Letter III. Mr. Mansel’s Preface.—Butler

My Dear Sir,

I think we shall save time in the end, if we dwell a little longer upon Mr. Mansel’s Preface, before we proceed to his Lectures. He has introduced us to an eminent Scotch Philosopher. I have tried to show you what good we may derive from him, and where he fails us. The next paragraph brings before us an English Divine, with whom we are acquainted already: whom we both, I trust, regard with reverence and gratitude.

“But if the best theoretical expression of the limits of human thought is to be found in the writings of a philosopher but recently removed from among us; it is in a work of more than a century old that we find the best instance of the acknow-ledgment of those limits in practice. The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitu-tion and Course of Nature, furnishes an example of a profound and searching philosophical spirit, com-bined with a just perception of the bounds within which all human philosophy must be confined, to which, in the whole range of similar investigations, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a pa-rallel. The author of that work has been justly described as ‘one to whose deep sayings no thought-ful mind was ever yet introduced for the first time, without acknowledging the period an epoch in its intellectual history;’ and it may be added that the feeling of admiration thus excited will only be increased by a comparison of his writings with the pretentious failures of more ambitious thinkers. Connected as the present author has been for many years with the studies of Oxford, of which those writings have long formed an important part, he feels that he would be wanting in his duty to the University to which he owes so much, were he to hesitate to declare, at this time, his deep-rooted and increasing conviction, that sound religious phi-losophy will flourish or fade within her walls, ac-cording as she perseveres or neglects to study the works and cultivate the spirit of her great son and teacher, Bishop Butler.” (pp. ix., x.)

Mr. Mansel could not more happily have distinguished Sir William Hamilton from Butler, than by speaking of one as a theorist and the other as a practical man. They are admirable specimens of two diametrically opposite kinds of intellect. With an immensely wider range of reading, perhaps with far greater metaphysical power, Sir W. Hamilton’s natural dwelling-place is evidently amidst notions and opinions. Whatever subject he contemplates, he must reduce under some notion; till he can do so, it has no interest, scarcely any existence, for him. Bishop Butler is impatient of notions; he would translate them all into facts if he could. It is among facts that he lives; he cares for nothing else. What he wants is to find out their meaning; he would go into the depths or the heights for the sake of ascertaining that. He would never be tempted to forsake the firm ground of earth by the finest theory that was ever invented.

Mr. Mansel therefore has good reason for thinking that he has here found a man who is exceedingly unlike Schelling or Hegel, or even Cousin. But he has not a right to say that he has found a man who will run in the same team with Sir W. Hamilton. If by saying that one has “expounded the limits of human thought,” and that the other is “the best instance of the acknowledgment of those limits in practice,” he merely means that Butler, in his judgment, is not a madman,——since all in his judgment are madmen who attempt to transgress the limits of thought which Sir W. Hamilton has marked out,—the admirers of Bishop Butler must accept that compliment with becoming gratitude. But if he means that Butler has alluded anywhere to those limits of thought, and has signified his intention of confining himself within them, the passages in his writings which contain that announcement should have been produced. I cannot find them. His work is of the tentative, experimental kind. He begins from what he sees, not from some definition of what he could or could not conceive. He does not descend from Generals, but ascends from Particulars. He will start from the very lowest probability; but what he is feeling after is something fixed and certain. I then “should be wanting in my duty to the University to which I owe,” not so much as Mr. Mansel, but very much, “if I did not declare at this time my deeply-rooted conviction that Oxford cannot cultivate the spirit of her great son and teacher, Bishop Butler,” if she confounds two methods of study which are so entirely unlike as these,—if she accepts the dissertation on the Unconditioned as the measure and rule by which she is to try the ‘Analogy.’

