Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/80

72 lay hold of natural opportunities, such as confirmation or sickness, for serious conversation with them, and for turning their thoughts towards religion.

Butler met John Wesley, and one would like to have a full record of what passed at such a meeting. But all that we know is, that when Butler was at Bristol, Wesley, who admired the "Analogy" and who was then preaching to the Kingswood miners, had an interview with him; that Butler "expressed his pleasure at the seriousness which Wesley's preaching awakened, but blamed him for sanctioning that violent physical excitement which was considered almost a necessary part of the so-called new birth."

I have kept for the last the description we have from Surtees, the historian of Durham, of Butler's person and manners:—

From another source we hear:—

This description would not ill suit Wesley himself, and it may be thought, perhaps, that here at any rate, if not in the letter to Sir Robert Walpole, we find the saint. And doubtless, where the eye is so single and the thoughts are so chastened as they were with Butler, the saintly character will never be far off; but still the total impression left by Butler is not exactly, I repeat, that of a saint.

Butler stood alone in his time and amongst his generation. Yet the most cursory reader can perceive that, in his writings, there is constant reference to the controversies of his time, and to the men of his generation. He himself has pointed this out as a possible cause of obscurity. In the preface to the second edition of his sermons he says:—

This reference to contemporary opinion, if it sometimes occasions difficulty in following him, makes his treatment of his subject more real and earnest. When he recurs so persistently to self-love, he is thinking of the "strange affectation in many people of explaining away all particular affections, and representing the whole of life as nothing but one continual exercise of self-love," by which he had so often been made impatient. One of the signal merits of Mr. Pattison's admirable sketch, in "Essays and Reviews," of the course of religious ideas in England from the Revolution to the middle of the eighteenth century, is that it so clearly marks this correspondence, at the time when Butler wrote, between what English society argued and what English theology answered. Society was full of discussions about religion, of objections to eternal punishment as inconsistent with the divine goodness, and to a system of future rewards as subversive of a disinterested love of virtue:—

And in a further sentence Mr. Pattison, in my opinion, has almost certainly put his finger on the determining cause of the "Analogy's" existence:—

That connection of the "Analogy" with the queen's philosophical parties seems to me an idea inspired by true critical genius. These parties given by Queen Caroline, a clever and strong-minded woman, the recluse and grave Butler had, as her clerk of the closet, to attend regularly.