to the princely See of Durham, was not the effect of ambition, but the voluntary tribute of those in power to transcendent talent and exalted though retiring worth. An instance of his modest and unambitious habits, given in the record of his life, is worthy of preservation, and is highly illustrative of hist character. For seven years he was occupied in the humble and laborious duties of a parish priest, at Stanhope. His friends regretted his retirement, and sought preferment for him. Mr. Secker, an intimate friend of Butler, being made chaplain to the king in 1732, one day, in conversation with Queen Caroline, took occasion to mention his friend's name. The queen said she thought he was dead, and asked Archbishop Blackburn if that was not the case. His reply was, No, madam, but he is buried.” He was thus raised again to notice, and ultimately to high honours in the hierarchy of the English church.

66

Butler was naturally of a contemplative and somewhat melancholy turn of mind. He sought retirement, therefore, and yet needed society. It is probable that natural inclination, ast well as the prevalent habits of unbelief in England, suggested the plan of his Analogy. Yet, though retiring and unambitious, he was lauded in the days of his advancement, as sustaining the episcopal office with great dignity and splendour; as conducting the ceremonies of religion with a pomp approaching the grandeur of the Roman Catholic form of worship; and as treating the neighbouring clergy and nobility with the "pride, pomp, and circumstance," becoming, in their view, a minister of Jesus transformed into a nobleman of secular rank, and reckoned among the great officers of state. These are, in our view, spots in the life of Butler; and all attempts to conceal them have only rendered them more glaring. No authority of antiquity, no plea of the grandeur of imposing rites, can justify the pomp and circumstance appropriate to an English prelatical bishop, or invest with

sacred authority the canons of a church that elevates the humble ministers of Him who had not where to lay his head, to the splendours of a palace or the pretended honours of an archiepiscopal throne-to a necessary alliance, under every danger to personal and ministerial character, with profligate noblemen or intriguing and imperious ministers. But Butler drew his title to memory, in subsequent ages, neither from the tinsel of rank, the staff and lawn of office, nor the attendant pomp and grandeur arising from the possession of one of the richest benefices in England. Butler the prelate will be forgotten: Butler the author of the Analogy will live to the last recorded time.

In the few remains of the Life of Butler, we lament, still more than any thing we have mentioned, that we learn nothing of his habits of study, his mode of investigation, and, especially, the process by which he composed his Analogy. We are told, indeed, that it combines the results of his thoughts for twenty years, and his observations and reading during that long period of his life. He is said to have written and re-written different parts of it, to have studied each word and phrase, until it expressed precisely his meaning, and no more. It bears plenary evidence that it must have been written by such a condensing and epitomizing process. Any man may be satisfied of this who attempts to express the thoughts in other language than that employed in the Analogy. Instinctively the sentences and paragraphs will swell out to a much greater size, and defy all the powers we possess to reduce them to their primitive dimensions, unless they be driven within the precise enclosures prescribed by the mind of Butler. We regret in vain that this is all our knowledge of the mechanical and mental process by which this book was composed. We are not permitted to see him at his toil, to mark the workings of his mind, and to learn the art of looking intensely at a thought until we see it standing

alone, aloof from all attendants, and prepared for a permanent location where the author intended to fix its abode, to be contemplated, as he viewed it, in all coming ages. We can hardly repress our indignation that those who undertake to write the biography of such gifted men, should not tell us less of their bodies, their trappings, their honours, and their offices, and more of the workings of the spirit, the process of subjecting and restraining the native wanderings of the mind. Nor can we suppress the sigh of regret that he has not himself revealed to us what no other man could have done, and admitted subsequent admirers to the intimacy of friendship, and to a contemplation of the process by which the Analogy was conceived and executed. Over the past, however, it is in vain to sigh. Every man feels that hitherto we have had but little biography. Sketches of the external circumstances of many men we have genealogical tables without number and without end-chronicled wonders, that such a man was born and died, ran through such a circle of honours, and obtained such a mausoleum to perpetuate his memory. But histories of mind we have not; and, for all the great purposes of knowledge, we should know as much of the man, if we had not looked upon the misnamed biography.

We now take leave of Butler as a man, and direct our thoughts more particularly to his great work.

Those were dark and portentous times which succeeded the reign of the Second Charles. That voluptuous and witty monarch had contributed more than any mortal, before or since his time, to fill a nation with infidels and debauchees. Corruption had seized upon the highest orders of the state, and it flowed down on all ranks of the community. Every grade in life had caught the infection of the court. Profligacy is alternately the parent and the child of unbelief. The unthinking multitude of courtiers and flatterers that fluttered

around the court of Charles, had learned to scoff at Christianity, and to consider it as not worth the trouble of anxious thought. The influence of the court extended over the nation. It soon infected the schools and professions; and perhaps there has not been a time in British history when infidelity had become so general, and had assumed a form so malignant. It had attached itself to dissoluteness, deep, dreadful, and universal. It was going hand in hand with all the pleasures of a profligate court; it was identified with all that actuated the souls of Charles and his ministers; it was the kind of infidelity which fitted an unthinking age-scorning alike reason, philosophy, patient thought, and purity of morals. In the language of Butler, "it had come to be taken for granted, by many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry, but that it is now, at length, discovered to be fictitious; and, accordingly, they treat it as if, in the present age, this were an agreed point among all people of discernment, and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were, by way of reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world." In times of such universal profligacy and infidelity arose, in succession, Locke, Newton, and Butler; the two former of whom, we need not say, have been unsurpassed in great powers of thought and in the influence which they exerted on the sentiments of mankind. It needed such men to bring back a volatile generation to habits of profound thought in the sciences. It needed such a man as Butler, in our view not inferior in profound thought to either, and whose works will have a more permanent effect on the destinies of men than both, to arrest the giddy steps of a nation; to bring religion from the palace of a scoffing prince and court to the bar of sober thought, and to show that Christianity was not undeserving of sober inquiry. This was the design of the Analogy. It was not so much to furnish a

complete demonstration of the truth of religion, as to show that it could not be proved to be false. It was to show that it accorded with a great system of things actually going on in the world, and that attacks made on Christianity were, to the same extent, assaults on the course of nature and of nature's God. Butler pointed the unbeliever to a grand system of things in actual existence, a world with every variety of character, feeling, conduct, and results-a system of things deeply mysterious, yet developing great principles, and bearing proof that it was under the government of God. He traced certain indubitable acts of the Almighty in a course of nature, whose existence could not be denied. Now, if it could be shown that Christianity contained like results, acts, and principles; if it was a scheme involving no greater mystery, and demanding a correspondent conduct on the part of man, it would be seen that it had proceeded from the same author. In other words, the objections alleged against Christianity, being equally applicable against the course of nature, could not be valid. To show this was the design of Butler. In doing this he carried the war into the camp of the enemy. He silenced the objector's arguments; or, if the objector still continued to urge them, he showed him that, with equal propriety, they could be urged against the acknowledged course of things; against his own principles of conduct on other subjects; against what indubitably affected his condition here, and what might, therefore, affect his doom hereafter.

We are fond of thus looking at the Bible as part of one vast plan of communicating truth to created intelligences. We know it is the fullest and most grand of all God's ways of teaching men, standing amidst the sources of information, as the sun does amid the stars of heaven, quenching their feeble glimmerings in the fulness of its meridian splendour. But, to carry forward the illustration, the sun does, indeed,