BISHOP BUTLER an ^Appreciation with the best Wastages of fit: Writings selected and arranged by i //•;•'/:, hf-i-r ;/7';!-;vV GKAKT 3 1. WMIVI > BISHOP BUTLER XBISHOP BUTLER an ^Appreciation -with the 'Best 'Passages of his Writings selected and arranged by ^Alexander Whyte D.D. 112246 Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier Saint ^Mary Street^ Edinburgh^ and 21 Paternoster Square^ London 1903 LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE Edinburgh : T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majc>ty To £My Classes INTRODUCTORY NOTE The Sample Passages selected out of Butler's Works have been indexed after Dr. Angus'* 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. CONTENTS PAGE APPRECIATION 13 BUTLER'S BEST PASSAGES:— ON GOD' 91 ON THE LOVE OF GOD 95 ON SCRIPTURE 97 ON CONSCIENCE,. IOO ON REASON / 110 ON CHARACTER'. I IO ON HABIT : 115 ON PROBATION . . . . . . Il8 ON THE PASSIONS . . . . . -131 ON MEANS AND ENDS 135 ON PROBABILITY 139 ON KNOWLEDGE .' 141 ON OUR IGNORANCE' 145 ON RICHES 148 ON CHARITY 153 ON HAPPINESS " 156 ON BENEVOLENCE * 159 ON ILL-WILL " 1 60 ix Butler PAGE ON PARTY-SPIRIT « 161 ON MISUNDERSTANDING - 162 ON PEEVISHNESS < 164 ON RESIGNATION / 165 ON DEVOTION' 172 ON THE CHURCH- 175 ON PUBLIC WORSHIP^ 181 ON PASTORAL CARE, 183 ON PULPIT CONTROVERSY. .... 185 ON THE STUDY OF DIVINITY ' . . . . 188 ON MISSIONS ' . .189 ON READING 190 ON STYLE • 191 ON TALKATIVENESS , 193 ON AMUSEMENTS f 198 ON CHILDREN - 2OO ON DEATH .* 202 ON THE FUTURE LIFE 204 LETTERS 209 PRAYERS . 221 APPRECIATION APPRECIATION JOSEPH BUTLER had for his contemporaries John Locke, Isaac Newton, 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 1733, the Alciphron in 1733, the Analogy in 1736, the Religious Affections in 1746, the Freedom of the Will in 1754, the Dictionary in 1755, and tne Lives of the Poets in 1781. If Butler's lifetime was not the very greatest age of English literature, and philosophy, and re- ligion, it was 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 16 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 well as all those who would 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 17 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 hist best, so far as style is concerned, when he isj 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. j».- 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 i8 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 afreets 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, I 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-dislike 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 way 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. Till 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 world 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 : tc 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 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 affection 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 Hor