masterpiece, Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. Henry Mackenzie, inspired by Sterne, opened his series of melancholy romances with The Man of Feeling in 1771, the year of Smollett's death. We shall speak of the most important of these works in dealing with their respective authors; several of them still hold a prominent place in literature. But they are merely satellites in attendance on the three great lights of eighteenth-century fiction, on Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, and when the third of these departed, the art of novel-writing ceased to progress, in any large sense, until it was taken up forty years afterwards by Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott.

CHAPTER IX

JOHNSON AND THE PHILOSOPHERS

A CRITIC Who is certainly unprejudiced has called Bishop Butler "the most patient, original, and candid of philosophical writers." The second quarter of the eighteenth century was not rich in contributions to religious literature, but it is to the glory of the Church of England that it possessed this singularly interesting man. The enthusiasm and direct ardent rhetoric of the seventeenth century were now things of the past. The very struggle between orthodoxy and the Deists was no longer novel; in the prosaic and mathematical theology of Clarke, stuck full of intellectual diagrams, it had ceased to be a spirit of warmth or movement. It is difficult to be convinced that on one side or the other there had been of late any great doctrinal fervour of faith or disbelief. The last of the genuine old Deists was Thomas Chubb (1680-1747), the tallow-chandler, a writer of little dignity. The orthodox theologians, in spite of their indignant and perpetual protestations, had really resigned so much that the creed of the English Church was becoming unnerved. The proper stimulant required by the religious mind of the country was given on one side by the new Puritans, by Law and Wesley and Whitefield, and on the other by an Anglican philosopher of extraordinary force and genius. So much had gradually been admitted to be doubtful that the scribbling bishops were ready to let Pilate's question pass virtually unanswered; Butler came, and revealed a

man who, as he himself says, made "the search after truth the business of his life."

Joseph Butler (1692-1752) was the son of a dissenting linendraper in Wantage. He was educated at a nonconformist school at Tewkesbury, where it is curious that three future bishops of the Church of England were taught at the same time. In 1713 Butler, although past the age of twenty-one, was still at this college, for it was from Tewkesbury that he sent his famous letters to Clarke, then the acknowledged intellectual head of the English Church, putting forward certain metaphysical objections which had occurred to him in the study of Clarke's writings. Clarke thought so highly of these letters that he appended them to his own letters and published them in 1716. In 1714 Butler entered the English Church, and proceeded to Oriel College, Oxford. He was ordained in 1718, and next year we find him appointed Preacher at the Rolls Chapel, to which was presently added the rectory of Haughton-le-Skerne in Durham; this was exchanged in 1725 for the "golden rectory" of Stanhope, in the same county.

In 1726 Butler published his first book, a selection of fifteen Sermons preached at the Rolls Chapel. The first three, on human nature, are, in fact, sections of one essay, on the constitution of the instincts of humanity; in which an effort is made to inquire into the meaning of morality. There follow sermons on certain

of the passions, as Benevolence, Anger, Compassion, and Love to God. More lively than Butler usually cares to be is the sermon on "The Government of the Tongue." This volume attracted a moderate degree of notice, but the author of it was soon temporarily forgotten. Secker, who had courtlier ways, but whose affection for his old schoolfellow was unbounded, took occasion at last to mention him one day to Queen Caroline, who was known to have read the Rolls Sermons with profit. She replied that she thought Mr. Butler had been dead. "No, madam, but buried !" another friend, Archdeacon Blackburne, answered. Butler was soon digged out of his Durham grave to be Clerk of the Queen's Closet.

In 1736 Butler emerged into fame by the publication of a

IX

BUTLER'S " ANALOGY"

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work on which he had been engaged for seven years, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature. In 1738 he was made Bishop of Bristol, in 1740 Dean of St. Paul's, and in 1747 was offered the Primacy. This he refused, saying, in his melancholy way, that "it was too late for him to try to support a falling church." In 1750, however, he consented, after some demur, to exchange the see of Bristol for Durham. He had become prematurely old, and of venerable appearance, with long white hair. Two years later he died. Butler's temperament was silent and retiring; he did not shine in conversation, though some very striking remarks of his are recorded. He had no love for female society, but preserved very loyally his old companionships with friends, such as Secker. His writings show no interest whatever in any form of literature, except theological controversy, nor is it recorded of him that he had any love of books. But he cultivated the fine arts, and in particular had a sort of passion for architecture. His taste for what would a century later have been called Puseyite decorations is well known. The Analogy is an isolated work. Even in its own age, when polemical pamphleteering was in fashion, though it was read, it was neither attacked nor defended. It does not refer to any theological movement that preceded it, and it is not the precursor of any subsequent literature. It stands alone, original, inexorably honest and veracious, but unsympathetic, like its silent and unexpansive author. The germ of the Analogy has been traced to the fifteenth of the Rolls Sermons, that on the Ignorance of Man. The aim of these sermons had been to deduce the existence of a Creator from the constitution of the human mind; the object of the Analogy is to prove the same thing by "the analogy of nature,”—that is to say, from the laws and phenomena of the external world. Butler's central idea is the majesty and authority of the conscience, placed in the centre of the human instincts as a representative of the divine will. Of late years a great many thinkers of various schools have held that Butler, although so fervent a believer himself, has furnished in the Analogy a philosophical persuasion to atheism.

His debt to the views of Shaftesbury has been dwelt upon, and he has been charged with exalting morality at the expense of faith. Into these questions it is impossible to enter here. No serious mind, however, can deny the greatness of Butler. His work, with all its peculiarities, is marked by extreme intellectual candour, by the purity of thought which disdains to conceal a weakness through any subterfuge of style, and by a passion for truth which must always affect the unbiassed reader.

Some words must be given to the subject of Butler's style, on which critics have been curiously at disagreement. The question was early raised; even the Bishop's dearest friend, Secker, thought that somewhat was lacking to this expression of his thoughts. Later admirers have combated the criticism, and have found no fault with the lucidity of his diction. All must agree that Butler's style is studiously unadorned. But the source of a considerable difference of opinion among critics may perhaps be traced to the bishop's own inequality. The pure and eloquent sentences of the sermon on "Love to God" are scarcely to be recognised as by the same hand as parts of the Analogy. An enthusiast who is impatient of any condemnation of Butler's style may, however, be confronted with the famous passage about the microscope and the staff, for instance :

"Thus a man determines that he will look at such an object through a microscope, or, being lame, supposes that he will walk to such a place with a staff a week hence. His eyes and his feet no more determine in these cases than the microscope and the staff. Nor is there any ground to think they any more put the determination in practice, or that his eyes are the seers or his feet the movers in any other sense than as the microscope and the staff are. Upon the whole then our organs of sense and our limbs are certainly instruments which the living persons ourselves make use of to perceive and move with: there is not any probability that they are any more, nor, consequently, that we have any other kind of relation to them than what we may have to any other foreign matter formed into instruments of perception and motion, suppose into a microscope or a staff (I say any other kind of relation, for I am not speaking of the degree of it), nor consequently is there any probability that the alienation or dissolution of these instruments is the destruction of the perceiving and moving agent."