. BI:;lK>P BUTLE 
 
 an z/!.ppre.(:tat.ton 
 
 'With the best '^Passages of his 
 Writings selected find arranged by 
 
 tAlexander JVloyte 
 
/0.3 .'cif- 
 
 PRINCETON, N. J. ^ 
 
 Presented by^f-o"^, ."oo r-, y-' lOfi, i V'VV^TD 35.. 
 
 . BX Il99 .B9^~ ^ 
 Whyte, Alexander, 1837-1921, 
 Bishop Butler, an 
 appreciation 
 
Digitized by tlie Internet Arcliive 
 in 2015 
 
 https://archive.org/details/bisliopbutlerapprOOwliyt 
 
BISHOP BUTLER 
 
BISHOP BUTLER 
 
 an appreciation 
 with the "Best 'Passages of his 
 Writings selected and ayanged by 
 
 Jllexander Whyte 
 
 D.D. 
 
 Fleming H. Revel/ Company 
 
 New York Chicago Toronto 
 1904 
 
Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty 
 
To SVLy Classes 
 
INTRODUCTORY NOTE 
 
 The Sample Passages selected out of Butler s W orks have 
 been indexed after Dr. Angus^s admirable edition of the 
 ' Analogy^ the ' Dissertations,^ and the ' Sermons.^ The 
 Religious Tract Society has done the students of our day an 
 immense service in sending out Butler under such excellent 
 editorship, and that, too, at such a cheap price. 
 
i 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 APPRECIATION 13 
 
 BUTLER'S BEST PASSAGES:— 
 
 ON GOD 91 
 
 ON THE LOVE OF GOD 95 
 
 ON SCRIPTUKE 97 
 
 ON CONSCIENCE lOO 
 
 ON REASON no 
 
 ON CHARACTER 110 
 
 ON HABIT 115 
 
 ON PROBATION I18 
 
 ON THE PASSIONS 131 
 
 ON MEANS AND ENDS ...... 135 
 
 ON PROBABILITY I 39 
 
 ON KNOWLEDGE ....... 141 
 
 ON OUR IGNORANCE ...... I45 
 
 ON RICHES ........ 148 
 
 ON CHARITY 153 
 
 ON HAPPINESS 156 
 
 ON BENEVOLENCE 159 
 
 ON ILL-WILL 160 
 
X Butler 
 
 PAGI 
 
 ON PARTY-SPIRIT l6l 
 
 ON MISUNDERSTANDING 162 
 
 ON PEEVISHNESS 1 64 
 
 ON RESIGNATION 165 
 
 ON DEVOTION 172 
 
 ON THE CHURCH I75 
 
 ON PUBLIC WORSHIP 181 
 
 ON PASTORAL CARE ...... iSj 
 
 ON PULPIT CONTROVERSY .... 185 
 
 ON THE STUDY OF DIVINITY . . .188 
 
 ON MISSIONS ....... 189 
 
 ON READING ....... 19O 
 
 ON STYLE 191 
 
 ON TALKATIVENESS I93 
 
 ON AMUSEMENTS ...... 198 
 
 ON CHILDREN ....... 200 
 
 ON DEATH 202 
 
 ON THE FUTURE LIFE 2O4. 
 
 LETTERS 209 
 
 PRAYERS 221 
 
APPRECIATION 
 
APPRECIATION 
 
 Joseph Butler had for his contemporaries 
 John Locke, Isaac Nev/ton, George Berkeley, 
 William Law, Alexander Pope, John Wesley, 
 Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Johnson, and many 
 other well-known men. The Principia was 
 published in 1687, the Essay Concerning Human 
 Understanding in 1690, the Rolls Sermons in 
 1726, the Serious Call in 1729, the Essay on 
 Man in 1 733, the y^/t-i/'/zrow in 1733, the Analogy 
 in 1736, the Religious Affections in 1746, the 
 Freedom of the Will in 1754, the Dictionary in 
 1755, Lives of the Poets in 178 i. If 
 
 Butler's lifetime was not the very greatest age 
 of English literature, and philosophy, and re- 
 ligion, it v/as still a great age, when these were 
 the men whose names were in every mouth, 
 and when these were the books that were in 
 every reader's hand. 
 
 13 
 
14 Butler 
 
 Butler quite excelled himself the very first 
 time he put pen to paper. He never wrote 
 anything again so astonishingly acute as was 
 the short series of anonymous letters he 
 addressed to Dr. Samuel Clarke on certain 
 philosophical and theological positions of that 
 eminent author. Butler tells us that the Being 
 and the Nature of God had been his incessant 
 study ever since he began to think at all. 
 And that he had thought to some purpose on 
 that supreme subject of thought, those able 
 letters of his are the sufficient evidence. " A 
 correspondence," says Professor Fraser in his 
 Life of Berkeley, " unmatched in its kind in 
 English philosophical literature." But it is 
 not the acuteness of their dialectic, nor even 
 the depth of their thought, that gives those 
 early letters of Butler their lasting interest 
 to us. It is much more the rare qualities 
 of heart and character that shine out of every 
 page of those modest letters that make 
 Butler's admirers so to cherish his early 
 correspondence with Clarke. 
 
Appreciation 15 
 
 Butler has no biography. Butler's books 
 are his whole biography. What Jowett so 
 well says of Plato's writings may also be said 
 of Butler's : " The progress of his writings is 
 the history of his life. We have no other 
 authentic life of him. His writings are the 
 true self of the philosopher, stripped of the 
 accidents of time and place." Butler's school- 
 boy letters to Clarke are the best biography of 
 his boyhood and youth, and his Rolls Sermons 
 and his Analogy are the sum and substance of 
 all his after days. The Preface to the second 
 edition of his Rolls Sermons is, perhaps, on the 
 whole, the most self-revealing and most char- 
 acteristic piece of writing that ever proceeded 
 from Butler's pen. " The Preface to the 
 Sermons,'' says Maurice, " is the most impor- 
 tant of all the documents we possess for the 
 understanding of Butler's character." The 
 famous Preface is full, I will not say of 
 contempt, but of a certain saddened scorn at 
 the generality of the readers of his day. 
 Those are classical passages in which he takes 
 
i6 Butler 
 
 up the defence of his much-assailed manner of 
 writing in his Rolls Sermons. Butler's really 
 noble style is never seen to greater advantage 
 than just in those two or three pages in which 
 he defends his Rolls Sermons. All those men 
 among ourselves who would write seriously, as 
 v/ell as all those who v/ould read seriously, 
 should lay to heart those warm and weighty 
 pages of this great writer. And then, after 
 his severe chastisement of the indolent and 
 incapable readers of his day, Butler passes on 
 to assist his really serious-minded readers by 
 preparing for them a most masterly intro- 
 duction to the fifteen sermons. When the 
 famous Preface comes to a close with this 
 valuable autobiographic paragraph : " It may 
 be proper to advertise the reader that he is not 
 to look for any particular reason for the choice 
 of the greatest part of these discourses ; their 
 being taken from amongst many others 
 preached in the same place, through a course 
 of eight years, being in a great measure 
 accidental. Neither is he to expect any other 
 
Appreciation 
 
 connection between them than that uniformity 
 of thought and design which will always be 
 found in the writings of the same person when 
 he writes with simplicity and in earnest." 
 With these simple and earnest words Butler 
 winds up a piece of composition so charac- 
 teristic of him, that we would not have wanted 
 it for anything. Butler writes by far his 
 best, so far as style is concerned, when he is 
 smarting under a sense of injury. His resent- 
 ment makes him strike with his pen in this 
 Preface of his as with a sword. In these power- 
 ful pages Butler turns and charges home on his 
 idle-minded and fault-finding readers in a way 
 that still reaches to many readers among our- 
 selves. We all reel under Butler's blows as we 
 read his retaliatory Preface to his Rolls Sermons. 
 
 The three epoch-making sermons on Human 
 Nature commence with a characteristically 
 conducted examination as to what human 
 nature really is ; of what several parts it is 
 composed, and how those several parts are all 
 
 B 
 
Butler 
 
 constituted and constructed into human nature 
 as we possess it and know it. And then from 
 that, Butler proceeds to ask what it is for a 
 man to " live according to his nature," as the 
 Stoics always insisted that every man ought to 
 live. Christian bishop as Butler was, it was 
 true of him what Maurice says about Jonathan 
 Edwards : " He was not afraid to agree with 
 the Stoics when they were right." Appropri- 
 ating, therefore, the very words of those 
 " ancient moralists," as he always calls them, 
 Butler proceeds to explain and to enforce their 
 teaching by showing that human nature is 
 made up of its several appetites, passions, 
 affections, and emotions, and that conscience 
 sits as a sovereign and a judge over all these 
 her subjects. And it is just in his discovery 
 and exposition of this complex constitution 
 of human nature ; and especially it is in his 
 discovery and vindication of the supremacy of 
 conscience, that Butler's services to philosophy, 
 and to morals, and to religion, are so original and 
 so immense. " In his three sermons on Human 
 
Appreciation 19 
 
 Nature," says Dr. Eagar, " Butler dropped 
 a plummet into depths before unsounded." 
 "It may be stated, once for all," says Car- 
 michael in his admirably annotated edition of 
 the Rolls Sermons, " that to Butler belongs the 
 merit of having first, as a scientific moralist, 
 made the supremacy of conscience the subject 
 of distinct and reflex cognition." And then, 
 after characterising the ethical standards of 
 Plato and Aristotle and Bentham and Hobbes, > 
 Carmichael goes on to say, " Butler would 
 simply direct the enquirer to reverence his 
 conscience, to respect its dictates, and to 
 bring all his conduct before it as before a 
 faculty from which there can be no appeal 
 but to itself : that is to say, from its unil- 
 lumined to its enlightened decision, to seek for 
 that enlightenment, to wish for it, and in the 
 consciousness of his countless secret faults and 
 his unnumbered shortcomings, to pray for it, 
 and to bow down, an humble, contrite penitent, 
 before that God in whose sight even the 
 heavens are not clean." 
 
20 
 
 Butler 
 
 The law of conscience in the moral world is 
 like nothing so much as the law of gravitation 
 in the material world. And both those founda- 
 tion laws of Almighty God were for the first 
 time brought to light in the same generation : 
 the one by Newton and the other by Butler. 
 Newton made the most magnificent and the 
 most fruitful of all physical discoveries, that 
 every atom of matter in the material universe 
 exercises a measurable influence on every other 
 atom ; and that this law, which he named the 
 law of gravitation, is absolutely universal and 
 invariable in its operation. The smallest atom 
 of red-hot lava at the heart of our own earth 
 throwsoutan influenceof attraction that measur- 
 ably affects the remotest speck of star-dust 
 on the outermost border of the unfathomable 
 universe. And it was while the minds of men 
 were so overawed and exalted with Newton's 
 astounding discovery and with all that followed 
 upon it, that Butler made his parallel discovery 
 and demonstration of the law of conscience 
 in the moral world. This law, namely, that 
 
Appreciation 21 
 
 there is not an act that any man performs, nor 
 a word that any man speaks, nor a thought in 
 any man's mind, nor an affection in any man's 
 heart, that is not all placed under the sceptre 
 of his conscience. It is true, the nature of 
 man in the present life is such, that the law of 
 conscience suffers endless perturbations and 
 suspensions, and sometimes what would seem 
 to be reversals ; but so does the law of 
 gravitation. And just as our ever-widening 
 knowledge has proved the absolute univers- 
 ality and inviolability of Newton's law, so 
 will it be with Butler's law. Wait, says 
 Butler, till you enter on the completing dis- 
 pensation of things, and you will find that 
 conscience has only handed over all her seem- 
 ing defeats and reversals to the judgment and 
 to the power of One who will sooner see 
 heaven and earth perish than that one jot 
 or tittle of His moral law shall be left un- 
 vindicated and unexecuted. Both the law of 
 gravitation and the law of conscience had been 
 laid by Almighty God on nature and on man 
 
22 
 
 Butler 
 
 from the beginning. But those two universally- 
 binding laws of God were never fully dis- 
 covered nor finally demonstrated to the 
 children of men till Newton and Butler were 
 raised up to discover them and to demonstrate 
 them. And that immense service, so far as 
 the law of conscience is concerned, is performed 
 by Butler in his three epoch-making sermons 
 on Human Nature. The noble teaching of 
 those three sermons has been so absorbed and 
 assimilated into our best literature, that it is 
 not very easy for us to go back to that age 
 when Butler's doctrine of conscience could be 
 called a new discovery, as Sir James Mackintosh 
 so emphatically calls it. Dr. Newman, especially, 
 has made Butler's teaching on the subject of 
 conscience such a theme of his in a multitude of 
 magnificent passages, that the supremacy, and 
 the authority, and the anticipations, and the 
 presages, of conscience are all familiar ideas to 
 us, as well as daily experiences. Newman took 
 up his great master's teaching on conscience, 
 and brought to that teaching all his own so 
 
Appreciation 23 
 
 captivating English style, and all his own so 
 unequalled homiletical genius, in both of which 
 gifts Butler was, comparatively speaking, so 
 deficient. It is true that all the best literature, 
 both ancient and modern, has always been full 
 of the omnipresence, and the authority, and 
 the presages, of conscience. But it was Butler 
 who first established all that on a scientific and 
 an unassailable basis ; till it almost seems as 
 if very conscience herself holds the pen and 
 mounts the pulpit in these three immortal 
 sermons upon herself. 
 
 Robert Hall on one occasion gave a young 
 preacher a most impressive advice as to his 
 frequently taking up particular parts of con- 
 duct and character in his sermons. John 
 Foster also, both by precept and example, 
 often sets this duty before his ministerial 
 readers. Butler was still but a young preacher 
 when he delivered his extraordinarily original 
 and pungent sermon on this particular part of 
 conduct and character — the government of the 
 
24 Butler 
 
 tongue. Butler was still a young man, but 
 there is a whole lifetime of observation and 
 insight, 1 might almost say of suffering and 
 exasperation, in that single sermon. No one 
 ever reads that sermon, and of those who do 
 read it, not one in ten pays any attention to it 
 so as to apply it to himself. And thus the 
 widespread mischief and misery go on, just as 
 if that sermon had never been written. " The 
 fault referred to, and the disposition supposed," 
 says the preacher, " is not evil-speaking from 
 malice, nor lying, nor bearing false witness for 
 selfish ends. The thing here supposed is talk- 
 ativeness." Nothing seems to have worn out 
 Butler like the incessant talking of the people 
 round about him. After his death his enemies 
 said that he had died a Papist. But that was 
 only another instance of their irrepressible 
 talkativeness. Butler did not die a Papist, 
 but he would be tempted sometimes to think 
 of entering the Carthusian Order so as to 
 escape for ever from the tongues of continually 
 talking men. Butler rode a little black pony, 
 
Appreciation 25 
 
 and he always rode it as fast as it could carry 
 him — so his old parishioners used to tell. He 
 rode fast, sometimes, to escape the crowds of 
 beggars who continually infested him, and 
 sometimes, as we are led to think, to escape 
 the tongues of men who so continually tor- 
 mented him. It has been said that there is a 
 certain tinge of remorse in the style of Tacitus. 
 And I never read Butler's sermon on the mis- 
 government of the tongue without detecting in 
 that sermon Butler's own bitter remorse for 
 his misgovernment of his own tongue. No 
 man ever speaks with such an intense bitterness 
 as I taste in that sermon except when he speaks 
 in remorse, and in self-resentment, and, as 
 Butler says, with real self-dishke toward him- 
 self. And then, lest some of his superficial 
 readers should think that he is making far too 
 much of a small matter, he has this observa- 
 tion, that " the greatest evils in life have had 
 their rise from somewhat which was thought 
 of too little importance to be attended to." 
 " There is, nor can be," says Mr. Gladstone, 
 
26 
 
 Butler 
 
 " no superannuation in this sermon." No : 
 not so long as men and women are ruining 
 themselves every day by talking continually, 
 and by straining continually, as Butler has it, 
 " to engage your attention : to take you up 
 wholly for the present time : what reflections 
 will be made afterwards is in truth the least 
 of their thoughts." The son of Sirach is a 
 classical author with Butler : " Honour and 
 shame is in talk. A wise man will hold his 
 tongue till he sees opportunity ; but a babbler 
 and a fool will regard no time. He that useth 
 many words will be abhorred ; and he that 
 taketh to himself authority therein shall be 
 hated. The tongue of a man is his fall." Let 
 every man who has a tongue to govern read 
 regularly, once every year, Butler's bitter ser- 
 mon on that subject, and lay it to heart. 
 
 " Balaam" and "David " are two tremendous 
 sermons. " Good God, what inconsistency is 
 here ! What fatality is here ! " Butler bursts 
 out in a v/ay most unusual with him. And 
 
Appreciation 27 
 
 then he goes down to the darkest bottom of 
 Balaam's heart, and of his hearer's heart, with 
 the two-edged sword of the Spirit in his hand. 
 lUt lES Butler's Balaam is one of the most terrible 
 pieces of conscience-searching invective in the 
 English language. And then, David's self- 
 partiality and self-deceit make the tenth 
 sermon a companion sermon, quite worthy 
 of the seventh sermon. Both those sermons 
 must be read many times over before their 
 tremendous power will be believed. " I am 
 persuaded," says the preacher, " that a very 
 great part of the wickedness of the vi'orld is, 
 one way or other, owing to the self-partiality, 
 self-flattery, and self-deceit, endeavoured here 
 to be laid open and explained. Those who 
 have taken notice that there is really such a 
 thing, namely, plain falseness and insincerity 
 in men with regard to themselves, will readily 
 see the drift and design of these discourses. 
 And nothing that I can add will explain the 
 design of them to him who has not beforehand 
 remarked at least somewhat of the character." 
 
28 
 
 Butler 
 
 " Viewed in the light of the Gospel," says 
 Carmichael, " this sermon is incomplete." 
 
 "On Resentment" is a most enlightening and 
 memorable sermon. " One point in Butler's 
 account of resentment," says Dr. Whewell, 
 " has been admired as happy and novel. I 
 mean the distinction he draws between anger 
 and settled resentment." And Whewell sums 
 up Butler's doctrines on these subjects in these 
 words : " The distinction that Butler takes 
 between sudden anger and settled resentment 
 is of this kind. Sudden anger does not imply 
 that we have wrong inflicted on us, resentment 
 does. Sudden anger flashes up before we have 
 time to reflect, and resists all violence and 
 harm : resentment glows with a permanent 
 heat against injury and injustice. Sudden 
 anger is an instinct implanted for the pre- 
 servation of the individual : resentment is a 
 moral sentiment given for the repression of 
 injustice, and the preservation of society. The 
 former, we may add, belongs to animals as well 
 
Appreciation 29 
 
 as to men, the latter is peculiar to mankind." 
 Let every hot-hearted, and every sullen-hearted, 
 and every spiteful-hearted, man lay this sermon 
 of Butler's to heart, and it will be a great 
 assistance to him in his deliverance from his 
 besetting sin. 
 
 The sermon on the Forgiveness of Injuries 
 is full of that moral and intellectual seed- 
 sowing which is so characteristic of all Butler's 
 best work, and which has made his writings 
 so singularly fruitful to all his readers. And 
 the same thing may be said about his two 
 beautiful sermons on the Love of our Neigh- 
 bour. It is in the second of those two sermons 
 that this single seed is dropped which has 
 raised such a harvest of thoughtfulness, and 
 fellow-feeling, and brotherly love, in so many 
 of Butler's readers. This single seed, that 
 " we ourselves differ from other men just as 
 much as they differ from us." The two 
 sermons are summed up into this closing 
 prayer : " O Almighty God, inspire us with 
 
30 Butler 
 
 this divine principle of brotherly love. Kill 
 in us all the seeds of envy and ill-will. And 
 help us, by cultivating within ourselves the 
 love of our neighbour, to improve in the love 
 of Thee. Thou hast placed us in various 
 kindreds, friendships, and relations, as the 
 school of discipline for our affections. Help 
 us, by the due exercise of all these, to im- 
 prove to perfection, till all partial a/Fection 
 be lost in that entire universal one, and Thou, 
 O God, Shalt be all in all." 
 
 In his two sermons on the Love of God, 
 Butler touches by far his highest chord. 
 There is the very thrill of David and Isaiah 
 in those two sermons, if not of Paul and 
 John. In the fourteenth Essay of his Hora 
 Sabbatk^e, Sir James Stephen says that the 
 famous sermons on the Love of God are in 
 his judgment not only the greatest of Butler's 
 writings, but they are also the first to which 
 a person Avho wishes to understand those 
 writings as a whole should attend. I have 
 
Appreciation 31 
 
 preferred to take Butler's own arrangement 
 of his sermons, and to study them in the 
 order in which he has placed them himself. 
 I agree with Sir James Stephen that those 
 two sermons are the greatest of Butler's writ- 
 ings, and I return to them oftener than to any 
 other of his writings, and always with the 
 same result. So far as they go they are to 
 me among the most conclusive and satisfying 
 pieces of religious writing in the English 
 language, and every serious student ought to 
 return to those sermons till he has them, as 
 we say, by heart. This is the characteristically 
 quiet way in which Butler introduces us to 
 those enthralling sermons: "There must be 
 some movements of mind and heart which 
 correspond to the divine perfection." It is from 
 these few words that those truly magnificent 
 sermons are developed and elaborated and 
 reasoned out, and that with such depth and 
 strength and opulence of thought, and with 
 such masculine eloquence of style. In his ad- 
 mirably annotated edition of the Ro/Is SermoJis^ 
 
32 Butler 
 
 Carmichael has this introductory footnote 
 to guide the student through those deep 
 sermons : " Although the thirteenth and four- 
 teenth sermons are included under the same 
 head, the points of view are widely different. 
 In the thirteenth sermon Butler treats of the 
 love of God as an affection in the highest 
 degree reasonable, alike from the constitution 
 of man and the character of God. In the 
 fourteenth sermon he considers the love of 
 God as a principle which is influenced in its 
 exercise by man's present condition, and is to 
 be perfected in heaven." Butler is the least 
 scriptural of all our great preachers, but for 
 once he closes and crowns those two magnificent 
 sermons with a long chain of scripture passages 
 which gleam in Butler's somewhat sombre 
 pages like a cluster of pearls. Such masterly 
 sermons as these are, and coming to such a 
 close, and approaching, as they sometimes do 
 approach, to the very borders of becoming 
 evangelical — all this makes us wish that Butler 
 had gone on to give himself up wholly to 
 
Appreciation 33 
 
 apostolical and evangelical theology, instead 
 of spending his great gifts on philosophical 
 apologetics, however successfully and however 
 fruitfully executed. As it is, those two truly 
 superb sermons will always go with the reader 
 of Butler to lighten up his path and to warm 
 his heart as he toils on through the somewhat 
 unsunned and severe spaces of the Analogy. 
 
 Now, after saying all that, it is a strong 
 thing to go on to say that as far as Butler's 
 sermons on our love to God are concerned, 
 the Son of God need never have come with 
 His Father's message of love to us, nor need 
 the New Testament Epistles ever have been 
 written. The truth is, the very name of Him 
 in whom God's love to us has been most fully 
 manifested, and in whom our love to God is 
 first kindled, is never mentioned by Butler in 
 these two sermons. Literally, the name of 
 our Lord occurs only once, and that once is in 
 a quite incidental way, in the whole of these 
 sermons. Now, very far be it from me to 
 point that out in order to raise a prejudice 
 c 
 
34 Butler 
 
 against Butler. My sole object in pointing 
 out this distressing limitation and impoverish- 
 ment of Butler's high argument is in order 
 to forewarn the student not to expect what 
 Butler's chosen and deliberate plan does not 
 promise, or indeed permit. Butler has deter- 
 mined to rest his whole argument with us on 
 those deep and primeval foundations which 
 are laid in the nature of God, and in the 
 corresponding constitution of the mind and 
 heart of man. " It cannot be denied " — they 
 are Butler's own words in his first sermon — 
 " that our being God's creatures, and virtue 
 being the natural law we are born under, and 
 the whole constitution of man being plainly 
 adapted to it, are prior obligations to piety 
 and virtue than the consideration that God 
 sent His Son into the world to save it." 
 Now, it is among those " prior obligations " 
 that Butler's mind is most at home, and moves 
 most easily. And it is on those " prior 
 obligations" that he preaches with such in- 
 comparable power. Whereas the New Testa- 
 
Appreciation 35 
 
 ment, while taking its first stand on those same 
 " prior obligations," goes on to bring forward 
 still stronger obligations to piety and virtue. 
 The God of redemption claims our love and 
 our obedience on this supreme obligation, that 
 He has purchased us to Himself at a great 
 price, till we are no longer our own. Butler 
 himself has taught us that new relations both 
 demand and produce new affections and new 
 duties. But in his present sermons he has 
 left out the most heart-melting relations and 
 affections of all ; that is to say, God's relations 
 and affections to us in Jesus Christ, and our 
 relations and affections back again in Jesus 
 Chi-ist to God. Had Butler but followed 
 out his own teaching on relations and their 
 resulting duties in these two sermons, what 
 a magnificent service he would thereby have 
 rendered to New Testament theology and 
 morals, and to his New Testament readers. 
 Carmichael, while v/armly defending Butler 
 from some philosophical censures of Mack- 
 intosh, and Wardlaw, and Maurice, is himself 
 
36 Butler 
 
 compelled to append this note of censure to 
 these two sermons: "It will be a matter of 
 surprise and regret to the Christian reader 
 that, in the two sermons on the Love of God, 
 the New Testament should have been almost 
 completely ignored. It may indeed be urged 
 that Butler was mainly concerned in establish- 
 ing upon natural and metaphysical grounds, 
 the reasonableness of our love of God. But 
 this will scarcely justify the omission of all 
 reference to truths, such, for example, as are 
 contained in the words, Come unto Me, all ye 
 that labour, and are heavy laden, and I will 
 give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and 
 learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in 
 heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls." 
 But the best explanation of this constant and 
 distressing defect in Butler is supplied in this 
 true distinction of Maurice : " Butler was a 
 preacher professionally ; whereas he was by 
 instinct and by character a philosopher." 
 
