There can be little doubt, however, in spite of his robust optimism and the courage with which he confronted the world, the young divine led a cheerless and solitary existence at Needham. And it is no less certain that it was during this dark and troubled time that he sowed the seed—the wheat and the tares—which in the fulness of time was to furnish the harvest of good and evil he eventually garnered—fame, obloquy, insult, persecution, respect, affection and his position among the immortals. Although the account which Priestley has left us of his life and work at Needham is somewhat meagre, it is sufficiently full to enable us to trace in it the initial stages of his evolution as a theological thinker. Indeed, he says his studies at this period were chiefly theological, theology being the business of his life and the vocation to which he had been called. He had left the academy with a qualified belief in the doctrine of atonement, and as he was desirous of getting some more definite ideas on the subject he set himself to peruse the whole of the Old and New Testament and to collect from them, with the greatest care, all the texts that appeared to him to have any relation to the subject, and to arrange them under a great variety of heads. “The consequence of this was,” he says, “what I had no apprehension of when I began the work, viz., a full persuasion that the doctrine of atonement, even in its most qualified sense, had no countenance either from Scripture or reason.” He then proceeded to digest his observations into a regular treatise, a part only of which was at that time published, under the title of the _Doctrine of Remission_. The portion omitted had reference to an examination of the writings of the Apostle Paul, whose reasoning, he was satisfied, was in many places far from being conclusive. This examination grew into a separate work, in which he tested every passage in which the reasoning appeared to him to be defective or the conclusions ill-supported; and, as he says, he thought them to be pretty numerous. His friend Kippis advised him to publish this treatise under the character of an unbeliever, in order to draw the more attention to it. “This” he says, “I did not choose, having always had a great aversion to assume any character that was not my own, even so much as disputing for the sake of discovering truth. I cannot ever say that I was quite reconciled to the idea of writing to a fictitious person, as in my _Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever_, though nothing can be more innocent, or sometimes more proper, our Saviour’s parables implying a much greater departure from strict truth than those letters do. I therefore wrote the book with great freedom indeed, but as a Christian and an admirer of the Apostle Paul, as I always was in other respects.”