Wishing as heartily as Mr. Mansel can do, that the students of Oxford should continue to reverence Butler, and should receive even greater benefits from him than any which they have received hitherto, I cannot conceal from myself that there are serious difficulties in the way of the accomplishment of this desire. They are difficulties which may be overcome if we state them fairly to ourselves; if we believe that Butler, like every great and generative thinker, has the power of adapting himself to circumstances and conditions which he did not contemplate, and which did not exist in his day; if we suppose that the principles which he enforced are not dependent upon the accidents of the moment to which he applied them, or even upon the peculiarities of his own temperament,—but will prove their force most when they are loosened from phrases which he adopted chiefly from compliance with the habits of a dry and dreary period, and which have not borne the test of later experience. Above all, I think those who look upon Butler as a great apologist for the Scriptures, will not suppose he has failed in his object, if the Scriptures themselves should be found to tell more than he could tell. In trying to state the difficulties to which I have alluded, and to point out how they may be removed, I shall not be speaking at random or from guess; I shall be giving the results of my own personal experience, as well as of my experience among young men of your class. I set them down in the conviction that both you and the Undergraduates of Oxford may attain a sounder religious philosophy through Bishop Butler than can ever be attained through the Bampton Lecturer.

1. Mr. Mansel has wisely quoted the entire title of Butler’s book. The ellipsis, The Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion, often makes us forget those pregnant and important words, without which the others have no significance,—to the Constitution and Course of Nature. I can answer for myself, that what I owe more than anything else to Butler, and to Butler, so far as I can trace and define obligations, more than to almost any other man, is the sense of being in such a Constitution,—one that I did not create, and have no power to alter, but with which I must be in conformity, or suffer the penalty of being at war with it.

It is not the force of the comparison one thinks of first; it is not the conclusiveness of the argument. What facts are these by which you are illustrating your Religion, natural or revealed! How profoundly important they are to me? This is a thought which startles and frightens a man before he has time to calculate the effect of what he is reading on the mind of an opponent. I do not wonder that any one who has felt this should speak of his first acquaintance with Butler as an “epoch in his life”. His rapid and brilliant Irish namesake would never, I am persuaded, have used that language about any one who had merely supplied him with a new illustration or argument. His own wit would have produced hundreds of these for or against any cause, on the plaintiff’s side or the defendant’s. It is quite a different thing when one is forced to ponder the path of one’s own life,—to know what it is that wit and argument cannot devise or change. That remains with us as part of an everlasting history when arguments that seemed to us very decisive, have faded from our recollection, or even have proved fallacious.

Any one who cares to know the man Butler, should study the ‘Sermons on Human Nature’ as much as the ‘Analogy.’ Both, I believe, will make the same impression upon his mind. In one as much as the other, Butler is proving himself a constitutional writer, in the fullest sense of that word. He is helping us to understand what the sense of the word is by bringing us gradually into an experience of the fact which it denotes. How we become partakers of that experience is as hard to say as it is to trace the steps by which one is familiarized to a tree, or a face. By slow, repeated strokes, each of which in itself is scarcely perceptible, the conviction is wrought into you. The seriousness of the writer’s own conviction has had more share in communicating it to you than any skill of which he is master.

2. Butler was well aware of one obstacle to the reception of this belief. Our frivolity, our delight in our own conceptions rather than in the observation of facts and the reflection upon them, this kind of danger was constantly present to his mind. He speaks of men’s levity and impatience of trouble with sorrow, sometimes almost with bitterness.¹ But there was a hindrance to the acceptance of his teaching which he was not prepared for, which no man living just at his time, and with his education, could fully appreciate. What is it that commonly awakens a man out of his frivolity? What is that fact which presents itself to him when he begins to think earnestly? It is the sense of his own evil; what is commonly called—and I do not think there is any better phrase to describe it by—the conviction of sin. Not the perception of an order at all, but of a disorder; not an interest about the laws of the universe, but about my own very self; this is what takes possession of me. All religion, it seems to me, has to do with this. I cannot understand what it means if it is not occupied about this fact of which I have become so terribly conscious, if it does not explain that fact to me, and make known to me some other fact concerning myself which may render that less intolerable. Nature gives me apparently no information about it. Sea, sky, air,—each say, “The secret of thy trouble and of the deliverance from it is not in me.” I resort to the Bible only because I have been told it is there. Slowly out of the words of some Prophet or Evangelist or Apostle it comes. The dream is told as well as the interpretation.