 Hazlitt has finely said about Burke that the 
 
Appreciation 37 
 
 only specimen of the great orator is ail that 
 he ever wrote. And the same thing may be 
 said about Butler with even more truth and 
 point. At the same time, if I were asked 
 what, to my mind, is the best specimen of the 
 real Butler, I would without hesitation say 
 that it is his great sermon On The Ignorance 
 of Man. Nowhere else, in such short space, 
 do Butler's immense depth of mind ; his 
 constitutional seriousness of mind, even to 
 melancholy ; his humility and his wisdom, all 
 come out, and all at their best, as in his great 
 sermon On The Ignorance of Man. Socrates 
 himself might have written the sermon On 
 The Ignorance of Man. Only, by Butler's 
 day the diameter of knowledge had been so 
 extended that the corresponding circumference 
 of ignorance was immensely enlarged beyond 
 the realised ignorance of Socrates's day. 
 " Creation is absolutely and entirely out of 
 our depth and beyond the extent of our 
 utmost reach. And yet it is as certain that 
 God made the world, as it is certain that 
 
38 Butler 
 
 effects must have a cause. It is indeed, in 
 general, no more than effects that the most 
 knowing are acquainted with ; for as for 
 causes, the most knowing are as entirely in 
 the dark as the most ignorant." And so 
 of the government of the world. " Since 
 the Divine Monarchy is a dominion unlimited 
 in extent and everlasting in duration, it cannot 
 but be absolutely beyond our comprehension." 
 And Butler's deep heart reflects on all these 
 things till he can only find adequate utterance 
 for his heart in such prostrate and adoring 
 passages as these : " Thy faithfulness, O Lord, 
 reacheth uuto the clouds : Thy righteous- 
 ness standeth like the strong mountains : 
 Thy judgments are like the great deep. O 
 the depth of the riches both of the wisdom 
 and the knowledge of God ! How unsearch- 
 able are His judgments, and His ways past 
 finding out ! " And, then, he would not be 
 Butler if he did not read all that home 
 to himself and to his hearers in some of the 
 weightiest words that ever were written by 
 
Appreciation 39 
 
 the pen of man. Dr. Angus well says that 
 this sermon is one of the most impressive 
 examples of Butler's wisdom. Altogether, 
 the fifteen Rolls Sermons, if sometimes very 
 "abstruse and difficult, or, if you please, 
 obscure," as their author admits they are, will 
 always be an epoch in the intellectual and 
 moral life of the student who takes the trouble 
 to master them. 
 
 With that studied caprice which becomes so 
 belittling to himself, and so wearisome to his 
 most admiring readers, Matthew Arnold tells 
 us that the most entirely satisfactory to him of 
 all Butler's productions are the Six Sermons 
 on Public Occasions. Arnold is alone in that 
 satisfaction, as he so ostentatiously advertises 
 himself to be. The Six Sermons are very able 
 sermons, and they are all sermons that Butler 
 alone in that day could have written. But 
 there is one sermon among them that I could 
 wish for the honour of his good name that 
 Butler had never written : his sermon preached 
 before the House of Lords on " The martyr- 
 
4© Butler 
 
 dom of King Charles the First." This sermon 
 is as unworthy of Butler as the Gowrie series 
 are unworthy of Andrewes. Both those great 
 and good men still remained men enough to 
 suffer both their pulpits to be tuned on 
 occasion, and by the same finger. 
 
 The Analogy of Religion, Natural 
 AND Revealed, to the Constitution and 
 Course of Nature, is the full title of 
 Butler's second great work. " Others," says 
 Southey in his famous epitaph on Butler, 
 "had established the historical and prophetical 
 grounds of the Christian religion, as also that 
 sure testimony to its truth which is found in 
 its perfect adaptation to the heart of man. 
 But it was reserved for Butler to develop its 
 analogy to the constitution and the course of 
 nature. And, laying its strong foundations in 
 the depth of that argument, there to construct 
 another and an irrefragable proof. Thus 
 rendering philosophy subservient to faith ; and 
 
Appreciation 41 
 
 finding in outward and visible things the type 
 and the evidence of things within the veil." 
 The angel's words to Adam in Paradise Lost 
 will supply another remarkable illustration and 
 enforcement of Butler's title-page — 
 
 " What surmounts the reach 
 Of human sense I will delineate so 
 By likening spiritual to corporal forms 
 As may express them best, tho' what if Earth 
 Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein 
 Each to other like, more than on earth is thoughir" 
 
 The Apostle's words also in his Ejiistle to 
 the Romans might very well have been taken 
 for a motto to the Analogy : " For the in- 
 visible things of Him from the creation of the 
 world are clearly seen, being understood by 
 the things that are made, even His eternal 
 power and Godhead, so that they are without 
 excuse." " All things are double, one against 
 another," says one of Butler's favourite 
 authors. And, then, the real design of the 
 Analogy, as Butler himself explains to us, is 
 not, as so many have assumed, to vindicate 
 the character of God, but to show the obliga- 
 
42 Butler 
 
 tions of men : it is not to justify God's 
 providences toward us, but to show us what 
 belongs to us to do under His providence. 
 
 When the studious reader of the Rolls 
 Sermons opens the Analogy, he has not gone far 
 into that deep book till he begins to discover 
 the presence of the Rolls preacher in the 
 person of the philosopher. The same qualities 
 of mind, and heart, and character, that so 
 signalised the preacher come out conspicuously 
 in the apologist also. The same profound 
 thoughtfulness at once comes out, the same 
 deep seriousness, the same sober-mindedness, 
 the same intellectual and moral humility, the 
 same scrupulous truthfulness, the same fairness 
 to opponents, the same immediate and un- 
 questioning submission to the will of God, 
 and the same subordination of everything to 
 the sovereignty of conscience : all these char- 
 acteristic quaUties so come out both in the 
 Sermons and in the Analogy, that if both these 
 books had been anonymous, every capable 
 
Appreciation 43 
 
 reader would have set them down with abso- 
 lute certainty to the same author. And this 
 is just what Butler starts his great work by- 
 saying about Nature and Revelation ; and he 
 repeats it and proves it till he claims at the 
 end of his high argument to have as good as 
 demonstrated to every willing and receptive 
 reader that the Author of Nature is also the 
 Author of Revelation. Butler is the most 
 modest of controversialists ; but as he closes 
 his Analogy he is bold to claim that he has shut 
 all serious-minded men up to the beliefs, and 
 to the comforts, and to the duties, and to the 
 hopes, that all arise out of Revelation. The 
 amazingly close analogy that subsists between 
 natural and revealed religion and the constitu- 
 tion and course of nature is Butler's great 
 argument, but no mere description of his 
 argument, however true and however exact, 
 and no epitome of it, not even his own masterly 
 epitome of it, can convey any conception of 
 the wealth of thought that goes to establish his 
 argument, or of the enlarging and enriching of 
 
44 Butler 
 
 mind that comes to the reader as he accom- 
 panies Butler through his magnificent apology. 
 Till, such is his own experience, that the 
 reader ceases to wonder at the extraordinary 
 acknowledgments of indebtedness that he finds 
 paid to Butler on all hands. " Bishop Butler," 
 wrote Mr. Gladstone in 1873, "taught me 
 forty-five years ago to suspend my judgment 
 on things I knew I did not understand. Even 
 with his aid I may often have been wrong ; 
 without him I think I should never have 
 been right. And oh ! that this age knew the 
 treasure it possesses in him, and neglects." 
 " I have derived greater aid from the views 
 and reasonings of Bishop Butler," says Dr. 
 Chalmers, " than I have been able to find 
 besides in the whole range of our extant author- 
 ship. It was Butler who made me a Christian," 
 says that great man and true Christian. True 
 as I believe all that to be, at the same 
 time I entirely agree with what Maurice says 
 in his admirable remarks on the Analogy. 
 " Butler," says Maurice, " is such a great and 
 
Appreciation 45 
 
 generative thinker, that his hints are often far 
 more to us than even his conclusions." Now, 
 that has been the case most emphatically with 
 myself. I have almost lost myself sometimes 
 in travelling on to Butler's conclusions. But 
 it has been the hints of things, and the seeds 
 of thought, that Butler has dropped into my 
 mind as I walked with him — it is this that 
 makes me to continue to walk with him and 
 to keep so close beside him. Dean Church 
 also has given eloquent expression to my own 
 feelings as a student of Butler. " Even if a 
 person cannot thoroughly master the argu- 
 ment, yet the tone and the spirit of the book, 
 and its whole manner of looking at things, is 
 so remarkable, is so high, so original, so pure 
 and so calmly earnest, that great interest may 
 be taken in Butler's book, and an infinite 
 amount of good may be got out of it even by 
 those who are baffled by its difficult argument." 
 And again, " there is as much to be learned 
 from Butler's tone and manner as there is from 
 the substance of his reasonings." 
 
46 Butler 
 
 "Probability is the very guide of 
 LIFE." , This famous proposition of Butler's 
 contains the essence of his extraordinarily able 
 Introduction to the Analogy. And to master 
 Butler's great doctrine of probability is the 
 student's first palaestra-like encounter with 
 Butler, of which encounter Mr. Gladstone writes 
 so impressively and so eloquently. Multitudes 
 of new beginners have been turned away from 
 Butler by the difficulty they experienced in 
 mastering his opening pages. But had they 
 persevered ; had they tried the Introduction 
 again and again, and had they been encouraged 
 to go on into the body of the book even 
 though they had not yet taken full possession 
 of its opening pages, they would have got such 
 pleasure and such profit in the body of the 
 book that they would have returned to the 
 Introduction somewhat accustomed to Butler's 
 difficult style, and would thus have more easily 
 mastered his fundamental principles. What 
 both Maurice and Church say so well about 
 the difficulty of Butler's writings, and at the 
 
Appreciation 47 
 
 same time about his many ways of rewarding 
 his persevering readers, should be kept con- 
 tinually before all new beginners in this great 
 intellectual arena. As also this that Dr. 
 Bernard says on this subject : " It is conduct, 
 not conviction, that Butler has in his mind 
 throughout." And so true is it that proba- 
 bility is the guide of life and conduct, that 
 there will be seasons with the most experienced 
 and the most assured of Christian men when 
 difficulties, both speculative and experimental, 
 will so beset them that they will be fain to fall 
 back upon Butler's great law of probability. 
 And if they are happy enough to be students 
 of Butler and followers of his, they will often be 
 inexpressibly thankful to him for what he has 
 said with such power and such persuasiveness as 
 to the wisdom and the duty of our acting often- 
 times on a bare probability in the absence of 
 demonstrative proof and full assurance. A 
 proof and an assurance that we cannot possibly 
 have concerning the most important matters 
 both of this life and the next. Do what your 
 
48 Butler 
 
 conscience tells you to be your duty, even if it 
 is only on probable evidence, and in doing so 
 you will act according to the true nature of 
 your own mind and heart, and according to 
 the true nature of this whole economy in which 
 God has placed you here, says Butler to his 
 readers. And this is just his philosophical and 
 apologetical way of adapting to us our Lord's 
 own authoritative and assuring words : " If 
 any man will do the will of God, he shall 
 know the doctrine." And again, " If ye con- 
 tinue in My word, then are ye My disciples 
 indeed. And ye shall know the truth, and 
 the truth shall make you free." 
 
 " Death, that unknown event," never dies 
 out of Butler's thoughts, and he never lets it 
 die out of his reader's thoughts. Butler's 
 whole life was, in Plato's words, one long 
 meditation on death ; on our due preparation 
 for death, on our due anticipation of death, on 
 the real nature and exact experience of death 
 when it comes to us, and on the nature of that 
 
Appreciation 49 
 
 life which follows death. If I am to imagine 
 other readers of Butler to be exercised under 
 his arguments and conclusions as I am, the 
 first chapter of the Analogy will give them not 
 a few thoughts and feelings in connection with 
 the great shock and alteration which they will 
 undergo by death, thoughts and feelings which 
 will never leave them. While it will lead them 
 to dwell far more than they have hitherto dwelt 
 on " that something in themselves which is quite 
 out of the reach of the king of terrors." The 
 whole argument of Butler's chapter on a future 
 state may best be summed up in these words 
 of the Apostle : " For which cause we faint 
 not ; but though our outward man perish, yet 
 the inward man is renewed day by day." And 
 in these words of one of Butler's latest and 
 best commentators : " The senses may grow 
 weak ; but the man himself does not weaken 
 in truth, in honesty, in uprightness, in 
 love." 
 
 In no part of his solemnising and overawing 
 book does Butler more solemnise and overawe 
 
 D 
 
50 Butler 
 
 his readers than in his chapter on probation. 
 "The conception," says Canon Spooner, "which 
 in these chapters Butler has elaborated, of our 
 present life being a period of probation for a 
 future state of existence, has probably affected 
 English thought more than any other part of 
 the Analogy.'" This life is not an end in 
 itself and to itself ; this life is meaningless 
 and purposeless, it is a maze and a mystery, 
 it is absolutely without explanation or justifica- 
 tion to Butler unless it is the ordained entrance 
 to another life which is to be the completion 
 and the compensation of this life. But, then, 
 grant that this present life is but the school- 
 room and the practising-ground to another 
 life, and what a grandeur straightway invests 
 this life ! What a holy fear, and what a holy 
 hope, thenceforward take possession of the 
 heart of the probationer of immortality ! And 
 then it is in working out his great argument of 
 probation that Butler discovers to his readers 
 the momentous part that the law of habit per- 
 forms in the formation of character, and in the 
 
Appreciation 51 
 
 successful or unsuccessful probation of every 
 man who has another life before him. Next 
 to his having made his great discovery con- 
 cerning conscience, Butler has done nothing 
 more important and more fruitful than his 
 enunciation and illustration of the doctrine of 
 habit. " This part of the chapter," says Canon 
 Collins, " is mainly founded on Aristotle's 
 ethical theory, and Butler's exposition of the 
 growth and power of habit has been considered 
 by many to be the most valuable part of the 
 whole treatise." But Mr. Gladstone, always 
 scrupulously jealous for Butler's honour, says, 
 " Seminally, the declarations in the Ethics of 
 Aristotle are of great weight. But the Greek 
 writer does not enter on the field of self- 
 education at all. The idea of mental habits is 
 radically distinct in the two writers ; and the 
 full development of the subject, with the great 
 lessons it conveys, seems to be due to the 
 thought of Butler," Some of Butler's most 
 thought-laden passages are on this subject, and 
 they are passages never to be forgotten by him 
 
52 Butler 
 
 who has once read them and laid them to 
 heart. 
 
 In the Second Part of the Analogy, as in the 
 First Part, it is the originality, and the depth, 
 and the seriousness, and the suggestiveness, 
 of Butler's incidental thoughts, occasional 
 aphorisms, and solemnising reflections, that 
 chiefly instruct and impress the reader. The 
 great argument in itself does not in every part 
 find and command the modern reader. But 
 no reader with sufficient mind and heart, and, 
 as Butler is always saying, with sufficient 
 seriousness, can accompany Butler through his 
 discussion of Revealed Religion without carry- 
 ing away both enlightening and enriching for 
 all his after days. Butler opens his Second 
 Part with some great thoughts strikingly 
 expressed on this thesis of his, that Revealed 
 Religion is an authoritative republication of 
 Natural Religion ; that the divine truths 
 which had become dimmed and distorted in 
 the blinded minds and the corrupted hearts 
 
Appreciation 53 
 
 of fallen men, were kindled afresh, and 
 were set forth in more than all their pristine 
 authority and power, in Revelation. " Chris- 
 tianity especially " — they are Butler's own 
 words — " is a republication of Natural Religion. 
 Christianity instructs mankind in the moral 
 system of the world ; that it is the work of 
 an infinitely perfect Being, and is under 
 His government ; that virtue is His law ; 
 and that He will finally judge mankind in 
 righteousness, and render to all according to 
 their works, in a future state. And, which is 
 very material, Christianity teaches Natural 
 Religion in its genuine simplicity ; free from 
 those superstitions with which it was totally 
 corrupted, and under which it was in a manner 
 lost." But the religion of Jesus Christ, blessed 
 be God, is a vast deal more, and a vast deal 
 better, than a mere republication of Natural 
 Religion. Holy Scripture sets forth an abso- 
 lutely new departure that Almighty God has 
 taken toward the children of men. In Natural 
 Religion, God is revealed as the Maker, and 
 
54 Butler 
 
 the Law-giver, and the Judge of men ; as our 
 Father also, and our Friend. But how glorious 
 His fatherhood is, and how blessed His friend- 
 ship, the Gospel alone has revealed. Natural 
 Religion in its highest and best dispensation 
 might attain to tell us that God had sent forth 
 His Logos-Son to create, and to enlighten, 
 and to govern, and to judge the world. But 
 no man ever read in the very best book of 
 Natural Religion that God so loved the world 
 as to make His Son to be sin for us, that we 
 might be made the righteousness of God in Him. 
 But instead of taking up and pursuing this line 
 of thought, Butler turns immediately to quite 
 another field of things in which he is much 
 more at home. And he proceeds to draw out 
 and to illustrate the striking contrast between 
 what he calls moral and positive duties. No 
 doubt the opportunities, if not the necessities, 
 of his argument offered this field of reflection 
 to Butler. But it is painfully characteristic of 
 our author that he can always find plenty of 
 room for purely ethical and logical discussions. 
 
Appreciation 55 
 
 but keeps scrupulously close to his philosophical 
 and analogical argument as often as he comes 
 into the neighbourhood of apostolical and evan- 
 gelical truth. " In reviewing this chapter," 
 says Dr. Angus, " too much stress cannot be 
 laid on the principle laid down by Dr. Chal- 
 mers. Christianity is not only a republication 
 of natural religion, with added truth, but the 
 added truth is adapted to the condition in 
 which natural religion leaves us. The first 
 without the second, the republication without 
 the remedial addition, would have been a 
 message of terror and denunciation. It is the 
 Gospel which reconciles all difficulties ; and 
 which, besides adding the light of its own 
 manifestation, resolves all the doubts and 
 hushes all the fears which natural religion had 
 awakened." At the same time, let us not be 
 tempted to make little of the immense service 
 Butler has done for us, because he has not per- 
 formed for us the highest service of all. Let 
 us not cast Butler to the moles and the bats 
 because he is not able to give us all that we 
 
56 Butler 
 
 demand of him. All the more since we have 
 the full truth on this subject, and at this stage, 
 in Chalmers and Angus and many others, in 
 correction and in completion of Butler. Let 
 us go on to study, with all due attention and 
 profit, those remarkably suggestive chapters on 
 moral and positive institutions and duties, 
 thankful for the great services Butler here 
 performs to us, instead of uselessly complaining 
 because of the absence of services that, to his 
 own impoverishment, he was not able to 
 perform. 
 
 In these days, when so much attention is being 
 given to the history of revelation — that is to say 
 to the sundry times and divers manners in which 
 God spake unto the fathers by the prophets — 
 Butler's two chapters on those sundry times 
 and divers manners are intensely interesting 
 and highly instructive. Butler alone could 
 have written the chapter on our unfitness to 
 sit in judgment as to when and how God 
 would speak to the children of men. The 
 whole argument at this point is most enlighten- 
 
Appreciation 57 
 
 ing and most enlarging to the mind of the 
 reader. And then, we come again and again 
 on passages that would almost seem to have 
 been written in anticipation of our own per- 
 plexed and anxious day. Such passages as this : 
 " Neither this obscurity, nor seeming inaccuracy 
 of style, nor various readings, nor early disputes 
 about the authors of particular parts, nor any 
 other thing of the like kind, though they had 
 been much more considerable than they are, 
 could overthrow the authority of Scripture, 
 unless the prophets, the apostles, or our Lord 
 Himself had promised that the book contain- 
 ing the Divine revelation should be secure 
 from those things." Butler's whole discussion 
 on Scripture is full of that sanity and sobriety 
 of mind, and that deep and reverent wisdom, 
 with which he has made us so familiar in all 
 his previous writings. At the same time, it 
 must be admitted that when Butler passes on 
 from the defence of revelation to the exposi- 
 tion of the contents and substance of revela- 
 tion, he by no means shows the same qualities 
 
58 Butler 
 
 of mind as heretofore, nor commands the same 
 assent and admiration from all his readers as 
 heretofore. All the remaining chapters of the 
 Analogy are full of the finest thoughts, and 
 the most fruitful suggestions ; but, as a whole, 
 the remainder of the work falls very much 
 below the high and adequate level of the First 
 Part. Butler has no equal in his defence of 
 the outworks of the Christian faith. But when 
 he passes into the inner sanctuary itself, he no 
 longer commands the same assent and admira- 
 tion as he does among the defences. " Butler," 
 says Chalmers, " is like one who, vpith admir- 
 able skill, lays down the distances and the 
 directions of a land into which he has not 
 travelled very far himself." " But," adds 
 Chalmers, " without sitting in judgment on the 
 personal religion of Butler, it is the part of the 
 Christian world to ov^^n their deepest obligations 
 to the man who has so nobly asserted the 
 authority of the Word of God over all the 
 darkling speculations of human fancy, and 
 who has evinced to us, by the truest of all 
 
Appreciation 59 
 
 philosophy, that we should cast down every 
 lofty imagination and bring all our thoughts 
 into the captivity of its obedience." Dr. John 
 Cairns- — who, his biographer tells us, read the 
 Analogy regularly once a year — writing to his 
 sister from Stanhope in the year 1873, ^^7^ • 
 " Here, doubtless, the Analogy was finally 
 thought out and adjusted to its present state. 
 I had a specimen of the local humour when 
 asking a young farmer what I should see from 
 a distant point. His reply was, ' a sight of fell, 
 and the road.' It was only too true. For I 
 had to labour on through the fell till at last the 
 ocean rose upon the view. A sight of fell, but 
 a road through it, and a grand outlook beyond, 
 is not a bad image of Butler's work." 
 
 The very title-page of Butler's great book 
 shows the immense capaciousness of Butler's 
 mind. The Constitution of Nature — how vast 
 a subject is that for a human mind to attempt 
 to grasp ! And then, the Course of Nature 
 — how vast a subject is that also for a human 
 
6o 
 
 Butler 
 
 mind to attempt to trace and follow out ! 
 And then to take up both Natural and Revealed 
 Religion, and to lay both those great fields 
 of Divine truth alongside of Nature, both in 
 her constitution and her course — all that was 
 surely far too much for any created mind to 
 undertake. And yet Butler was not only led 
 to undertake all that, but was enabled to carry 
 all that out in a way that has been the wonder 
 and the praise of all his readers ever since. 
 Never had a book, after the Bible itself, a 
 more capacious title-page than the Analogy, and 
 never had an uninspired book a more complete 
 success in what it undertook. Butler has 
 never had sitting at his feet a more capacious- 
 minded scholar than Mr. Gladstone. And this 
 is how that generous-hearted and grateful- 
 hearted man speaks about the capacious mind 
 of his master : " The argument of the Analogy 
 is an argument perhaps even greater than 
 Butler himself was aware. In opening up his 
 argument, which in my judgment stands among 
 the masterpieces of the human mind, Butler 
 
Appreciation 6i 
 
 has unfolded to us the entire method of God's 
 dealings with His creatures ; and in this way 
 the argument which he offers us is as wide as 
 those dealings themselves." And again : "It is 
 Butler who, more than any other writer, opens 
 to us the one all-pervading scheme upon which 
 Almighty God deals with His creatures." 
 And again : " Butler's method is so compre- 
 hensive as to embrace every question belonging 
 to the relations between the Deity and man." 
 The truth is, very much what his great con- 
 temporary Newton is in the material world 
 that Butler is in the moral world. And more 
 than once Butler as good as acknowledges the 
 debt he owed to the discoveries of his great 
 contemporary. Dr. Wace carries out the 
 parallel between Newton and Butler in a very 
 interesting and suggestive way in his lecture on 
 Butler in Typical English Churchmen. 
 
