WILLIAM PALEY [William Paley, born at Peterborough, 1743, and brought up at his father's school at Giggleswick, West Riding, became sizar of Christ's College, Cambridge, 1758; was Senior Wrangler, 1763; defended Epicureanism against Stoicism in a University Prize Essay, 1765; and became Fellow of his College, 1766. His friend, Edmund Law, becoming Bishop of Carlisle in 1769, made Paley his chaplain. Paley supported Law's pamphlet in criticism of the required subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles: "Confessions of Faith ought to be converted into Articles of Peace" (Mor. and Pol. Phil., Bk. vi., chap. x.); but he would not join the petition of clergymen in 1772 for relief from subscription. He became Rector of Musgrove, Westmoreland, 1775, of Appleby 1777, Prebendary of Carlisle 1780, and Archdeacon of Carlisle (his best known title) 1782. In 1785 he published his Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, in 1790 his Hora Paulinæ, and in 1794 his View of the Evidences of Christianity. Rector of Bishop-Wearmouth, in Durham, 1795, he devoted his leisure to anatomy, and in spite of great bodily suffering published in 1802 his Natural Theology. He died in 1805.] PALEY is not among the authors either wholly loved or wholly admired. He is a clear reasoner, a "man of probity and good sense," who is laudably anxious that sound morals, the canon of Scripture, the truth of Christianity and Theism should be made matters of demonstration as well as faith. He is said to have sowed his wild oats at college; and in after life, though he did not disdain amusement in the form of trout-fishing and cardplaying, he was the embodiment of the respectable virtues. His moral philosophy resolves all virtue into prudence. "Virtue," he says, "is the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness,”—a definition not now accepted by any school of moral philosophers, but at least superficially in harmony with the doctrines of the Church. But his element is circumstantial evidence; and he finds himself in it in his Hora Paulina, where he tries to prove the harmony of the Epistles with the Acts, and with one another, by pointing out VOL. IV 2 K a multitude of "undesigned coincidences." This is the only book in which he has ventured to be original, for the Moral and Political Philosophy is in debt to Abraham Tucker, the Evidences of Christianity to Lardner, and the Natural Theology to Nieuwentyt, "the Religious Philosopher." But if he borrowed from others, he made the others more readable. Life is too short for the reading of many such books as Tucker's Light of Nature in nine octavo volumes; the pages of Paley are always terse and intelligible It is true he has little humour; and if we see irony in the description of an imaginary private property among pigeons (Mor. and Pol. Phil., iii. 1), the context shows him to be quite unconscious of it. Whether talking on things small or great, human or divine, he has all the seriousness of a counsel defending a prisoner accused of murder. The evidences of the truth of the Christian religion, and the proofs of the being of a God had never been presented in a form that seemed to bring them so nearly within the grasp of the ordinary human understanding. Yet after 100 years Paley's work on the subject seems to have many defects. In particular the Argument from Design is, as he gave it, founded too narrowly on the analogies of physical mechanism. The very facts of physiology, so carefully and minutely described (such as the phenomena of seeing and hearing), and the facts of biology as to the growth of life in the world, are all translated into terms of mechanical adaptation and compared to the watch or the windlass. He bore the stamp of his time. It is fairer to point to such defects in philosophical argument than to treat Paley's reasoning as discredited throughout by an arrière-pensée. No doubt like most men he did not refuse advancement, and he may even have courted it. But the social optimism which made him think that the labourers of England had nearly every reason in 1791 to be contented with their condition is of a piece with the metaphysical optimism which made him regard the organisation of living beings as nearly perfect. It seems also true that his theology, which gave character to his utilitarianism, qualified his optimism. The world is a place of probation, and therefore is not perfect. Christianity would make men perfectly happy; but it has not been universally accepted (Evid., Part III. chap, vi.). Paley is theologian first and philosopher afterwards. J. BONAR. A POPULAR MAXIM EXAMINED [AFTER disputing the saying that circumstantial evidence falls short of positive proof, he goes on:-] The other maxim which deserves a similar examination is this:"That it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent man should suffer." If by saying it is better be meant that it is more for the public advantage, the proposition, I think cannot be maintained. The security of civil life, which is essential to the value and the enjoyment of every blessing it contains, and the interruption of which is followed by universal misery and confusion, is protected chiefly by the dread of punishment. The misfortune of an individual (for such may the sufferings, or even the death, of an innocent person be called when they are occasioned by no evil intention) cannot be placed in competition with this object. I do not contend that the life or safety of the meanest subject ought, in any case, to be knowingly sacrificed : no principle of judicature, no end of punishment can ever require that. But, when certain rules of adjudication must be pursued, when certain degrees of credibility must be accepted in order to reach the crimes with which the public are infested; courts of justice should not be deterred from the application of these rules by every suspicion of danger, or by the mere possibility of confounding the innocent with the guilty. They ought rather to reflect, that he who falls by a mistaken sentence, may be considered as falling for his country, whilst he suffers under the operation of those rules, by the general effect and tendency of which the welfare of the community is maintained and upholden. (From Moral and Political Philosophy.) ST. PAUL HERE then we have a man of liberal attainments, and in other points of sound judgment, who had addicted his life to the service of the Gospel. We see him, in the prosecution of his purpose, travelling from country to country, enduring every species of hardship, encountering every extremity of danger, assaulted by the populace, punished by the magistrates, scourged, beat, stoned, left for dead; expecting, wherever he came, a renewal of the same treatment and the same dangers, yet, when driven from one city, preaching in the next; spending his whole time in the employment, sacrificing to it his pleasures, his ease, his safety, persisting in this course to old age, unaltered by the experience of perverseness, ingratitude, prejudice, desertion; unsubdued by anxiety, want, labour, persecutions; unwearied by long confinement, undismayed by the prospect of death. Such was St. Paul. We have his letters in our hand; we have also a history purporting to be written by one of his fellow-travellers, and appearing, by a comparison with these letters, certainly to have been written by some person well acquainted with the transactions of his life. From the letters, as well as from the history, we gather not only the account which we have stated of him, but that he was one out of many who acted and suffered in the same manner; and that of those who did so, several had been the companions of Christ's ministry, the ocular witnesses, or pretending to be such, of his miracles, and of his resurrection. We moreover find this same person referring in his letters to his supernatural conversion, the particulars and accompanying circumstances of which are related in the history, and which accompanying circumstances, if all or any of them be true, render it impossible to have been a delusion. We also find him positively, and in appropriated terms, asserting that he himself worked miracles, strictly and properly so called, in support of the mission which he executed; the history, meanwhile, recording various passages of his ministry, which come up to the extent of this assertion. The question is, whether falsehood was ever attested by evidence like this. Falsehoods, we know, have found their way into reports, into tradition, into books; but is an example to be met with of a man voluntarily undertaking a life of want and pain, of incessant fatigue, of continual peril; submitting to the loss of his home and country, to stripes and stoning, to tedious imprisonment, and the constant expectation of a violent death, for the sake of carrying about a story of what was false, and of what if false he must have known to be so? (From Hora Paulinæ.) |