In Natural Theology Paley has adapted with consummate skill the argument which Ray (1691) and Derham (1711) and Nieuwentyt (1730) had already made familiar to Englishmen. "For our section," he says, "We choose our substitute mortal anatomy"; and what he everywhere insists upon is "the necessity, within to each one particular out break, of an intelligent scheming mind for the contriving & determinative of the forms which organized bodies bear." A charge of wholesale plagiarism from this book was brought against Paley in the Athenaeum for 1848. Paley refers several times to Nieuwentyt, who uses the famous illustration of the watch. But the illustration is not peculiar to Nieuwentyt, and had been appropriated by many others before Paley. The germ of the idea is to be found in Cicero, De natura deorum, ii. 34 (see Hallam, Literature of Europe, ii. 385, note.) In the case of a writer whose chief merit is the way in which he has worked up existing material, a general charge of plagiarism is almost irrelevant.

The Evidences of Christianity is mainly a condensation of Bishop Douglas's Criterion and Lardner's Credibility of the Gospel History. But the task is so judiciously performed that it would probably be difficult to get a more effective statement of the external evidences of Christianity than Paley has here presented. His idea of revelation depends upon the same mechanical conception of the relation of God to the world which dominates his Natural Theology; and he seeks to prove the divine origin of Christianity by isolating it from the general history of mankind, whereas later writers find their chief argument in the continuity of the process of revelation.

The face of the world has changed so greatly since Paley's day that we are apt to do less than justice to his undoubted merits. He is nowhere original, and nowhere profound, but his strong reasoning power, his faculty of clear arrangement and forcible statement, place him in the first rank of expositors and advocates. He masses his arguments, it has been said, with a general's eye. His style is perfectly perspicuous, and its "heavy house-touch" compensates for what is lacking in elasticity and grace. Paley displays little or no spirituality of feeling; but this is a matter in which one age is apt to misjudge another, and Paley was at least practically benevolent and conscientiously attentive to his parish duties. The active part he took in advocating the abolition of the slave-trade is evidence of a wider power of sympathy. His unconquerable cheerfulness becomes itself almost religious in the last chapters of the Natural Theology, considering that they were written during the intervals of relief from the painful complaint which finally proved fatal to him.

For his life, see Public Characters (1802); Aikin's General Biography, vii. (1808); Lives, by GW Meadley (1809) and his son Edmund Paley, prefixed to the 1825 edition of his works; Leslie Stephen in Dictionary of National Biography; Quarterly Review, ii. (Aug. 1809), ix. (July 1813). On Paley as a theologian and philosopher, see Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, i. 405 seq., ii. 121 seq.; R Buddensieg, in ''Herzog-Hauck's Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie'', xiv. (1904).

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