 In the matter of Butler's imagination I am 
 not only alone against all the world, but also at 
 first sight against Butler himself. For he never 
 
62 
 
 Butler 
 
 once mentions the imagination without belittling 
 it, and he more than once actually vilifies it, to 
 use one of his own strong words about another 
 great faculty of the human mind. And 
 Bagehot's passages on this subject may be 
 taken as only too good specimens of the way 
 that Butler has been taken at his own unfor- 
 tunate valuation in the matter of the imagina- 
 tion. For that able essayist actually says, and 
 says it with a great and a repeated emphasis, 
 that Butler is wholly wanting in imagination, 
 that he is wholly deficient in the visual faculty, 
 that he is not able to picture particulars, and 
 that no instances or illustrations occur in his 
 writings. Able and authoritative as Bagehot 
 is, I must be permitted to say that I cannot 
 agree with him in all that. I cannot agree 
 with him that Butler does not see what he is 
 writing about, and does not let his reader see 
 what he is reading about. Butler does not 
 indeed delay in his great task to expatiate 
 pictorially on what he sees. He does not take 
 time in his high argument to describe dramati- 
 
Appreciation 63 
 
 cally and dilate eloquently on the vast visions 
 that pass before his heaven-soaring mind. His 
 imagination does not come out in purple 
 patches on his pages. But if Butler had not 
 himself seen the great things of nature, and of 
 natural and revealed religion, with his own 
 inward, and imaginative, and realising eye, he 
 could never have made me see and realise them 
 as I, for one, must always acknowledge and 
 rejoice that he has done. " Of some assistance 
 to apprehension," is one of Butler's far too 
 grudging, and far too ungrateful, references to 
 a faculty of his own mind, which he employs 
 continually to assist his own apprehension and 
 that of his readers. Butler ought to have been 
 as scrupulous not to vilify or undervalue 
 imagination, as he is not to vilify or under- 
 value reason, since imagination is the only 
 faculty we possess in this life that can be to us 
 the substance of things hoped for, and the 
 evidence of things not seen. A service that 
 both Butler and all his readers are continually 
 receiving at the realising and illuminating hands 
 
64 Butler 
 
 of the imagination. To me, at any rate, let 
 Butler himself, and Bagehot, and all Butler's 
 other critics, say what they will, Butler will 
 always rank, if not with the great masters of 
 the dramatic and pictorial imagination, such as 
 Dante and Bunyan and Milton, yet with those 
 other masterly minds, who by means of that 
 same noble faculty, exercised in another way, 
 have made me vividly realise what I had 
 hitherto but vaguely heard of, and who have 
 also made things to be present and impressive 
 to me which had hitherto been so remote as 
 to be all but unreal. "See !" exclaims Maurice, 
 " how he throws in the length of the ages and 
 the immensity of the universe." As often as 
 Butler is brought to a standstill in his high 
 argument till he again says to his reader 
 suppose, suppose, suppose — and he says that 
 in some of his chapters in every second 
 sentence — Butler by saying that, and by the 
 way he goes on to make his suppositions, 
 summons all my imagination into his service, 
 till his whole high argument is lighted up to 
 
Appreciation 65 
 
 me from the one end of heaven to the other. 
 And till ever after, the dry light of Butler's 
 own reason is suffused and softened, and shed 
 far and wide, as only the imagination could 
 suffuse it, and soften it, and shed it abroad. 
 The simple truth is, as Mr. Gladstone so 
 regretfully points out, there is a serious con- 
 fusion of language on Butler's part in all those 
 passages in which he seems to us to vilify the 
 imagination. For it is not against the im- 
 agination proper that Butler is writing at all 
 in those unfortunate and misleading passages, 
 says Mr. Gladstone, but it is against " an un- 
 bridled fancy, an intellectual caprice, and an ill- 
 regulated judgment." All which things are as 
 far as the poles asunder from the proper use of 
 the imagination, that so superb faculty of the 
 human mind. " The term imagination in 
 Butler's pages," so Mr. Gladstone sums up, 
 "would seem to be a misnomer." I will be bold 
 to add, it not only seems to be a misnomer, but 
 actually is such a fatal misnomer as to have 
 misled many of Butler's readers, and drawn 
 
 E 
 
66 
 
 Butler 
 
 them wholly away from the due recognition 
 and the due appreciation of a divinely given 
 faculty that as little deserves to be vilified as 
 either the reason or the conscience themselves. 
 Dean Church alone has done something like 
 justice to this noble endowment of Butler's 
 own mind. " That was the feature of Butler's 
 mind," says the Dean in his brilliant lecture, 
 " that he never lost hold on his high thoughts, 
 and never let custom or any other thing close 
 his eyes or raise a mist between him and them. 
 It was his power, the greatest perhaps that 
 he had, that what his reason told him was 
 certain and true, he was able continually to see, 
 and feel, and imagine to be true and real. He 
 had the power of faith." And again : " These 
 touches of imagination and feeHng come in the 
 midst of austere argument or statement ; they 
 come in naturally and unforced ; and they 
 give us a momentary glimpse, the more 
 interesting because rare, into the depths of a 
 great mind." And again in what Mr. Glad- 
 stone calls " that masterly sermon of Dean 
 
Appreciation 67 
 
 Church," " there are passages in Butler, when 
 we read between the lines of his words, that 
 at first sight look so dry and commonplace, 
 which seem to open a glimpse of the very 
 foundations of the world and nature." And 
 Professor Alexander Bain, in a striking passage 
 in his Study of Character, says on this same 
 subject : "The many observations scattered over 
 Butler's writings that have been esteemed for 
 their profundity, owe their force to the flash of 
 some hidden identity that gives a new aspect 
 to an old problem. Remove from Butler's 
 mind his foremost end, which is to obtain 
 truth ; give him the local susceptibilities to 
 colour and form, to words, cadence, and 
 metre ; and the same reach of the identifying 
 faculty would have emerged in a poet." 
 
 It is a great lesson in English composition 
 to read what has been written first and last 
 about Butler's style. And the best thing that 
 has ever been said on that subject was what 
 Butler said himself. In the Preface to the 
 
68 
 
 Butler 
 
 second edition of his Rolls Sermons he replied 
 in these words to the fault that had been 
 found with his style of writing, — " It must 
 be acknowledged that some of the following 
 discourses are very abstruse and difficult ; or, 
 if you please, obscure. But I must take leave 
 to add that those alone are judges whether or 
 no this is a fault who are judges whether or no 
 and how far it might have been avoided. 
 Those only who will be at the trouble to 
 understand what is here said, and to see how 
 far the things here insisted upon and not other 
 things, might have been put in a plainer 
 manner : which I am very far from asserting 
 they could not. Confusion and perplexity 
 in writing is indeed without excuse, because 
 any one may, if he pleases, know whether he 
 understands and sees through what he is 
 about. And it is unpardonable for a man to 
 lay his thoughts before others when he is 
 conscious that he himself does not know 
 whereabouts he is, or how the matter before 
 him stands. It is coming abroad in disorder. 
 
Appreciation 69 
 
 which he ought to be dissatisfied to find him- 
 self in at home." And then at the end of 
 his extraordinarily ably written preface he 
 puts in this claim for himself, that at any rate 
 he has written his sermons "with simplicity 
 and earnestness of purpose." Take the follow- 
 ing as so many most interesting specimens of 
 the debate that has been held over Butler's 
 style, John Byrom, stenographer and poet, 
 and William Law's Boswell, has this in his 
 Journal. "Some," says Byrom, "thought 
 Butler a little too little vigorous, and wished 
 he would have spoken more earnestly." Sir 
 James Mackintosh, who averred that he owed 
 all his philosophy to Butler, at the same time 
 allows himself to call the Rolls Sermons " those 
 deep and dark dissertations." And he goes 
 on to say that " no thinker so great was ever 
 so bad a writer." On the other hand, Bartlett, 
 Butler's best biographer, has this on the 
 matter in hand : " We have heard persons 
 talk of the obscurity of Bishop Butler's style, 
 and lament that his book was not rewritten 
 
70 Butler 
 
 by some more luminous master of language. 
 We have always suspected that such critics 
 know very little about the Analogy. We 
 would have no sacrilegious hand touch it. 
 To touch it would be like officious meddling 
 with a well-considered move at chess. The 
 Analogy is a work carefully and closely packed 
 up out of twenty years' hard thinking. It 
 must have filled folios had its illustrious author 
 taken less time to concoct it ; for never was 
 there a stronger instance of the truth of the 
 observation, that it requires far more time to 
 make a small book than a large one." And 
 further on he adds : " The style of Butler has, 
 we think, been condemned undeservedly. It 
 certainly is not formed to anything like 
 Ciceronian harmony and elegance ; but it 
 seldom offends the ear, or violates the purity 
 of the English idiom." " After all," says 
 Fitzgerald, one of Butler's best editors, "the 
 faults of his style are greatly overstated by 
 many of his critics. It may not be polished ; 
 but it is good, plain, downright English, the 
 
Appreciation 71 
 
 words are proper for his purpose, and they are 
 generally put in their proper places. Nay, 
 though it would be absurd to claim for 
 Butler's general style the artful simplicity of 
 Addison's elegance, the brilliant perspicuity of 
 Berkeley, or even the plain compactness of 
 Swift, it is not too much to say that there 
 occur, here and there, passages of pure, 
 musical, Saxon-English that will not suffer 
 from a comparison with any of those great 
 models." " Butler's style," admits Dean 
 Goulburn, " though it has a massive grandeur 
 and solidity in it, is yet anything but attractive 
 to the general reader." "Butler's words," 
 says Maurice, " often become feeble and con- 
 tradictory, because he cannot write what is 
 struggling within him." " A great thinker, 
 but a poor writer," says Bagehot. " It is 
 probable, that if Butler hated anything, he 
 hated his pen. Composition is pleasant work 
 for men of ready words, fine ears, and thick- 
 coming illustrations. But Butler, so far from 
 having the pleasures of eloquence, had not 
 
72 Butler 
 
 even the comfort of perspicuity. In some 
 places the mode of statement is even stupid : 
 it seems selected to occasion a difficulty." 
 And then Bagehot sums up against Butler in 
 these words : " No writer of equal eminence 
 is so defective as Butler. His thoughts, if 
 you take each one singly, seem to lose a good 
 deal from the feeble and hesitating manner in 
 which they are stated. And yet, if you read 
 any considerable portion of his writings, you 
 become sensible of a strong disinclination to 
 disagree with him." And again, and much 
 more generously in another book : " There 
 was not a spark of the littleness of literary 
 ambition about Butler. There is nothing 
 light in Butler ; he leaves to others all 
 amusing skirmishing and superficial writing. 
 In Butler all is grave, serious, and essential. 
 Nothing else would be characteristic of 
 Butler." " The admirable arrangement of the 
 Analogy^'' says Mark Pattison, " is all its 
 own. Its closely packed and carefully fitted 
 order speaks of many years' contrivance. Its 
 
Appreciation 73 
 
 substance is the thought of a whole age, not 
 barely compiled, but each separate thought 
 reconsidered and digested. Every brick in 
 the building has been rung before it was 
 relaid, and replaced in its true relation to the 
 complex and various whole." "The style of 
 Butler," says Mr. Gladstone, " has been made 
 largely responsible for the difficulties of his 
 subject, but those who might rewrite one of 
 his pages would find it more difficult than they 
 suppose to improve the style without im- 
 pairing the substance." And in direct con- 
 tradiction of one of Bagehot's charges against 
 Butler's style, Mr. Gladstone proceeds : " In 
 his illustrations Butler is particularly happy ; 
 and upon the whole, in his case, and also 
 in that of Aristotle, it may be said that the 
 style and the substance cannot be parted." 
 And then, if " a consciousness of what has 
 preceded and what is to follow makes a 
 perfect style," as Jowett in his introduction 
 to the Laws says it does, then Butler's 
 rank as a writer is secure. For never was 
 
74 Butler 
 
 there a more regular plan laid down for 
 any book, and never had any book more 
 consciousness of what had preceded and 
 what was to follow. Canon Spooner also, 
 Butler's latest biographer, has this in his 
 excellent little book : " Is the charge of 
 obscurity that is brought against Butler well 
 deserved ? On such a matter the reading 
 public is the only judge. A writer whom 
 most, even intelligent, readers find obscure, 
 is obscure. Tried by this test, Butler will 
 almost certainly stand convicted. But the 
 obscurity that exists is not the obscurity of a 
 loose and confused thinker. There was no- 
 thing loose or confused in Butler's mind : quite 
 the reverse. The difficulty of the style arises 
 from the extreme closeness and continuity of 
 the thoughts. Still more from the caution, 
 many-sidedness, and conscientiousness of the 
 writer which would leave no aspect of the 
 question unprovided for, no possible objection 
 which might be taken unmet, no necessary 
 limitation unexpressed, no possible misunder- 
 
Appreciation 75 
 
 standing of his meaning unguarded against. 
 A man writing in such a spirit, particularly 
 a man of Butler's anxious and even morbidly 
 conscientious temperament, could scarcely attain 
 to a facile and unlaboured style. Certainly 
 Butler would have been less himself had his 
 style been less laboured : with him even more 
 than with most men, the style is the man." 
 
 It is a study in literary criticism, as well as 
 in style, to ponder these various opinions, and 
 to consider them in relation to their respective 
 authors, as well as in relation to Butler's style. 
 It is an excellent exercise in criticism and in 
 composition to watch in what, and how far, 
 his critics coincide with one another, and to 
 discover how they less, any single one of 
 them, say the whole truth about Butler, than 
 make each his own contribution to the whole 
 truth. For myself, I will say in one word 
 that the more I read Butler, and the better I 
 understand him, the more I enjoy his peculiar 
 style. His style is what it is, to employ one 
 of his own repeated expressions, and I would 
 
76 Butler 
 
 not have it other than it is. And I most 
 heartily subscribe to what Bishop Steere says 
 so well on this same subject : " In truth the 
 greatest beauty in any author's style consists 
 in its appropriateness to express his meaning. 
 And thus it is that careful students of Butler's 
 works generally come, in the end, to have a 
 sort of relish for his peculiar style." I think 
 that is a very happy expression of Steere's. 
 " A sort of relish " exactly describes my own 
 enjoyment of Butler's peculiar style. For 
 there is a certain dry, nutty, oaten aroma that 
 comes off Butler's page as I read it ; not only 
 not disagreeable, but positively healing, and 
 restoring, and strengthening. Till, what with 
 his style and what with his substance, with all 
 his limitations — and they are neither few nor 
 small — Butler will always remain one of the 
 few first-class authors in the whole world to 
 me. 
 
 Butler is universally acknowledged to be the 
 most thoughtful of all our English theologians 
 
Appreciation 77 
 
 and moralists. Many English theologians, and 
 moralists, and preachers, could be named who 
 far excelled Butler in other things. Many were 
 more learned, many were more eloquent, many 
 were far more scriptural, and consequently 
 far more evangelical. But Butler stands 
 alone in his own sheer power of thought, 
 and in his amazing power of awakening 
 thought in his readers. Hooker was far more 
 learned and far more evangelical. Taylor was 
 far more oceanically read, and his eloquence 
 was without parallel. Edwards's mind was 
 far more powerful than Butler's mind was 
 naturally, and it was simply seraphically sanc- 
 tified. While the great Puritans far eclipsed 
 Butler in the apostolicity and spirituality of 
 their ministry. But for plunging his readers 
 into the greatest depths of thought, Butler 
 excels them all. Butler was like Pascal in 
 this, that he was not at all a wide reader, but 
 was one of the princeliest of thinkers. It was 
 simply Butler's own thoughtfulness, and his 
 power of producing thoughtfulness, that has 
 
78 Butler 
 
 called forth such extraordinary appreciations 
 and acknowledgments as these : " The most 
 original and profound work extant in any 
 language on the philosophy of religion," says 
 Sir James Mackintosh. " I could not write 
 on this or on any other kindred subject," says 
 Bishop O'Brien, " without a consciousness that 
 I was either directly or indirectly borrowing 
 from Butler." " I have derived greater aid 
 from the views and reasonings of Butler," says 
 Dr. Chalmers, " than I have been able to find 
 besides in the whole range of our extant 
 authorship." " I am more indebted to Butler's 
 writings than I am to any other uninspired 
 author," says Bishop Kaye. " That great and 
 generative thinker," says Maurice. " The 
 greatest name," says Newman, "in the Anglican 
 Church." And writing about books to a lady, 
 Newman says : " I think you will gain great 
 benefit on the whole subject of ethics and 
 religion from Butler's Analogy. It is a very 
 deep work, and while it requires, it will repay 
 your attention." It is no detraction from 
 
Appreciation 79 
 
 Newman's own great fertility of mind to say 
 that the reader of Butler and of Newman 
 continually comes on sentences, and clauses of 
 sentences, in Butler that have been the seed of 
 some of Newman's most famous sermons. 
 And the same thing may be said of not a few 
 of the sermons of Butler's philosophic and 
 eloquent Irish namesake, as also of some of the 
 best of Mozley's sermons, who has been called 
 the Butler of the nineteenth century. One of 
 the most original and impressive preachers I 
 ever sat under, David White of Airlie, had 
 Butler always on his desk beside his Bible, 
 and had little else. Plato's discourses were 
 so overladen with thought, that when he 
 looked up after finishing one of the longest 
 and deepest of them, all his audience had 
 escaped: only Aristotle was left in the lecture- 
 room. So Plutarch tells us. And I would 
 not have wondered to have been told by 
 Byrom that when Butler had finished some 
 of his Rolls Sermons^ there was no one left in 
 the chapel but the Master of the Rolls and 
 
8o 
 
 Butler 
 
 William Law in for the forenoon from Putney. 
 " The pain of attending " is one of Butler's 
 own admissions about his sermons. But then, 
 all the pain is well repaid. 
 
 " A more than ordinary depth of thought 
 produces the melancholy temperament," says 
 Jacob Behmen. And Butler's deep melancholy 
 is one of his outstanding characteristics, both 
 as a preacher and a philosopher. Passages 
 like these occur continually in his writings. 
 " The infinite disorders of this world." " This 
 world is a mere scene of distraction." " In- 
 stead of this world being what it was 
 intended to be, a discipline of virtue, the 
 generality of men make it a discipline of 
 vice. It is a state of apostasy, wickedness, 
 and ruin. Men are depraved creatures, who 
 want to be renewed." " If the discoveries of 
 men of research tend in any way to render 
 life less unhappy than it is, then they are most 
 usefully employed." Lamentations like these 
 come out of the Sermons and out of the 
 
Appreciation 8i 
 
 Analogy continually, till to say Butler is to 
 say melancholy. At the same time, Butler's 
 melancholy is more a philosophical and a 
 speculative melancholy than a religious and 
 an experimental melancholy. There is a far 
 deeper, a far more bitter, and a far more 
 inconsolable, melancholy than is that melan- 
 choly to which Butler, with all his depth of 
 thought, has ever given voice. There is a 
 cup, " bitterer to drink than blood," that 
 Butler would seem scarcely ever to have tasted. 
 So far as his Analogy^ or his sermons, or even 
 his prayers go, he would seem to have had 
 little or no experimental acquaintance with the 
 unspeakable melancholy of such spiritual men as 
 Behmen, and Pascal, and Foster- — to keep to 
 some of the men of deepest thought that have 
 ever lived. It is always this fallen, and corrupt, 
 and depraved world that is the source of 
 Butler's melancholy. It is their own corrupt 
 and depraved and hopeless hearts that is the 
 source of the far deeper melancholy of such 
 men as have been named above. Butler is a 
 
 F 
 
82 
 
 Butler 
 
 great " melancholian," but, all the same, his 
 great melancholy is but philosophical, and 
 speculative, and economical : whereas the 
 melancholy of Behmen, and Pascal, and Foster 
 is spiritual, and personal, and experimental, 
 and inconsolable. 
 
 Under the head of his mental qualities 
 Mr. Gladstone discusses Butler's measure, his 
 strength of tissue, his courage, his questionable 
 theses, his imagination, and his originality. 
 All students of Butler should be sure not 
 to miss what that great statesman has to say 
 about the mental qualities of his revered master. 
 Contenting myself with recommending Glad- 
 stone's third volume to all students of Butler — 
 and I may add to all students of Gladstone 
 himself — I pass on to take some notice of what 
 is by far the most serious complaint that has 
 ever been made against Butler. That is to 
 say, his extraordinary deficiency in apostolical 
 and evangelical truth. Now, that complaint is 
 so serious, and is so fundamental, that it must 
 
Appreciation 83 
 
 be made by me in the words of one who 
 had both the ability, and the courage, and 
 the loyalty to truth, to make it. Dr. Chalmers 
 shall speak for all those who agree with him in 
 his immense regret concerning Butler's religion. 
 Whether in praise or in blame of Butler, as I 
 have already said, I like to read Dr. Chalmers 
 above all Butler's other editors and com- 
 mentators. There is nothing to my mind to 
 compare with Chalmers's lectures on the 
 Analogy. That great man is so reverential to 
 Butler ; he is so full of noble acknowledgment 
 of indebtedness to his great master ; and he is 
 so eloquent and impressive in expounding him. 
 Let Dr. Chalmers therefore speak on this dis- 
 tressing subject. " We fear," says Chalmers 
 in his fourth chapter, " that Butler here makes 
 the first, though not the only, exhibition that 
 occurs in his work, of his meagre and moderate 
 theology. Sound as his general views were on 
 what might be termed the philosophy of re- 
 ligion, this formed no security against the 
 errors of a lax and superficial creed on certain 
 
84 Butler 
 
 of its specific doctrines." And again : " It 
 were great and unwarrantable presumption to 
 decide on the personal Christianity of Butler, 
 but I think it but fair to warn you that up and 
 down throughout the volume there do occur 
 the symptoms of a heart not thoroughly evan- 
 gelised." " I have already," says Chalmers in 
 another place, " given repeated intimation that, 
 viewed as a Christian composition, I do not 
 regard Butler's book as being sufficiently im- 
 pregnated with the sal evangelicum, and that 
 even his own principles are not fully and 
 practically carried out. Butler is like one who, 
 with admirable skill, lays down the distances 
 and the directions of a land into which he has 
 not travelled very far himself." Let any 
 careful student read Butler's Dissertation on 
 the Nature of Virtue, and then let him read 
 Jonathan Edwards's treatise on the same 
 subject, and he will see for himself what it is 
 that Dr. Chalmers complains of when he says 
 that Butler is so afraid or so incapable of be- 
 coming evangelical that he will not even follow 
 
Appreciation 85 
 
 his own principles fully and practically out. 
 Butler continually confines himself to the barely 
 ethical, even when his subject claims to become 
 spiritual. He will abide rigidly and severely 
 philosophical even when, on every ground, he 
 should rise to be apostolical and evangelical. 
 But he never does so rise : never so much as 
 once. And thus it is that there is a height and 
 a depth, a fragrance, a sweetness, and a beauty 
 about all Edwards's ethical work, of which 
 Butler's very best work is wholly and blame- 
 fully devoid. He defends himself, and his out- 
 and-out eulogists defend him, on the plea that 
 he is always arguing, not on his own principles, 
 but on the principles of the deists, who were 
 his opponents. But Edwards argues not less 
 effectually because he lets his great subject 
 carry both him and his readers away up to its 
 native heavens. Edwards is only the more 
 genuinely and profoundly philosophical that 
 he is so seraphically spiritual ; and only the 
 more truly and convincingly ethical that he is 
 so Pauline in the grace and truth of his philo- 
 
86 
 
 Butler 
 
 sophy as well as his theology. Wesley's re- 
 port of his interview with Butler is humiliating 
 reading. And when it is read alongside of 
 Chalmers's lectures on Butler, it is absolutely 
 conclusive as to Butler's utter lack of sympathy 
 with apostolic and evangelic preaching, even 
 when he could not but see the miracles that 
 such preaching was working in his own diocese. 
 Mr. Gladstone is driven to think that the 
 interview between the Bishop and the great 
 Gospel preacher cannot be correctly reported 
 in Wesley's Journal. I wish I could believe 
 that. For, with all his shortcomings on the 
 most important of all matters, I love and 
 honour Butler more than I can tell. The truth 
 is, with all his greatness, Butler falls far short 
 of the greatest. Many an author, many a 
 preacher, many an unlettered believer, who 
 was not talented enough to read what Butler 
 had written, could have taken him and taught 
 him the way of God more perfectly, as Aquila 
 and Priscilla taught Apollos. It is a mystery 
 to me how such a deep-seeing man, and such a 
 
Appreciation 87 
 
 fearless and honest man, and such a serious- 
 minded man as Butler was could have lived 
 and died contented with sucli an emasculated 
 and meagre gospel as that of the Sermons and 
 the Analogy. It would be a mystery did we 
 not see the same mystery every day. But we 
 have only too good evidence that Butler did 
 not either live or die contented. As to his 
 death, a delightful narrative is given of the 
 Bishop's last moments, a narrative that carries 
 its truth on the face of it, and a narrative we 
 would not have wanted for anything. When 
 Butler lay on his deathbed he called for his 
 chaplain and said to him : " Though I have 
 endeavoured to avoid sin, and to please God 
 to the utmost of my power, yet, from the 
 consciousness of perpetual infirmities, I am 
 still afraid to die." " My lord," said the 
 chaplain, " you have forgotten that Jesus 
 Christ is a Saviour." "True," said Butler, 
 " but how shall I know that He is a Saviour 
 for me.'' " " My lord, it is written, ' Him that 
 conieth unto Me, I will in no wise cast out.' " 
 
88 
 
 Butler 
 
 " True," said Butler, " and I am surprised that 
 though I have read that Scripture a thousand 
 times over, I never felt its virtue till this 
 moment. And now I die happy." 
 
