opinion is but a hopeless undertaking, but in the absence of all facts which point out any more intimate admiration of the principles of any party, and with the possession of an experience which plainly speaks the contrary, it may be fairly and fearlessly said, that he never in his life was a party man. On all questions, he was the advocate of liberal principles, and the most liberal discussion, but he never went one step beyond the bounds of fair and candid conclusions, or of established order. What his biographer says of him on this subject, viz. that he was of a liberal party in the university, is just as true of him at any other period of his life. He was more properly a liberal man of any party. He brought great interest and eagerness to any party, and advocated any set of arguments by which good was to be done, or truth forwarded; but to say he was a secret advocate for ecclesiastical reform, or a political dabbler, from the circumstance of his having very slightly engaged in a question of the day which made considerable noise, or from having entered on a course of lecturing which involved all duties, moral and political, is to confound party with opinion, and to make every man a partisan who expresses his sentiments for or against any side of a question. It must be remembered that there was at that day, and perhaps is still, a certain aptitude in receiving, as well as readiness in affixing the name of party to men of any public note, according as their cast of mind or their abilities seem favourable to a certain way of treating particular subjects. Yet they are not to be called liberal, either in spirit or in letter, though they are equally eager for the character of liberality. Gilbert Wakefield, who adds a good deal to the weight of what might be called the liberal party at that time in the university, though by the selfishness. and disappointed vanity which runs through his Memoirs, he gives occasion for doubting the purity of his motives on many occasions, says, "No man of any age, of any sect or denomination, has been so much a practical dissenter as myself, but as to party I will be of none, nor fight under any standard but that of truth and liberty." Yet this same was a reviler of church establishments, at the same time that he was called by Dr. Priestley an enemy to dissenters. He acknowledges himself indeed an enemy to most of the dissenters of that day, but not to the cause; and says, that ecclesiastical power in the hands of some of them would be a tyranny. One difference between these two, and probably many more of the same party, seems to have been, a Meadley.

that Wakefield was not pleased with any party, and could not be; for his maxim, of which he says he made an excellent use on numerous occasions, was παντων δε μάλιστ' αισχυνες σαυτον. ." Mr. Paley was of every party, and friendly with men of all parties, but never exclusively attached to any. Wakefield's general account of this age of the university, and the questions at that time agitated, if they form a sort of right to his correcting "a mistake of those censorious surmisers who had imagined him to have been brought over to the same party," may serve equally on this occasion. He says, "It is not improbable that the example of such respectable characters, occupied in the pursuit and the profession of religious truth, might apply a spur to the willing courser, as it certainly excited, with the publications then current, a variety of conversation and debate upon the controverted points in theology among the undergraduates. But the influence over my mind went no further. I soon found the truth to lie upon the surface; and was persuaded that a single eye of any acuteness, purged from those films of habitual acquiescence which are superinduced by the operations of timidity, or the suggestions of prudence, would never be a very long time in making the discovery, and then my constitutional frankness and intrepidity would instantly impel me to the practical profession of it." The only transaction of public interest in the university in which Mr. Paley is said to have been concerned with any thing like eagerness or interest, was one on which ke published a pamphlet entitled a Defence of Considerations on the Propriety of requiring Subscription to the Articles of the Church of England: his interest in this question seems to have arisen from his having already made it a subject of attention in his lectures. But he appears, according to general opinion, to have engaged in it only so far, as to answer an attack made upon Bishop Law, his friend's father. But on this, as a young performance, which was not made the vehicle for grave opinion, and which reflects more on the tone of his opponent than conveys any additional information or sentiment, it is not necessary to say much more. Indeed, it is probably as signal a proof of his dislike to party, and much more to the purpose to observe, that he has not left behind him any one hint, or any room for conjecture, how far he was concerned in it. It was made a subject of

I have now by me authority enough to enable me to say decidedly that this pamphlet was the production of Mr. Paley.-ED.

VOL. I.

d

doubt, even during his life, whether it was his or not, and was admitted after his death into a volume almost foisted into public notice; but he seems to have been still satisfied with his own silence, and might have been much more entertained with the random-shots that have been fired at him since, by its being found out, "that it contains great arrogance and contempt both for his predecessors and his contemporaries, who viewed the matter in a different light, and with much intemperate argument." We are farther told to judge a how far he was consistent with himself, by appealing to his chapter on Subscription to the Articles of Religion; but it ought not to be forgotten, that he was using the substance of this chapter in his lectures at the very time. On this subject, and the interest it excited, as well as the general character of Mr. Paley in the university, which may very fairly be drawn from him without suspicion of partiality, something may be collected from the very equivocal bashfulness exhibited so boldly and intemperately by the author here named, who was nearly contemporary. Without noticing any pamphlet of Mr. Paley's in Defence of Considerations which incline to his own side of the question, he brings forward a difference of view on another part of the argument, and says, "I blush for him, I blush for the degradation of my species, when I see a man like Mr. Paley stain the pages of his incomparable book with such a shuffling chapter on subscription. He has amply gratified the most sanguine expectations raised in his friends by the extraordinary powers of his penetrating and comprehensive understanding, and the glory of his academical career; but has he acted up in this instance to the general simplicity and honesty of his character?" It will confirm what was said before, of the influence of a man's own views in determining him to or from the concerns of a party, if it be recollected that this dissenting Wakefield denominates the articles a "blessed farrago of mere impertinence and absurdity," and therefore is not likely to bear patiently with any one who treats them reasonably; though such an one proves himself to be no advocate of ecclesiastical slavery, having wished to abolish them, as appears by the Defence of Considerations. The truth is, they are treated by Wakefield as matters that deserve but one opinion; by Paley, as points to call forth and fairly exercise a difference of opinion, though he is himself unfavourable to them. This certainly is no

