Justified True Belief

(●) The bishop who answered the confident unbelief of his century by refusing to argue from certainty, and made probability the ground a Christian can stand on. + In the spring of 1736 a country clergyman who had been rector of a parish in the Durham hills for eleven years published a book about whether Christianity was still worth examining. He opened it with a complaint. It had come to be assumed, he wrote, that the question was closed, that the thing had been found out to be a fiction, and that nothing remained but to make jokes about it. Joseph Butler thought the assumption had never been earned, and he set out to show it in an unexpected way: not by proving Christianity beyond doubt, but by asking what standard of proof anybody actually uses for anything. That question is why he belongs on a Christian apologetics site. Butler noticed that human beings almost never act on certainty. A farmer sows in April because the seasons have held so far. A patient swallows the pill because it usually works. A juror convicts on evidence that could, in principle, be explained some other way. If that kind of evidence is good enough to run a life on, Butler asked, why should religion alone be required to produce a demonstration? Probability, he said, is the very guide of life, and an argument that leaves you with a strong balance of reasons has given you exactly what you use everywhere else. He also wrote three sermons on human nature that moral philosophers still assign, and he took apart, as thoroughly as anyone has, the claim that human beings are all really selfish underneath. One signature fact: from the second edition of On the Origin of Species in 1860 onward, Charles Darwin printed a sentence of Butler’s opposite his own title page, using a bishop to argue that a law-governed world is not a godless one.

(●) 1692 AD: Born in Wantage to a Presbyterian shopkeeper who meant him for the dissenting ministry. + Joseph Butler was born on 18 May 1692 at Wantage in Berkshire, the youngest of the eight children of Thomas Butler, a retired linen draper. The family were Presbyterians, which in England after the Act of Uniformity of 1662 meant dissenters: Protestants who would not conform to the Church of England, and who paid a price for it every year of their lives. A dissenter was shut out of Oxford, out of a Cambridge degree, out of the army commissions, out of most public office. What such families could not get, they made for themselves. Barred from the universities, they opened schools of their own. So Butler went first to the Latin school at Wantage and then, around 1712, to the dissenting academy that Samuel Jones kept at Gloucester and later moved to Tewkesbury. These academies were small, poor, and unusually good. Jones taught Hebrew and logic and mathematics to a handful of boys in his own house, and two of the boys in Butler’s year would end their lives at the top of the church his family had refused to join. One was Thomas Secker, who became Archbishop of Canterbury and remained Butler’s closest friend for forty years. The other was Butler.

(●) 1713 AD: At twenty-one he wrote anonymously to the most celebrated theologian in England and told him his proof did not work. + Samuel Clarke was then the leading philosophical divine in the country, which is to say he was exactly the man a clever student would want to test himself against. His Boyle Lectures of 1704, a series endowed to defend the Christian religion against unbelief, were published as A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, and what they offered was what philosophers call an a priori proof: an argument that runs on concepts alone, without appealing to anything you have to go outside and observe. Clarke began from the bare idea of a being that exists necessarily, meaning one that could not have failed to be there and that depends on nothing else for its existence, and he thought that from that idea alone he could derive the rest: that such a being must be one, and eternal, and everywhere present. A demonstration in the old sense of the word is a proof that leaves no room whatever for doubt, the way a proof in geometry does, and Clarke meant the word seriously. Then, on 4 November 1713, an unsigned letter reached him from a student in Gloucestershire, politely taking the argument apart. Why, the writer asked, could there not be several necessary beings rather than one? And how exactly does necessity get you from there to being everywhere at once? The arrangements for secrecy were careful ones. Secker carried the letters to a post office some distance off so that the writer could not be traced, and collected the replies there. Clarke answered every one, at length, and thought well enough of the exchange to print the whole correspondence in later editions of his own book, where it still sits. Two things in that episode set the pattern of Butler’s life. He had gone straight at the strongest argument on his own side rather than at the weakest argument on the other, which is a rare habit at any age and a remarkable one at twenty-one. And he had come away permanently doubtful that religion is the kind of thing you demonstrate from concepts. Everything he later wrote takes the other road.

