewish pride and contempt for other nations had bred an equal hatred and contempt on their side, so nothing coming from a Jew was likely to be favourably received. The heathens, Greeks and Romans especially, were strongly attached to their rites, thought their observance necessary to the prosperity of the state; grave magistrates dreaded their discontinuance, and the profligate indulged their vices under religion’s sanction. The learned looked with contempt on the plainness and want of eloquence in the preachers. In such a state of things, was the heathen world likely to be credulous about miracles wrought by such men? The preachers could expect nothing but the extreme of incredulity. Many could not be brought to give the least attention to reports concerning them or to look into their books. Dr. Lardner observes that even Pliny, a man of letters, who reported his proceedings against the Christians to Trajan, had evidently not read any of the books of the New Testament or other unquestionably extant Christian writings. If the new religion made its way, it did so against every possible disadvantage—and history shows that it did.
Opportunity and Motive for Examination
To secure credit to accounts of miracles there must be both opportunity and motive for examining the facts. The miracles were numerous, which gives opportunity, and their continuance over time does the same: the plagues of Egypt were not momentary appearances but lasted some days each; the passage through the Red Sea took a whole night and the passage of the Jordan a whole day; the delivery of the Ten Commandments from Sinai, and above all the manna and the pillar of cloud and fire, continued forty years. The cures performed by Jesus, though instantaneous, produced lasting effects, especially his raising of the dead.
The Hebrew Oracle and the Prophets
The Hebrews received knowledge of future events in two ways: by consulting the oracle, answers given to particular questions through the high-priest, and by prophets raised up to speak in God’s name. The regular method of inquiry required the chief magistrate to attend in the sanctuary with the high-priest in his vestments, directing what questions to put, both hearing the answer equally—as when Joshua was told to stand before Eleazar the priest. Hence the high-priest could not impose his own words as a divine oracle; he did not go of his own accord but only when required by the civil magistrate. The priests never acquired more authority than the constitution gave them, or they would have preserved superiority over the occasional prophets—yet old Eli acquiesced in the child Samuel’s denunciations, replying, “It is the Lord, let him do what seemeth him good.” Under judges and kings no high-priest gained civil power or emolument.
The Hebrew oracle was accessible at all times, unlike Delphi, consultable only one spring month and on few stated days, which gave heathen priests time to prepare answers. No expense attended it, whereas Grecian oracles were costly, so only the great and wealthy had access; Delphi’s riches from donors like Croesus were immense, while the tabernacle and temple gained nothing. Nothing overawed the consulters of the Hebrew oracle, unlike the cavern of Trophonius with its elaborate preparation, bathing, waters of oblivion and remembrance, and the terror of being dragged feet-foremost into stupor. The Hebrew answer came in an articulate voice, not liable to misconstruction, while Grecian oracles answered by dreams, the flight of birds, or entrails; at Pherae in Achaia the oracle of Mercury required walking with stopped ears and taking the first words heard; elsewhere dice with characters, or a mirror in a fountain for questions about sickness. No ambiguity clouded the Hebrew oracle—plain and direct—unlike Delphi’s answer to the Lacedemonians about Tegea, measured with a line and fulfilled when prisoners cultivated the land, or the answer to Croesus about overturning a great empire, the mule prince being Cyrus, born of a Persian father and Median mother. The oracle existed before Moses, as Rebecca’s answer shows, and after Joshua, as when the Israelites asked who should go up first, and in David’s particular answer at the valley of Rephaim. All directions and predictions given by God or angels were clear: Abraham’s command to leave his country, Hagar’s message about Ishmael, verified in the Arabs descended from him, and the commands to Moses. Dreams and emblems had intelligible interpretations: Joseph’s reading of Pharaoh’s baker’s and butler’s dreams and of the seven years of plenty and famine; Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams and of his own by an angel.
Besides the oracle, God sent a succession of prophets speaking plainly, Moses the greatest and first, with a succession like him promised.