Now a man returning to Butler in the midst of this experience, or when he has just attained the result of it, feels what can only be described as a bitter discontent. He may pursue the study as a school-task; he may prepare himself for an examination in the Analogy; he may hope that it will serve his turn hereafter in combating the objections of infidels. But all personal sympathy with it is gone.

He does not understand its nomenclature. The religion which it speaks of does not look like the religion with which he is occupied in his closet. He begins to regard it as an artificial, outward thing, which has acquired, unfortunately, the same name with the real inward thing. There is a bewilderment in the equivoque; he submits to it, reluctant and protesting, supposing that there must in the nature of things be one religion for the schools, and another for the man himself. Yet he feels more in Butler than in any of the writers upon evidences like Paley, the sharpness of the contradiction. He can fancy that arguments about credibility and authenticity lie outside of him. The analogy appeals to himself. And yet it talks to him about Nature, and a constitution of Nature with which he, the sinner, can recognize no fellowship, in which he has the least possible interest. It merely introduces the Bible as containing certain difficulties like those in this constitution of Nature, whereas he has fled to it as a refuge from the only difficulties that have really ever tormented him, or which appear to him of any consequence.

3. That these feelings should exist in some of the most serious readers, must be a great discouragement to any University teacher who wishes to promote the study and cultivate the spirit of Butler. Perhaps the discouragement may be lessened for a time when he perceives amongst other young men, also in earnest,—amongst some of those even who have passed through this state of mind, a strong reaction against it. From such he will hear loud denunciations of what they call merely “subjective” religion, cries as loud for a well defined religious system which shall come with the authority of a long tradition, which is given to all, not submitted to the private judgments of any. Those who demand a religion of this kind unquestionably turn to Butler with far greater respect, with far more expectation of finding sympathy in him and support from him, than the class to which I referred just now. They welcome the introduction to the Analogy with great delight. They put it forward as the protection against the craving for certainty which characterizes scientific men on the one side, the believers in an infallible authority on the other. ‘See,’ they say, ‘what Butler teaches us respecting Probability as the guide of human life; see how he admonishes us that we ought to take the safer course, even if the arguments in favour of a more dangerous one actually predominate! Wise and excellent counsellor! What can we do better than apply his maxim in determining whether we shall accept or reject any of the traditions of our fathers?’

Such preparation is there in these minds for the study of Butler by their sympathy with some passages in his opening chapter. But what disappointment awaits them when they actually pursue that study through the subsequent chapters! All the promise of an appeal to the traditions of the past as a protection against the exercise of the understanding upon the facts of the present is utterly belied. On such a question as that of a future state, I am led to think, not of what has been said about it in other days, but of the deep, awful fact of my own personal being,—of the strong evidence which there must be to show me that that can be dissolved,—of the absence of any such evidence in the world around me or in my own experience,—of the presence of a number of facts in both, which corroborate a conclusion that would be weighty without them. Even when I come to the chapter on Punishment,—where the argument for believing anything whatever on the ground of safety must be strongest,—I am still led along in the same quiet unexcited method to notice, not what has been said or threatened of punishment in another state, but the actual connection between ill-doing and punishment in this state,—the signs which there are of a fixed, unchangeable law in the midst of apparent anomalies,—the warrant there is for believing that that law must fully assert itself some day. This is a method of proof so entirely alien from the notions and habits of those who looked to Butler as the champion of Church authority against the exercises of a profane reasoning, that their expectation must be numbered among one of the main hindrances to the “study of his works and the cultivation of his spirit.”