 "A mighty prelate on his deathbed lay, 
 
 Revolving the dread themes of life and death 
 And their stupendous issues, with dismay. 
 
 His marvellous powers nigh quenched. ' My lord,' 
 one saith, 
 
 ' Hast thou forgotten how Christ came to be 
 
 A Saviour?' 'Nay,' the bishop made reply, 
 'How i'lnow I He's a Saviour unto ar?' 
 
 The chaplain paused, then answered thoughtfully: 
 "'Lo, him that cometh unto Me," Christ said, 
 
 " I will in nowise cast out," need we more r' 
 The bishop slowly raised his dying head : 
 
 'I've read a thousand times that Scripture o'er. 
 Nor felt its truth till now I near the tomb; 
 
 It is enough, O mighty Christ, I come.' " 
 
BUTLER'S BEST PASSAGES 
 
BUTLER'S BEST PASSAGES 
 
 ON GOD 
 
 Our whole nature leads us to ascribe all 
 moral perfection to God, and to deny all 
 imperfection of Him. And this will for ever 
 be a practical proof of His moral character, to 
 such as will consider what a practical proof is ; 
 because it is the voice of God speaking in us. 
 — Angus, p. lo. 
 
 If we are constituted such sort of creatures, 
 as from our very nature to feel certain affec- 
 tions or movements of mind upon the sight or 
 contemplation of the meanest inanimate part 
 of the creation, for the flowers of the field have 
 their beauty, certainly there must be somewhat 
 due to Him Himself, who is the Author and 
 Cause of all things, who is more intimately 
 
 91 
 
92 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 present to us than anything else can be, and 
 with whom we have a nearer and more constant 
 intercourse than we can have with any creature. 
 There must be some movements of mind and 
 heart which correspond to His perfections, or 
 of which those perfections are the natural 
 object. — Angus, p. 354. 
 
 Reverence, ambition of His love and appro- 
 bation, delight in the hope or consciousness of 
 it, come likewise into this definition of the love 
 of God, because He is the natural object of all 
 those affections or movements of mind, as 
 really as He is the object of the affection 
 which is in the strictest sense called love ; and 
 all of them equally rest in Him as their end. 
 —Angus, p. 499. 
 
 Nothing is more certain than that an infinite 
 Being may himself be, if he pleases, the supply 
 to all the capacities of our nature. All the 
 common enjoyments of life are from the 
 faculties he hath endued us with, and the 
 
Butler's Best Passages 93 
 
 objects he hath made suitable to them. He 
 may himself be to us infinitely more than all 
 these; he may be to us all that we want. As 
 our understanding can contemplate itself, and 
 our affections be exercised upon themselves by 
 reflection, so may each be employed in the 
 same manner upon any other mind ; and since 
 the Supreme Mind, the Author and Cause of 
 all things, is the higliest possible object to 
 himself, he may be an adequate supply to 
 all the faculties of our souls, a subject to our 
 understanding, and an object to our affections. 
 —Angus, p. 513. 
 
 Words, to be sure, are wanting upon this 
 subject : to say that everything of grace and 
 beauty throughout the whole of Nature, 
 everything excellent and amiable shared in 
 differently lower degrees by the whole crea- 
 tion, meet in the Author and Cause of all 
 things ; this is an inadequate and perhaps 
 improper way of speaking of the Divine 
 Nature, but it is manifest that absolute recti- 
 
94 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 tude, the perfection of being, must be in all 
 senses and in every respect the highest object 
 to the mind. — Angus, p. 51 4. 
 
 Now, as our capacities of perception improve, 
 we shall have, perhaps by some faculty entirely 
 new, a perception of God's presence with us 
 in a nearer and stricter way ; since it is certain 
 He is more intimately present with us, than 
 anything else can be. Proof of the existence 
 and presence of any being is quite different 
 from the immediate perception, the conscious- 
 ness of it. What then will be the joy of 
 heart which His presence, and the light of 
 His countenance, who is the life of the Uni- 
 verse, will inspire good men with, when they 
 shall have a sensation, that He is the Sustainer 
 of their being, that they exist in Him ; when 
 they shall feel His influence to cheer and 
 enliven and support their frame, in a manner 
 of which we have now no conception He 
 will be in a literal sense their strength and 
 their portion for ever. 
 
Butler's Best Passages 95 
 
 When we speak of things so much above 
 our comprehension, as the employment and 
 happiness of a future state, doubtless it behoves 
 us to speak with all modesty and distrust of 
 ourselves. But the Scripture represents the 
 happiness of that state under the notions of 
 seeing God, seeing Him as He is, knowing as 
 we are known, and seeing face to face. These 
 words are not general or undetermined, but 
 express a particular determinate happiness. And 
 I will be bold to say, that nothing can account 
 for, or come up to, these expressions, but only 
 this, that God Himself will be an object to 
 our faculties, that He Himself will be our 
 happiness ; as distinguished from the enjoy- 
 ments of the present state which seem to arise, 
 not immediately from Him but from the 
 objects He has adapted to give us delight. — 
 Angus, p. 516. 
 
 ON THE LOVE OF GOD 
 
 By the love of God I would understand all 
 those regards, all those affections of mind 
 
g6 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 which are due immediately to Him from such 
 a creature as man, and which rest in Him as 
 their end. As this does not include servile 
 fear, so neither will any other regards, how 
 reasonable soever, which respect anything out 
 of or besides the perfection of the Divine 
 nature come into consideration here. But all 
 fear is not excluded, because His displeasure 
 is itself the natural proper object of fear. 
 Reverence, ambition of His love and approba- 
 tion, delight in the hope or consciousness of it, 
 come Hkewise into this definition of the love 
 of God, because He is the natural object of all 
 those affections or movements of mind, as 
 really as He is the object of the affection 
 which is in the strictest sense called love ; and 
 all of them equally rest in Him as their end. 
 And they may all be understood to be implied 
 in these words of our Saviour, without putting 
 any force upon them ; for he is speaking of 
 the love of God and our neighbours as con- 
 taining the whole of piety and virtue. — Angus, 
 p. 499. 
 
Butler's Best Passages 97 
 
 ON SCRIPTURE 
 
 The general design of Scripture, which con- 
 tains in it this revelation, thus considered as 
 historical, may be said to be, to give us an 
 account of the world, in this one single view 
 as God's world : by which it appears essentially 
 distinguished from all other books, so far as I 
 have found, except such as are copied from it. 
 — Angus, p. 272. 
 
 Those who will thoroughly examine into reve- 
 lation will find it worth remarking, that there 
 are several ways of arguing, which, though just 
 with regard to other writings, are not applic- 
 able to Scripture, at least not to the prophetic 
 parts of it. We cannot argue, for instance, 
 that this cannot be the sense or intent of such 
 a passage of Scripture ; for if it had it would 
 have been expressed more plainly, or have 
 been represented under a more apt figure or 
 hieroglyphic ; yet we may justly argue thus 
 with respect to common books. And the 
 reason of this difference is very evident ; that 
 
 G 
 
98 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 in Scripture we are not competent judges, as 
 we are in common books, how plainly it were 
 to have been expected, what is the true sense 
 should have been expressed, or under how apt 
 an image figured. The only question is, 
 what appearance there is that this is the sense ; 
 and scarce at all how much more determinately 
 or accurately it might have been expressed or 
 figured. — Angus, p. 186. 
 
 If one knew a person to have compiled a 
 book out of memoirs, which he received 
 from another, of vastly superior knowledge 
 in the subject of it, especially if it were a 
 book full of great intricacies and difficulties ; 
 it would in no wise follow that one knew 
 the whole meaning of the book, from know- 
 ing the whole meaning of the compiler : for 
 the original memoirs, i.e. the author of them, 
 might have, and there would be no degree 
 of presumption, in many cases, against sup- 
 posing him to have, some further meaning 
 than the compiler saw. To say then, that 
 
Butler's Best Passages 99 
 
 the Scriptures, and the things contained in 
 them, can have no other or further meaning 
 than those persons thought or had, who first 
 recited or wrote them ; is evidently saying, 
 that those persons were the original, proper, 
 and sole authors of those books. — Angus, 
 p. 268. 
 
 This supposed revelation's obtaining and 
 being received in the world, with all the 
 circumstances and effects of it, considered 
 together as one event, is the most conspicu- 
 ous and important event in the story of 
 mankind : a book of this nature, and thus 
 promulged and recommended to our con- 
 sideration, demands, as if by a voice from 
 heaven, to have its claim most seriously ex- 
 amined into ; and, before such examination, 
 to treat it with any kind of scoffing and 
 ridicule, is an offence against natural piety. 
 —Angus, p. 277. 
 
 Neither obscurity, nor seeming inaccuracy 
 
loo Butler's Best Passages 
 
 of style, nor various readings, nor early dis- 
 putes about the authors of particular parts ; 
 nor any other things of the like kind, though 
 they had been much more considerable in 
 degree than they are, could overthrow the 
 authority of the Scripture ; unless the prophets, 
 apostles, or our Lord had promised that the 
 book containing the Divine revelation should 
 be secure from those things. — Angus, p. i 86. 
 
 ON CONSCIENCE 
 
 God hath given us a moral faculty, by 
 which we distinguish between actions, and 
 approve some as virtuous and of good desert, 
 and disapprove others as vicious and of ill 
 desert. 
 
 Now this moral discernment implies, in the 
 notion of it, a rule of action, and a rule of 
 a very peculiar kind ; for it carries in it 
 authority and a right of direction ; authority 
 in such a sense, as that we cannot depart 
 from it without being self-condemned. And 
 
Butler's Best Passages loi 
 
 that the dictates of this moral faculty, which 
 are by nature a rule to us, are moreover the 
 laws of God, laws in a sense including 
 sanctions, may be thus proved. Conscious- 
 ness of a rule or guide of action, in creatures 
 who are capable of considering it as given 
 them by their Maker, not only raises im- 
 mediately a sense of duty, but also a sense 
 of security in following it, and of danger in 
 deviating from it. A direction of the Author 
 of Nature, given to creatures capable of look- 
 ing upon it as such, is plainly a command from 
 Him ; and a command from Him necessarily 
 includes in it, at least, an implicit promise in 
 case of obedience, or threatening in case of 
 disobedience. — Angus, p. 121. 
 
 That which renders beings capable of moral 
 government, is their having a moral nature, 
 and moral faculties of perception and of action. 
 Brute creatures are impressed and actuated by 
 various instincts and propensions : so also are 
 we. But additional to this, we have a capacity 
 
I02 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 of reflecting upon actions and characters, and 
 making them an object to our thought : and 
 on doing this, we naturally and unavoidably 
 approve some actions, under the peculiar 
 view of their being virtuous and of good 
 desert ; and disapprove others, as vicious and 
 of ill desert. That we have this moral ap- 
 proving and disapproving faculty, is certain 
 from our experiencing it in ourselves, and 
 recognising it in each other. It appears from 
 our exercising it unavoidably in the approba- 
 tion and disapprobation even of feigned char- 
 acters : from the words right and wrongs odious 
 and amiable^ base and worthy, with many others 
 of like signification in all languages, applied to 
 actions and characters : from the many written 
 systems of morals which suppose it : since it 
 cannot be imagined, that all these authors, 
 throughout all these treatises, had absolutely 
 no meaning at all to their words, or a meaning 
 merely chimerical : from our natural sense of 
 gratitude, which implies a distinction between 
 merely being the instrument of good, and 
 
Butler's Best Passages 103 
 
 intending it : from the like distinction, every 
 one makes, between injury and mere harm, 
 which, Hobbes says, is peculiar to mankind ; 
 and between injury and just punishment, a 
 distinction plainly natural, prior to the con- 
 sideration of human laws. It is manifest great 
 part of common language, and of common 
 behaviour over the world, is formed upon 
 supposition of such a moral faculty; whether 
 called conscience, moral reason, moral sense, 
 or Divine reason ; whether considered as a 
 sentiment of the understanding, or as a per- 
 ception of the heart ; or, which seems the 
 truth, as including both. — Angus, p. 323. 
 
 It does not appear that brutes have the 
 least reflex sense of actions as distinguished 
 from events ; or that will and design, which 
 constitute the very nature of actions as such, 
 are at all an object to their perception. But 
 to ours they are ; and they are the object, 
 and the only one, of the approving and dis- 
 approving faculty. Acting, conduct, behaviour, 
 
I04 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 abstracted from all regard to what is, in fact 
 and event, the consequence of it, is itself the 
 natural object of the moral discernment ; as 
 speculative truth and falsehood is of specula- 
 tive reason. Intention of such and such con- 
 sequences, indeed, is always included ; for it 
 is part of the action itself ; but though the 
 intended good or bad consequences do not 
 follow, we have exactly the same sense of the 
 action as if they did. In like manner we 
 think well or ill of characters, abstracted from 
 all consideration of the good or the evil, which 
 persons of such characters have it actually in 
 their power to do. We never, in the moral 
 way, applaud or blame either ourselves or 
 others, for what we enjoy or what we sufFer, 
 or for having impressions made upon us which 
 we consider as altogether out of our power ; 
 but only for what we do, or would have done, 
 had it been in our power : or what we leave 
 undone, which we might have done, or would 
 have left undone, though we could have done 
 \t.— Angus, p. 325. 
 
Butler's Best Passages 105 
 
 But that is not a complete account of man's 
 nature. Somewhat further must be brought 
 in to give us an adequate notion of it ; 
 namely, that one of those principles of action, 
 conscience, or reflection, compared with the 
 rest as they all stand together in the nature 
 of man, plainly bears upon it marks of 
 authority over all the rest, and claims the 
 absolute direction of them all, to allow or 
 forbid their gratification ; a disapprobation 
 of reflection being in itself a principle mani- 
 fesdy superior to a mere propension. And 
 the conclusion is, that to allow no more to 
 this superior principle or part of our nature, 
 than to other parts ; to let it govern and 
 guide only occasionally in common with the 
 rest, as its turn happens to come, from the 
 temper and circumstances one happens to be 
 in ; this is not to act conformably to the 
 constitution of man ; neither can any human 
 creature be said to act conformably to his 
 constitution of nature, unless he allows to 
 that superior principle the absolute authority 
 
io6 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 which is due to it. And this conclusion 
 is abundantly confirmed from hence, that 
 one may determine what course of action 
 the economy of man's nature requires, 
 without so much as knowing in what degree 
 of strength the several principles prevail, or 
 which of them have actually the greatest 
 influence. 
 
 The practical reason of insisting so much 
 upon this natural authority of the principle of 
 reflection or conscience is, that it seems in 
 great measure overlooked by many, who are 
 by no means the worst sort of men. It is 
 thought sufficient to abstain from gross wicked- 
 ness, and to be humane and kind to such as 
 happen to come in their way. Whereas in 
 reality, the very constitution of our nature 
 requires that we bring our whole conduct 
 before this superior faculty ; wait its deter- 
 mination and enforce upon ourselves its 
 authority, and make it the business of our 
 lives, as it is absolutely the whole business of a 
 moral agent, to conform ourselves to it. This 
 
Butler's Best Passages 107 
 
 is the true meaning of that ancient precept, 
 Reverence thyself. — Angus, p. 344. 
 
 There is a principle of reflection in men, by 
 which they distinguish between, approve, and 
 disapprove their own actions. We are plainly 
 constituted such sort of creatures as to reflect 
 upon our own nature. The mind can take a 
 view of what passes within itself, its propen- 
 sions, aversions, passions, affections, as respect- 
 ing such objects, and in such degrees ; and of 
 the several actions consequent thereupon. In 
 this survey it approves of one, disapproves of 
 another, and towards a third is affected in 
 neither of these ways, but is quite indifferent. 
 This principle in man, by which he approves 
 or disapproves his heart, temper, and actions, 
 is conscience ; for this is the strict sense of the 
 word, though sometimes it is used so as to 
 take in more. And that this faculty tends to 
 restrain men from doing mischief to each other, 
 and leads them to do good, is too manifest to 
 need being insisted upon. — Angus, p. 365. 
 
io8 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 There is a superior principle of reflection 
 or conscience in every man, which distinguishes 
 between the internal principles of his heart, 
 as well as his external actions ; which passes 
 judgment upon himself and them ; pronounces 
 determinately some actions to be in themselves 
 just, right, good ; others to be in them- 
 selves evil, wrong, unjust. Which, without 
 being consulted, without being advised with, 
 magisterially exerts itself, and approves or 
 condemns him the doer of them accordingly. 
 And which, if not forcibly stopped, naturally 
 and always of course goes on to anticipate a 
 higher and more effectual sentence, which shall 
 hereafter second and affirm its own. — Angus, 
 P- 378- 
 
 Conscience is the guide of life. — Angus, 
 p. 467. 
 
 Thus that principle, by which we survey, 
 and either approve or disapprove our own 
 heart, temper, and actions, is not only to be 
 
Butler's Best Passages 109 
 
 considered as what is in its turn to have some 
 influence ; which may be said of every passion, 
 of the lowest appetites : but likewise as being 
 superior ; as from its very nature manifestly 
 claiming superiority over all others : insomuch 
 that you cannot form a notion of this faculty, 
 conscience, without taking in judgment, direc- 
 tion, superintendency. This is a constituent 
 part of the idea, that is, of the faculty itself ; 
 and to preside and govern, from the very 
 economy and constitution of man, belongs to 
 it. Had it strength, as it has right ; had it 
 power, as it has manifest authority ; it would 
 absolutely govern the world. — Angus, p, 381. 
 
 That your conscience approves of and 
 attests to such a course of action, is itself alone 
 an obligation. Conscience does not only offer 
 itself to show us the way we should walk in, 
 but it likewise carries its own authority with 
 it, that it is our natural guide ; the guide 
 assigned to us by the Author of our nature. 
 It therefore belongs to our condition of being, 
 
iio Butler's Best Passages 
 
 it is our duty to walk, in that path and follow 
 this guide without looking about to see 
 whether we may not possibly forsake them 
 with impunity. — Angus, p. 386. 
 
 ON REASON 
 
 I express myself with caution, lest 1 should 
 be mistaken to vilify reason, which is indeed 
 the only faculty we have wherewith to judge 
 concerning anything, even revelation itself. — 
 Angus, p. 182. 
 
 Great caution of not vilifying the faculty of 
 reason, which is the candle of the Lord within 
 us.— Angus, p. 303. 
 
 ON CHARACTER 
 
 By character is meant that which, in speak- 
 ing of men, we should express by the words 
 temper, taste, dispositions, practical principles, that 
 whole frame of mind, from whence we act in one 
 manner rather than another. — Angus^ p. 120. 
 
Butler's Best Passages iii 
 
 But then, as Nature has endued us with a 
 power of supplying those deficiencies, by 
 acquired knowledge, experience, and habits ; 
 so likewise we are placed in a condition, in 
 infancy, childhood, and youth, fitted for it ; 
 fitted for our acquiring those qualifications of 
 all sorts, which we stand in need of in mature 
 age. Hence children from their very birth 
 are daily growing acquainted with the objects 
 about them, with the scene in which they are 
 placed, and to have a future part, and learning 
 somewhat or other necessary to the perform- 
 ance of it. The subordinations to which they 
 are accustomed in domestic life, teach them 
 self-government in common behaviour abroad, 
 and prepare them for subjection and obedience 
 to civil authority. What passes before their 
 eyes and daily happens to them, gives them 
 experience, caution against treachery and 
 deceit, together with numberless little rules of 
 action and conduct which we could not live 
 without, and which are learned so insensibly 
 and so perfectly, as to be mistaken perhaps 
 
112 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 for instinct, though they are the effect of 
 long experience and exercise, as much so as 
 language or knowledge in particular business, 
 or the qualifications and behaviour belonging 
 to the several ranks and professions. 
 
 Thus the beginning of our days is adapted 
 to be, and is, a state of education in the theory 
 and practice of mature life. We are much 
 assisted in it by example, instruction, and the 
 care of others, but a great deal is left to our- 
 selves to do. And of this, as part is done 
 easily and of course, so part requires diligence 
 and care, the voluntary foregoing many things 
 which we desire, and setting ourselves to what 
 we should have no inclination to, but for the 
 necessity or expedience of it. For that labour 
 and industry, which the station of so many 
 absolutely requires, they would be greatly 
 unqualified for in maturity, as those in other 
 stations would be for any other sorts of 
 application, if both were not accustomed to 
 them in their youth. And according as 
 persons behave themselves in the general 
 
Butler's Best Passages 113 
 
 education which all go through, and in the 
 particular ones adapted to particular employ- 
 ments, their character is formed and made 
 appear ; they recommend themselves more or 
 less, and are capable of, and placed in, different 
 stations in the society of mankind. — Angus, 
 p. 95. 
 
 A man's character cannot be determined by 
 the love he bears to his neighbour, considered 
 absolutely ; but the proportion which this 
 bears to self-love, whether it be attended to 
 or not, is the chief thing which forms the 
 character, and influences the actions. For, 
 as the form of the body is a composition 
 of various parts ; so likewise our inward 
 structure is not simple or uniform, but a 
 composition of various passions, appetites, 
 affections, together with rationality ; including 
 in this last both the discernment of what is 
 right, and a disposition to regulate ourselves 
 by it. There is greater variety of parts in 
 what we call a character than there are features 
 
 H 
 
114 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 in a face ; and the morality of that is no more 
 determined by one part, than the beauty or 
 deformity of this is by one single feature : 
 each is to be judged of by all the parts or 
 features, not taken singly, but together. — 
 Angus, p. 487. 
 
 There is a third thing, which may seem 
 implied in the present world's being a 
 state of probation ; that it is a theatre of 
 action, for the manifestation of persons' 
 characters with respect to a future one ; not, 
 to be sure, to an all-knowing Being, but to 
 this creation or part of it. This may, perhaps, 
 be only a consequence of our being in a state 
 of probation in the other senses. However, 
 it is not impossible that men's showing and 
 making manifest what is in their heart, what 
 their real character is, may have respect to a 
 future life, in ways and manners which we are 
 not acquainted with ; particularly it may be a 
 means, for the Author of Nature does not 
 appear to do anything without means, of their 
 
Butler's Best Passages 115 
 
 being disposed of suitably to their characters, 
 and of its being known to the creation by 
 way of example, that they are thus disposed 
 of. 
 
 But not to enter upon any conjectural 
 account of this, one may just mention, that 
 the manifestation of persons' characters con- 
 tributes very much in various ways, to the 
 carrying on a great part of that general course 
 of Nature, respecting mankind, which comes 
 under our observation at present. 
 
 I shall only add, that probation, in both these 
 senses, as well as in that treated in the fore- 
 going chapter, is implied in moral government ; 
 since by persons' behaviour under it, their 
 characters cannot but be manifested, and if 
 they behave well, improved. — Angus, p. no. 
 
 ON HABIT 
 
 As habits belonging to the body are pro- 
 duced by external acts, so habits of the mind 
 are produced by the exertion of inward 
 
ii6 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 practical principles, i.e. by carrying them into 
 act, or acting upon them ; the principles of 
 obedience, or veracity, justice, and charity. 
 
