'Priestley and Unitarianism' Talk by John Goodchild
[19th Jun 2010]News » 'Priestley and Unitarianism' Talk by John Goodchild
John Goodchild talking at this year's AGM.
On the 13th May, John Goodchild gave a talk to the Priestley Society at Mill Hill Chapel in Leeds. The talk was entitled 'Priestley and Unitarianism'. Below is a copy of the talk given on that day.
Two pictures in words might usefully introduce this paper. The first of these is of a recollection of about 1770 of three men walking arm in arm in the still existing Unitarian Chapel Yard at Wakefield. They were Dr Priestley; Benjamin Franklin, the North American patriot and one of the founders of the USA; and Abbé Raynal, the Roman Catholic (and French) historian and philosopher, and a father of the French Revolution. They were visiting William Turner, Minister at Wakefield for over 30 years and Priestley’s bosom friend. The anecdote illustrates Priestley’s international connections and his concerns with liberal political thought. The second picture is of a set of four volumes of Priestley’s History of Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ, published in Birmingham in 1786, which I was given only three weeks ago. On its title page it bears the signature of the 3rd Duke of Grafton, sometime British Prime Minister, an active Unitarian, and a constant attendee at Priestley’s great friend Theophilus Lindsey’s Essex Street Chapel in London. The volumes illustrate Priestley’s theological position and his influence within the top ranks of British society.
Now Priestley was obviously a polymath, widely knowledgeable in the fields of theology, political theory, history, grammar and science, and elsewhere; he is acknowledged to be Yorkshire’s greatest son – and perhaps Britain’s too. But his main concern in life was that of a minister of religion; other matters filled his time as a ministerial life was, in those times, one primarily of Sunday preaching and a little work with members of one’s congregation, but with ample opportunity for pursuing other interests as well as reading, researching and writing. Many ministers, as well as Priestley, thus found useful niches in society, where they are still remembered for their work. Dr Priestley’s work in founding the Leeds Library – which still flourishes here – is but one example of such activity for the benefit of the community.
But this short talk is concerned with Priestley as a minister of religion, and with how his opinions changed over the years, as did those of many others of his time, which was one of immense interest in, and enthusiasm for, religion both organised and personal. Priestley’s gradual adoption of a Unitarian viewpoint, i.e. one of religious reverence coupled with an enquiring mind in regard to religious beliefs, was not his alone; as we shall see, it was not uncommon in his time. He and those who thought like him had, as do all of liberal views, to bear the insults and denigration of those of conservative views, and in consequence to be mocked and vilified by the media, the Establishment and the wrought-up working class of the time; it happens still today. Priestley was naturally not perfect; he jumped to conclusions which he made public before they were fully thought out, and he wrote in the excitement of evolving thoughts. His theological works were always controversial, and it was perhaps unwise to entitle one of his best known books A History of the Corruptions of Christianity. But he was versatile, he was completely honest, he did not personally attack his opponents in print, as they did him, and he was of a deeply devotional spirit. He is also noted, in a very perspicacious account of him written by the grandson of his old friend William Turner of Wakefield, as having been a social being – he mixed in society, had friends as well as family, and was no bookworm imprisoned in his library.
Priestley was increasingly unorthodox in his beliefs from being a youth, when attending the Upper Chapel at Heckmondwike, the village where he lived with his father’s eldest sister, who informally adopted him. She was fully orthodox in her Calvinistic views, but happily received ministers of unorthodox views when they were accommodated with meals when on preaching engagements in the area. During his period at college, Priestley became an Arian, one believing in the divinity, but “createdness”, of Christ. Later, when Minister here at Mill Hill Chapel – to where he came in 1767 – Priestley became a Unitarian, believing in the full humanity of Jesus, which after all is as taught in the New Testament.
But Priestley was by no means the first in these theological advances. Oliver Heywood, the Puritan Apostle of the North, who had died in 1702, had lamented in his diary in his later years what he saw as a decline in theological soundness, and there had been published in the 1690s several volumes of what are known as the Unitarian Tracts: they are exceedingly rare, but in my own Collection I have the first two of them. The questioning of the Trinity spread first in the Church of England and then into Nonconformity, the questions resolving themselves essentially into whether or not ministers and laypeople were to be forced to accept formulations of orthodox words before being regardable as Christians, or be free to follow their minds and consciences in such matters.
It was in 1767, when he was still only in his early 30s – newly elected as Fellow of the Royal Society – that Priestley came from the teaching staff of the famous Nonconformist Academy in Warrington here to Mill Hill Chapel. (This was his first ministerial appointment in the West Riding, although he had been a candidate in 1758 for a corresponding position at Upper Chapel in Sheffield, but was rejected as being 'too gay in attitude'.) Mill Hill Chapel was only built and opened in 1848, and is very different to the chapel of Priestley’s time. That stood on this same site, but it was orientated East and West rather than the North and South as today, and it had a curious twin nave arrangement which had been followed from the congregation’s mother church, the extraordinary St John’s in New Briggate, which still exists and is open to the public. Of Mill Hill Chapel, which had been opened in 1674 – the first purpose built Nonconformist meeting house in the Provinces – during a period of temporary cessation of persecution of Nonconformists, Daniel Defoe, the famous 18th Century novelist, journalist and traveller, wrote that it was the finest meeting house he had ever seen.