(●) 1719 AD: He conformed to the Church of England and preached, to a congregation of lawyers, the sermons on human nature. + In 1714 Butler sat down and worked through the principles of nonconformity for himself, the whole case for staying outside the national church, a case his family had lived by and his schooling had been built around, and decided that he could conform after all. The decision cost him something at home and gained him a university. He entered Oriel College, Oxford, in 1715 and took his degree in October 1718, and in that same October he was ordained deacon, with the priesthood following in December, both at the hands of William Talbot, Bishop of Salisbury. Oxford gave him something else as well, which was a friend. Edward Talbot was the bishop’s son, and when he lay dying of smallpox in 1720 he asked his father to look after three young men: Butler, Secker, and Martin Benson. Secker was one of the three, and he is also the one who tells the story. Much of Butler’s advancement over the next twenty years came down that line. In July 1719 he was appointed preacher at the Rolls Chapel in London, on Clarke’s recommendation. The Rolls was the office where the records of the Court of Chancery were kept, and its chapel congregation was largely lawyers: men trained to weigh evidence, to distrust a confident assertion, and to notice when a speaker has assumed what he needed to prove. It is hard to imagine a better audience for what Butler gave them. Instead of exhortation he offered an anatomy of a human being, worked out as carefully as a piece of pleading. He published fifteen of those sermons in 1726 and resigned the post that autumn. The book sold slowly, as books of that kind do. Two hundred years later it was still in the syllabus.

(●) 1725 AD: He took a rich parish in the Durham hills and vanished into it so completely that the queen supposed he was dead. + In June 1725 Bishop Talbot, who had by then been translated to Durham (a bishop moved from one diocese to another is said to be translated, and a bishop’s diocese is also called his see), presented Butler to the rectory of Stanhope in Weardale, up in the high country west of the city. To be presented to a rectory was to be handed a living, which meant the post of parish priest together with the income attached to it, and a living was a man’s for the rest of his life unless he chose to give it up. Stanhope was known locally as the golden rectory, because the tithes of that valley made its holder a wealthy man, and a rector in the eighteenth century could perfectly well draw that income, hire a curate to do the actual work, and live somewhere more agreeable. Butler did not. He resigned the Rolls, went north, and stayed eight years, living quietly among a few hundred lead miners and farmers, riding his own parish, and writing. He held the living itself for fifteen years, long after he had stopped living in it. The silence was near total. Around 1733 Secker mentioned Butler’s name at court, and Queen Caroline said she had thought he was dead. Lancelot Blackburne, the Archbishop of York, corrected her: no, madam, he is not dead, but he is buried. The line stuck, and it is the best short account of those years anyone has given. What he was doing in the grave was writing the Analogy. Secker, meanwhile, set about digging him out. In 1733 Butler became chaplain to Lord Chancellor Talbot, Edward’s brother, which put him back within reach of London, and the queen, who liked to spend her evenings arguing philosophy with clergymen, began to send for him.

(●) 1736 AD: The Analogy appeared, and the queen who had called him to court was dead within eighteen months. + The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature came out in May 1736, and in July Butler was made Clerk of the Closet to Queen Caroline, the officer who attends the sovereign in matters of religion. In practice it meant standing in her drawing room from seven until nine most evenings while she and her circle argued. The book he had carried down out of Weardale was aimed at a particular opponent. The deists held that a rational person could accept a Creator known through nature and reason, and should reject the specifically Christian additions: miracles, prophecy, an atonement, a chosen people, a book. Their case rested on the difficulties. Revealed religion, they said, is full of things that a good and wise God would surely not have arranged that way. Butler agreed that the difficulties are real, refused to explain them away, and then did something his opponents had not expected. He asked them to look at the world they had already accepted as God’s. Caroline died in November 1737 after a wretched illness, having asked her husband to see that Butler was provided for. It took a while. Robert Walpole eventually offered him Bristol, the poorest bishopric in England, and Butler accepted it on 28 August 1738 in a letter that let the slight show: the see, he told Walpole, was "not very suitable either to the condition of my fortune or the circumstances of my preferment," nor answerable to the recommendation with which he had been honoured.