 Nor can those habits be formed by any 
 external course of action, otherwise than as it 
 proceeds from these principles ; because it is 
 only these inward principles exerted, which 
 are strictly acts of obedience, of veracity, of 
 justice, and of charity. So likewise habits of 
 attention, industry, self-government, are in 
 the same manner acquired by exercise ; and 
 habits of envy and revenge by indulgence, 
 whether in outward act, or in thought and 
 intention, i.e. inward act ; for such intention 
 is an act. Resolutions also to do well are 
 properly acts. And endeavouring to enforce 
 upon our minds a practical sense of virtue, 
 or to beget in others that practical sense of it 
 which a man really has himself, is a virtuous 
 act. All these, therefore, may and will con- 
 tribute towards forming good habits. But 
 going over the theory of virtue in one's 
 thoughts, talking well, and drawing fine 
 
Butler's Best Passages 117 
 
 pictures of it ; this is so far from necessarily 
 or certainly conducing to form a habit of it in 
 him who thus employs himself, that it may 
 harden the mind in a contrary course, and 
 render it gradually more insensible, i.e. form 
 a habit of insensibility to all moral considera- 
 tions. For, from our very faculty of habits, 
 passive impressions, by being repeated, grow 
 weaker. — Angus, p. 90. 
 
 Thus, by accustoming ourselves to any 
 course of action, we get an aptness to go on, a 
 facility, readiness, and often pleasure, in it. 
 The inclinations which rendered us averse to it 
 grow weaker ; the difTiculties in it, not only 
 the imaginary but the real ones, lessen ; the 
 reasons for it offer themselves of course to our 
 thoughts upon all occasions ; and the least 
 glimpse of them is sufficient to make us go on 
 in a course of action to which we have been 
 accustomed. And practical principles appear 
 to grow stronger, absolutely in themselves, by 
 exercise, as well as relatively with regard to 
 
ii8 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 contrary principles, which, by being accustomed 
 to submit, do so habitually and of course. 
 And thus a new character, in several respects, 
 may be formed ; and many habitudes of life, 
 not given by Nature, but which Nature directs 
 us to acquire. — Angus, p. 93. 
 
 ON PROBATION 
 
 The evidence of religion not appearing 
 obvious, may constitute one particular part of 
 some men's trial in the religious sense : as it 
 gives scope for a virtuous exercise, or vicious 
 neglect, of their understanding, in examining 
 or not examining into that evidence. There 
 seems no possible reason to be given, why we 
 may not be in a state of moral probation, with 
 regard to the exercise of our understanding 
 upon the subject of religion, as we are with 
 regard to our behaviour in common affairs. 
 The former is as much a thing within our 
 power and choice as the latter. And I suppose 
 it is to be laid down for certain, that the same 
 
Butler's Best Passages 119 
 
 character, the same inward principle, which, 
 after a man is convinced of the truth of 
 religion, renders him obedient to the precepts 
 of it, would, were he not thus convinced, set 
 him about an examination of it, upon its 
 system and evidence being offered to his 
 thoughts ; and that in the latter state his 
 examination would be with an impartiality, 
 seriousness, and solicitude, proportionable to 
 what his obedience is in the former. And as 
 inattention, negligence, want of all serious 
 concern, about a matter of such a nature, and 
 such importance, when offered to men's con- 
 sideration, is, before a distinct conviction of 
 its truth, as real immoral depravity and dis- 
 soluteness as neglect of religious practice after 
 such conviction ; so active solicitude about it, 
 and fair impartial consideration of its evidence 
 before such conviction, is as really an exercise of 
 a morally right temper, as is religious practice 
 after. Thus, that religion is not intuitively 
 true, but a matter of deduction and inference ; 
 that a conviction of its truth is not forced 
 
I20 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 upon every one, but left to be, by some, 
 collected with heedful attention to premises ; 
 this as much constitutes religious probation, as 
 much affords sphere, scope, opportunity, for 
 right and wrong behaviour, as anything what- 
 ever does. And their manner of treating this 
 subject, when laid before them, shows what is 
 in their heart, and is an exertion of it. — Angus, 
 P- 235- 
 
 Especially men are bound to keep at the 
 greatest distance from all dissolute profane- 
 ness ; for this the very nature of the case for- 
 bids ; and to treat with the highest reverence a 
 matter, upon which their own whole interest and 
 being, and the fate of Nature, depend. This 
 behaviour, and an active endeavour to maintain 
 within themselves this temper, is the business, 
 the duty, and the wisdom of those persons, 
 who complain of the doubtfulness of religion : 
 is what they are under the most proper obliga- 
 tions to. And such behaviour is an exertion 
 of, and has a tendency to improve in them, 
 
Butler's Best Passages 121 
 
 that character, which the practice of all the 
 several duties of religion, from a full conviction 
 of its truth, is an exertion of, and has a tendency 
 to improve in others ; others, I say, to whom 
 God has afforded such conviction. Nay, con- 
 sidering the infinite importance of religion, 
 revealed as well as natural, I think it may be 
 said in general, that whoever will weigh the 
 matter thoroughly may see, that there is not 
 near so much difference as is commonly 
 imagined between what ought in reason to be 
 the rule of life, to those persons who are 
 fully convinced of its truth, and to those who 
 have only a serious doubting apprehension that 
 it may be true. Their hopes, and fears, and 
 obligations, will be in various degrees : but as 
 the subject-matter of their hopes and fears is 
 the same, so the subject-matter of their obliga- 
 tions, what they are bound to do and to refrain 
 from, is not so very unlike. — Angus, p. 237. 
 
 The difficulties in which the evidence of 
 religion is involved, which some complain of, 
 
122 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 is no more a just ground of complaint than the 
 external circumstances of temptation, which 
 others are placed in ; or than difficulties in 
 the practice of it, after a full conviction of its 
 truth. Temptations render our state a more 
 improving state of discipline than it would be 
 otherwise : as they give occasion for a more 
 attentive exercise of the virtuous principle 
 which confirms and strengthens it more than 
 an easier or less attentive exercise of it could. 
 Now, speculative difficulties are, in this respect, 
 of the very same nature with these external 
 temptations. For the evidence of religion not 
 appearing obvious, is to some persons a temp- 
 tation to reject it without any consideration at 
 all ; and therefore requires such an attentive 
 exercise of the virtuous principle, seriously to 
 consider that evidence, as there would be no 
 occasion for, but for such temptation. And 
 the supposed doubtfulness of its evidence, 
 after it has been in some sort considered, 
 affords opportunity to an unfair mind of 
 explaining away and deceitfully hiding from 
 
Butler's Best Passages 123 
 
 itself that evidence which it might see ; and 
 also for men's encouraging themselves in vice, 
 from hopes of impunity, though they do 
 clearly see thus much at least, that these hopes 
 are uncertain : in like manner as the common 
 temptation to many instances of folly, which 
 end in temporal infamy and ruin, is the 
 ground for hope of not being detected and 
 of escaping with impunity ; i.e. the doubtful- 
 ness of the proof beforehand, that such foolish 
 behaviour will thus end in infamy and ruin. 
 On the contrary, supposed doubtfulness in the 
 evidence of religion calls for a more careful 
 and attentive exercise of the virtuous principle, 
 in fairly yielding themselves up to the proper 
 influence of any real evidence, though doubtful : 
 and in practising conscientiously all virtue, 
 though under some uncertainty, whether the 
 government in the universe may not possibly 
 be such, as that vice may escape with impunity. 
 
 And in general, temptation, meaning by 
 this word the lesser allurements to wrong, and 
 difficulties in the discharge of our duty, as well 
 
124 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 as the greater ones ; temptation, I say, as such, 
 and of every kind and degree, as it calls forth 
 some virtuous efforts, additional to what would 
 otherwise have been wanting, cannot but be 
 an additional discipline and improvement of 
 virtue, as well as probation of it in the other 
 senses of that word. 
 
 So that the very same account is to be 
 given, why the evidence of religion should be 
 left in such a manner as to require in some an 
 attentive, solicitous, perhaps painful exercise 
 of their understanding about it ; as why others 
 should be placed in such circumstances as that 
 the practice of its common duties, after a full 
 conviction of the truth of it, should require 
 attention, solicitude, and pains ; or why appear- 
 ing doubtfulness should be permitted to afford 
 matter of temptation to some ; as why ex- 
 ternal difficulties and allurements should be 
 permitted to afford matter of temptation to 
 others. The same account also is to be given, 
 why some should be exercised with tempta- 
 tions of both these kinds ; as why others 
 
Butler's Best Passages 125 
 
 should be exercised with the latter in such very 
 high degrees as some have been, particularly 
 as the primitive Christians were. 
 
 Nor does there appear any absurdity in 
 supposing, that the speculative difficulties in 
 which the evidence of religion is involved, may 
 make even the principal part of some persons' 
 trial. For as the chief temptations of the 
 generality of the world are the ordinary 
 motives to injustice or unrestrained pleasure ; 
 or to live in the neglect of religion from that 
 frame of mind which renders many persons 
 almost without feeling as to anything distant, 
 or which is not the object of their senses : so 
 there are other persons without this shallow- 
 ness of temper, persons of a deeper sense as to 
 what is invisible and future ; who not only 
 see, but have a general practical feeling, that 
 what is to come will be present, and that 
 things are not less real for their not being the 
 objects of sense ; and who, from their natural 
 constitution of body and of temper, and 
 from their external condition, may have small 
 
126 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 temptations to behave ill, small difficulty in 
 behaving well, in the common course of life. 
 Now when these latter persons have a distinct 
 full conviction of the truth of religion, with- 
 out any possible doubts or difficulties, the 
 practice of it is to them unavoidable, unless 
 they will do a constant violence to their own 
 minds ; and religion is scarce any more a 
 discipline to them than it is to creatures in 
 a state of perfection. Yet these persons may 
 possibly stand in need of moral discipHne and 
 exercise in a higher degree, than they would 
 have by such an easy practice of religion. Or 
 it may be requisite, for reasons unknown to 
 us, that they should give some further mani- 
 festation what is their moral character to the 
 creation of God, than such a practice of it 
 would be. Thus in the great variety of 
 religious situations in which men are placed, 
 what constitutes, what chiefly and peculiarly 
 constitutes, the probation, in all senses, of some 
 persons, may be the difficulties in which the 
 evidence of religion is involved ; and their 
 
Butler's Best Passages 127 
 
 principal and distinguished trial may be, how 
 they will behave under and with respect to 
 these difficulties. Circumstances in men's 
 situation in their temporal capacity, analogous 
 in good measure to this respecting religion, are 
 to be observed. We find some persons are 
 placed in such a situation in the world, as that 
 their chief difficulty with regard to conduct, is 
 not the doing what is prudent when it is 
 known ; for this, in numberless cases, is as 
 easy as the contrary : but to some the principal 
 exercise is, recollection and being upon their 
 guard against deceits, the deceits suppose of 
 those about them ; against false appearances 
 of reason and prudence. To persons in some 
 situations, the principal exercise with respect to 
 conduct is, attention in order to inform them- 
 selves what is proper, what is really the 
 reasonable and prudent part to act. — Angus, 
 P- 239- 
 
 Religion presupposes this as much, and in 
 the same sense, as speaking to a man pre- 
 
128 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 supposes he understands the language in 
 which you speak ; or a warning a man of any 
 danger presupposes that he hath such a regard 
 to himself, as that he will endeavour to avoid 
 it. And therefore, the question is not at all. 
 Whether the evidence of religion be satis- 
 factory ; but, whether it be, in reason, sufficient 
 to prove and discipline that virtue, which it 
 presupposes. Now the evidence of it is fully 
 sufficient for all those purposes of probation ; 
 how far soever it is from being satisfactory as 
 to the purposes of curiosity, or any other : 
 and indeed it answers the purposes of the 
 former in several respects, which it would not 
 do if it were as overbearing as is required. 
 One might add further, that whether the 
 motives or the evidence for any course of 
 action be satisfactory, meaning here, by that 
 word, what satisfies a man, that such a course 
 of action will in event be for his good ; this 
 need never be, and I think, strictly speaking, 
 never is, the practical question in common 
 matters. But the practical question in all cases 
 
Butler's Best Passages 129 
 
 is, whether the evidence for a course of action 
 be such as, taking in all circumstances, makes 
 the faculty within us, which is the guide and 
 judge of conduct, determine that course of 
 action to be prudent. Indeed, satisfaction 
 that it will be for our interest or happiness, 
 abundantly determines an action to be prudent : 
 but evidence almost infinitely lower than this 
 determines actions to be so too, even in the 
 conduct of every day. — Angus, p. 296. 
 
 It is indeed true, God willeth that all men 
 should be saved : yet, from the unalterable con- 
 stitution of His government, the salvation of 
 every man cannot but depend upon his be- 
 haviour, and therefore cannot but depend upon 
 himself ; and is necessarily his own concern, in 
 a sense in which it cannot be another's. All 
 this the Scripture declares, in a manner the most 
 forcible and alarming : Can a man be -profitable 
 unto God, as he that is wise may he ■profitable 
 unto himself? Is it any pleasure to the Almighty, 
 that thou art righteous ? or is it gain to Him, that 
 I 
 
130 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 ihou makest thy way perfect ? If thou be wise, 
 thou shah be wise for thyself; but if thou scornest, 
 thou alone shall bear it. He that heareth, let him 
 hear ; and he that forbeareth, let him forbear. 
 And again, He that hath ears to hear, let him 
 hear ; but if any man be ignorant, i.e. wilfully, 
 let him be ignorant. To the same purpose are 
 those awful words of the angel, in the person 
 of Him to whom all judgment is committed : He 
 that is unjust, let him be unjust still ; and he 
 which is filthy, let him be filthy still ; and he that 
 is righteous, let him be righteous still ; and he that 
 is holy, let him be holy still. And, behold, I 
 come quickly ; and My reward is with Me, to give 
 every man according as his work shall be. The 
 righteous government of the world must be 
 carried on ; and, of necessity, men shall remain 
 the subjects of it, by being examples of its 
 mercy or of its justice. Life and death are set 
 before them, and whether they like shall be given 
 unto them. They are to make their choice, and 
 abide by it : but whichsoever their choice be, 
 the gospel is equally a witness to them ; and 
 
Butler's Best Passages 131 
 
 the purposes of Providence are answered 
 by this witness of the gospel. — -Gladstone, ii. 
 p. 283. 
 
 ON THE PASSIONS 
 
 Now particular propensions, from their very- 
 nature, must be felt, the objects of them being 
 present ; though they cannot be gratified at 
 all, or not w^ith the allowance of the moral 
 principle. But if they can be gratified without 
 its allowance, or by contradicting it, then 
 they must be conceived to have some tendency 
 in how low a degree soever, yet some tendency, 
 to induce persons to such forbidden gratifica- 
 tion. This tendency, in some one particular 
 propension, may be increased by the greater 
 frequency of occasions naturally exciting it, 
 than of occasions exciting others. The least 
 voluntary indulgence in forbidden circum- 
 stances, though but in thought, will increase 
 this wrong tendency ; and may increase it 
 further, till, peculiar conjunctures perhaps 
 conspiring, it becomes effect ; and danger ot 
 deviating from right ends in actual deviation 
 
132 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 from it ; a danger necessarily arising from the 
 very nature of propension ; and which there- 
 fore could not have been prevented, though it 
 might have been escaped, or got innocently 
 through. The case would be, as if we were 
 to suppose a straight path marked out for a 
 person, in which such a degree of attention 
 would keep him steady ; but if he would not 
 attend in this degree, any one of a thousand 
 objects, catching his eye, might lead him out 
 of it. Now it is impossible to say how much 
 even the first full overt act of irregularity 
 might disorder the inward constitution, unsettle 
 the adjustments, and alter the proportions 
 which formed it, and in which the uprightness 
 of its make consisted; but repetition of ir- 
 regularities would produce habits. And 
 thus the constitution would be spoiled ; and 
 creatures made upright, become corrupt and 
 depraved in their settled character, proportion- 
 ably to their repeated irregularities in occasional 
 acts. But, on the contrary, these creatures 
 might have improved and raised themselves to 
 
Butler's Best Passages 1-53 
 
 a higher and more secure state of virtue, by the 
 contrary behaviour ; by steadily following the 
 moral principle, supposed to be one part of 
 their nature ; and thus withstanding that 
 unavoidable danger of defection, which neces- 
 sarily arose from propension, the other part of 
 it. For, by thus preserving their integrity for 
 some time, their danger would lessen ; since 
 propensions, by being inured to submit, would 
 do it more easily and of course ; and their 
 security against this lessening danger would 
 increase ; since the moral principle would gain 
 additional strength by exercise ; both which 
 things are implied in the notion of virtuous 
 habits. Thus, then, vicious indulgence is not 
 only criminal in itself, but also depraves the 
 inward constitution or character. And virtuous 
 self-government is not only right in itself, but 
 also improves the inward constitution or 
 character ; and may improve it to such a 
 degree, that though we should suppose it 
 impossible for particular affections to be abso- 
 lutely coincident with the moral principle ; and 
 
134 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 consequently should allow, that such creatures 
 as have been above supposed, would for ever 
 remain defectible ; yet their danger of actually 
 deviating from right may be almost infinitely 
 lessened, and they fully fortified against what 
 remains of it ; if that may be called danger, 
 against which there is an adequate effectual 
 security. — Angus, p. lOO. 
 
 However, as when we say, men are misled 
 by external circumstances of temptation, it 
 cannot but be understood that there is some- 
 what within themselves to render those cir- 
 cumstances temptations, or to render them 
 susceptible of impressions from them ; so 
 when we say they are misled by passions, it is 
 always supposed that there are occasions, 
 circumstances, and objects, exciting these 
 passions, and affording means for gratifying 
 them. And, therefore, temptations from within 
 and from without, coincide and mutually imply 
 each other. Now the several external objects 
 of the appetites, passions, and affections, being 
 
Butler's Best Passages 135 
 
 present to the senses, or offering themselves to 
 the mind, and so exciting emotions suitable to 
 their nature ; not only in cases where they can 
 be gratified consistently with innocence and 
 prudence, but also in cases where they cannot, 
 and yet can be gratified imprudently and 
 viciously ; this as really puts them in danger of 
 voluntarily foregoing their present interest or 
 good, as their future. — Angus, p. 78- 
 
 Every natural appetite, passion, and affection, 
 may be gratified in particular instances, without 
 being subservient to the particular chief end 
 for which these several principles were respec- 
 tively implanted in our nature. And, if neither 
 this end, nor any other moral obligation be 
 contradicted, such gratification is innocent. — 
 Angus, p. 448. 
 
 ON MEANS AND ENDS 
 
 As in the scheme of the natural world, no 
 ends appear to be accomplished without means ; 
 
136 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 so we find that means very undesirable, often 
 conduce to bring about ends in such a measure 
 desirable, as greatly to overbalance the dis- 
 agreeableness of the means. And in cases 
 where such means are conducive to such ends, 
 it is not reason, but experience, which shows 
 us, that they are thus conducive. Experience 
 also shows many means to be conducive and 
 necessary to accomplish ends, which means 
 before experience, we should have thought 
 would have had even a contrary tendency. — 
 Angus, p. 135. 
 
 According to our manner of conception 
 God makes use of variety of means, what we 
 often think tedious ones, in the natural course 
 of providence, for the accomplishment of all 
 His ends. Indeed, it is certain there is some- 
 what in this matter quite beyond our compre- 
 hension ; but the mystery is as great in Nature 
 as in Christianity. We know what we our- 
 selves aim at, as final ends ; and what courses 
 we take, merely as means conducing to those 
 
Butler's Best Passages 137 
 
 ends. But we are greatly ignorant how far 
 things are considered by the Author of Nature 
 under the single notion of means and ends ; so 
 as that it may be said this is merely an end 
 and that merely means, in His regard. And 
 whether there be not some peculiar absurdity 
 in our very manner of conception concerning 
 this matter, somewhat contradictory arising 
 from our extremely imperfect view of things, 
 it is impossible to say. However, this much 
 is manifest, that the whole natural world and 
 government of it is a scheme or system ; not 
 a fixed, but a progressive one : a scheme in 
 which the operation of various means takes up 
 a great length of time before the ends they 
 tend to can be attained. — Angus, p. 203. 
 
 The whole end for which God made, and 
 thus governs the world, may be utterly beyond 
 the reach of our faculties ; there may be some- 
 what in it as impossible for us to have any 
 conception of, as for a blind man to have a 
 conception of colours. — Angus, p. 39. 
 
138 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 Indeed we are so far from being able to 
 judge of this, that we are not judges what may 
 be the necessary means of raising and con- 
 ducting one person to the highest perfection 
 and happiness of his nature. Nay, even in 
 the little affairs of the present life, we find 
 men of different educations and ranks are not 
 competent judges of the conduct of each 
 other. Our whole nature leads us to ascribe 
 all moral perfection to God, and to deny all 
 imperfection of Him. And this will for ever 
 be a practical proof of His moral character, 
 to such as v/ill consider what a practical proof 
 is ; because it is the voice of God speaking in 
 us. And from hence we conclude, that virtue 
 must be the happiness, and vice the misery, 
 of every creature ; and that regularity and 
 order and right cannot but prevail finally in a 
 universe under His government. But we are 
 in no sort judges, what are the necessary 
 means of accomplishing this end. — Angus, 
 p. 10. 
 
Butler's Best Passages 139 
 
 ON PROBABILITY 
 
 Probable evidence, in its very nature, affords 
 but an imperfect kind of information, and is 
 to be considered as relative only to beings 
 of limited capacities. For nothing which is 
 the possible object of knowledge, whether 
 past, present, or future, can be probable to 
 an infinite Intelligence, since it cannot but 
 be discerned absolutely as it is in itself, 
 certainly true, or certainly false. But to us, 
 probability is the very guide of life. 
 
 From these things it follows, that in 
 questions of difficulty, or such as are thought 
 so, where more satisfactory evidence cannot be 
 had, or is not seen ; if the result of examina- 
 tion be, that there appears upon the whole 
 any the lowest presumption on one side, and 
 none on the other, or a greater presumption 
 on one side, though in the lowest degree 
 greater, this determines the question, even in 
 matters of speculation ; and in matters of 
 practice, will lay us under an 'absolute and 
 
140 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 formal obligation, in point of prudence and 
 of interest, to act upon that presumption or 
 low probability, though it be so low as to leave 
 the mind in very great doubt which is the 
 truth. For surely a man is as really bound in 
 prudence to do what upon the whole appears, 
 according to the best of his judgment, to be 
 for his happiness, as what he certainly knows 
 to be so. Nay, further, in questions of great 
 consequence, a reasonable man will think it 
 concerns him to remark lower probabilities 
 and presumptions than these ; such as amount 
 to no more than showing one side of a 
 question to be as supposable and credible as 
 the other ; nay, such as but amount to much 
 less even than this. For numberless instances 
 might be mentioned respecting the common 
 pursuits of life, where a man would be thought, 
 in a literal sense, distracted who would not act, 
 and with great application too, not only upon 
 an even chance, but upon much less, and 
 where the probabiHty or chance was greatly 
 against his succeeding. — Angus, p. 5. 
 
