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Should darkness come ere day had reached WHICH LEONARDO DA VINCI SHALL DRAW

From The Contemporary Review. BISHOP BUTLER AND THE ZEIT-GEIST.*

I.

your

says must be capable of being put more truly, put clearer. Yet we at Oxford used to read our Aristotle or our Butler with the same absolute faith in the classicality of their matter as in the classicality of

Homer's form.

The time inevitably arrives, to people who think at all seriously, when, as their experience widens, they ask themselves what they are really to conclude about the masters and the works thus authoritatively imposed upon them in their youth. Above all, of a man like Butler one is sure to ask an Englishman, a Christian, oneself this a modern, whose circumstances and point of view we can come pretty well to know and to understand, and whose works we can be sure of possessing just as he published them and meant them to stand before us.

And Butler deserves that one

IN Scotland, I imagine, you have in philosophical studies small experience of the reverent devotion formerly, at any rate, paid at Oxford to text-books in philosophy, such as the sermons of Bishop Butler, or the Ethics of Aristotle. Your students in philosophy have always read pretty widely, and have not concentrated themselves, as we at Oxford used to concentrate ourselves, upon one or two great books. However, in your study of the Bible you got abundant experience of our attitude of mind towards our two philosophers. Your text-book was right; there were no mistakes there. If there was anything obscure, anything hard to be comprehended, it was your ignorance which was in fault, your failure of comprehension. should regard him very attentively, both Just such was our mode of dealing with on his own account, and also because of Butler's sermons and Aristotle's Ethics. the immense and confident laudation beWhatever was hard, whatever was obscure, stowed upon his writings. Whether he the text-book was all right, and our under- completely satisfies us or no, a man so standings were to conform themselves to profoundly convinced that "virtue - the it. What agonies of puzzle has Butler's law of virtue written on our hearts—is account of self-love, or Aristotle's of the the law we are born under; "a man so intellectual virtues, caused to clever under- staunch in his respectful allegiance to reagraduates and to clever tutors; and by son, a man who says: "I express myself what feats of astonishing explanation, as- with caution, lest I should be mistaken to tonishingly acquiesced in, were those ago- vilify reason, which is indeed the only nies calmed! Yet the true solution of the faculty we have wherewith to judge condifficulty was in some cases, undoubtedly, cerning anything, even revelation itself; that our author, as he stood, was not right, a man, finally, so deeply and evidently in not satisfactory. As to secular authors, at earnest, filled with so awful a sense of the any rate, it is indisputable that their works reality of things and of the madness of are to be regarded as contributions to hu- self-deception: "Things and actions are man knowledge, and not more. It is only what they are, and the consequences of experience which assures us that even the them will be what they will be; why then poetry and artistic form of certain epochs should we desire to be deceived?"- such has not, in fact, been improved upon, and a man, even if he was somewhat despoticis, therefore, classical. But the same ex- ally imposed upon our youth, may yet well perience assures us that in all matters of challenge the most grave consideration knowledge properly so called, above all, of from our mature manhood. And even did such difficult knowledge as are questions we fail to give it willingly, the strong conof mind and of moral philosophy, any writ-senting eulogy upon his achievements er in past times must be on many points capable of correction, much of what he

The following discourse, and a second which will succeed it, were two lectures given at the Edinburgh

Philosophical Institution. They had the form, therefore, of an address to hearers, not readers; and they are printed in that form in which they were delivered.

would extort it from us. It is asserted that his three sermons on "Human Nature" are, in the department of moral philosophy, "perhaps the three most valuable essays that were ever published." They are this because they contain his famous a doctrine which,

doctrine of conscience

If,

being, in those sermons, "explained ac- | dustry, in physical science and the prac cording to the strict truth of our mental tical arts, is called an interest in things, constitution, is irresistible." Butler is therefore said, in the words of one of his admirers, "by pursuing precisely the same mode of reasoning in the science of morals as his great predecessor Newton had done in the system of nature, to have formed and concluded a happy alliance between faith and philosophy." And again: "Metaphysic, which till then had nothing to support it but mere abstraction or shadowy speculation, Butler placed on the firm basis of observation and experiment." Sir James Mackintosh says of the sermons: "In these sermons Butler has taught truths more capable of being exactly distinguished from the doctrines of his predecessors, more satisfactorily established by him, more comprehensively applied to particulars, more rationally connected with each other, and therefore more worthy of the name of discovery, than any with which we are acquainted, if we ought not, with some hesitation, to except the first steps of the Grecian philosophers towards a theory of morals." The "Analogy" Mackintosh calls "the most original and profound work extant in any language on the philosophy of religion." Such are Butler's claims upon our atten

tion.

