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BUTLER, JOSEPH. 



BUTLER, JOSEPH. 



IDE 8 



what had become faulty. The text of the second sermon shows the 

 meaning in which the word nature ought to be used. " For when the 

 Gentiles which have not the law, do by nature the things contained 

 in the law, these having not the law are a law unto themselves. 

 Which show the works of the law written in their hearts, their 

 consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile 

 accusing or else excusing one another." Conscience makes man a 

 moral agent. It justifies and it condemns. It cannot justify what 

 is wrong ; it cannot condemn what is right ; right therefore is natural 

 to man, and determined by the testimony of conscience alone. After 

 establishing the supremacy of conscience, he forms his notion of 

 human nature, in the following of which virtue is said to consist, and 

 the deviation from which U vice. "As the idea of a civil constitu- 

 tion implies in it united strength, various subordinations, under one 

 direction, that of the supreme authority, the different strength of each 

 particular member of the society not coming into the idea; whereas, 

 if you leave out the subordination, the union, and the one direction, 

 you destroy and lose it : so reason, several appetites, passions, and 

 affections prevailing in different degrees of strength, is not that idea 

 or notion of human nature; but that nature consists in these several 

 principles considered as having a natural respect to each other, in the 

 several passions being naturally subordinate to the one superior prin- 

 ciple of reflection or conscience. Every bias, instinct, propension 

 within, is a real part of our nature, but not the whole. Add to these 

 the superior faculty, whose office it is to adjust, manage, and preside 

 over them, and take in this its natural superiority, and you complete 

 the idea of human nature." A deviation from it, or its violation, he 

 thus defines : " And as in civil government the constitution is broken 

 in upon and violated by power and strength prevailing over authority, 

 so the constitution of man is broken in upon and violated by the 

 lower f;ulties or principles within prevailing over that which is in its 

 nature -jpreme over them alL" Man indeed cannot be considered as 

 left to himself, to act as present inclination may lead him: the very 

 ability of putting the questions, " Is this I am going about right, or 

 ia it wrong ? Is it good, or is it evil ?" implies an obligation to act 

 rightly, for it shews that he has a natural conception of right. The 

 objection, " Why should we be concerned about anything out of and 

 beyond ourselves?" is thus removed. Are we, or can wo be, indif- 

 ferent to disgrace, neglect, or contempt ? Man is by nature disposed 

 to action ; and " upon comparing some actions with this nature, they 

 appear suitable and correspondent to it : from comparison of other 

 actions with the same nature, there arises to our view some uusuita- 

 bleness or disproportion." Those which are most suitable to it are 

 the law or design of nature; and that which promotes real happiness, 

 or the true purpose of nature, is virtue. 



These sermons contain the germ of those principles of analogy 

 which were afterwards developed by the author in a separate work ; 

 when viewed in all their parts and bearings, they must be considered 

 as one of the most successful attempts to explain the true nature of 

 man as a moral agent, and to discover the springs of human action. 

 It has been observed by a recent writer (Austin, ' The Province of 

 Jurisprudence determined,' p. 109), "In so far as I can gather his 

 opinion from his admirable sermons, it would seem that the compound 

 hypothesis (that is, the hypothesis compounded of the hypothesis of 

 utility, and the hypothesis of the moral sense) was embraced by 

 Bishop Butler. But of this I am not certain : for, from many passages 

 in those sermons, we may infer that he thought the moral sense our 

 only index and guide." In this remark we concur : in several passages 

 Butler seems to consider the moral sense as that by which we judge 

 of the character of actions, and yet there are other passages which 

 appear to prevent us from adopting this conclusion. 



It is unnecessary to analyse the other admirable discourses : that 

 on the government of the tongue is a masterpiece of its kind ; and 

 the sermona on resentment and forgiveness of injuries are equally 

 remarkable for the profound insight into the principles by which 

 human society is held together, and for their practical utility. 



To this volume, in a later edition, he appended six other sermons, 

 preached on certain public occasions. One of these sermons (the 

 fourth) ia well calculated to meet certain objections that have been 

 made to the education of the poor. 



His residence at Stanhope continued until 1733, when he was drawn 

 from his retirement by being appointed chaplain to Lord Chancellor 

 Talbot. About the same time he was presented by his patron to a 

 prebend in the church of Rochester. This was done through the 

 interposition of his friend and fellow-pupil Seeker, who was anxious 

 for his re-appearance in the world, and wished to see him in somo 

 more conspicuous station than the rectory of Stanhope. Seeker, 

 having taken occasion to mention him to Queen Caroline, her Majesty 

 remarked that she thought he was dead ; and, not satisfied with his 

 assurance to the contrary, she inquired of Archbishop Blackburne, 

 who replied, " No, madam, but he is buried." In 1736 Butler was 

 appointed clerk of the closet to the queen, upon whom he was in con- 

 stant attendance until her death in the following year. He had lately 

 produced his great work, ' The Analogy of Religion, Natural and 

 Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature,' which he had 

 presented to her Majesty before publication, and which he dedicated 

 to the Lord Chancellor Talbot, " in acknowledgment of the highest 

 obligations to the late Lord Bishop of Durham and to himself." In this 



Bioo. Div. VOL. I. 



work it was his aim to demonstrate the connection between the present 

 and a future state, and to show that there could be but one author of 

 both, and consequently one general system of moral government by 

 which they must be regulated. Of this admirable work it has been 

 justly observed " Upon the whole, as our author was the first who 

 handled the argument in proof of religion from analogy in a set 

 treatise, he has undeniably merited the character of a first discoverer ; 

 others indeed had occasionally dropped some hints and remarks of 

 the argument, but Dr. Butler first brought it to a state of perfection. 