Butler's Best Passages 141 
 
 ON KNOWLEDGE 
 
 Knowledge is not our proper happiness. 
 Whoever will in the least attend to the thing 
 will see that it is the gaining, not the having 
 of it, which is the entertainment of the mind ; 
 indeed, if the proper happiness of man con- 
 sisted in knowledge, considered as a possession 
 or treasure, men who are possessed of the 
 largest share would have a very ill time of it, 
 as they would be infinitely more sensible than 
 others of their poverty in this respect; thus 
 he who increases knowledge would eminently 
 increase sorrow. Men of deep research and 
 curious inquiry should just be put in mind 
 not to mistake what they are doing. If their 
 discoveries serve the cause of virtue and 
 religion in the way of proof, motive to 
 practice, or assistance in it, or if they tend to 
 render life less unhappy, and promote its 
 satisfactions, then they are most usefully 
 employed ; but bringing things to light, alone 
 and of itself, is of no manner of use any 
 
142 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 otherwise than as an entertainment or diver- 
 sion. Neither is this at all amiss if it does 
 not take up the time which should be employed 
 in better work ; but it is evident that there is 
 another mark set up for us to aim at, another 
 end appointed us to direct our lives to ; an 
 end which the most knowing may fail of and 
 the most ignorant arrive at. " The secret 
 things belong unto the Lord our God : but 
 those things which are revealed belong unto us 
 and to our children for ever, that we may do all 
 the words of this law"; which reflection of 
 Moses, put in general terms, is, that the only 
 knowledge which is of any avail to us is that 
 which teaches us our duty, or assists us in the 
 discharge of it. The economy of the universe, 
 the course of Nature, Almighty power exerted 
 in the creation and government of the world, 
 is out of our reach. What would be the 
 consequence if we could really get an insight 
 into these things is very uncertain ; whether it 
 would assist us in, or divert us from, what we 
 have to do in this present state. If then there 
 
Butler's Best Passages 143 
 
 be a sphere of knowledge, of contemplation 
 and employment, level to our capacities, and 
 of the utmost importance to us, we ought 
 surely to apply ourselves with all diligence to 
 this our proper business, and esteem every- 
 thing else nothing, nothing as to us in com- 
 parison of it. Thus Job, discoursing of 
 natural knowledge, how much it is above us, 
 and of wisdom in general, says, " God under- 
 standeth the way thereof, and He knoweth 
 the place thereof. And unto man He said, 
 Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom ; 
 and to depart from evil is understanding." 
 Other orders of creatures may perhaps be let 
 into the secret counsels of heaven, and have 
 the designs and methods of Providence, in the 
 creation and government of the world, com- 
 municated to them ; but this does not belong 
 to our rank or condition. "The fear of the 
 Lord, and to depart from evil," is the only 
 wisdom which man should aspire after as his 
 work and business. The same is said, and 
 with the same connection and context, in the 
 
144 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 conclusion of the book of Ecclesiastes. Our 
 ignorance, and the little we can know of other 
 things, affords a reason why we should not 
 perplex ourselves about them ; but no way 
 invalidates that which is the " conclusion of 
 the whole matter : Fear God and keep His 
 commandments : for this is the whole duty of 
 man." So that Socrates was not the first who 
 endeavoured to draw men off from labouring 
 after, and laying stress upon other knowledge, 
 in comparison of that which related to morals. 
 Our province is virtue and religion, life and 
 manners ; the science of improving the temper, 
 and making the heart better. This is the 
 field assigned us to cultivate : how much it 
 has lain neglected is indeed astonishing. 
 Virtue is demonstrably the happiness of man ; 
 it consists in good actions proceeding from 
 a good principle, temper, or heart. Overt 
 acts are entirely in our power. What remains 
 is, that we learn to keep our heart, to govern 
 and regulate our passions, mind, affections, 
 that so we may be free from the impotencies 
 
Butler's Best Passages 145 
 
 of fear, envy, malice, covetousness, ambition ; 
 that we may be clear of these, considered as vices 
 seated in the heart — considered as constituting 
 a general wrong temper, from which general 
 wrong frame of mind all the mistaken pursuits, 
 and far the greatest part of the unhappiness of 
 life, proceed. He who should find out one 
 rule to assist us in this work would deserve 
 infinitely better of mankind than all the 
 improvers of other knowledge put together. — 
 Angus ^ p. 525. 
 
 ON OUR IGNORANCE 
 
 Creation is absolutely and entirely out of 
 our depth, and beyond the extent of our 
 utmost reach. And yet it is as certain that 
 God made the world, as it is certain that effects 
 must have a cause. It is indeed in general no 
 more than effects, that the most knowing are 
 acquainted with : for as to causes, they are as 
 entirely in the dark as the most ignorant. 
 What are the laws by which matter acts upon 
 
146 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 matter, but certain effects ; which some, having 
 observed to be frequently repeated, have re- 
 duced to general rules ? The real nature and 
 essence of beings likewise is what we are 
 altogether ignorant of. All these things are 
 so entirely out of our reach, that we have not 
 the least glimpse of them. And we know 
 little more of ourselves, than we do of the 
 world about us : how we were made, how our 
 being is continued and preserved, what the 
 faculties of our minds are, and upon what the 
 power of exercising them depends. " I am 
 fearfully and wonderfully made : marvellous 
 are Thy works, and that my soul knoweth 
 right well." Our own nature, and the objects 
 we are surrounded with, serve to raise our 
 curiosity ; but we are quite out of a condition 
 of satisfying it. Every secret which is dis- 
 closed, every discovery which is made, every 
 new effect which is brought to view, serves to 
 convince us of numberless more which remain 
 concealed, and which we had before no sus- 
 picion of. And what if we were acquainted 
 
Butler's Best Passages 147 
 
 with the whole creation, in the same way and 
 as thoroughly as we are with any single object 
 in it ? What would all this natural knowledge 
 amount to ? It must be a low curiosity in- 
 deed which such superficial knowledge could 
 satisfy. On the contrary, would it not serve 
 to convince us of our ignorance still ; and to 
 raise our desire of knowing the nature of 
 things themselves, the author, the cause, and 
 the end of them ? — Angus, p. 518. 
 
 I am afraid we think too highly of our- 
 selves ; of our rank in the creation, and of 
 what is due to us. What sphere of action, 
 what business is assigned to man, that he has 
 not capacities and knowledge fully equal to 
 It is manifest he has reason, and knowledge, and 
 faculties superior to the business of the present 
 world : faculties which appear superfluous, if 
 we do not take in the respect which they have 
 to somewhat further, and beyond it. If to 
 acquire knowledge were our proper end, we 
 should indeed be but poorly provided : but if 
 
148 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 somewhat else be our business and duty, we 
 may, notwithstanding our ignorance, be well 
 enough furnished for it ; and the observation 
 of our ignorance may be of assistance to us in 
 the discharge oi it. —Angus, p. 522. 
 
 The conclusion is, that in all lowliness of 
 mind we set lightly by ourselves ; that we 
 form our temper to an implicit submission to 
 the Divine Majesty ; beget within ourselves an 
 absolute resignation to all the methods of His 
 providence, in His dealings with the children 
 of men : that, in the deepest humility of our 
 souls, we prostrate ourselves before Him, and 
 join in that celestial song : " Great and mar- 
 vellous are Thy works, Lord God Almighty ; 
 just and true are Thy ways. Thou king of 
 saints ! Who shall not fear Thee, O Lord, 
 and glorify Thy name ?" — Angus, p. 527. 
 
 ON RICHES 
 
 The constitution of things being such, that 
 the labour of one man, or the united labour of 
 
Butler's Best Passages 149 
 
 several, is sufficient to procure more necessaries 
 than he or they stand in need of, which it may 
 be supposed was, in some degree, the case, even 
 in the first ages ; this immediately gave room 
 for riches to arise in the world, and for men's 
 acquiring them by honest means ; by diligence, 
 frugality, and prudent management. Thus 
 some would very soon acquire greater plenty 
 of necessaries than they had occasion for ; and 
 others by contrary means, or by cross accidents, 
 would be in want of them. And he who 
 should supply their wants would have the 
 property in a proportionable labour of their 
 hands, which he would scarce fail to make use 
 of instead of his own, or perhaps together with 
 them, to provide future necessaries in greater 
 plenty. Riches then were first bestowed upon 
 the world, as they are still continued in it, by 
 the blessing of God upon the industry of men, 
 in the use of their understanding and strength. 
 Riches themselves have always this source, 
 though the possession of them is conveyed to 
 particular persons by different channels. Yet 
 
150 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 still, the hand of the diligent maketh rich, and, 
 other circumstances being equal, in proportion 
 to its diligence. 
 
 But to return to the first rich man, whom 
 we left in possession of dependants, and plenty 
 of necessaries for himself and them. A family 
 would not be long in this state, before con- 
 veniences, somewhat ornamental and for enter- 
 tainment, would be wanted, looked for, and 
 found out. And, by degrees, these secondary 
 wants, and inventions for the supply of them, 
 the fruits of leisure and ease, came to employ 
 much of men's time and labour. Hence a new 
 species of riches came into the world, consisting 
 of things which it might have done well enough 
 without, yet thought desirable, as affording 
 pleasure to the imagination or the senses. 
 And these went on increasing till, at length, 
 the superfluities of life took in a vastly larger 
 compass of things than the necessaries of it. 
 Thus luxury made its inroad, and all the 
 numerous train of evils its attendants ; of 
 which poverty, as bad an one as we may 
 
Butler's Best Passages 151 
 
 account it, is far from being the worst. 
 Indeed the hands of the generality must be 
 employed ; and a very few of them would now 
 be sufficient to provide the world with neces- 
 saries ; and therefore the rest of them must 
 be employed about what may be called super- 
 fluities ; which could not be, if these super- 
 fluities were not made use of. Yet the desire 
 of such things insensibly becomes immoderate, 
 and the use of them, also of course, degenerates 
 into luxury ; which, in every age, has been the 
 dissipation of riches, and, in every sense, the 
 ruin of those who were possessed of them : 
 and therefore cannot be too much guarded 
 against by all opulent cities. And as men 
 sink into luxury as much from fashion as direct 
 inclination, the richer sort together may easily 
 restrain this vice, in almost what degree they 
 please : and a few of the chief of them may 
 contribute a great deal towards the restraining 
 it. — Gladstone, ii. p. 296. 
 
 Blessed are they who employ their riches in 
 
152 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 promoting so excellent a design. The tem- 
 poral advantages of them are far from coming 
 up, in enjoyment, to what they promise at a 
 distance. But the distinguished privilege, the 
 prerogative of riches, is, that they increase our 
 power of doing good. This is their proper 
 use. In proportion as men make this use of 
 them, they imitate Almighty God ; and co- 
 operate together with Him in promoting the 
 happiness of the world ; and may expect the 
 most favourable judgment which their case will 
 admit of, at the last day, upon the general, 
 repeated maxim of the gospel, that we shall 
 then be treated ourselves as we now treat 
 others. They have, moreover, the prayers of 
 all good men, those of them particularly whom 
 they have befriended ; and by such exercise of 
 charity, they improve within themselves the 
 temper of it, which is the very temper of 
 heaven. Consider next the peculiar force with 
 which this branch of charity, almsgiving, is 
 recommended to us in these words : He that 
 hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the Lord i 
 
Butler's Best Passages 153 
 
 and in these of our Saviour, Verily I say unto 
 you, inasmuch as ye have done it, relieved the 
 sick and needy, unto one of the least of these My 
 brethren, ye have done it unto Me. Beware you 
 do not explain away these passages of Scripture 
 under the notion that they have been made to 
 serve superstitious purposes ; but ponder them 
 fairly in your heart, and you will feel them to 
 be of irresistible weight. — Gladstone, ii. p. 394. 
 
 ON CHARITY 
 
 The temper and behaviour of charity is 
 explained at large in that known passage of 
 St. Paul : Charity sufFereth long, and is kind ; 
 charity envieth not, doth not behave itself un- 
 seemly, seeketh not her own, thinketh no evil, 
 beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth 
 all things. As to the meaning of the expressions, 
 seeketh not her own, thinketh no evil, believeth 
 all things — however those expressions may be 
 explained away, this meekness, and in some 
 degree easiness of temper, readiness to forego 
 
154 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 our right for the sake of peace as well as in 
 the way of compassion, freedom from mis- 
 trust, and disposition to believe well of our 
 neighbour, this general temper, I say, accom- 
 panies and is plainly the effect of love and 
 good-will. And, though such is the world 
 in which we live, that experience and know- 
 ledge of it not only may, but must, beget 
 in us greater regard to ourselves, and doubt- 
 fulness of the characters of others, than is 
 natural to mankind ; yet these ought not to 
 be carried further than the nature and course 
 of things make necessary. It is still true, 
 even in the present state of things, bad as it 
 is, that a real good man had rather be de- 
 ceived, than be suspicious ; had rather forego 
 his known right, than run the venture of 
 doing even a hard thing. This is the general 
 temper of that charity, of which the apostle 
 asserts, that if he had it not, giving his body 
 to be burned would avail him nothing ; and 
 which, he says, shall never fail. 
 
 The happy influence of this temper extends 
 
Butler's Best Passages 155 
 
 to every different relation and circumstance in 
 human life. It plainly renders a man better, 
 more to be desired, as to all the respects and 
 relations we can stand in to each other. The 
 benevolent man is disposed to make use of all 
 external advantages in such a manner as shall 
 contribute to the good of others, as well as 
 to his own satisfaction. His own satisfaction 
 consists in this. He will be easy and kind to 
 his dependants, compassionate to the poor and 
 distressed, friendly to all with whom he has to 
 do. This includes the good neighbour, parent, 
 master, magistrate ; and such a behaviour 
 would plainly make dependence, inferiority, 
 and even servitude, easy. So that a good or 
 charitable man of superior rank in wisdom, 
 fortune, authority, is a common blessing to 
 the place he lives in ; happiness grows under 
 his influence. This good principle in inferiors 
 would discover itself in paying respect, grati- 
 tude, obedience, as due. It were, therefore, 
 methinks, one just way of trying one's own 
 character, to ask ourselves, Am I in reality 
 
156 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 a better master or servant, a better friend, a 
 better neighbour, than such and such persons ; 
 whom, perhaps, I may think not to deserve 
 the character of virtue and religion so much 
 as myself? — Angus, p. 491. 
 
 ON HAPPINESS 
 
 Every species of creatures is, we see, de- 
 signed for a particular way of life ; to which, 
 the nature, the capacities, temper, and quali- 
 fications of each species, are as necessary as 
 their external circumstances. Both come into 
 the notion of such state, or particular way of 
 life, and are constituent parts of it. Change 
 a man's capacities or character to the degree 
 in which it is conceivable they may be 
 
 changed, and he would be altogether in- 
 to ' t) 
 
 capable of a human course of life and human 
 happiness ; as incapable as if, his nature con- 
 tinuing unchanged, he were placed in a world 
 where he had no sphere of action, nor any 
 objects to answer his appetites, passions, and 
 
Butler's Best Passages 1 157 
 
 affections of any sort. One thing is set over 
 against another, as an ancient writer expresses 
 it. Our nature corresponds to our external 
 condition. Without this correspondence, there 
 would be no possibility of any such thing as 
 human life and human happiness ; which life 
 and happiness are, therefore, a result from our 
 nature and condition jointly ; meaning by 
 human life, not Hving in the literal sense, but 
 the whole complex notion commonly under- 
 stood by those words. So that without deter- 
 mining what will be the employment and 
 happiness, the particular life of good men 
 hereafter, there must be some determinate 
 capacities, some necessary character and quali- 
 fications, without which persons cannot but 
 be utterly incapable of it : in like manner, 
 as there must be some, without which men 
 would be incapable of their present state of 
 life. — Angus, p. 88. 
 
 Perhaps an infinitely perfect Mind may be 
 pleased with seeing His creatures behave suit- 
 
158 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 ably to the nature which He has given them ; 
 to the relations which He has placed them in 
 to each other ; and to that, which they stand 
 in to Himself : that relation to Himself, which, 
 during their existence, is even necessary, 
 and which is the most important one of all : 
 perhaps, 1 say, an infinitely perfect Mind may 
 be pleased with this moral piety of moral 
 agents, in and for itself, as well as upon 
 account of its being essentially conducive to 
 the happiness of His creation. Or the whole 
 end for which God made, and thus governs 
 the world, may be utterly beyond the reach 
 of our faculties : there may be somewhat in 
 it as impossible for us to have any conception 
 of, as for a blind man to have a conception 
 of colours. But however this be, it is certain 
 matter of universal experience, that the general 
 method of Divine administration is, fore- 
 warning us, or giving us capacities to foresee, 
 with more or less clearness, that if we act so 
 and so, we shall have such enjoyments ; if so 
 and so, such sufferings ; and giving us those 
 
Butler's Best Passages 159 
 
 enjoyments, and making us feel those suffer- 
 ings, in consequence of our actions. — Angus, 
 P- 39- 
 
 ON BENEVOLENCE 
 
 The objects and due extent of this affection 
 will be understood by attending to the nature 
 of it, and to the nature and circumstances of 
 mankind in this world. The love of our 
 neighbour is the same with charity, benevo- 
 lence, or goodwill : it is an affection to the 
 good and happiness of our fellow-creatures. 
 This implies in it a disposition to produce 
 happiness : and this is the simple notion of 
 goodness, which appears so amiable wherever 
 we meet with it. From hence it is easy to 
 see, that the perfection of goodness consists 
 in love to the whole universe. This is the 
 perfection of Almighty God. — Angus, p. 483. 
 
 The Scripture, not being a book of theory 
 and speculation, but a plain rule of life for 
 mankind, has with the utmost possible pro- 
 
i6o Butler's Best Passages 
 
 priety put the principle of virtue upon the 
 love of our neighbour, which is that part of 
 the universe, that part of mankind, that part 
 of our country, which comes under our im- 
 mediate notice, acquaintance, and influence, 
 and with which we have to do. — Angus, 
 p. 484. 
 
 " O Almighty God, inspire us with this 
 Divine principle ; kill in us all the seeds of 
 envy and ill-will ; and help us, by cultivating 
 within ourselves the love of our neighbour, 
 to improve in the love of Thee. Thou hast 
 placed us in various kindreds, friendships, 
 and relations, as the school of discipline for 
 our affections : help us, by the due exercise 
 of them, to improve to perfection ; till all 
 partial affection be lost in that entire universal 
 one, and Thou, O God, shalt be all in all." — 
 Angus, p. 496. 
 
 ON ILL-WILL 
 
 lU-will not only never speaks but never 
 
Butler's Best Passages i6r 
 
 thinks well, of the person towards whom it 
 is exercised. Thus, in cases of offence and 
 enmity, the whole character and behaviour 
 is considered with an eye to that particular 
 part which has offended us, and the whole 
 man appears monstrous, without anything 
 right or human in him, whereas the resent- 
 ment should surely at least be confined to 
 that particular part of behaviour which gave 
 offence, since the other parts of a man's life 
 and character stand just the same as they 
 did before. — Angus, p. 452. 
 
 ON PARTY SPIRIT 
 
 And as to the spirit of party, which un- 
 happily prevails amongst mankind, whatever 
 are the distinctions which serve for a supply to 
 it, some or other of which have obtained in all 
 ages and countries ; one, who is thus friendly 
 to his kind, will immediately make due allow- 
 ances for it, as what cannot but be amongst 
 such creatures as men, in such a world as this. 
 
 L 
 
i62 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 And as wrath and fury and overbearing upon 
 these occasions proceed, as I may speak, from 
 men's feeling only on their own side ; so a 
 common feeling for others as well as for our- 
 selves, would render us sensible to this truth, 
 which it is strange can have so little influence ; 
 that we ourselves differ from others, just as 
 much as they do from us. I put the matter 
 in this way, because it can scarce be expected 
 that the generality of men should see that 
 those things, which are made the occasions 
 of dissension and fomenting the party spirit, 
 are really nothing at all : but it may be ex- 
 pected from all people, how much soever they 
 are in earnest about their respective peculiar- 
 ities, that humanity, and common goodwill to 
 their fellow-creatures, should moderate and 
 restrain that wretched spirit. — Angus, p. 492. 
 
 ON MISUNDERSTANDING 
 
 If there be any probability of a misunder- 
 standing in the case, either from our imagining 
 
Butler's Best Passages 163 
 
 we are injured when we are not, or representing 
 the injury to ourselves as greater than it really 
 is ; one would hope an intimation of this sort 
 might be kindly received, and that people 
 would be glad to find the injury not so great 
 as they imagined. Therefore, without knowing 
 particulars, I take upon me to assure all 
 persons who think they have received in- 
 dignities or injurious treatment, that they may 
 depend upon it, as in a manner certain, that 
 the offence is not so great as they themselves 
 imagine. We are in such a peculiar situation, 
 with respect to injuries done to ourselves, that 
 we can scarce any more see them as they really 
 are, than our eye can see itself. If we could 
 place ourselves at a due distance, i.e. be really 
 unprejudiced, we should frequently discern 
 that to be in reality inadvertence and mistake 
 in our enemy, which we now fancy we see to 
 be malice or scorn. From this proper point 
 of view we should likewise in all probability 
 see something of these latter in ourselves, and 
 most certainly a great deal of the former. 
 
164 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 Thus the indignity or injury would almost 
 infinitely lessen, or perhaps at last come out 
 to be nothing at all. Self-love is a medium 
 of a peculiar kind — in these cases it magnifies 
 everything vi^hich is amiss in others, at the 
 same time that it lessens everything amiss in 
 ourselves. — Angus, p. 452. 
 
 ON PEEVISHNESS 
 
 Of a less boisterous, but not of a less 
 innocent kind than the passion of anger, is 
 peevishness, which I mention with pity, with 
 real pity, to the unhappy creatures who, from 
 their inferior station, or other circumstances 
 and relations, are obliged to be in the way of, 
 and to serve for a supply to it. Both these, 
 for aught that I can see, are one and the same 
 principle, but as it takes root in minds of 
 different makes, it appears differently, and so 
 is come to be distinguished by different names. 
 That which in a more feeble temper is 
 peevishness, and languidly discharges itself 
 
Butler's Best Passages 165 
 
 upon everything which comes in its way, the 
 same principle, in a temper of greater force 
 and stronger passions, becomes rage and fury. 
 In one the humour discharges itself at once, 
 in the other it is continually discharging. 
 This is the account of passion and peevishness, 
 as distinct from each other, and appearing in 
 different persons ; it is no objection against 
 the truth of it that they are both to be seen 
 sometimes in one and the same person. — 
 Angus, p. 440. 
 
 ON RESIGNATION 
 
 It may be imagined that nothing but afflic- 
 tions can give occasion for or require this 
 virtue ; that it can have no respect to, nor be 
 any way necessary to qualify for, a state of 
 perfect happiness ; but it is not experience 
 which can make us think thus. Prosperity 
 itself, whilst anything supposed desirable is 
 not ours, begets extravagant and unbounded 
 thoughts. Imagination is altogether as much 
 
i66 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 a source of discontent, as anything in our 
 external condition. It is indeed true, that 
 there can be no scope for patience when 
 sorrow shall be no more ; but there may be 
 need of a temper of mind which shall have 
 been formed by patience. For though self- 
 love, considered merely as an active principle 
 leading us to pursue our chief interest, cannot 
 but be uniformly coincident with the principle 
 of obedience to God's commands, our interest 
 being rightly understood ; because this obedi- 
 ence and the pursuit of our own chief interest 
 must be in every case one and the same thing ; 
 yet it may be questioned whether self-love, con- 
 sidered merely as the desire of our own interest 
 or happiness, can, from its nature, be thus abso- 
 lutely and uniformly coincident with the will 
 of God ; any more than particular affections 
 can ; coincident in such sort, as not to be 
 liable to be excited upon occasions and in 
 degrees impossible to be gratified consistently 
 with the constitution of things, or the Divine 
 appointments. So that habits of resignation 
 
Butler's Best Passages 167 
 
 may, upon this account, be requisite for all 
 creatures ; habits, I say, which signify what is 
 formed by use. However, in general it is 
 obvious that both self-love and particular 
 affections in human creatures, considered only 
 as passive feelings, distort and rend the mind, 
 and therefore stand in need of discipline. 
 Now, denial of those particular affections, in 
 the course of active virtue and obedience to 
 God's will, has a tendency to moderate them ; 
 and seems also to have a tendency to habituate 
 the mind to be easy and satisfied with that 
 degree of happiness which is allotted us, i.e. 
 to moderate self-love. But the proper dis- 
 cipline for resignation is affliction. 
 
 For, a right behaviour under that trial, 
 recollecting ourselves so as to consider it in 
 the view in which religion teaches us to con- 
 sider it, as from the hand of God ; receiving it 
 as what He appoints, or thinks proper to per- 
 mit, in His world and under His government ; 
 this will habituate the mind to a dutiful sub- 
 mission ; and such submission, together with 
 
i68 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 the active principle of obedience, makes up the 
 temper and character in us, which answers to 
 His sovereignty, and which absolutely belongs 
 to the condition of our being, as dependent 
 creatures. Nor can it be said that this is only 
 breaking the mind to a submission to mere 
 power ; for mere power may be accidental, 
 and precarious, and usurped; but it is forming 
 within ourselves the temper of resignation to 
 His rightful authority, who is by nature 
 supreme over all. — Angus, p. 107. 
 
 Resignation to the will of God is the whole 
 of piety ; it includes in it all that is good, and 
 is a source of the most settled quiet and 
 composure of mind. There is the general 
 principle of submission in our nature. Man 
 is not so constituted as to desire things, and 
 be uneasy in the want of them, in proportion 
 to their known value ; many other considera- 
 tions come in to determine the degrees of 
 desire, particularly whether the advantage we 
 take view of be within the sphere of our rank. 
 