(●) 1738 AD: Bishop of Bristol, where he spent his own money on the diocese and told John Wesley to leave it. + He was nominated to Bristol in August 1738 and consecrated on 3 December. The see was worth about four hundred pounds a year, a fraction of what the rich sees paid, and whatever he thought of that, he spent a great deal of his own money on repairing the bishop’s palace and its chapel. One piece of that repair followed him for the rest of his life and past the end of it. Above the chapel altar he set a slab of black marble with a cross of white marble inlaid in it. A cross in an English chapel is an unremarkable thing now. It was not unremarkable then, when a good many Protestants looked at ornament of that kind and saw a man drifting back toward Rome, and it was remembered against him later. In 1740 he was made Dean of St Paul’s and kept the deanery alongside the bishopric, one man holding two posts and drawing two incomes, which was the ordinary way a poor see was made livable. Stanhope he resigned at last, fifteen years after Talbot had handed it to him. And in the summer of 1739 he had three interviews, in Bristol, with a young clergyman named John Wesley, who together with George Whitefield had begun preaching to colliers in the open fields outside the city, to crowds no church in England could have held. People at these meetings were crying out and falling down, and Wesley spoke of the direct witness of the Holy Spirit to a believer’s heart. Butler had built his whole case for Christianity on the sober weighing of evidence, and what he heard in that room was a claim to private revelation. He recoiled from it, and he told Wesley he had no business in the diocese. Wesley did not go.

(●) 1750 AD: Bishop of Durham for twenty months, where he gave his money away and then died at Bath. + Durham stood fourth among the English sees in precedence, after Canterbury, York, and London, and few were richer; its bishops had once governed the county like princes. Butler was nominated to it in July 1750 and confirmed that October, twenty-five years after he had first ridden into that same county as a country rector with nothing much expected of him. He was already ill, and there was less time left than anybody supposed. He got through one visitation of the diocese in the summer of 1751, a visitation being the formal round a bishop makes through his parishes to see how they are kept and to address the clergy who keep them. The address he delivered on that round, a Charge in the church’s word for it, took as its subject the use of external religion: the buildings, the fixed hours, the plain outward observances that carry a habit of devotion when feeling fails. It was a lifetime’s pastoral realism compressed into thirty pages. It also earned him a pamphlet from Archdeacon Francis Blackburne accusing him of a drift toward Rome. He gave money away with both hands. One story told of him is that a request for a subscription led him to ask his steward how much cash was in the house; told it was five hundred pounds, he gave the whole of it, remarking that it was a shame for a bishop to have so much lying by. Josiah Tucker, who had served him as chaplain at Bristol, remembered him walking the palace garden there for hours after dark, and stopping once to ask whether whole nations might not go mad in the way that individuals do, and whether that would not account for most of what is in the history books. His health broke down through the spring of 1752, and he died at Bath on 16 June, unmarried, with Bishop Martin Benson and his chaplain Nathaniel Forster beside him. He was buried in Bristol Cathedral on 20 June. By his will he directed that his sermons, letters, and papers be burned unread, and so almost nothing survives of him except what he chose to print.

What He Taught

(T1) Conscience is not one desire among the others; it stands over them, and its right to rule is part of what a human being is. + Think about two things you might feel at four in the afternoon. One is hunger. The other is the sick recollection that you said something cruel to a friend at lunch. Both are feelings, both arrive uninvited, and if feelings were simply forces pushing you about, the stronger one would win and that would be the end of it. But that is not how you experience them. Hunger makes a bid. The other thing passes a verdict, and it passes a verdict on the hunger too, if you were about to let the hunger settle the matter. Butler’s name for the second thing is the principle of reflection, or conscience: the part of us that turns around and judges our own principles and actions, pronouncing some just and right and good and others wrong. His point about it is easy to state and easy to miss. Conscience is not merely one more impulse in the crowd, to be measured against the rest by how loudly it shouts. It comes with a claim to authority built into it, so that a man who overrules his conscience knows he has done something different in kind from a man who overrules his appetite for a second helping. The illustration Butler uses is a constitution: a watch, or a state, is not just a heap of parts but parts arranged in an order, and you cannot say what the thing is for without saying which part governs. Take a watch to pieces and lay the components on a table and every one of them is still there, and yet the watch is gone, because what made it a watch was the arrangement. Human nature is like that, and conscience is the governing part. So when we say a man ought to follow his conscience we are not laying an external rule on him. We are telling him to be what he already is. Butler preached this from Paul’s letter to Rome: "For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law" (Romans 2:14). That is his text for the second and third sermons, and the phrase a law to themselves is the whole doctrine in five words. Whether the authority of conscience points beyond the man to a lawgiver is a question Butler raises and treats gently. Later Christian writers, from John Henry Newman onward, have pressed it much harder.

(Q) "Had it strength, as it has right; had it power, as it has manifest authority, it would absolutely govern the world." + Source: Butler, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, Sermon II (1827 edition). Butler has just distinguished two questions that are constantly confused: how much force conscience actually has over a person, and how much right it has. Its right is total and its strength is often pitiful, and the gap between the two is the human condition. Notice that he is not complaining. He is pointing out that you already know conscience ought to have won, which is the thing he wanted to establish (T1).