4. But these students may reckon, like the others, that if the ‘Analogy’ does not meet their own especial wants, it may at least furnish them with effectual weapons against different prevalent forms of avowed unbelief. That all-inclusive argument, There are not more difficulties in our hypothesis than yours;—Without Natural and Revealed Religion you would still meet with a number of unsolved problems in the Course and Constitution of Nature,—what mouths may it not stop, what subtle reasonings may it not put to rest? My friend! have you tried? Do you know in yourself, do you know in the case of others, what it can effect? It is well that you should understand before you take Orders, or—permit me to say it—in your ministrations to your brethren, in your own heart, there will be a hollowness greater than you can guess. You have worked through the Analogy, you have strengthened your knowledge by reading all the books of Mr. Rogers, and many others who support the same thesis. You can produce the confutation of this and that objection at a moment’s notice. But what if you are met with agreement, not objections? What if the unbeliever should say to you,—You are quite right. I am tormented with perplexities, difficulties, anomalies in the course and Constitution of Nature. They haunt me by night and by day. The condition of millions of human beings in this country, in every country of the world, their physical condition, their moral condition, crushes me; it has taken away from me all faith that there is an Order in the Universe, or that there is a God of Order. I thought, perhaps, as you spoke of a Revelation of God, that might have helped me out of my infinite darkness, that might have given me some light and hope. I find from your own confession that it will not. You wish me to receive your Revelation because it leaves me where it found me—not more hopeless, more Atheistic than I was before. I thank you for the offer, but it is not what I want.

Or what if you are met with such an answer as this, coming from a person of quite another class? There are unsolved problems, you say, in the Constitution and Course of Nature. No doubt there are thousands and ten thousands of them. But a number have been solved. We are always hoping for the solution of more. It is the work of the lives of us scientific men to seek after the solution. We feel that we are dishonest men when we are not busy in that work, when we are not pursuing it with hopeful earnestness. We start with ignorance,—the sense of our ignorance increases at every step. But that does not hinder us from seeking after truths, after certainties. As long as we float about among hypotheses and probabilities, we are self-conceited enough; as long as we acquiesce in ignorance, we are conceited enough. It is when we demand truth and refuse to abandon the search of it that we become awe-stricken and humble. In your subject, if we understand you aright, the opposite rule holds. You do not seek for certainties; you are content with hypotheses. Therefore it seems to us there is no Analogy between the Constitution and Course of Nature, and Religion, Natural or Revealed, as you expound it to us.

Now all these very serious hindrances to the study of Butler proceed, you will perceive, from the kind of men whose opposition he would the least have dreaded, upon whose sympathy he would have most counted; from those who are looking earnestly upon the world, and really desiring to do their own work in it. And you, as an Oxford man, cannot be ignorant that nowhere more than in Oxford is each class of these feelings likely to exist,—to exist in great strength and liveliness. In Butler’s own day, it was the first home of that Methodist movement which has affected England so mightily ever since. In our day it has been the starting-point of the High Church movement. Numbers there must be groaning over social anomalies and contradictions. Mathematicians and experimental students are vigorously and successfully asserting their claim to be heard there. A splendid Museum is rising to attest the conviction of the University that something is known, that more may be known, of the Course and Constitution of Nature. Are all these influences, so different, some of them so contradictory,—to conspire in ostracizing Butler?

I am sure they need not. If I had Mr. Mansel’s knowledge and faculty of persuasion, and could get the ear of one and another young man who was strongly possessed with any of the thoughts to which I have referred, I believe I could show him that the more he was determined not to part with any of his deepest convictions, the greater might be his respect for the Analogy, the more he might learn from it.

1. I would begin with the man who is absorbed by the sense of personal evil, and the need of personal deliverance. I would long for him that he might never let go that deep, awful truth of which he has become conscious,—might never care less for the discovery that has been made to him of a goodness and forgiveness mightier than the sin within him. I should agree with him altogether that to the Bible, and not to anything in the order and constitution of nature, he was indebted for that discovery. I should agree with him that to the study of the Bible, in its simple and literal signification, he was called by all his past experience, by all the deepest monitions of God’s Spirit. Then I would ask him, whether, as he enters upon this task in this hope, it does not strike him that he has overlooked some words which stand out, very prominently, in the Gospels, I mean these—The Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven. Are not these actually the most prominent words in the Evangelical narratives, those which a literal student has least right to pass by or to treat carelessly? Is it not the professed business of the narratives to unfold the meaning of those words, to remove the vulgar apprehensions respecting them which existed in the minds of the disciples, which are likely to exist in our minds? That a man in the eagerness and passion of an inquiry concerning the condition of his own soul should scarcely see these constantly recurring expressions, at least not attach any significance to them, is exceedingly natural. Any man who knows anything of himself will understand such an oversight, strange as it is. But can it safely continue? May not the indifference about words, to which our Lord himself attached so much importance, be one cause why those facts of personal experience, once held strongly, become weak in so many minds,—why they are held rather as recollections of the past than as present truths,—why the phrases take the place of that which they signify, why violent reactions banish even the recollection, or cause it to be contemned? If we knew what that Kingdom of Heaven was which is said to be about us, to be within us, might not we know better, more deeply, what our own radical evil has been; why only a Divine power can extirpate it?

