With the success of the American Revolution prophecy entered other spheres, and here we welcome a remarkable writer, the Rev. William Paley, an English divine, who was born July, 1743, and died 25th May, 1805. He is known for various works of great contemporary repute, all commended by a style of singular transparency, and admirably adapted to the level of opinion at the time. If they are gradually vanishing from sight, it is because other works, especially in philosophy, are more satisfactory and touch higher chords. His earliest considerable work, and for a long period a popular text-book of education, was the well-known “Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy,” which first appeared in 1785. Here, with grave errors and a reprehensible laxity on certain topics, he did much for truth. The clear vision with which he saw the enormity of Slavery was not disturbed by any prevailing interest at home, and he constantly testified against it. American Independence furnished occasion for a prophetic aspiration of more than common value, because embodied in a work of morals especially for the young:-- “The great revolution which seems preparing in the Western World may probably conduce (and who knows but that it is designed?) _to accelerate the fall of this abominable tyranny_: and when this contest, and the passions that attend it, are no more, there will succeed a season for reflecting whether a legislature which had so long lent its assistance to the support of an institution replete with human misery was fit to be trusted with an empire the most extensive that ever obtained in any age or quarter of the world.”[603] In thus associating Emancipation with American Independence, the philosopher became an unconscious associate of Lafayette, who, on the consummation of peace, invited Washington to this beneficent enterprise,[604]--alas! in vain. Paley did not confine his testimony to the pages of philosophy, but openly united with the Abolitionists of the day. To help the movement against the slave-trade, he encountered the _claim of pecuniary compensation_ for the partakers in the traffic, by a brief essay, in 1789, entitled “Arguments against the Unjust Pretensions of Slave Dealers and Holders to be indemnified by Pecuniary Allowances at the Public Expense, in Case the Slave Trade should be abolished.”[605] This was sent to the Abolition Committee, by whom the substance was presented to the public; but unhappily the essay was lost or mislaid. His honorable interest in the cause was attested by a speech at a public meeting of the inhabitants of Carlisle, over which he presided, 9th February, 1792. Here he denounced the slave-trade as “this diabolical traffic,” and by a plain similitude, as applicable to slavery as to the trade in slaves, held it up to judgment:--