(T2) Self-love and love of neighbour are not rivals, and the man who cares for nobody is not even good at caring for himself. + There is an idea that turns up in every generation, and Thomas Hobbes had given it its hardest modern form in the century before Butler: that underneath all our kindness we are simply pursuing our own advantage, and that generosity is self-interest wearing a coat. Philosophers have a name for it, psychological egoism, which is the claim that every human action, whatever it may look like from the outside, is really aimed at the good of the person doing it. Pity is really fear for ourselves. Charity is really the pleasure of feeling charitable. You have met this idea, probably from someone who thought they were being unillusioned. Butler’s reply is one of the most admired short arguments in moral philosophy, and it turns on food. Suppose that what you really want, when you sit down to dinner, is your own pleasure and nothing else. Then why the dinner? Swallowing a stone would do just as well, if the appetite were aimed at the pleasure rather than at the food. The pleasure comes because you wanted the thing itself. So an appetite is directed outward, at its object, and only then produces satisfaction in you. Now run the same test on kindness. If I feed a hungry man and feel glad afterwards, the gladness is evidence that I wanted him fed, not evidence that I wanted the gladness. Butler’s conclusion is disarming: every particular passion is exactly as interested or disinterested as every other. Benevolence is no more suspect than ambition or revenge, and the man who calls all motives selfish has not made a discovery, he has confused two meanings of one word. Two consequences follow, and Butler cares about both. Self-love is not the villain of the piece: a settled, cool regard for your own real good over a whole life is a perfectly reasonable principle, and Butler says frankly that most people have too little of it rather than too much, since they wreck their own happiness hourly for a passing fancy. And when self-love is cool enough to see clearly, it stops fighting conscience, because a life of resentment and grasping is not in fact a good life to have had. Virtue and interest turn out to be two descriptions of one road.

(Q) "self-love and benevolence, virtue and interest, are not to be opposed, but only to be distinguished from each other" + Source: Butler, Preface to the Fifteen Sermons, added in the second edition of 1729 (1827 printing). The whole sentence runs: "If the observation be true, it follows, that self-love and benevolence, virtue and interest, are not to be opposed, but only to be distinguished from each other; in the same way as virtue and any other particular affection, love of arts, suppose, are to be distinguished." The next paragraph opens with the words philosophers quote most often: "Every thing is what it is, and not another thing." G. E. Moore printed that line on the title page of Principia Ethica in 1903 as the motto of his own campaign against confusing goodness with something else (T2).

(T3) Nobody lives by certainty, so it is strange to demand certainty of religion alone. + A woman gets into her car on a Tuesday morning knowing that the brakes worked yesterday. She has no proof they will work today. She has a strong expectation founded on repetition, on the mechanic’s word, and on the fact that cars mostly do what they did last time, and she backs down the drive on that and nothing more. Everything she will do for the rest of the day runs on the same footing. Butler makes this the hinge of his whole case. Probable evidence differs from demonstration in one way above all: it admits of degrees. It runs from the highest moral certainty, which was the old phrase for being as sure of a thing as a juror is when he votes to convict, all the way down to the barest presumption, and nowhere along that range does it quite close the gap and turn into proof. To a mind that knew everything, nothing would be probable at all, because everything would be flatly seen to be true or false. Probability is a report on our limits rather than on the world. But it is the only report we have, and we act on it constantly and rightly. So when a man says that he will believe nothing about God without a demonstration, he is asking religion for a kind of evidence he does not have about the safety of his own house. That is not a rule of reason; it is an exemption invented for one subject. The reasonable question is the ordinary one: which way does the balance of evidence lean, and how far? Butler is careful about what this does and does not buy. It does not make the Christian case certain, and he never says it does. It means that a strong probability is a real reason to act, and that a man who waits for more before committing himself has not thereby stayed neutral. He has decided, and on worse grounds than the ones he refused.

(Q) "But to us, probability is the very guide of life." + Source: Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Introduction. The sentences just before it explain why: probable evidence is relative to beings of limited capacity, since nothing whatever could be merely probable to an infinite intelligence, which sees each thing as it is. The line became the motto of a whole tradition of English religious thought and Newman built a book on it (T3).