Butler's Best Passages 169 
 
 Who ever felt uneasiness upon observing any 
 of the advantages brute creatures have over 
 us ? and yet it is plain they have several. It 
 is the same with respect to advantages belong- 
 ing to creatures of a superior order ; thus, 
 though we see a thing to be highly valuable, 
 yet that it does not belong to our condition 
 of being is sufficient to suspend our desires 
 after it, to make us rest satisfied without such 
 advantage. Now there is just the same reason 
 for quiet resignation in the want of everything 
 equally unattainable and out of our reach in 
 particular, though others of our species be 
 possessed of it. All this may be appHed to 
 the whole of life, to positive inconveniences as 
 well as wants ; not indeed to the sensations 
 of pain and sorrow, but to all the uneasiness 
 of reflection, murmuring, and discontent. This 
 is human nature formed to compliance, yield- 
 ing, submission of temper. We find the 
 principles of it within us, and every one 
 exercises it towards some objects or other, 
 i.e. feels it with regard to some persons and 
 
I/O Butler's Best Passages 
 
 some circumstances. Now this is an excellent 
 foundation of a reasonable and religious resig- 
 nation. 
 
 Nature teaches and inclines us to take up 
 with our lot ; the consideration that the course 
 of things is unalterable hath a tendency to 
 quiet the mind under it, to beget a submission 
 of temper to it ; but when we can add that 
 this unalterable course is appointed and con- 
 tinued by Infinite wisdom and goodness, how 
 absolute should be our submission, how entire 
 our trust and dependence ! — Angus, p. 508. 
 
 Our resignation to the will of God may be 
 said to be perfect when our wiU is lost and 
 resolved up into His ; when we rest in His 
 will as our end, as being itself most just, and 
 right, and good ; and where is the impossibility 
 of such an affection to what is just, and right, 
 and good, such a loyalty of heart to the 
 Governor of the Universe as shall prevail over 
 all sinister, indirect desires of our own ? 
 Neither is this at bottom anything more than 
 
Butler's Best Passages 171 
 
 faith, and honesty, and fairness of mind, in a 
 more enlarged sense, indeed, than those words 
 are commonly used ; and as, in common cases, 
 fear and hope and other passions are raised in 
 us by their respective objects, so this sub- 
 mission of heart and soul and mind, this 
 religious resignation, would be as naturally 
 produced by our having just conceptions of 
 Almighty God and a real sense of His presence 
 with us. In how low a degree soever this 
 temper usually prevails amongst men, yet it is 
 a temper right in itself ; it is what we owe to 
 our Creator, it is particularly suitable to our 
 mortal condition, and to what we should 
 endeavour after for our own sakes in our 
 passage through such a world as this, where 
 is nothing upon which we can rest or depend, 
 nothing but what we are liable to be deceived 
 and disappointed in. Thus we might acquaint 
 ourselves with God and be at peace. This is 
 piety and religion in the strictest sense, con- 
 sidered as a habit of mind, an habitual sense of 
 God's presence with us, being affected towards 
 
172 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 Him, as present, in the manner His superior 
 nature requires from such a creature as man. 
 This is to walk with God. — Angus, p. 510. 
 
 ON DEVOTION 
 
 The nature of devotion or religious worship 
 consists in the actual exercise of those affec- 
 tions towards God which are supposed habitual 
 in good men. He is always equally present 
 with us, but we are so much taken up with 
 sensible things that, " Lo, He goeth by me, 
 and I see Him not ; He passeth on also, but 1 
 perceive Him not." Devotion is retirement 
 from the world He has made to Him alone ; 
 it is to withdraw from the avocations of sense, 
 to employ our attention wholly upon Him 
 as upon an object actually present, to yield 
 ourselves up to the influence of the Divine 
 Presence, and to give full scope to the affec- 
 tions of gratitude, love, reverence, trust, and 
 dependence ; of which Infinite power, wisdom, 
 and goodness is the natural and only adequate 
 
Butler's Best Passages 173 
 
 object. We may apply to the whole of 
 devotion those words of the son of Sirach, 
 "When you glorify the Lord, exalt Him as 
 much as you can, for even yet will He far 
 exceed ; and when you exalt Him put forth 
 all your strength and be not weary, for you 
 can never go far enough." Our most raised 
 affections of every kind cannot but fall short 
 and be disproportionate, when an infinite 
 Being is the object of them. This is the 
 highest exercise and employment of mind that 
 a creature is capable of. As this divine service 
 and worship is itself absolutely due to God, so 
 also is it necessary, in order to a further end, 
 to keep alive upon our minds a sense of His 
 authority, a sense that, in our ordinary 
 behaviour amongst men we act under Him as 
 our Governor and Judge. — Angus, p. 510. 
 
 God cannot approve of anything but what is 
 in itself Right, Fit, Just. We should worship 
 and endeavour to obey Him with this con- 
 sciousness and recollection. To endeavour 
 
174 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 to please a man merely, is a different thing 
 from endeavouring to please him as a wise and 
 good man, i.e. endeavouring to please him on 
 the particular way, of behaving towards him 
 as we think the relations we stand in to him, 
 and the intercourse we have with him, require. 
 Almighty God is, to be sure, infinitely 
 removed from all those human weaknesses 
 which we express by the words captious, apt 
 to take offence, etc. But an unthinking world 
 does not consider what may be absolutely due 
 to Him from all creatures capable of consider- 
 ing themselves His creatures. Recollect the 
 idea, inadequate as it is, which we have of 
 God, and the idea of ourselves and carelessness 
 with regard to Him, whether we are to worship 
 Him at all, whether we worship Him in a 
 right manner, or conceited confidence that 
 we do so, will seem to imply unspeakable 
 presumption. Neither do we know what 
 necessary, unalterable connection there may be 
 between moral right and happiness, moral 
 wrong and misery, Sincerity is doubtless the 
 
Butler's Best Passages 175 
 
 thing, and not whether we hit the right manner, 
 etc. But a sense of the imperfection of our 
 worship, apprehension that it may be, and a 
 degree of fear that it is, in some respects 
 erroneous, may perhaps be a temper of mind 
 not unbecoming such poor creatures as we are, 
 in our addresses to God. In proportion as we 
 are assured that we are honest and sincere, 
 we may rest satisfied that God cannot be 
 offended with us, but indifference whether 
 what we do be materially, or in the nature of 
 the thing abstracted from our way of consider- 
 ing it. Good and Right, — such indifference is 
 utterly inconsistent with Sincerity. — Steere, 
 p. 7. 
 
 ON THE CHURCH 
 
 As Christianity served these ends and pur- 
 poses, when it was first published, by the 
 miraculous publication itself, so it was intended 
 to serve the same purposes in future ages by 
 means of the settlement of a visible church, of 
 a society, distinguished from common ones 
 
176 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 and from the rest of the world by peculiar 
 religious institutions, by an instituted method 
 of instruction and an instituted form of 
 external religion. Miraculous powers were 
 given to the first preachers of Christianity in 
 order to their introducing it into the world ; 
 a visible church was established in order to con- 
 tinue it and carry it on successively throughout 
 all ages. Had Moses and the prophets, Christ 
 and His apostles, only taught, and by miracles 
 proved, religion to their contemporaries, the 
 benefits of their instructions would have 
 reached but to a small part of mankind. 
 Christianity must have been in a great degree 
 sunk and forgotten in a very few ages. To 
 prevent this appears to have been one reason 
 why a visible church was instituted ; to be, 
 like a city upon a hill, a standing memorial to 
 the world of the duty which we owe our 
 Maker ; to call men continually, both by 
 example and instruction, to attend to it, and, 
 by the form of religion ever before their eyes, 
 remind them of the reality ; to be the reposi- 
 
Butler's Best Passages 177 
 
 tory of the oracles of God ; to hold up the 
 light of revelation in aid to that of Nature, and 
 propagate it throughout all generations to the 
 end of the world — the light of revelation con- 
 sidered here in no other view than as designed 
 to enforce natural religion. And in proportion 
 as Christianity is professed and taught in the 
 world, religion, natural or essential religion, is 
 thus distinctly and advantageously laid before 
 mankind, and brought again and again to their 
 thoughts as a matter of infinite importance. 
 A visible church has also a further tendency to 
 promote natural religion, as being an instituted 
 method of education, originally intended to be 
 of more peculiar advantage to those who would 
 conform to it. For one end of the institution 
 was, that by admonition and reproof, as well as 
 instruction, by a general regular discipline and 
 public exercises of religion, the body of Christy 
 as the Scripture speaks, should be edified^ i.e. 
 trained up in piety and virtue for a higher and 
 better state. — Angus, p. 155. 
 
 M 
 
178 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 And it is to be observed further, that as the 
 nature of the case requires, so all Christians are 
 commanded to contribute by their profession 
 of Christianity to preserve it in the world, and 
 render it such a promulgation and enforcement 
 of religion. For it is the very scheme of the 
 gospel, that each Christian should in his degree 
 contribute towards continuing and carrying it 
 on ; all by uniting in the public profession 
 and external practice of Christianity ; some by 
 instructing, by having the oversight and taking 
 care of this religious community, the Church 
 of God. — Angus, p. 158. 
 
 Christianity was left with Christians, to be 
 transmitted down pure and genuine, or to be 
 corrupted and sunk, in like manner as the 
 religion of nature had been before left with 
 mankind in general. There was, however, 
 this difference, that by an institution of ex- 
 ternal religion fitted for all men (consisting in 
 a common form of Christian worship, together 
 with a standing ministry of instruction and 
 
Butler's Best Passages 179 
 
 discipline), it pleased God to unite Christians 
 in communities or visible churches, and all 
 along to preserve them, over a great part of 
 the world ; and thus perpetuate a general 
 publication of the Gospel. For these com- 
 munities, which together make up the catholic 
 visible church, are, first, the repositories of 
 the written oracles of God ; and, in every age, 
 have preserved and published them in every 
 country, where the profession of Christianity 
 has obtained. Hence it has come to pass, and 
 it is a thing very much to be observed in the 
 appointment of Providence, that even such of 
 these communities as, in a long succession of 
 years, have corrupted Christianity the most, 
 have yet continually carried, together with their 
 corruptions, the confutations of them ; for 
 they have everywhere preserved the pure 
 original standard of it, the Scripture, to which 
 recourse might have been had, both by the 
 deceivers and the deceived, in every successive 
 age. Secondly, any particular church, in what- 
 ever place established, is like a city that is set on 
 
i8o Butler's Best Passages 
 
 an hill, uohich cannot be hid, inviting all who pass 
 by to enter into it. All persons to whom any 
 notices of it come have, in Scripture language, 
 the Kingdom of God come nigh unto them. They 
 are reminded of that religion, which natural 
 conscience attests the truth of ; and they may, 
 if they will, be instructed in it more distinctly, 
 and likewise in the gracious means, whereby 
 sinful creatures may obtain eternal life ; that 
 chief and final good, which all men, in pro- 
 portion to their understanding and integrity, 
 even in all ages and countries of the heathen 
 world, were ever in pursuit of. And, lastly, 
 out of these churches have all along gone forth 
 persons, who have preached the Gospel in 
 remote places, with greater or less good effect ; 
 for the establishment of any profession of 
 Christianity, however corrupt, I call a good 
 effect, whilst accompanied with a continued 
 publication of the Scripture, notwithstanding 
 it may for some time lie quite neglected. — 
 Gladstone, ii. p. 279. 
 
Butler's Best Passages i8i 
 
 ON PUBLIC WORSHIP 
 
 From these things, it may be worth observing 
 by the way, appears the weakness of all pleas 
 for neglecting the public service of the church. 
 For though a man prays with as much devotion 
 and less interruption at home, and reads better 
 sermons there, yet that will by no means 
 excuse the neglect of his appointed part in 
 keeping up the profession of Christianity 
 amongst mankind. And this neglect, were it 
 universal, must be the dissolution of the whole 
 visible church, i.e. of all Christian communities; 
 and so must prevent those good purposes, 
 which were intended to be answered by them, 
 and which they have, all along, answered over 
 the world. For we see that by their means 
 the event foretold in the text which began in 
 the preaching of Christ and the apostles, has 
 been carried on, more or less, ever since, and 
 is still carrying on ; those being the providential 
 means of its progress. And it is, I suppose, 
 the completion of this event, which St. John 
 
i82 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 had a representation of, under the figure of 
 
 an angel flying in the midst of heaven, having the 
 everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwelt 
 on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, 
 and tongue, and people. — Gladstone, ii. p. 281. 
 
 But if these appendages of the divine service 
 are to be regarded, doubtless the divine service 
 itself is more to be regarded ; and the con- 
 scientious attendance upon it ought often to 
 be inculcated upon the people, as a plain 
 precept of the Gospel, as the means of grace, 
 and what has peculiar promises annexed to it. 
 But external acts of piety and devotion, and 
 the frequent returns of them, are, moreover, 
 necessary to keep up a sense of religion, which 
 the affairs of the world will otherwise wear out 
 of men's hearts. And the frequent returns, 
 whether of public devotions, or of any thing 
 else, to introduce religion into men's serious 
 thoughts, will have an influence upon them, in 
 proportion as they are susceptible of religion, 
 and not given over to a reprobate mind. For 
 
Butler's Best Passages 183 
 
 this reason, besides others, the service of the 
 church ought to be celebrated as often as you 
 can have a congregation to attend it. — Glad- 
 stone^ ii. p. 409. 
 
 ON PASTORAL CARE 
 
 The greater festivals of the church being 
 instituted for commemorating the several parts 
 of the Gospel history, of course lead you to 
 explain these its several doctrines, and show 
 the Christian practice which arises out of 
 them. And the more occasional solemnities 
 of religion, as well as these festivals, will often 
 afford you the fairest opportunities of enforcing 
 all those things in familiar conversation. In- 
 deed all affectation of talking piously is quite 
 nauseous : and though there be nothing of 
 this, yet men will easily be disgusted at the too 
 great frequency or length of these occasional 
 admonitions. But a word of God and religion 
 dropped sometimes in conversation, gently, and 
 without any thing severe or forbidding in the 
 
184 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 manner of it, this is not unacceptable. It leaves 
 an impression, is repeated again by the hearers, 
 and often remembered by plain well-disposed 
 persons longer than one would think. Parti- 
 cular circumstances too, which render men 
 more apt to receive instruction, should be laid 
 hold of to talk seriously to their consciences. 
 For instance, after a man's recovery from a 
 dangerous sickness, how proper it is to advise 
 him to recollect, and ever bear in mind, what 
 were his hopes and fears, his wishes and resolu- 
 tions, when under the apprehension of death, 
 in order to bring him to repentance, or con- 
 firm him in a course of piety, according as his 
 life and character has been. So likewise the 
 terrible accidents which often happen from riot 
 and debauchery, and indeed almost every vice, 
 are occasions providentially thrown in your 
 way, to discourse against these vices in common 
 conversation, as well as from the pulpit, upon 
 any such accidents happening in your parish, 
 or in a neighbouring one. Occasions and 
 circumstances of a like kind to some or other 
 
Butler's Best Passages 185 
 
 of these occur often, and ought, if I may so 
 speak, to be catched at as opportunities of 
 conveying instruction, both public and private, 
 with great force and advantage. 
 
 Public instruction is absolutely necessary, 
 and can in no sort be dispensed with. But as 
 it is common to all who are present, many 
 persons strangely neglect to appropriate what 
 they hear to themselves, to their own heart and 
 life. Now the only remedy for this in our 
 power is a particular personal application, and 
 a personal application makes a very different 
 impression from a common, general one. It 
 were therefore greatly to be wished, that every 
 man should have the principles of Christianity, 
 and his own particular duty enforced upon his 
 conscience, in a manner suited to his capacity, 
 in private. — Gladstone, ii. p. 413. 
 
 ON PULPIT CONTROVERSY 
 
 But your standing business, and which 
 requires constant attention, is with the body 
 
i86 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 of the people ; to revive in them the spirit 
 of religion, which is so much declining. And 
 it may seem, that whatever reason there be 
 for caution as to entering into an argu- 
 mentative defence of religion in common con- 
 versation, yet that it is necessary to do this 
 from the pulpit, in order to guard the people 
 against being corrupted, however, in some 
 places. But then surely it should be done 
 in a manner as little controversial as possible. 
 For though such as are capable of seeing 
 the force of objections are capable also of 
 seeing the force of the answers which are 
 given to them ; yet the truth is, the people 
 will not competently attend to either. But 
 it is easy to see which they will attend to 
 most. And to hear religion treated of as 
 what many deny, and which has much said 
 against it as well as for it ; this cannot but 
 have a tendency to give them ill impressions 
 at any time, and seems particularly improper 
 for all persons at a time of devotion, even 
 for such as are arrived at the most settled 
 
Butler's Best Passages 187 
 
 state of piety : I say at a time of devotion, 
 when we are assembled to yield ourselves up 
 to the full influence of the Divine presence, 
 and to call forth into actual exercise every 
 pious affection of heart. For it is to be 
 repeated, that the heart and course of affec- 
 tions may be disturbed when there is no 
 alteration of judgment. Now the evidence 
 of religion may be laid before men without 
 any air of controversy. The proof of the 
 being of God from final causes, or the design 
 and wisdom which appears in every part of 
 nature ; together with the law of virtue 
 written upon our hearts : the proof of Chris- 
 tianity from miracles, and the accomplish- 
 ment of prophecies ; and the confirmation 
 which the natural and civil history of the 
 world give to the Scripture account of things, 
 these evidences of religion might properly be 
 insisted on, in a way to affect and influence 
 the heart, though there were no professed 
 unbelievers in the world ; and therefore may 
 be insisted on, without taking much notice 
 
i88 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 that there are such. And even their particular 
 objections may be obviated without a formal 
 mention of them. Besides, as to religion in 
 general, it is a practical thing, and no other- 
 wise a matter of speculation, than common 
 prudence in the management of our worldly 
 affairs is so. And if one were endeavouring 
 to bring a plain man to be more careful with 
 regard to this last, it would be thought a 
 strange method of doing it, to perplex him 
 with stating formally the several objections 
 which men of gaiety or speculation have made 
 against prudence, and the advantages which 
 they pleasantly tell us folly has over it ; though 
 one could answer those objections ever so 
 fully. — Gladstone, ii. p. 403. 
 
 ON THE STUDY OF DIVINITY 
 
 . . . Divinity, that being what I should 
 chuse for the business of my life, it being, I 
 think, of all other studies the most suitable 
 to a reasonable nature. — Steere, p. 12. 
 
Butler's Best Passages 189 
 
 ON MISSIONS 
 
 God, if He had so pleased, could indeed 
 miraculously have revealed every religious 
 truth which concerns mankind, to every in- 
 dividual man : and so He could have every 
 common truth, and thus have superseded all 
 use of human teaching in either. Yet He has 
 not done this : but has appointed that men 
 should be instructed by the assistance of their 
 fellow-creatures in both. Further : though 
 all knowledge from reason is as really from 
 God, as revelation is ; yet this last is a dis- 
 tinguished favour to us, and naturally strikes 
 us with the greatest awe, and carries in it an 
 assurance, that those things which we are in- 
 formed of by it are of the utmost importance 
 to us to be informed of. 
 
 Revelation, therefore, as it demands to be 
 received with a regard and reverence peculiar 
 to itself ; so it lays us under obligations, of 
 a like peculiar sort, to communicate the light 
 of it. Further still : it being an indispensable 
 
190 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 law of the gospel, that Christians should unite 
 in religious communities, and these being in- 
 tended for repositories of written oracles of God, 
 for standing memorials of religion to unthink- 
 ing men, and for the propagation of it in the 
 world ; Christianity is very particularly to be 
 considered as a trust, deposited with us in 
 behalf of others, in behalf of mankind, as well 
 as for our own instruction. No one has a 
 right to be called a Christian, who doth not 
 do somewhat in his station, towards the dis- 
 charge of this trust ; who doth not, for in- 
 stance, assist in keeping up the profession of 
 Christianity where he lives. — Gladstone, ii. 
 p. 285. 
 
 ON READING 
 
 The great number of books and papers of 
 amusement, which, of one kind or another, 
 daily come in one's way, have in part occa- 
 sioned, and most perfectly fall in with, and 
 humour this idle way of reading and con- 
 sidering things. By this means, time even 
 
Butler's Best Passages 191 
 
 in solitude is happily got rid of, without the 
 pain of attention : neither is any part of it 
 more put to the account of idleness, one can 
 scarce forbear saying, is spent with less 
 thought, than great part of that which is 
 spent in reading. 
 
 Thus people habituate themselves to let 
 things pass through their minds, as one may 
 speak, rather than to think of them. Thus 
 by use they become satisfied merely with see- 
 ing what is said without going any further. 
 Review and attention, or even forming a 
 judgment, becomes fatigue ; and to lay any- 
 thing before them that requires it, is putting 
 them quite out of their way. — Angus, p. 337. 
 
 Brutus never read but in order to make 
 himself a better man. — Angus, p. 458. 
 
 ON STYLE 
 
 It must be acknowledged that some of the 
 following Discourses are very abstruse and 
 
192 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 difficult, or, if you please, obscure ; but I 
 must take leave to add, that those alone are 
 judges, whether or no and how far this is a 
 fault, who are judges whether or no and how 
 far it might have been avoided — those only 
 who will be at the trouble to understand 
 what is here said, and to see how far the 
 things here insisted upon, and not other 
 things, might have been put in a plainer 
 manner, which yet I am very far from assert- 
 ing that they could not. Thus much how- 
 ever will be allowed, that general criticisms 
 concerning obscurity considered as a distinct 
 thing from confusion and perplexity of thought, 
 as in some cases there may be ground for 
 them ; so in others, they may be nothing 
 more at the bottom than complaints, that 
 everything is not to be understood with the 
 same ease that some things are. Confusion 
 and perplexity in writing, is indeed without 
 excuse, because any one may, if he pleases, 
 know whether he understands and sees through 
 what he is about : and it is unpardonable for 
 
Butler's Best Passages 193 
 
 a man to lay his thoughts before others, when 
 he is conscious that he himself does not know 
 whereabouts he is, or how the matter before 
 him stands. It is coming abroad in disorder 
 which he ought to be dissatisfied to find 
 himself in at home. — Angus, p. 338. 
 
 ON TALKATIVENESS 
 
 Now the fault referred to, and the disposi- 
 tion supposed, in precepts and reflections con- 
 cerning the government of the tongue, is not 
 evil-speaking from malice, nor lying, nor bear- 
 ing false witness from indirect selfish designs. 
 The disposition to these, and the actual vices 
 themselves, all come under other subjects. 
 The tongue may be employed about and made 
 to serve all the purposes of vice in tempting 
 and deceiving, in perjury and injustice. But 
 the thing here supposed and referred to is 
 talkativeness ; a disposition to be talking, 
 abstracted from the consideration of what is 
 to be said, with very little or no regard to or 
 
 N 
 
194 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 thought of doing either good or harm. And 
 let not any imagine this to be a slight matter, 
 and that it deserves not to have so great 
 weight laid upon it, till he has considered what 
 evil is implied in it, and the bad effects which 
 follows from it. It is perhaps true, that they 
 who are addicted to this folly would choose 
 to confine themselves to trifles and indifferent 
 subjects, and so intend only to be guilty of 
 being impertinent ; but as they cannot go on 
 for ever talking of nothing, as common 
 matters will not afford a sufficient fund for 
 perpetual continued discourse ; when subjects 
 of this kind are exhausted they will go on to 
 defamation, scandal, divulging of secrets, their 
 own secrets as well as those of others, anything 
 rather than be silent. They are plainly hurried 
 on in the heat of their talk to say quite 
 different things from what they first intended, 
 and which they afterwards wish unsaid ; or 
 improper things, which they had no other end 
 in saying but only to afford employment to 
 their tongue ; and if these people expect to 
 
Butler's Best Passages 195 
 
 be heard and regarded (for there are some 
 content merely with talking), they will invent 
 to engage your attention ; and when they have 
 heard the least imperfect hint of an affair, they 
 will out of their own head add the circum- 
 stances of time and place, and other matters to 
 make out their story, and give the appear- 
 ance of probability to it ; not that they have 
 any concern about being believed, otherwise 
 than as a means of being heard. 
 
 The thing is to engage your attention, to 
 take you up wholly for the present time ; what 
 reflections will be made afterwards is in truth 
 the least of their thoughts. And further, when 
 persons who indulge themselves in these liberties 
 of the tongue are in any degree offended with 
 another, as little disgusts and misunderstand- 
 ings will be, they allow themselves to defame 
 and revile such an one without any moderation 
 or bounds, though the offence is so very slight 
 that they themselves would not do, nor perhaps 
 wish him an injury in any other way ; and in 
 this case the scandal and revilings are chiefly 
 
196 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 owing to talkativeness and not bridling their 
 tongue, and so come under our present subject. 
 The least occasion in the world will make the 
 humour break out in this particular way, or in 
 another. It is like a torrent which must and 
 will flow, but the least thing imaginable will 
 first of all give it either this or another direc- 
 tion, turn it into this or that channel ; or like 
 a fire, the nature of which, when in a heap of 
 combustible matter, is to spread and lay waste 
 all around, but any one of a thousand little 
 accidents will occasion it to break out first 
 either in this or another particular part. — 
 Angus, p. 393. 
 