In Priestley’s day, it housed a large, socially and economically significant congregation, who paid their minister £100 a year and provided him with a house; a parsonage was being built for Priestley in the Chapel Yard adjacent to City Square in his time here. (When Priestley left in 1773 to become literary companion to Lord Shelburne, he was paid £250 a year and provided with a horse.) It was at Mill Hill that Priestley came to a humanitarian view of the person of Jesus. His congregation had already enjoyed the ministry for some 15 years of Thomas Walker, MA, who was commented upon by Priestley himself as being orthodox in his views. Priestley reported his congregation here as being liberal, friendly and harmonious, and his six years here as very happy ones, taking an active part in the religious education of the younger part of his congregation too, being active in the social life of the people – who numbered many hundreds – and founding the still existing Leeds Subscription Library in 1768.
He produced a steady stream of books and pamphlets – I have his View of the Principles of the Principles and Conduct of Protestant Dissenters of 91 pages and his Considerations of Differences of Opinion among Christians of 88 pages, each published in 1769 when he was here and sold typically at 1s 6d. He was very friendly with many of the neighbouring Nonconformist ministers and some of the church ones too; with some of them he founded a magazine, The Theological Repository, which investigated Christianity and was issued in parts from Leeds, each costing 1s (or 1s 6d for larger issues). The Chapel Circulation Library within my own Unitarian congregation at Wakefield bought and circulated these parts as they came out, and Priestley joined with many of them in buying other radical theological books – we know, for example, that he and others from the West Riding are in the list of subscribers to a biography of Socinus, the 16th Century Unitarian published in 1777 – I have a copy of it. In the fully developed 18th Century Unitarianism, which Priestley developed here, he dropped the idea of Eternal Punishment, regarded Jesus as human and did not accept the Virgin Birth, but at the same time he accepted the Miracles of the New Testament and, until his death, believed in a Second Coming of Christ which would occur in or before 1814. When he left Mill Hill Chapel, he wrote that his people had given him full liberty to speak, write or do as he thought right, and he had been exceedingly happy. In later years, after he had become involved with the formation of the Unitarian Tract Society in 1791, that Society reprinted, as their first volume, three of his pamphlets of this period, including one which tried to draw his own people from an enthusiasm for the new Methodism.
It must be appreciated that Priestley was not the only man who was moving towards Unitarianism; some others joined him in the publication of books and pamphlets, although he was by far the most telling of the writers of his day on such matters. Others, ministers and laymen too, preferred to keep their religious radicalism less public, and it is important to bear in mind that, even in Yorkshire, there were many old Nonconformist congregations which became Unitarian at this period – Leeds, Wakefield, Bradford, Lydgate near Holmfirth, York, Malton, Whitby, Sheffield, Doncaster, Rotherham, Elland, Halifax – and these remained so into the 20th Century, 8 of the 12 even to this day. But there were many more which became Arian and often subsequently Unitarian temporarily – I have counted 21 in the three Ridings, in places from country villages like Ayton in Cleveland or Low Row in Swaledale to towns like Barnsley, Bingley, Keighley, Morley, Ossett and Pudsey. The Congregationalists were so concerned that, in 1756, they established a college at Heckmondwike for the training of ministers to counteract what they described as the cloud of Unitarian darkness then spreading over Northern England, which in the outcome was highly successful and took many congregations back into evangelical orthodoxy. Priestley was well known to the unorthodox congregations, and friendly with their members and ministers.
Some of the Unitarians of this period rose to high stations: the Duke of Grafton and Lord Shelburne both became Prime Ministers, Priestley’s friend John Lee of Leeds became Attorney General, three of the Wakefield congregation were MPs – one had a series of Unitarian family chaplains at Fryston Hall –, Sir George Savile, MP for Yorkshire and a Unitarian, was known as the Yorkshire Patriot. Many were united with Priestley in support of the North American colonists in the 1770s and 1780s, and joined with him in support of the Anti-Slavery Movement. Many became initial strong supporters of the French Revolution from its outbreak in 1789, and one Wakefield enthusiast named his son Alfred Washington Mirabeau Milnes in honour of these events. In the USA, Thomas Jefferson had read Priestley’s Early Opinions on Jesus Christ several times and was a Unitarian. Priestley was however unusual among even the Unitarians in supporting the claims of the Roman Catholics to full civil rights.
Priestley had developed his Unitarianism by 1770, and it changed little from that time. His was an active and reforming faith in a period of rapid change. It was to be a form of Unitarianism which survived into the mid 19th Century, but it was to be overtaken by a more spiritual and less literal form: the essence of Unitarianism is that it moves onwards, a view totally in accord with Priestley’s attitudes. Priestley was indeed a very great man, a pleasant, kind and hard working man, and first of all, in his own view, he was a minister of religion.
Comments
| User | Comment |
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| Mike 30th Aug 2010 16:10:20 | A point of speculation is whether Joseph Priestley, given the importance he placed on science, evidence and factual information, would have changed his views on religion had he seen the work and discoveries of Darwin. I firmly believe that he would have become a Darwinian and we would have seen the intellectual courage and humanity of Priestley take matters much further. |
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