approbation ever to be remembered by its author with pride and satisfaction. At their request it was given with considerable enlargement to the public. It is the first tract in the present collection. The first publication of this discourse gave no small alarm to the well-wishers and admirers of Dr Priestley's doctrines. Dr Priestley however kept up the spirits of his party by pro mising an early and satisfactory answer.

Per damna, per cædes, ab ipso

Ducit opes animumque ferront

was his vaunting language. He predicted that he should rise more illustrious from his supposed defeat; he promised to strengthen the evidence of his favourite opinion by the very objections that had been raised against it; he seemed to flatter himself that he should find a new convert in his antagonist himself; and his new performance had scarce made its appearance when he had the ridiculous vanity to boast even in print of

the shame and remorse with which he was confident his adversary must be penetrated. A controversy that was in the meanwhile going on upon the same subject between Dr Priestley and the Rev. Mr Samuel Badcock, the author of a learned critique upon the first part of Dr Priestley's history, inserted in the Monthly Review for the month of June 1783, gave Dr Priestley the occasion of raising these expectations in the public. It was late in the autumn of the same year (1783) when the work which was to effect these wonders appeared in the form of Letters to Dr Horsley. These Letters These Letters gave occasion to the tract which is the second in this collection, entitled, Letters from the Archdeacon of St Alban's in Reply to Dr Priestley, which was first published in the summer of the year 1784. Dr Priestley in his Letters expressed a great desire to draw his adversary into a tedious controversy on the main question,-the article of our Lord's divinity. His adversary knowing that ques

tion to have been long since exhausted, and that nothing new was to be said on either side, chose in his Letters in Reply to adhere closely to his own main question. He defended his former argument, and he collected new specimens from Dr Priestley's new publication, of his utter inability to throw light upon the subject. Thus a useless and endless contention upon the main question was avoided; but many discussions necessarily arose upon secondary points more or less connected with it. The authority of the writings that go under the name of the apostolical fathers-the rise of the two sects of the Nazarenes and the Ebionites-the difference between the two-and the difference of both from the orthodox Hebrew Christians-these the learned reader will probably esteem the most interesting parts of the whole controversy, as on the other hand he will certainly judge the long dispute whether the word Jews means Jews, on Dr Priestley's part at least to be the most

frivolous. In these Letters in Reply Dr Priestley's antagonist declared himself resolved to give no answer to any thing that Dr Priestley might find to say further upon the subject. A declaration in which at the time he was much in earnest.

Dr Priestley mortified to find that his Letters had failed of the expected success; that his antagonist touched with no shame, with no remorse, remained unshaken in his opinion; and that the authority of his own opinion was still set at nought, his learning disallowed, his ingenuity in argument impeached; and what was least to be borne,— finding that a haughty churchman ventured incidentally to avow his sentiments of the Divine commission of the Episcopal ministry, and presumed to question the authority of those teachers who usurp the preacher's office without any better warrant than their own opinion of their own sufficiency, lost all temper. A second set of Letters to the

Archdeacon of St Alban's appeared in the autumn of the year 1784, in which all pro fession of personal regard and civility was laid aside. The charge of insufficiency in the subject was warmly retorted, and the incorrigible dignitary was taxed with manifest misrepresentation of his adversary's argument; with injustice to the character of Origen whose veracity he had called in question, and with the grossest falsification of ancient history. He was stigmatized in short, in terms as a falsifier of history, and a defamer of the character of the dead.

Under all this reproach he continued silent almost eighteen months: the character of Origen and an intricate question of ancient history upon which the charge of direct falsification had been advanced against him, were indeed the only points on which he felt the least desire to reply. A Sermon on the Incarnation preached in his parish church of St Mary Newington, in Surrey,