а Wakefield's Memoirs.

shuffling, at least not shuffling for honours. As to his not joining the petition, and excusing it by saying "that he was a coward, and that he could not afford to keep a conscience," or "that he would come in with the next wave," or inferring " that he was inconsistent with himself in such expressions," this is surely to give his mere sallies of wit and humour a more grave rebuke than such occasions seem to call for. These, like any other expressions uttered with his constitutional vivacity, as is very justly observed, ought not to be too rigidly interpreted b. Those who knew him well can exactly measure the importance of them, and can say, that his character has been entirely misunderstood, if from his being acquainted with men of great learning, and freedom of mind, and boldness in grappling with the mysteries of science, he has drawn upon himself an opinon of his being either a party man, or a partaker in most of the peculiar sentiments of his associates. For himself he would probably have recommended the old woman's recipe, which is given in the said Defence of Considerations, &c. "to leave off thinking for fear of thinking wrong." In the Biographical Dictionary, by Aikin, it is well observed from some periodical work, "that the Bishop of Carlisle's theological opinion fell greatly below the established standard of orthodoxy ;" and Dr. Jebb's sentiments were equally obnoxious to the zealous friends of the church on the same account, though what were "his unwearied and intrepid exertions for promoting a reform in the university as well as in the church and state, by which he had incurred their odium,” may be partly conjectured from what has just now been said. "The intimate friendship which subsisted between these learned men and Mr. Paley was perceived with a jealous eye by many who were closely attached to the established systems. Because he was a liberal thinker, it was suspected that he must be a latitudinarian; and they were prepared to discover dangerous tendencies in his moral and political speculations, if they should ever be given to the public." That his opinion, as well as his general character as an author, met with a good deal of this premeditated, preconcerted plan of opposition, may be best left as a matter of uncertainty; but it is a point quite beyond the power of

b With Meadley, in spite of this good-natured salvo, Mr. Chalmers is much affronted, because he has not at once saved him from the imputation of great impro priety. His present biographer does not think that there is any occasion to apprehend the least danger, or feel the least affronted.

any party to deny, that he seems not to have been so affected by any such insinuations as to be induced to swerve, during a great part of his life, from an open and independent declaration of his sentiments; that he never in truth departed from that true balance of reason which is the best test of independence; and that he supported all sides from the same, and only from the same motives, as he blamed, and ridiculed, and endeavoured to correct, all sides. Neither, on the other hand, ought any farther anxiety to be shown about his adherence to party than may withdraw him from the stir and bustle necessarily attendant upon it; because he would not have been either afraid to avow, or ashamed to confess, that he admired the same liberality of view, the same boldness in pioneering amongst the entanglements of learning, and opening the approach to the true spirit of all institutions. As far as this might be considered the design of the liberal party in the university, he would not be unlikely to engage in it with all his might; but though it might incline him to adopt some views at first, the tendency of which he neither saw nor looked for, it gave no twist to his mind at all sufficient to make him valuable to a party. It might lead him, indeed, not by any means to be "an overturner of churches, and spoiler of temples," but to take the obvious and first impressions of their use and abuse, to compare institutions and establishments as they exist, with the first intention of them, rather than to reason in favour of them, merely because they were existing institutions, or to follow them from their rise through the several steps of improvement. A young and ardent mind, little able, or at best not much inclined, to take hold of the chain on which many of our institutions and established forms depend, nor observing the links by which it is connected, each more polished than the last, might easily be tempted to join in any wish for reform or revision, from detecting some roughnesses and blunders. From his natural taste for rubbing off any artificial guise, together with a certain reluctance in courting discretion, he might have been led hastily, and, with his early impression, to a rashness in finding fault with what more matured deliberation would have induced him to allow for; and so he might be more than partially involved in any public charge of heterodoxy, or at least a suspicion of being bent on innovation of some kind. But we may easily imagine that he scarcely supposed himself able to hold a decided opinion on matters of grave doctrine or political sentiment, or to stand forth as the advocate, and much less the champion of any