Priestley in America

nt to your situation, I had no right to expect, was highly gratifying to me, and I take the first opportunity of acknowledging it. For tho I believe I am completely recovered from my late illness, I am advised to write as little as possible. Your invitation to pay you a visit is flattering to me in the highest degree, and I shall not wholly despair of some time or other availing myself of it, but for the present I must take the nearest way home. Your resentment of the treatment I have met with in this country is truly generous, but I must have been but little impressed with the principles of the religion you so justly commend, if they had not enabled me to bear much more than I have yet suffered.Do not suppose that, after the much worse treatment to which I was for many years exposed in England (of which the pamphlet I take the liberty to inclose will give you some idea) I was much affected by this. My Letters to the Inhabitants of Northumberland were not occasioned by any such thing, tho it served me as a pretense for writing them, but the threatenings of Mr. Pickering, whose purpose to send me out of the country Mr. Adams (as I conclude from a circuitous attempt that he made to prevent it) would not, in the circumstances in which he then was, have been able to directly oppose. My publication was of service to me in that and other respects and I hope, in some measure, to the common cause. But had il not been for the extreme absurdity and violence of the lat...