A FAMOUS PHILOSOPHER

Northland Age, Volume 5, Issue 23, 6 March 1936, Page 10

A FAMOUS PHILOSOPHER

[By J. C. Fussell]

One of the greatest books ever published was written by Joseph Butler D.C.L., when Vicar of Stanhope, just two hundred years ago. I refer to the famous “Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and Course of Nature,” which was written by Butler in 1736, after twenty years’ hard thinking. It is still of immense value to ethics and theology ; for it is a profound study of Nature, Scripture, ethics and reasoning, solidly hammered out into a complete system of thought. Today it is interesting to read three great tributes paid to the Analogy by eminent men. Cardinal Newman said that the reading of the work created an era in a man’s religious life, and that Bishop Butler’s name was the greatest in the Anglican Church. Dr. Chalmers, the noted Scotch divine, declared that the reading of Butler had made him a Christian, and he had learnt more from him than from the whole world of literature. Then, England’s famous Prime Minister, W. E. Gladstone, was a devoted student of Butler and he said that the Analogy was probably a far greater argument than the Author himself realised, and it was amongst the supreme achievements of the human mind. Butler lived in an age of great intellectual genius and activity ; and it has been said that what his contemporary, Sir Isaac Newton, was in Science, Butler was in ethics and religion. He died in 1752 at the age of 60, after having been a bishop for fourteen years, first at Bristol and then at Durham.