 There is some such a disposition to be 
 talking, that an offence of the slightest kind, 
 and such as would not raise any other resent- 
 ment, yet raises, if I may so speak, the resent- 
 ment of the tongue, puts it into a flame, 
 into the most ungovernable motions. — Angus, 
 P- 395- 
 
 Let any one consider the various interests. 
 
Butler's Best Passages 197 
 
 competitions, and little misunderstandings 
 which arise amongst men, and he will soon see 
 that he is not unprejudiced and impartial, that 
 he is not, as I may speak, neutral enough to 
 trust himself with talking of the character and 
 concerns of his neighbour in a free, careless, 
 and unreserved manner. There is perpetually, 
 and often it is not attended to, a rivalship 
 amongst people of one kind or another, in 
 respect to wit, beauty, learning, fortune ; and 
 that one thing will insensibly influence them 
 to speak to the disadvantage of others, even 
 where there is no formed malice or ill design. 
 Since, therefore, it is so hard to enter into this 
 subject without offending ; the first thing to 
 be observed is, that people should learn to 
 decline it; to get over that inclination most have 
 to be talking of the concerns and behaviour of 
 their neighbour. — Angus, p. 400. 
 
 Upon the whole matter : if people would 
 observe the occasions of silence ; if they would 
 subdue the inclination to tale-bearing, and that 
 
198 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 eager desire to engage attention, which is an 
 original disease in some minds ; they would be 
 in little danger of offending with their tongue ; 
 and would, in a moral and religious sense, have 
 due government over it. — Angus, p. 402. 
 
 ON AMUSEMENTS 
 
 Let us, then, suppose a man entirely dis- 
 engaged from business and pleasure, sitting 
 down alone and at leisure, to reflect upon 
 himself and his own condition of being. He 
 would immediately feel that he was by no 
 means complete of himself, but totally in- 
 sufficient for his own happiness. One may 
 venture to affirm that every man hath felt 
 this whether he hath again reflected upon it 
 or not. It is feeling this deficiency, that they 
 are unsatisfied with themselves, which makes 
 men look out for assistance from abroad, and 
 which has given rise to various kinds of 
 amusements altogether needless any otherwise 
 than as they serve to fill up the blank spaces 
 
Butler's Best Passages 199 
 
 of time, and so hinder their feeling this 
 deficiency, and being uneasy with themselves. 
 Now, if these external things we take up with 
 were really an adequate supply to this deficiency 
 of human nature ; if by their means our capa- 
 cities and desires were all satisfied and filled 
 up ; then it might be truly said that we had 
 found out the proper happiness of man, and 
 so might sit down satisfied, and be at rest in 
 the enjoyment of it. But if it appears that the 
 amusements which men usually pass their time 
 in, are so far from coming up to, or answering 
 our notions and desires of happiness or good, 
 that they are really no more than what they 
 are commonly called, somewhat to pass away 
 the time ; i.e. somewhat which serves to turn 
 us aside from, and prevent our attending to this 
 our internal poverty and want ; if they serve 
 only, or chiefly to suspend, instead of satisfying 
 our conceptions and desires of happiness ; if 
 the want remains, and we have found out little 
 more than barely the means of making it less 
 sensible, then are we still to seek for somewhat 
 
200 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 to be an adequate supply to it. — Angus, p. 
 512. 
 
 ON CHILDREN 
 
 Human creatures, from the constitution of 
 their nature and the circumstances in which 
 they are placed, cannot but acquire habits 
 during their childhood, by the impressions 
 which are given them, and their own customary 
 actions. And long before they arrive at 
 mature age, these habits form a general settled 
 character, and the observation ot the text, that 
 the most early habits are usually the most 
 lasting, is likewise every one's observation. 
 Now whenever children are left to themselves, 
 and to the guides and companions which they 
 choose, or by hazard light upon, we. find by 
 experience that the first impressions they take, 
 and course of action they get into, are very 
 bad ; and so consequently must be their habits 
 and character, and future behaviour. Thus, if 
 they are not trained up in the way they should 
 go, they will certainly be trained up in the way 
 
Butler's Best Passages 201 
 
 they should not go ; and in all probability will 
 persevere in it, and become miserable them- 
 selves and mischievous to society : which, in 
 event, is worse, upon account of both, than 
 if they had been exposed to perish in their 
 infancy. 
 
 On the other hand, the ingenuous docility 
 of children before they have been deceived, 
 their distrust of themselves, and natural defer- 
 ence to grown people, whom they find here 
 settled in a world where they themselves are 
 strangers ; and to whom they have recourse 
 for advice as readily as for protection, which 
 deference is still greater towards those who 
 are placed over them ; these things give the 
 justest ground to expect that they may receive 
 such impressions and be influenced to such a 
 course of behaviour, as will produce lasting 
 good habits ; and, together with the dangers 
 before mentioned, are as truly a natural 
 demand on us to train them up in the way they 
 should go, as their bodily wants are a demand 
 to provide them bodily nourishment. 
 
202 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 Brute creatures are appointed to do no more 
 than this last for their offspring, nature form- 
 ing them by instincts to the particular manner 
 of life appointed them, from which they never 
 deviate. But this is so far from being the 
 case of men, that, on the contrary, considering 
 communities collectively, every successive 
 generation is left, in the ordinary course of 
 Providence, to be formed by the preceding 
 one ; and becomes good or bad, though not 
 without its own merit or demerit, as this 
 trust is discharged or violated, chiefly in the 
 management of youth. — Gladstone, ii. p. 339. 
 
 ON DEATH 
 
 The unknown event, death. — Angus, p. 18. 
 
 We know not at all what death is in itself ; 
 but only some of its effects, such as the dis- 
 solution of flesh, skin, and bones. — Angus, p. 1 9. 
 
 Nay, for aught we know of ourselves, of 
 our present life and of death ; death may 
 
Butler's Best Passages 203 
 
 immediately, in the natural course of things, 
 put us into a higher and more enlarged state 
 of life as our birth does ; a state in which our 
 capacities, and sphere of perception and of 
 action, may be much greater than at present. 
 For as our relation to our external organs of 
 sense renders us capable of existing in our 
 present state of sensation, so it may be the 
 only natural hindrance to our existing, im- 
 mediately and of course, in a higher state of 
 reflection. The truth is, reason does not at all 
 show us in what state death naturally leaves 
 us. But were we sure it would suspend all 
 our perceptive and active powers, yet the sus- 
 pension of a power and the destruction of it 
 are effects so totally different in kind, as we 
 experience from sleep and a swoon, that we 
 cannot in any wise argue from one to the 
 other ; or conclude even to the lowest degree 
 of probability that the same kind of force 
 which is sufficient to suspend our faculties, 
 though it be increased ever so much, will be 
 sufficient to destroy them. — Angus, p. 31. 
 
204 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 ON THE FUTURE LIFE 
 
 That which makes the question concerning 
 a future life to be of so great importance to 
 us, is our capacity of happiness and misery. 
 And that which makes the consideration of it 
 to be of so great importance to us, is the suppo- 
 sition of our happiness and misery hereafter, 
 depending upon our actions here. Without 
 this, indeed, curiosity could not but sometimes 
 bring a subject, in which we may be so highly 
 interested, to our thoughts ; especially upon 
 the mortality of others, or the near prospect of 
 our own. But reasonable men would not take 
 any further thought about hereafter, than what 
 should happen thus occasionally to rise in their 
 minds, if it were certain that our future interest 
 no way depended upon our present behaviour; 
 whereas on the contrary, if there be ground 
 either from analogy or anything else, to think 
 it does ; then there is reason also for the most 
 active thought and solicitude to secure that 
 interest ; to behave so as that we may escape 
 
Butler's Best Passages 205 
 
 that misery and obtain that happiness in 
 another life, which we not only suppose our- 
 selves capable of, but which we apprehend is 
 put in our own power. — Angus, p. 37. 
 
 Our posthumous life, whatever there may 
 be in it additional to our present, yet may not 
 be entirely beginning anew, but going on. 
 Death may, in some sort and in some respects, 
 answer to our birth ; which is not a suspension 
 of the faculties which we had before it, or a 
 total change of the state of life in which we 
 existed when in the womb, but a continuation 
 of both, with such and such great alterations. 
 
 Nay, for aught we know of ourselves, of 
 our present life and of death ; death may 
 immediately, in the natural course of things, 
 put us into a higher and more enlarged state 
 of life as our birth does ; a state in which our 
 capacities, and sphere of perception and of 
 action, may be much greater than at present. 
 —Angus, p. 31. 
 
2o6 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 We are led to consider this little scene of 
 human life in which we are so busily engaged, 
 as having a reference of some sort or other to 
 a much larger plan of things. Whether we 
 are any way related to the more distant parts 
 of the boundless universe, into which we are 
 brought, is altogether uncertain. But it is 
 evident that the course of things, which comes 
 within our view, is connected with somewhat 
 past, present, and future, beyond it. So that 
 we are placed, as one may speak, in the middle 
 of a scheme, not a fixed but a progressive one, 
 every way incomprehensible ; incomprehensible 
 in a manner equally with respect to what has 
 been, what now is, and what shall be hereafter. 
 — Angus, p. 141. 
 
 Irrational creatures act this their part, and 
 enjoy and undergo the pleasures and the pains 
 allotted them without any reflection. But 
 one would think it impossible that creatures 
 endued with reason could avoid reflecting 
 sometimes upon all this ; reflecting, if not 
 
Butler's Best Passages 207 
 
 from whence we came, yet at least whither we 
 are going, and what the mysterious scheme, in 
 the midst of which we find ourselves, will at 
 length come out and produce ; a scheme in 
 which it is certain we are highly interested and 
 in which we may be interested even beyond 
 conception. — Angus, p. 142. 
 
 Nothing which we at present see would 
 lead us to the thought of a solitary inactive 
 state hereafter : but, if we judge at all from 
 the analogy of Nature, we must suppose, 
 according to the Scripture account of it, that 
 it will be a community. And there is no 
 shadow of anything unreasonable in con- 
 ceiving, though there be no analogy for it, 
 that this community will be, as the Scripture 
 represents it, under the more immediate, or, 
 if such an expression may be used, the more 
 sensible government of God. Nor is our 
 ignorance what will be the employments of 
 this happy community, nor our consequent 
 ignorance, what particular scope or occasion 
 
2o8 Butler's Best Passages 
 
 there will be for the exercise of veracity, 
 justice, and charity, amongst the members of 
 it, with regard to each other, any proof, that 
 there will be no sphere of exercise for those 
 virtues. Much less, if that were possible, is 
 our ignorance any proof, that there will be 
 no occasion for that frame of mind, or char- 
 acter, which is formed by the daily practice 
 of those particular virtues here, and which is 
 a result from it. This at least must be owned 
 in general, that, as the government established 
 in the universe is moral, the character of virtue 
 and piety must, in some way or other, be the 
 condition of our happiness, or the qualification 
 for it. — Angus, p. 97. 
 
LETTERS 
 
 Bristol was the poorest of the English 
 Bishoprics, the value not exceeding £400 
 per annum ; and the promotion of Gooch 
 (whose claims fell far short of Butler's) to 
 Norwich was probably a low manoeuvre of 
 Walpole's, who may have thought that the 
 ascetic Rector of Stanhope was too unworldly 
 a person to care for the poverty of his prefer- 
 ment, or perceive the slight which it implied. 
 But, if such were his calculations, the coarse- 
 minded minister mistook his man ; and the 
 letter, in which he acknowledged Sir Robert's 
 announcement of his promotion, shows plainly 
 that Butler understood his position, and was 
 no way disposed to compromise it : — 
 
 Stanhope, August 28, 1738. 
 
 Sir, — I received yesterday, from your own 
 o 
 
2IO 
 
 Butler's Letters 
 
 hand (an honour which I ought very particu- 
 larly to acknowledge), the information that the 
 King had nominated me to the Bishoprick of 
 Bristol. I most truly think myself very highly 
 obliged to His Majesty, as much, all things 
 considered, as any subject in his dominions ; 
 for I know no greater obligation, than to find 
 the Queen's condescending goodness and kind 
 intentions towards me, transferred to His 
 Majesty. Nor is it possible, while I live, to 
 be without the most grateful sense of his 
 favour to me, whether the effects of it be 
 greater or less ; for, this must in some 
 measure depend upon accidents. Indeed, the 
 Bishoprick of Bristol is not very suitable 
 either to the condition of my fortune, or the 
 circumstances of my preferment ; nor, as I 
 should have thought, answerable to the re- 
 commendation with which I was honoured. 
 But you will excuse me. Sir, if I think of 
 this last with greater sensibility than the 
 conduct of affairs will admit of. 
 
 But without entering further into detail, I 
 
Butler's Letters 
 
 2 I I 
 
 desire, Sir, you will please to let His Majesty 
 know, that I humbly accept this instance of 
 his favour with the utmost possible gratitude. 
 
 I beg leave, also, Sir, to return you my 
 humble thanks for your good offices upon 
 this, and all occasions ; and for your very 
 obliging expressions of regard to, — Sir, your 
 most obedient, most faithful, and most humble 
 Servant, Joseph Butler. 
 
 — Fitzgerald, p. liii. 
 
 Two letters to the Duke of Newcastle : — 
 
 The Bishop of Bristol to the Duke of Newcastle 
 Bristol, 5 Aug. 1750. 
 
 My Lord, — I have this afternoon the 
 Honour of your Grace's letter informing me 
 of my Nomination to the Bishoprick of 
 Durham, which I am sensible is the greatest 
 Instance of Favour I could receive from the 
 King. As I read in your letter, my Lord, 
 my answer to it in my own Thoughts was, 
 to return your Grace my humble Thanks for 
 all your Favours, particularly for your kind 
 
212 
 
 Butler's Letters 
 
 concurrence and assistances upon this occasion 
 and the obliging satisfaction you take in the 
 success of them. But when I came to the 
 postscript and found a Command accompany- 
 ing that nomination it gave me greater Dis- 
 turbance of mind than I think I ever felt. 
 Your Grace will please to remember that when 
 you mentioned this to me near three-quarters 
 of a year agoe, I made not a word of answer, 
 but went on talking of other things, and upon 
 your repeating the mention of it at the same 
 time, just as I was going out of your Dressing 
 Room, I told your Grace it did not admit 
 of an answer. This my Silence, and this my 
 Reply were owing to my being in so great 
 a surprize as such a thing being asked of 
 me beforehand that I durst not trust myself 
 to talk upon the subject. But upon settling 
 within myself what I ought to say, I proposed 
 to wait upon your Grace, and let you know 
 that I could not take any Church Promotion 
 upon the condition of any such Promise or 
 Intimation as your Grace seemed to expect. 
 
Butler's Letters 213 
 
 But before I had time for this I met the 
 Archbishop who began as from you to talk 
 to me of the affair, upon which I desired 
 him to let your Grace know what I had 
 purposed, as I now said, to tell you myself. 
 My words, so far as I can remember were, 
 that my Principles would not permit me to 
 accept of any Promotion upon the condition 
 of making any Promise or raising any Ex- 
 pectation beforehand of giving away prefer- 
 ment. After all this, my Lord, I had not 
 the most distant suspicion but that if His 
 Majesty would nominate me to Durham, 
 your Grace would have permitted the Nomi- 
 nation to come free. 
 
 My Lord, the Bishops as well as the in- 
 ferior Clergy take the Oaths against Simony, 
 and as I should think an express Promise 
 of Preferment to a Patron beforehand an 
 express Breach of that Oath, and would deny 
 Institution upon it, so I should think a tacit 
 Promise a tacit Breach of it. I am afraid 
 your Grace may think I have already said 
 
214 Butler's Letters 
 
 too much, but as this affair that I am to 
 give Dr. Chapman the first Prebend of 
 Durham, is common Talk at Cambridge, and 
 consequently will be so, if it be not already, 
 wherever I am known, I think myself bound, 
 whatever be the Consequence of my Simplicity 
 and Openness, to add that it will be im- 
 possible for me to do it consistently with 
 my Character and Honour, since if I should, 
 it would be understood (tho' your Grace and 
 I know the contrary) to be done in con- 
 sequence of some previous Promise, either 
 express or tacit. I am, my Lord, in great 
 Discomposure of mind upon this affair, and 
 very unfit to write to your Grace. Yet I 
 think it absolutely necessary to return your 
 Grace an immediate answer by the King's 
 Messenger, and I must also write to His 
 Majesty. 
 
 So I hope your Grace will put a candid 
 construction upon any improper expressions 
 which may have 'scaped me. For I can 
 have no Desire (and my present situation is 
 
Butler's Letters 215 
 
 surely a Proof of it) to say anything or 
 express myself in any manner disagreeable 
 to your Grace, further than what my Prin- 
 ciples may have obliged me to. 
 
 I am, with the greatest Respect, your Grace's 
 most obedient, devoted humble Servant, 
 
 Jo., Bristol. 
 
 Your Grace recollects that if a Prebend of 
 D. held by Com"' becomes vacant by my 
 Promotion it of course devolves to the 
 Crown. 
 
 The Bishop of Durham to the Duke of Newcastle 
 Hampsted, Dec. ist, 1751 
 
 My Lord, — I shall pay all the Regard to 
 your Grace's Recommendation that I am per- 
 suaded you yourself will think reasonable. 
 But as I am altogether unacquainted with 
 the character of the Person recommended I 
 must desire a little time to inquire into it ; 
 especially as I am inclined to think he is a 
 stranger to your Grace. 
 
2l6 
 
 Butler's Letters 
 
 I must likewise beg leave to add that 
 Eglinham being a vicarage I cannot give 
 leave of absence to any one who I myself 
 shall present to it. 
 
 I am, with the greatest Respect, my Lord, 
 your Grace's most obliged, most obedient and 
 most humble Servant, Jo. Duresme. 
 
 • — Gladstone, ii. p. 431. 
 
 Good Sir, — When, or where, this will 
 find you, I know not ; but I would not 
 defer thanking you for the obliging satis- 
 faction you express, in my translation to the 
 See of Durham. I wish my behaviour in it 
 may be such as to justify His Majesty's choice, 
 and the approbation of it, which you (much 
 too kindly, I suppose) think to be general. 
 If one is enabled to do a little good, and to 
 prefer worthy men, this indeed is a valuable 
 of life, and will afford satisfaction in the close 
 of it ; but the change of station in itself will 
 in no wise answer the trouble of it, and of 
 getting into new forms of living : I mean 
 
Butler's Letters 217 
 
 with respect to the peace and happiness of 
 one's own mind, for in fortune, to be sure 
 it will. 
 
 I am, etc. 
 
 Bristol, Aug. 13, 1750. 
 
 My Good Friend, — I should have been 
 mighty glad of the favour of a visit from you, 
 when you were in town. I thank you for 
 your kind congratulations, though I am not 
 without my doubts and fears, how far the 
 occasion of them is a real subject of congratula- 
 tion to me. Increase of fortune is insignificant 
 to one who thought he had enough before ; 
 and I foresee many difficulties in the station 
 I am coming into, and no advantage worth 
 thinking of, except some greater power of 
 being serviceable to others ; and whether this 
 be an advantage, entirely depends on the use 
 one shall make of it : I pray God it may be a 
 good one. It would be a melancholy thing in 
 the close of life, to have no reflections to 
 entertain one's self with, but that one had 
 
2l8 
 
 Butler's Letters 
 
 spent the revenues of the bishoprick of 
 Durham in a sumptuous course of living, and 
 enriched one's friends with the promotions of 
 it, instead of having really set one's self to do 
 good, and promote worthy men ; yet this 
 right use of fortune and power is more difficult 
 than the generality of even good people think, 
 and requires both a guard upon one's self, and 
 a strength of mind, to withstand solicitations, 
 greater, I wish I may not find it, than I am 
 master of. I pray God preserve your health, 
 and am always, Dear Sir, Your affectionate 
 Brother and Servant, Joseph Dukelm. 
 
 — Fitzgerala, p. xcix. 
 
 To THF Countess of Hartford 
 
 Summer oj 1751. 
 
 I had a mind to see Auckland before I 
 wrote to your Grace, and, as you take so kind 
 a part in everything which contributes to my 
 satisfaction, I am sure you will be pleased to 
 hear that the place is a very agreeable one. 
 
Butler's Letters 219 
 
 and fully answering expectations, except that 
 one of the chief prospects, which is very- 
 pretty (the river Wear with hills, much 
 diversified, rising above it), is too bare of 
 wood ; the park not much amiss as to that ; 
 but I am obliged to pale it anew all round, the 
 old pale being quite decayed. This will give 
 an opportunity, with which I am much pleased, 
 to take in forty or fifty acres competently 
 wooded ; though with that enlargement it will 
 scarce be sufficient for the hospitality of the 
 country. These, with some little improve- 
 ments and very great repairs, take up my 
 leisure time. 
 
 Thus, Madam, I seem to have laid out 
 a very long life for myself ; yet, in reality, 
 everything I see puts me in mind of the short- 
 ness and uncertainty of it ; the arms and 
 inscriptions of my predecessors, what they did 
 and what they neglected, and (from accidental 
 circumstances) the very place itself, and the 
 rooms I walk through and sit in. And when 
 I consider, in one view, the many things of 
 
220 
 
 Butler's Letters 
 
 the kind I have just mentioned, which I have 
 upon my hands, I feel the burlesque of being 
 employed in this manner at my time of life. 
 But in another view, and taking in all circum- 
 stances, these things, as trifling as they may 
 appear, no less than things of greater import- 
 ance, seem to be put upon me to do, or at 
 least to begin ; whether I am to live to com- 
 plete any or all of them, is not my concern. 
 — Fitzgerald, Ixv. 
 
PRAYERS 
 
 O Almighty God, Maker and Preserver of 
 the world, Governor and Judge of all creatures, 
 whom Thou hast endued with understanding 
 so as to render them accountable for their 
 actions, and capable of being judged for them ; 
 we prostrate ourselves as in Thy presence, and 
 v/orship Thee the Sovereign Lord of all, in 
 Whom we live and move and have our being. 
 The greatness and perfection of Thy Nature 
 is infinitely beyond all possible comprehension, 
 but in proportion to our capacities we would 
 endeavour to have a true conception of Thy 
 Divine Majesty, and to live under a just sense 
 and apprehension of it, that we may fear Thee 
 and hope in Thee, as we entirely depend on 
 Thee : that we may love Thee as supremely 
 good, and have our wills conformed to Thy 
 will in all righteousness and truth ; that we 
 
 221 
 
222 Butler's Prayers 
 
 may be thankful to Thee for everything we 
 enjoy, as the gift of Thine hand, and be 
 patient under every affliction as what Thou 
 sendest or permittest. 
 
 We desire to be duly sensible of what we 
 have done amiss, and we solemnly resolve 
 before Thee that for the time to come we will 
 endeavour to obey all Thy commands as they 
 are made known to us. 
 
 We are Thy creatures by nature ; we give 
 up ourselves to be Thy servants voluntarily 
 and by choice, and present ourselves, body 
 and soul, a hving sacrifice to Thee. 
 
 But, O Almighty God, as Thou hast mani- 
 fested Thyself to the world by Jesus Christ; 
 as Thou hast given Him to be a Propitiation 
 for the sins of it, and the Mediator between 
 God and Man ; we lay hold with all humility 
 and thankfulness on so estimable a Benefit, 
 and come unto Thee according to Thine 
 appointment in His Name, and in the form 
 and manner which He has taught us. 
 
 Our Father, etc. 
 
Butler's Prayers 
 
 223 
 
 MORNING PRAYER 
 
 Almighty God, by whose protection we 
 were preserved the night passed, and are here 
 before Thee this morning in health and safety ; 
 we dedicate this day, and all the days we live 
 to Thy service ; resolving that we will abstain 
 from all evil, that we will take heed to the 
 thing that is right in all our actions, and 
 endeavour to do our duty In that state of life 
 in which Thy Providence has placed us. We 
 would remind ourselves that we are always, 
 wherever we may go, in Thy presence. We 
 would be always in Thy fear ; and we beg the 
 continuance of Thy merciful protection, and 
 that Thou wouldst guide and keep us, in all 
 our ways, through Jesus Christ our Lord. — 
 Gladstone, ii. p. 428. 
 
 Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty 
 at the Edinburgh University Press 
 
Date Due 
 
 ., : ■■■■'4.'; 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 !