may have been perpetrated in the acquisition of supreme power, when the state is once peaceably settled, and the good of its subjects promoted, obedience to it becomes a duty. On the other hand, whatever may have been the original legitimacy of the ruling authority, if it become corrupt, negligent of the public welfare, and cease to sat- isfy the expectations of the governed, it is right to put it down and establish another in its place. Writing under a government which holds to the union of Church and State, Paley of course prominently treated of relig- ious establishments, and here also he allows the doctrine of expediency to have a controlling intiuence in his views and conclusions. He teaches that, as no form of Church government is laid down in the New Testament, a re- ligious establishment is no part of Christianity; it is only the means of inculcating it. But the means must be judged of according to their efliciency; this is the only standard ; consequently the authority of a Church establishment is founded in its utility. For the same reason tests and subscriptions ought to be made as sim- ple and easy as possible ; but when no present necessity requires unusual strictness, confessions of faith ought to be converted into articles of peace. In establishing a religion, where unanimity cannot be maintained, the will of the majority should be consulted, because less evil and inconvenience must attend this than any other plan. On the same principle persecution is condemned and toleration justified; because the former never pro- duced any real change of opinion, while the latter en- courages inquirj^ and advances the progress of truth. Objection has frequently been taken to the principles on which Paley rests his system (comp. Dug. Stewart, Ele- ments, vol. ii, and his Philos. of the Active and Moral Powers; Robert Hall, sermon on Infidelity; Fr. Way land, Elem. of Moral Philos.; and the defence by Wainwright, Palefs Theory of 31 orals, etc. [1830]), but the lucidity and appositeness of his illustrations are beyond all praise. If his treatise cannot be regarded as a profoundly philo- sophical work, it is at an}' rate one of the clearest and most sensible ever written, even by an Englishman; and at least it brushed off into oblivion the shallow and muddj' mysticism that had long enveloped the philosophy of politics. If it failed to sound the depths of '"moral obligation," there are excuses for this fail- ure. Says Dr. Blackie, "Paley's definition of virtue: the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God, for the sake of everlasting happiness, characterizes the man, the book, the age, the countr}^, and the profes- sion to which he belonged, admirably. It is a definition that, taken as a matter of fact, in all likelihood expressed the feelings of 999 out of every 1000 British Christians living in the generation immediately preceding the French Kevolution" {Four Phases of Morals, p. 308). In 1790 appeared Paley's most original and valuable work, the Horce Paulince, or the Truth of the Scripture History of St. Paid evinced by a Comparison of the Epistles which hear his Name with the A cts of the Apostles, ami tcith one another. The aim of this admirable work is to prove, by a great variety of " undesigned coincidences," the im- probability, if not impossibility, of the usual infidel hy- pothesis of his time, viz. that the New Testament is a " cunningly devised fable." It was dedicated to his friend John Law, then bishop of Killala, in Ireland, to whose favor he had been indebted for most of his preferments. In 179-4 was published Paley's next important work, en- titled A View of the Evidences of Christianity (repub- lished seventeen times in twenty-seven years, and fre- quently edited and widely circulated, latest b)' Whately [N. Y. 1865, I'imo]). It is not equal in originality to its predecessor, but the use made of the labors of such eminent scholars as Lardner and bishop Douglas is gen- erall}' reckoned most dexterous and effective, as the ma- terials are wrought up with so much address and disposed with so much skill, and the argument is laid before the reader in so clear and convincing a form, that it must be pronounced one of the most valuable and important books of the kind. The argument, which is opened and illua-
PALEY
587
PALI