Conviction and Apocalypse in Joseph Priestley's Writing

Joseph Priestley's millenarian prophecies were not necessarily at odds with his natural philosophy, nor his materialism with his theology, but to the French philosophes and to his friend John Adams they seemed incompatible and they may also seem so to us. That is what this article considers in its three parts: the first, Priestley's reading of revealed religion; the second, the politics entailed by it; and the third, the way a progressive direction is carried in to the future, uniting religion and politics in his late reading of Biblical prophecy.