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 the Lives of the Poets in 1781. If Butler's lifetime was not the very greatest age of English literature, and philosophy, and religion, 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. 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. |