BOOKS.
BISHOP BUTLER.*
In these days of bookstall literature be would be a bold man who should prophesy a revival of interest in the works of Bishop Butler. The admirable little book in which Canon Spooner describes and estimates Butler's work will be regarded by candidates for Holy Orders as a model intro- duction; it may have a circulation among the large number who look back with pleasure to the friendship of their old tutor at New College ; it will probably gladden the heart of those few students of morals which this nation possesses. But for the many—even of those who are readers—Butler is a man of "hard sayings." His writings demand, as he him- self admitted, that attention which was then, as it is now, by no means a popular virtue. "The great number of books and papers of amusement," he says, writing in 1729, "have in part occasioned this idle way of reading. Thus people habituate themselves to let things pass through their minds, as one may speak, rather than to think of them." Time was when Butler was necessary for the schools at Oxford, but now the great Bishop is comparatively an exile from Oxford, and has to depend on his own inherent qualities.
We are very prone to imagine that Butler's arguments are out of date because of the new mental framework won by mankind during the nineteenth century. Nor can it be denied that there is a great change in our intellectual climate. It is doubtful, however, whether the most characteristic pro- gress of the century has in any way sapped Butler's main contribution. Let us examine one or two aspects of this question. First, it is frequently said that the new science of comparative religion has damaged the claims of Christianity. The man of our day has a cosmopolitan outlook, owing to steam, the telegraph, and other space-defying inventions, which has never been equalled. Under the Roman Empire men became keenly aware of the jostling of creeds, and learnt to doubt the unique claim of their own. But from that mighty political crasis until the present time there has never been such a strain on the prerogative right of established creeds ; and now, with the cults of Buddha, of Mahomet, of Confu- cius treading the stage in open rivalry with the creeds of Europe,—in this theatre of all the nations what is a man to think ? visa orii mapidav gum. Has Butler any help for him? Did Butler in any degree face this question ? Canon Spooner remarks that "the progress of geo- graphical discovery, and particularly the opening up of the vast Chinese Empire, had made men ask themselves whether it was possible that God had left Himself without witness among so many millions of mankind." Men shied at the inequity of a " special " revelation. Butler replies characteristically to the effect that inequality does not connote inequity, and that inequality is a fixed principle in the arrangement of human affairs. The chapter in the Analogy will be remembered, proving, as it does, that Butler after all had faced our modern problem, at least in a milder form. His solution, too, is on the tight line, and valid so far as it goes; though nowadays a Christian is forced to see much more than "superstition" in alien creeds.
Secondly, we learn that what Haeckel calls the " mag. nificent cosmological perspective" given us by nineteenth- century science has made the Christian view at last untenable. Starting from the prime elements of matter and energy, and passing by means of the ethereal, the nebular, and other hypotheses, through all the stages of an immense evolution, we can construct a "rounded philo- sophical system," based on a single all-ruling "law of sub- stance," and find rest in a creed which "definitely rules out • Dish4 Ruder. By Rev. W. A. Spooger. London : Methuen and Co. pe. 6d.] God, freedom, and immortality." The false "anthropism," the "prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance," which is the great stand-by of Christianity, is doomed, once the true " perspective " is obtained, once the clear know- ledge of himself, "which he has only obtained in the second half of the nineteenth century," has revealed to man his own insignificance, as the mere creature of a comprehensive system of "eternal iron laws." But already in Butler's day "the discoveries of Copernicus," as Canon Spooner suggests, "and still more of Newton, had given man a conception, vast beyond all previous imagination, of the extent of the universe," and indeed Butler himself implies this large perspective. Yet, probably even to those theo- rists who profess that their "scientific faith" is based on a secure foundation of exact knowledge he would have a word to say on the use of imagination—" that vain, forward, and delusive faculty "—and on the universe in general as perhaps being even yet a scheme very imperfectly compre- hended. Was it not Huxley who said that if Butler was raised from the dead be would make short work of these new philo- sophies ? We have not space to do more than briefly suggest the way in which the author of the Analogy would turn the tables on Materialism, Agnosticism, and the brand-new Monism. Doubtless he would ask whether such a statement as "cosmic ether is a positive fact" does not imply at least as much " faith " as some of the "discredited" doctrines of Christianity. Probably he would suggest that the " objec- tions " against the " soul-life " of theology are no greater than the difficulties in accounting for the " soul-life " of plants and animals. But Butler redivicus would, we believe, make his chief impression by a new edition of the Sermons on Human Nature. We are inclined to agree with Canon Spooner in regarding Butler's vindication of conscience as his most telling achievement. His name is often far too exclusively identified with the Analogy, for it is the constitution of human nature, and the " fitness " of Christianity for that constitution, which Butler relies on as his fundamental position.