(T4) If the difficulties in Scripture are a reason to deny its Author, the difficulties in the world are a reason to deny his. + This is the argument the book is named for, and it works by turning the reader around to face something already agreed. Butler is writing for a man who accepts that God made the world and governs it, and who rejects the Bible because the Bible is full of hard things: a revelation given late and to one small nation, commands that trouble us, whole tracts left unexplained, a plan of salvation running through obscure and roundabout means. Very well, says Butler. Look at the world you have kept. Its government is late and partial too, in the sense that the ordinary run of things helps some people and passes others by. It is full of hard things: children die, the wicked prosper, and the arrangement by which every creature lives at the expense of another is not one a kind person would have designed unaided. It is worked out through means so roundabout that no one has ever traced them to the end. Every objection the deist brings against the Bible has a twin standing in the field outside his window, and he has already decided to live with the twin. Butler is exact about what this shows. It does not prove that the Bible is from God. It removes the objection, which is a smaller thing and a real one: you cannot use the difficulty of revelation as evidence against its divine origin while accepting the same sort of difficulty in nature without a murmur. The whole force of the argument depends on its modesty, and that modesty is why some readers have found it cold. Butler will not sell you more than he has. What he will not let you do is keep an objection you have already abandoned everywhere else.

(Q) "he who denies the Scripture to have been from God upon account of these difficulties, may, for the very same reason deny the world to have been formed by him." + Source: Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Introduction. Butler has just credited the point to Origen, the third-century Alexandrian, who observed that anyone who believes Scripture to have proceeded from the Author of nature may well expect to find in it the same sort of difficulties found in the constitution of nature. This sentence is Butler’s own addition, and it turns Origen’s remark into a challenge (T4).

(T5) You are the same person who did the thing you have forgotten, and remembering it is not what makes you the same. + John Locke had proposed a tidy answer to a very old puzzle. What makes the man in the dock today the same man who committed the robbery nine years ago, given that not one atom of him is the same and his opinions have changed twice over? Locke answered: consciousness. You are the same person as whoever you can remember being, and personal identity just is that reach of memory backward. Butler thought this got the order exactly wrong, and he said so in a short appendix to the Analogy that is still assigned in philosophy courses. Suppose the man in the dock genuinely cannot remember the robbery. On Locke’s account he is not the same person and cannot be liable. But now notice what happens when he does remember. Remembering is a way of knowing something, and knowing a thing does not make it true; it finds it true. When I remember signing a contract, my memory is evidence that I signed it, not the reason I am the one who signed it. Consciousness of being the same person assumes the sameness it is supposed to explain. Butler did not raise the point as a debating exercise. His whole first book turns on a future life in which a person is answerable for what he has done here, and that requires a real continuing self, not a rope of overlapping memories. If there is no one there who persists, there is no one to be judged, and no one to be saved either.

(Q) "And one should really think it self-evident, that consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity; any more than knowledge, in any other case, can constitute truth, which it presupposes." + Source: Butler, "Of Personal Identity," the first of the two dissertations appended to The Analogy of Religion (1736). The second dissertation, "Of the Nature of Virtue," is the compressed statement of the moral theory the sermons had worked out at length (T1, T5).

(Q) "It is come, I know not how, 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." + Source: Butler, Advertisement prefixed to the first edition of The Analogy of Religion, dated May 1736. He goes on to say that the fashion is to treat the whole matter as a settled point among people of discernment, and to make it a subject of mirth by way of reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world. Then comes the sentence that gives the book its purpose: whatever else is proved here, any reasonable person who considers the matter thoroughly may be as much assured as he is of his own being that it is not, however, so clear a case that there is nothing in it.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) For a century and a half the English-speaking church handed its students the Analogy and told them to master it. + Once Oxford reformed its examinations in the early nineteenth century, no one could take a degree there without showing a knowledge of three things: the Gospels in Greek, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and Butler’s Analogy. American colleges took it up as well, often as a capstone for seniors, and examined on it publicly at the end of a student’s course. At Dickinson College in Pennsylvania it entered the curriculum in 1834 and was still in the catalogue in 1895. One of those students was John Henry Newman, who read it as a young man at Oxford and wrote in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua that its study "has been to so many, as it was to me, an era in their religious opinions." What Newman took from Butler was the guide of life (T3), and he spent forty years working out what it meant. His Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent of 1870 is the result: an account of how a person comes to real, unqualified conviction not by one demonstration but by many independent probabilities converging on the same point, the way a rope holds although no single fibre runs its whole length. William Ewart Gladstone, four times Prime Minister, thought Butler the greatest of English divines and edited him in his old age, publishing a two-volume edition of the works in 1896 together with a companion volume of his own studies. Butler’s standing fell away toward the end of that century, partly under the criticism of Leslie Stephen, who objected that matching the difficulties of revelation against the difficulties of nature is a retort rather than an explanation, and can leave a reader doubting both.

