Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 43.djvu/111

 ‘prodigious commas,’ ‘as long as the printer's nose.’

Paley, like his friends the Laws, inherited the qualities of a long line of sturdy north-country yeomen. He was the incarnation of strong common-sense, full of genial good humour, and always disposed to take life pleasantly. As a lawyer, the profession for which he thought himself suited, he would probably have rivalled the younger Law, who became Lord Ellenborough. He had no romance, poetic sensibility, or enthusiasm; but was thoroughly genial and manly. He was a very affectionate father and husband, and fond, like Sydney Smith, of gaining knowledge from every one who would talk to him. He only met one person in his life from whom he could extract nothing. The phrases about his conscience and others given above, often quoted to prove his cynicism, seem rather to show the humourist's tendency to claim motives lower than the true ones.

Nobody has surpassed Paley as a writer of text-books. He is an unrivalled expositor of plain arguments, though he neither showed nor claimed much originality. His morality is one of the best statements of the utilitarianism of the eighteenth century. On the publication of his ‘Moral Philosophy,’ Bentham, then in Russia, was told by G. Wilson that his principles had been anticipated by ‘a parson and an archdeacon.’ Bentham was stirred by the news to bring out his own ‘Principles of Morals and Legislation,’ 1789 (see, Works, x. 163, 165, 167, 195). As Wilson said, Paley differed from Bentham chiefly by adding the supernatural sanction, which appears in his famous definition of virtue as ‘doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness’ (Moral Philosophy, bk. i. ch. vi.). Paley acknowledged in his preface his great obligations to Abraham Tucker; but, in fact, he neither did nor professed to do more than give a lucid summary of the position of previous moralists of the same way of thinking. He differs from his predecessors chiefly in accepting more frankly a position which his opponents regarded as untenable. The limitations of his intellect appear in his blindness to the difficulties often expounded by more subtle thinkers. The book upon the ‘Evidences’ is, in the same way, a compendium of a whole library of argument produced by the orthodox opponents of the deists during the eighteenth century, and his ‘Natural Theology’ an admirably clear account of the a posteriori argument—congenial to his mode of thought, and given with less felicity by many other popular writers. In some notes published by his son (p. ccxxxiv) there are references to Boyle, Ray, Derham, and many other well-known authors; and he was helped by his friend Law and by John Brinkley [q. v.] with various suggestions.

Paley's common-sense method has been discredited by the later developments of philosophy and theology. In theological questions he sympathised with his friend Jebb and other Cambridge contemporaries, such as Frend, Wakefield, Walsh Watson, and Hey, some of whom became avowedly unitarian; while others, taking Paley's liberal view of the Thirty-nine Articles, succeeded in reconciling their principles to a more or less nominal adherence to the orthodox creed. Paley's laxity has been condemned. It is defended in his ‘Moral Philosophy,’ and appears variously in his letters to a son of Dr. Perceval, who had scrupled about taking orders (printed in, App. p. 130 seq., and , p. xvii seq., from , Literary Correspondence). A writer in the ‘Christian Life and Unitarian Herald’ of 11 July and 2 and 22 Aug. 1891 seems to prove satisfactorily, from Paley's notes for his lectures, now in the British Museum, that he accepted the unitarian interpretation of most of the disputed texts. But, however vague the interpretation put upon the subscription by Paley, there is no reason to doubt his absolute sincerity in believing that the doctrines which he accepted could be logically proved. Whether his peculiar compromise between orthodoxy and rationalism can be accepted is a different question. His books, as he says in the preface to the ‘Natural Theology,’ form a system, containing the evidences of natural and of revealed religion, and of the duties which result from both. The system has gone out of fashion; but the ‘Evidences’ still hold their place as a text-book at his university, presumably from their extraordinary merits of style; and the ‘Natural Theology’ is still mentioned with respect by many who dissent from its conclusions, or hold that it requires modification.

Paley has been sometimes accused of plagiarism. His own statement in the preface to the ‘Moral Philosophy’ is a sufficient answer to the general charge. He was writing a text-book, not an original treatise, and used whatever he found in his notes, in which he had inserted whatever struck him, often without reference to the original authors. He refers, he says, to no other books, even when using the thoughts, and ‘sometimes the very expressions,’ of previous writers. If a writer upon theology were forbidden to use old arguments, the