The science of apologetics, according to Professor Harnack, is at present in a depressed condition; indeed, its votaries suffer from the disadvantage of not knowing what they want to prove. Professor Harnack, however, very possibly does but project his own speculative despair into the form of a science which at the worst can only be nursing its strength for a more vigorous spring ; and indeed, from America, the land where even philosophy still dares to hope and where thought is fired by the unspent energies of youth, there already come voices heralding a new and in- spiring way for Christian evidence. The new fact—new at least in its general recognition—of the social conscience stands out pre-eminent for all idealising and progressive minds. This "social conscience" needs a home : it needs to be placed and to be grasped as a real fruit of the cosmic system. No social reformer can permanently work without a faith to back him, but the new Monism has not one grain of the inspiration his inmost tendencies demand. He needs a universe, instinct with promise for the work of self-sacrifice and love. The scientist has so far conquered by reverent obedience to the laws of physical fact; his manhood is incomplete until he does further homage to the laws of social progress; his philosophy will be but a one-eyed creed until he constructs a universe where freedom as well as law, where spirit as well as nature, where love as well as force, can find their reconciliation and their home.
Butler's Sermons had the great merit of establishing this in- valuable method. In the face of the worship of physical im- mensities, he recalled man to the knowledge of himself. Look within,' he seems to say, and behold a spiritual world, a system or constitution of divers parts and of divers passions, which it is obviously your duty to regulate by the operation of your highest faculty, the conscience.' He does not try to demon- strate the reality of conscience or the validity of its preroga- tive claims. Quite explicitly he lays aside the speculative proofs of the supremacy of virtue, and points to the facts. He appeals to the bar of experience, and unless his audience are susceptible to the appeal, his argument falls to the ground. But he believes that if only men will attend to the facts of their inner self they will grant him his premise and follow him to his conclusion. This is the method of the prophet or the preacher, and Butler wisely published his theory in the form of sermons, for a large part of his task consists in rousing men to the mere consciousness of their own nature. Further, for instance, he strives to estab- lish the fact of natural compassion, and by bringing out into strong relief all the salient features of the inner life, to make men see their ideal self. The burden of his contention is always the same : be true to your nature as a whole.
We cannot but think that a transmigrated Butler would see in this method the aptest instrument of modern apolo- getics. When man is instructed, to contemplate the infinity of iron law and humbly to bow down before the idol of size, we feel sure that the champion of human nature would after all have a word to say for the despised "anthropism." Indeed, if he were in a pleasant mood he might even declare that man should no more abdicate his sovereignty before the pressing majesty of "cosmic law" than he should take off his hat to the big wheel at Earl's Court. The infinite value of the spiritual world within, the obvious freedom of the works of love without, the fact of the social conscience, would be a few of the points which a new Butler would certainly insist must be dealt with before the faith of man is justly determined. It is not unlikely that he would welcome the work of a great German school in boldly assuming the scientific validity of the facts of religious life. Butler the First staked everything on experience, and did in this sense for ethics what Bacon did for science. After the manner of Socrates, his main strength is exerted to force men by his dialectics to recognise the facts of inner life. His sober reverence for fact is akin to the best spirit of modern science. Butler the Second would find that his philosophy of experience was the prevalent method of to-day : only he would insist "Be true to experience and to human nature as a whole." He would hail with pleasure the recent suggestion that the religious consciousness has not yet had its due as a fact of normal experience. He would probably welcome and make good use of the "historical spirit" which invaded all the studies of the last century; but he would rescue patent verities from the blurring influence of the "genetic" fog; he would decline to lose the significance of the present in the labyrinthine evolutions of the past. He would rouse men with compelling earnestness to the unique reality of the present, and once more bid them be content in their religious life to act on the same measure of evidence as they everywhere accept in the matters of business and pleasure.
The author of Ecce Homo spoke impressively of humane enthusiasm, and his words find an echo in the heart of our civilisation. In Butler's day even the delight in art was dis- missed, he tells us, as "mere enthusiasm " ! We have travelled far since then, and the "principle of compassion" no longer needs public apology; but though the particular details of Butler's work may be out of touch with the spirit of an age which looks back on the French Revolution, yet his method remains the trustiest arm of the Christian apologist. The facts and permanent needs of human life still claim an explanation which nothing save Christianity can adequately provide. It is usually maintained that the style of Butler is the chief reason why he is not read. The style of Canon Spooner's book is simple, orderly, and lucid it has, indeed, an ease which only comes to those who are masters of their subject. His style is so clear, and his exposition is so exhaustive, that he might almost be recommended as a substitute for the original. But having said this we at once withdraw it, and admit that a classic can never be paraphrased. And so, at this point, we are forced to conclude that after all it is just in Butler's style that his permanent value consists. The close and laborious patience, that virtue which he himself extols as the "religious and sacred attention which is due to truth," that earnest sense of reality, that grey vigilance and veteran irony, are incommunicable apart from the style. Above all, his grave and deep piety, always steadily burning, though generally smothered down for the behoof of "loose Deists," lives in his style, and its peculiar flavour cannot be caught by the most skilful expositor. Truly, with Butler the style is the man.
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