Running beneath every discourse is Priestley’s conviction that reason and revelation are allies, not rivals. He has no patience for a faith that disclaims the use of reason; indeed he calls such a faith spurious, since reason is the very faculty by which we are capable of religion at all. This commitment shapes his method everywhere. He argues that the heathen world’s degradation was not a state reason could have escaped on its own—three thousand years of philosophy had failed to reform it—and that the gospel succeeded where reason could not. Yet the gospel’s success is itself submitted to rational scrutiny: miracles are weighed by the canons of evidence, testimony is tested by motive and opportunity, and prophecy is verified against the historical record. The dedication to Adams makes the same point politically: a “rational christianity” whose evidences and doctrines bear the test of reason is the faith of the truly disinterested patriot, and Priestley expects to be called an enthusiast by unbelievers who reached their unbelief without just investigation.
The Moral Weight of Belief
Priestley’s most distinctive argument is that unbelief is not merely an intellectual error but a moral and practical disaster. Religion, he contends, enlarges the mind by habituating it to great and distant objects—the man who contemplates God, providence, and a future state is raised above the child who lives only in the present and the bulk of mankind who look before them but not far. He answers the objection that acting on rational self-interest makes the religious man mercenary by an appeal to human psychology: the miser begins loving money for what it buys and ends loving it for itself, and so the man who first practices virtue for the sake of reward will in time come to love virtue for its own sake, his conscience becoming the supreme rule of action. Without belief in God and a future retribution, he insists, a man has no sufficient reason to practice virtue at all when it goes unrewarded here; the fear of God is the first necessary step, and the godlike character is the superstructure raised upon it.
Miracles, Testimony, and the Character of the Witnesses
The evidential heart of the book is Priestley’s treatment of miracles, and his argument there is unusually careful. He refuses the notion that miracles might be wrought by inferior beings for malevolent ends, since a benevolent God would never leave his creatures without the power of undeception; a real departure from nature’s laws must therefore be a divine interposition for a purpose worthy of divinity. For those who were not witnesses, the evidence is testimony—and testimony is credible when its falsehood would be a greater miracle than the event related. He then sets out the circumstances that give such testimony credit: sufficient numbers, senses that could not be deceived, no motive to deceive, miracles numerous and lasting enough for examination, exhibited before the hostile rather than the credulous, and producing a lasting effect. The Jews, he notes, were in anxious expectation of a temporal Messiah and were bitterly disappointed by Jesus; the apostles doubted the resurrection until their senses compelled belief; the Gentiles were attached to their own rites and contemptuous of Jewish preachers. A religion that spread against such resistance, he argues, spread against every possible disadvantage.
The Quarrel with the Philosophers and the Deists
Much of the book is a sustained polemic against the pretensions of heathen philosophy and its modern admirers. Priestley contrasts the Hebrew scriptures’ doctrine of creation with the philosophers’ eternal matter, their emanation schemes, and their outright denials of providence; he contrasts the plain, articulate answers of the Hebrew oracle with the ambiguity and expense of Delphi; and he contrasts the moral purity of the Mosaic law with the obscenities of heathen worship, quoting Voltaire’s whitewashing of pagan religion only to demolish it with Firmicus, Plutarch, and Cicero. His treatment of the soul is especially striking: he argues that scripture teaches a future state solely through resurrection at the last day, not through a naturally immortal soul, and that the doctrine of a separate immortal soul—which he traces to heathen and Gnostic sources—is repugnant to the resurrection and founded the corruptions of later Christianity. This is Priestley the rational dissenter at his most characteristic, willing to indict the received Christianity of his day as a heathen import.
A Contested Legacy
The discourses belong to the last great age of Christian apologetics conducted in the plain light of reason, and they show both its strengths and its limits. Priestley’s learning is immense and his argumentative energy relentless; he moves from Egyptian animal worship to the prophecies of Daniel to the geography of the Delphic oracle without losing the thread. Yet the book is also a period piece—its confidence that prophecy can be mapped onto the papacy, its conviction that the historical record settles every dispute, its willingness to pronounce on the fate of nations from the pulpit. What survives is the temper: a faith that asks to be examined, that welcomes the microscope rather than refusing to look through it, and that regards the search for truth as itself a religious duty. For a modern reader the discourses are less a closed case than a window onto how a brilliant eighteenth-century mind thought Christianity could be defended—and why he thought the defense mattered.