(†) Hume cut up his first book hoping Butler would read it, and Darwin printed a line of Butler’s opposite the title page of the Origin. + In 1737 a Scot of twenty-six was in London preparing his first book for the press, the Treatise of Human Nature, and there was one man in England he badly wanted to read it. Writing to his kinsman Henry Home on 2 December, David Hume explained what he was doing to his own manuscript to improve its chances: "I am at present castrating my work, that is, cutting off its nobler parts; that is, endeavouring it shall give as little offence as possible, before which, I could not pretend to put it into the Doctor’s hands." The nobler part he cut is generally identified as his argument against miracles. The Doctor was Butler. Hume never got his interview, and the suppressed essay came out eleven years later anyway, in the Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding of 1748, the book later renamed An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, aimed at exactly the sort of case Butler had built. Two things in that story are worth sitting with. The first is that the most formidable critic of Christian evidences in the English language thought Butler’s good opinion worth mutilating a book for. The second is that the two of them were arguing about the very same thing, the weight of probable evidence, which is why the exchange between them has never gone stale. More than a century later Charles Darwin reached for Butler too. From the second edition of On the Origin of Species in 1860, three epigraphs face the title page, and the middle one, standing between Whewell’s and Bacon’s, is Butler’s. The only distinct meaning of the word natural, it runs, is stated, fixed, or settled, "since what is natural as much requires and presupposes an intelligent agent to render it so, i. e. to effect it continually or at stated times, as what is supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for once." Darwin was answering the charge that a world running by law is a world without God, and he answered it with a bishop.

(†) His moral philosophy has outlived his apologetics, and it is still taught by people who have no use for his religion. + The three sermons on human nature and the sermons on the love of our neighbour are read today in university ethics courses on their merits, quite apart from the pulpit they were preached from. C. D. Broad gave Butler a chapter of his Five Types of Ethical Theory in 1930, alongside Spinoza and Kant, and the demolition of the everybody-is-really-selfish thesis (T2) is close to standard equipment in the subject. For Christian thought the debt is the argument from conscience. Butler did not build a proof of God out of it; he was too cautious for that, and he leaves the reader at the edge of the inference rather than over it. But he established the ground every later version stands on, which is that conscience presents itself with authority rather than with force, and that this authority is a fact about human beings and not a preference of theirs. Newman’s moral argument is explicitly Butler’s, worked further. The modern moral arguments for the existence of God begin where Butler begins, by asking what kind of thing an obligation is, and who could be in a position to impose one.

(†) Where he fell short: he met the great revival of his own century and told it to leave his diocese. + In the summer of 1739 Butler had three conversations in Bristol with John Wesley, and Wesley wrote out an account of the sharpest of them, on 16 August. Butler’s reported words are these: "Sir, the pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing." He then told Wesley that he was not commissioned to preach in that diocese and advised him to go hence. Wesley answered that he was a priest of the church universal and would stay where he thought he could do most good. The words come from Wesley’s own memorandum, printed in Nehemiah Curnock’s edition of the Journal; nothing survives from Butler’s side of the room. Some of Butler’s alarm was fair. People were collapsing and crying out at these meetings, and a bishop is right to ask whether a movement is being carried by the Spirit of God or by the excitement of a crowd. Wesley himself grew warier of the phenomena as the years went on. But Butler had gone further than caution. He had put the inward witness of the Spirit itself, and not merely its counterfeits, into the category of horrid things, and Scripture will not have that: the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Romans 8:16). A theology built entirely on the weighing of probabilities had left him without a place to put assurance. There is a related coolness in the man that his admirers concede. Horace Walpole said he was wafted to his see in a cloud of metaphysics and remained absorbed in it. Butler defends the credibility of Christianity with immense care and says remarkably little, for a bishop, about the love of God in Christ that the whole apparatus exists to make room for. His friend Secker, defending him after his death, admitted his natural melancholy. He was a man who could establish that the case for the gospel is strong, and who seems to have found it hard to be glad about it. When the gladness came to Bristol in a field full of miners, he did not recognise it.