and an interest in morals and religion is called an interest in words. People really do seem to imagine that in seeing and learning how buttons are made, or papier mâché, they shall find some new and untried vital resource; that our prospects from this sort of study have something peculiarly hopeful and animating about them, and that the positive and practical thing to do is to give up religion and turn to them. However, as Butler says in his sermon on "Self-Deceit," "Religion is true, or it is not. If it be not, there is no reason for any concern about it." however, it be true, it is important, and then it requires attention; as in the same sermon Butler says, in his serious way: "We cannot be acquainted with, nor in any propriety of speech be said to know, anything but what we attend to." And he speaks of the disregard of men for what he calls "the reproofs and instructions " that they meet with in religion and morals, as a disregard of what is "exactly suitable to the state of their own mind and the course of their behaviour; " more suitable, he would certainly have thought, than being instructed how buttons are made, or papier mâché. I am entirely of Butler's opinion. And though the posture of mind of a good many clever persons at the present day is that of the French Encyclopædists, yet here in the capital of Scotland, that country which has been such a stronghold of what I call “Hebraism," of deep and ardent occupation with righteousness and religion, you will not complain of my taking for my subject so eminent a doctor in the science of these important matters as Butler, and one who is said to have established his doctrine so firmly and impregnably. I can conceive no claim more great to advance on a man's behalf, and none which it more behoves us to test accurately. Let us attempt to satisfy ourselves how far, in Butler's case,

It is true, there are moments when the philosophy of religion and the theory of morals are not popular subjects, when men seem disposed to put them out of their minds, to shelve them as sterile, to try whether they cannot get on without them. Mr. John Morley, in that interesting series of articles on Diderot which he is publishing in the Fortnightly Review, points out how characteristic and popular in the French Encyclopædia was its authors' " earnest enthusiasm for all the purposes, intents, and details of productive industry, for physical science and the practical arts; "how this was felt to be a welcome relief to people tired of metaphysical and religious discussions. "Intellectual- it is solid. ly," says he, "it was the substitution of interest in things for interest in words." And undoubtedly there are times when a reaction of this sort sets in, when an interest in the processes of productive in

But first we should have before our minds a notion of the life and circumstances of the man with whose works we are going to deal. Joseph Butler was

In 1751 he delivered his first and only charge to the clergy of Durham, the famous charge upon the "Use and Importance of External Religion." But in June, 1752, he was taken, in a state of extreme. weakness, to Bath, died there on June 16th, and was buried in his old cathedral of Bristol. When he died he was just sixty years of age. He was never married.

born on the 18th of May, 1692, at Wan- | In 1746 he was made clerk of the closet tage, in Berkshire. His father was a re- to the king, and in 1750 he was translated tired tradesman, a Dissenter, and the son to the great and rich see of Durham. was sent to a Dissenting school. Before His health had by this time given way. he left school, he had his first correspondence with Dr. Samuel Clarke, on certain points in Clarke's "Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God;" and he wrote to a friend that he "designed to make truth the business of his life." Dissent did not satisfy him; he left the Presbyterian body, to which his father belonged, and was entered, in 1714, at Oxford, at Oriel College. There he formed a friendship with Edward Talbot, a fellow Such are, in outline, the external facts of Oriel, son of Bishop Talbot, and brother of Butler's life and history. To fill up to the future lord chancellor Talbot; and the outline for us there remain a very few this friendship determined the outward anecdotes, and one or two letters. Bishop course of his life. It led to his being ap- Philpotts, of Exeter, who afterwards folpointed preacher at the Rolls Chapel, in lowed him in the living of Stanhope, 1719, the year after his ordination as sought eagerly at Stanhope for some trapriest, and when he was only twenty-six ditions of his great predecessor; all he years old. There the famous sermons could gather was, that Butler had been were preached, between 1719 and 1726. much beloved, that he rode about on a Bishop Talbot appointed him, in 1722, to black pony, and rode very fast, and that hẹ the living of Haughton, in the diocese of was greatly pestered by beggars, because Durham, and, in 1725, transferred him to of his known easiness. But there has the rich living of Stanhope, in the same been preserved Butler's letter to Sir Robdiocese. After obtaining Stanhope, But-ert Walpole on accepting the see of Brisler resigned, in 1726, his preachership at the Rolls, and published his fifteen sermons. They made no noise, and it was four years before a second edition of them was required. But he had friends who knew his worth, and in 1733 he was made chaplain to Lord Chancellor Talbot, in 1736 clerk of the closet to Queen Caroline, the wife of George the Second. In this year he published the "Analogy." Queen Caroline died the year afterwards, and Butler returned to Stanhope. The queen, however, had, before her death, strongly recommended him to her husband; and George the Second, in 1738, made him bishop of Bristol, then the poorest of sees, with an income of but some £400 a year. About eighteen months afterwards, he. was appointed to the deanery of St. Paul's, when he resigned Stanhope, and passed his time between Bristol and London, acquiring a house at Hampstead. He attended the House of Lords regularly, but took no part, so far as is known, in the debates.

tol, and a passage in this letter is curious, as coming from such a man. He express. es his gratitude to the king, and then proceeds thus:

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 accident. Indeed, the bishopric of Bristol is not very suitable either to the condition of my fortune or the circumstances, nor, as I should have thought, answerable to the recommendation with which I was honoured. 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 desire, sir, you will please let his Majesty know that I humbly accept this instance of his favour with the utmost possible gratitude.

But you

As one reads that passage, it is impossible not to have the feeling that we are