But supposing we begin with very solemn purpose to consider this language of the Bible, are we not reminded a little of the language of Butler, of some of the lessons which he sought to impress upon us? There is a Constitution belonging to us as men, a different Constitution from that which is to be seen in Nature, but not a less real one. There is an Analogy between it and the Constitution and Course of Nature. Does not our Lord say so? What do His parables mean if He does not? Must not we be under the deepest obligation to a writer who tried to fix those truths upon us,—who probably did fix them upon us more than we knew,—even if in a particular crisis of our moral history his was not just the kind of assistance that we craved for?

Is there still something in these words, ‘Religion, Natural or Revealed,’ which grates upon your ear which does not connect itself readily with our Lord’s phrase, ‘Kingdom of Heaven,’ or with your own sense of what religion is? Well, on the subject of nomenclature I will not dispute with you. I think Butler adopted his from the custom of his age. If it strikes you that the word ‘Religion’ is better limited to internal life,—if it is for you, as the Germans and Sir William Hamilton and Mr. Mansel would say, merely ‘subjective,’ (remember, that is no word of mine, I dislike it heartily,) I shall not complain. In truth, I am not so careful as some are to ascertain the force of a word which is Roman and Pagan, rather than Jewish and Christian, which has nothing strictly corresponding to it either in the Old or New Testament. I find Evangelists and Apostles speaking not of Religion, but of God. I think, if Butler had lived in our time, he would have much preferred their language to that which he accepted because it was current in the eighteenth century, and that it would really have accorded much better with the meaning of his books. That change would no doubt involve another, also, I think, very favourable to the full understanding of his lessons, and to the scattering of clouds which have hidden from us their real purpose. St. Paul speaks of God as revealing, through the works He had made, His eternal Power and Godhead. Having started from that point, he is able consistently and harmoniously to speak of the perfect revelation in the Son. The phrase, ‘Natural and Revealed Religion,’ is, apparently at least, inconsistent with his view of the case; is it not also in itself ambiguous and bewildering? Would not many chapters in Butler become plainer if we took him to mean that the Author of Nature, whose existence he assumes, was revealing a part of His mind through the constitution and course of Nature, was indicating in that, a revelation that should be more complete and more directly addressed to man?

2. But if I make this concession to one class of serious and devout students, am I not abandoning all chance of recommending our author to that other class which appears to demand first of all what they call an objective Religion,—something given to us, not merely experienced by us? I should be very sorry if I thought so. For among these men have I met also with a devoted purpose, a thorough conviction, which I should count it a sin to weaken in them, which I am sure their friends and fellow-sufferers, if not their teachers, should do their utmost to strengthen in them. I tremble when I see those “first affections,” even those “shadowy recollections” which once dwelt in them and coloured their lives, passing away,—their life’s star “fading into the light of common day.” I know the loss must be grievous; and yet I think it is inevitable so long as they fancy that it is a religious system which they are craving for; that it is not rather a City that hath foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God,—a Temple in which they themselves are to be living stones. This is the true High Church longing. Those who become half-conscious that it is this they want, and yet retain a confused notion that it is something else which they want, rush to Rome for the satisfaction of a hope which is mixed of the thinnest dream and the firmest substance, fancying that the vague anticipations of the future which she cherishes in them will meet the one, and her present materialism the other. Alas! how many who do not take this course may find in the vagueness of their own thoughts and speculations, in the materialism of ordinary social existence, a drearier caput mortuum of all their early expectations than even the Romish confessional and the Romish ceremonial offer to them!

