The unspotted purity of Priestley's life, the strictness of his performance of every duty, his transparent sincerity, the unostentatious and deep-seated piety which breathes through all his correspondence, are in themselves a sufficient refutation of the hypothesis, invented by bigots to cover uncharitableness, that such opinions as his must arise from moral defects. And his statue will do as good service as the brazen image that was set upon a pole before the Israelites, if those who have been bitten by the fiery serpents of sectarian hatred, which still haunt this wilderness of a world, are made whole by looking upon the image of a heretic who was yet a saint. Though Priestley did not believe in the natural immortality of man, he held with an almost naïve realism that man would be raised from the dead by a direct exertion of the power of God, and thenceforward be immortal. And it may be as well for those who may be shocked by this doctrine to know that views, substantially identical with Priestley's, have been advocated, since his time, by two prelates of the Anglican Church: by Dr. Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, in his well-known "Essays"; [13] and by Dr. Courtenay, Bishop of Kingston in Jamaica, the first edition of whose remarkable book "On the Future States," dedicated to Archbishop Whately, was published in 1843 and the second in 1857. According to Bishop Courtenay, "The death of the body will cause a cessation of all the activity of the mind by way of natural consequence; to continue for ever UNLESS the Creator should interfere." And again:-- "The natural end of human existence is the 'first death, the dreamless slumber of the grave, wherein man lies spell-bound, soul and body, under the dominion of sin and death--that whatever modes of conscious existence, whatever future states of 'life' or of 'torment' beyond Hades are reserved for man, are results of our blessed Lord's victory over sin and death; that the resurrection of the dead must be preliminary to their entrance into either of the future states, and that the nature and even existence of these states, and even the mere fact that there is a futurity of consciousness, can be known _only_ through God's revelation of Himself in the Person and the Gospel of His Son."--P. 389. And now hear Priestley:-- "Man, according to this system (of materialism), is no more than we now see of him. His being commences at the time of his conception, or perhaps at an earlier period. The corporeal and mental faculties, in being in the same substance, grow, ripen, and decay together; and whenever the system is dissolved it continues in a state of dissolution till it shall please that Almighty Being who called it into existence to restore it to life again."--"Matter and Spirit," p. 49. And again:--