“You, miserable criminals, are of that number, and it is necessary that your lives should atone for your crimes, as a public example. You must therefore be removed from this world; and I most earnestly recommend you to employ the short space of time which will be allowed to you to make your peace with your offended Creator, who alone can grant that mercy which you must not expect from your country.” Priestley’s own account of these proceedings, as given in his _Memoirs_, is very naïve and even studiously dispassionate. He says:— “About two years before I left Birmingham, the question about the ‘Test Act’ was much agitated both in and out of Parliament. This, however, was altogether without any concurrence of mine. I only delivered, and published, a sermon on the 5th of November 1789, recommending the most peaceable method of pursuing our object. Mr Madan, however, the most respectable clergyman in the town, preaching and publishing a very inflammatory sermon on the subject, inveighing in the bitterest manner against the Dissenters in general and myself in particular, I addressed a number of ‘Familiar Letters to the Inhabitants of Birmingham’ in our defence. This produced a reply from him and other letters from me. All mine were written in an ironical and rather a pleasant manner, and in some of the last of them I introduced a further reply to Mr Burn, another clergyman in Birmingham, who had addressed to me ‘Letters on the Infallibility of the Testimony of the Apostles concerning the Person of Christ,’ after replying to his first set of letters, in a separate publication. “From these small pieces I was far from expecting any serious consequences. But the Dissenters in general being very obnoxious to the Court, and it being imagined, though without any reason, that I had been the chief promoter of the measures which gave them offence, the clergy, not only in Birmingham but through all England, seemed to make it their business, by writing in the public papers, by preaching and other methods, to inflame the minds of the people against me. And on occasion of the celebration of the anniversary of the French Revolution, on July 14, 1791, by several of my friends, but with which I had little to do, a mob, encouraged by some persons in power, first burned the meeting-house in which I preached, then another meeting-house in the town, and then my dwelling-house, demolishing my library, apparatus and, as far as they could, everything belonging to me. They also burned, or much damaged, the houses of many Dissenters, chiefly my friends.