58 Not "a cruel platitude'' CHAP. 



in nature with respect to those seeds by foreign causes 

 is to us as unaccountable as, what is much more 

 terrible, the present and future ruin of so many moral 

 agents by themselves." 1 



This passage at least its last sentence has been 

 called a " cruel platitude " ; but most unjustly. 

 Butler had not the slightest taint of cruelty in his 

 nature; his sense of human sinfulness was almost 

 morbidly acute, but he had nothing whatever of that 

 fierce delight in the thought of the Divine vengeance 

 upon it which has animated such men as Tertullian 

 and Jonathan Edwards. He was a logician, and, 

 though I believe he fell into errors in the applica- 

 tion of the principles of analogy, he was aware that 

 no analogy is perfect ; he could not fail to perceive 

 that this analogy fails in those particulars which are 

 in themselves the most important namely, that 

 seeds, unlike " moral agents," have neither power to 

 sin nor capacity to suffer ; but he thought it needless 

 to remind his readers of anything so obvious. I 

 admit, however, that this remark of Butler's may 

 naturally, though not quite reasonably, excite indig- 

 nation at a first reading ; and he was deficient in the 

 great literary virtue of sympathy with the reader. 

 But to return to the consideration of the entire 



1 This passage was probably suggested by 2nd Esdras viii. 

 41 : "For as the husbandman soweth much seed upon the 

 ground, and planteth many trees, and yet the thing that is 

 sown good in its season cometh not up, neither doth all that is 

 planted take root ; even so is it of them that are sown in the 

 world they shall not all be saved." 