Is there nothing in their old friend and teacher which might save them from this alternative,—which might point to the actual realization of that which in their youth was only a fair ideal? Those dry, hard sermons of his upon Human Nature are founded upon the text, “For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office; so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.” In the opening of his first sermon you see the man of the eighteenth century. He feels the extreme beauty of St. Paul’s comparison; he knows how it was drawn out by the Apostle himself in the Epistle to the Corinthians; but he supposes that such passages must have belonged “to the condition and usages of the Christian world at the time they were written,” to “circumstances now ceased and altered.” He hovers about the language with a bashful tenderness; with an evident feeling that it must be universal; that if ever language was universal, that is. Yet he is tied and bound by the usages and conditions of the Christian world in his time. The religion of hoops and ruffles enchains even his heart and intellect. But what a noble effort he makes to emancipate himself from it! What a sense he has that the Apostle was pointing to a fellowship grounded in the very nature of things, in the very constitution of humanity, which had nothing to do with hoops and ruffles at all! He longs to speak of men as constituted in Christ. His words often become feeble and contradictory because he cannot utter what is struggling within him. But how he may help us to utter it! How he may enable us to clear away the difficulties in himself and in us, in the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth, which hinder us from acknowledging the one Body in Christ, and all as being members one of another! How he drives us to seek a real not an artificial ground for a society of men—a Church of men—to rest upon! How, in his slow, clear, calm way, never taking two steps at a time, he makes us feel that every idea of our human nature must be inadequate, must be false, which does not assume a righteous ground for its thoughts, movements, activities; which does not treat every departure from that righteous ground as an act of rebellion on the part of our individual tempers and inclinations against the Order in which we are placed, against the law of Love which is holding us together! How much we gain in the force of the demonstration by those very circumstances of the author which make his statement of it scientifically imperfect!

Most affectionately then I would commend Butler to these students, in the confidence that if they will meditate both this work and the Analogy by the light of that higher wisdom which he and they would both confess to be in St. Paul, they may attain to such a grounded belief in a Church—as an actual family in heaven and earth, named in the Name of one Father, united in the Person of an elder Brother who sacrificed Himself for it, inhabited by the Spirit of the Father and the Son,—as no system, Romish or Anglican, could ever give them. And will not they then have an understanding with those who dwell in their experiences of individual sin, of rebellion against Christ’s law of love, of the blood which cleanseth away even that sin,—such as they never had before?

3. And will not both be able, having the wisdom which is taught by their different disciplines, to meet with a kindlier sympathy, with a bolder proclamation, those who demand a revelation which shall explain some of the perplexities in the course and constitution of Nature that have baffled them? Will they any longer assume that miserable attitude of defence which they pretend they have learnt from Butler, arguing that the Incarnation and Sacrifice of the Son of God, the revelation of the second Adam, the descent of the Comforter, do not make the condition of the universe more dark than it was before? Have we not faith to put the Gospel of the Son of Man, who came down from Heaven, and ascended into heaven, and is in heaven, upon another issue than this? Dare we not say, “Yes, we beseech you to consider whether this is not the interpretation of the anomalies which you see in the world; whether you are not told here how those anomalies shall be brought to an end; how the law which Butler declared to be latent in the constitution and course of Nature,—to be visible in the constitution of man,—shall triumph over all that has fought against it”? Dare we not say to the investigator of Nature—“In God’s Name go forward; His blessing be with thee! All the secrets that are hid in His works He would have thee search out. He rebukes only the cowardice which hides the talent in the napkin, because it counts Him an austere ruler. Work on with ever-increasing courage, and therefore with ever-increasing reverence and love. For there is an analogy,—as Butler has shown us there is,—between the Kingdom of God in man, His highest Kingdom, and His Kingdom in Nature. He has revealed the first in Christ, that we may know it, and enter into it. He will reveal the other to the patient inquirer who believes Christ’s promise as Butler believed it, that those who seek shall find.”

Blessed shall he be whosoever carries this message into the lecture-rooms and pulpits of Oxford. Butler’s spirit, and a higher Spirit than Butler’s, will be his guide and teacher!

Faithfully yours,