 The treatise contains the finishing and completion of that way of 

 reasoning, the foundation whereof was laid in his sermons." 



The year after the death of Queen Caroline, Butler was made bishop 

 of Bristol; and in 1740 he was presented to the deanery of St. Paul's, 

 on which occasion he resigned the rectory of Stanhope. One of his 

 first acts of patronage was to bestow on his old master, Mr. Barton, 

 master of the school at Wantage, the rectory of Hutton in Essex. 

 Butler was always liberal in the expenditure of his money ; he laid 

 out on the episcopal palace of Bristol 4000Z., and he was a munificent 

 benefactor to charitable institutions. In 1746 he was appointed clerk 

 of the closet to the king; and in 1750 was translated to the see of 

 Durham, vacant by the death of Dr. Edward Chandler, who had also 

 been a pupil, as already mentioned, at the academy at Tewkesbury. 

 The short time that he held this see allowed him to make only one 

 visitation of his diocese. The charge which he delivered to his clergy 

 on that occasion subjected him to much animadversion. He had 

 begun by lamenting the general decay of religion, and noticed it " as 

 a complaint by all serious persons." As an aid in remedying this evil 

 he recommended his clergy to " keep as well as they were able the 

 form and face of religion with decency and reverence, and in such a 

 degree as to bring the thoughts of religion often to the minds of the 

 people ; and to endeavour to make this form more and more sub- 

 servient to promote the power and reality of it." He insisted that 

 although the form might and often did exist without the substance, 

 yet that the substance could not bo preserved among mankind without 

 the form. He instanced the examples of heathen, Mohammedan, and 

 Roman Catholic countries, where the form had been very influential 

 in causing the superstition to sink deeply into the mind ; and he 

 inferred that true religion would, by the same rule, sink the more 

 deeply with such aid into the minds of all who should be serious and 

 well disposed. These observations, which, like all the remarks of this 

 profound thinker, show an intimate acquaintance with human nature, 

 were strongly censured as savouring of popery, and he was particularly 

 attacked in a pamphlet entitled 'A Serious Inquiry into the use and 

 importance of External Religion, occasioned by some passages in tho 

 Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Durham's Charge to the Clergy 

 of that Diocese.' The very sentence in which he says that the form 

 is to be made "subservient to promote the reality and the power," 

 ought to have been sufficient to protect him. Bishop Butler did not 

 long enjoy his last preferment. His health rapidly declined, and ho 

 died at Bath on the 16th of June 1752, and was buried in Bristol 

 cathedral. His writings, though not numerous, are sufficient to show 

 the extent of his knowledge, the solidity of his judgment, and tho 

 great powers of his mind. His statement of a question is fair and 

 candid, his reasoning is close and sincere, and his conclusions nearly 

 always just and convincing. His piety was unostentatious but fervent, 

 with something from natural disposition and the grave direction of 

 his studies approaching to gloom. A man whose thoughts were so 

 seriously employed, whose inquiries were of so abstruse a character, 

 could hardly be otherwise. Still "no man ever more thoroughly 

 possessed tha.t-meekneas of wisdom which the apostle enjoins ; he had 

 noticed the expression for its beauty ; his heart and disposition wero 

 conformed to it, and in high as in humble lifo it was uniformly 

 manifested in his conversation. Neither the consciousness of in- 

 tellectual strength, nor the just reputation which he had thereby 

 attained, nor the elevated station to which he had been raised, in the 

 slightest degree injured the natural modesty of his character, or the 

 mildness and sweetness of his temper," His intercourse with clergy 

 and laity was open and free ; his income he considered to belong to 

 his station, and not to himself; and so thoroughly was this feeling of 

 his understood that his relatives never indulged the expectation 

 of pecuniary benefit from his death. It was his remark, on his pro- 

 motion to Durham, " It would be a melancholy thing in the close of life 

 to have no reflections to entertain oneself with, save that one had spent 

 the revenues of the bishopric of Durham in a sumptuous course of 

 living, and enriched one's friends with the promotions of it, instead 

 of really having set oneself to do good, and to promote worthy men." 

 It has already been stated that he was accused of a disposition to 

 popery, in consequence of some expressions in his charge to the clergy 

 of Durham. This charge was repeated by an anonymous writer fifteen 

 years after his death, and was made to rest chiefly on the circumstance 

 of his having put up a cross in the episcopal chapel of Bristol. It was 

 also asserted that he had died in communion with the Church of 

 Rome. His friend Seeker, at that time archbishop of Canterbury, 

 satisfactorily disproved the charge. He did not deny that tho bishop 

 had erected the cross, but this, he contended, was no manifestation of 

 popery ; it was merely as an emblem and a memorial of the Christian 

 faith. With respect to his having died in communion with the Church 

 ot' Rome, tho circumstance was not even hinted at until fifteen years 



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