only, and in a sentence or two; yet even there, it should be remarked, the Bishop takes care to describe the peculiar observances required by it, "some as in themselves wrong and superstitious, and others of them as being made subservient to the purposes of superstition." With respect to his other writings, any one at all conversant with them needs not to be told, that the matters treated of both in his Sermons and his Analogy did none of them directly lead him to consider, and much less to combat, the opinions, whether relating to faith or worship, which are peculiar to the Church of Rome: it might therefore have happened, yet without any just conclusion arising from thence, of being himself inclined to favour those opinions, that he had never mentioned, so much as incidentally, the subject of Popery at all, But fortunately for the reputation of the Bishop, and to the eternal disgrace of his calumniators, even this poor resource is wanting to support their malevolence. In his Sermon at St Bride's before the Lord Mayor in 1740, after having said that "our laws and whole consti tution go more upon supposition of an equality amongst mankind, than the constitution and laws of other countries;" he goes on to observe, that "this plainly requires, that more particular regard should be had to the education of the lower people here, than in places where they are born slaves of power, and to be made slaves of superstition:* meaning evidently in this place, by the general term superstition, the particular errors of the Romanists. This is something: but we have a still plainer indication what his sentiments concerning Popery really were, from another of his additional Sermons, I mean that before the House of Lords on June the 11th, 1747, the anniversary of his late Majesty's accession. The passage alluded to is as follows; and my readers will not be displeased that I give it them at length. "The value of our religious Establishment ought to be very much heightened in our esteem, by considering what it is a security from; I mean that great corruption of Christianity, Popery, which is ever hard at work to bring us again under its yoke. Whoever will consider the Po

* Serm. xvii,

pish claims, to the disposal of the whole earth, as of divine right, to dispense with the most sacred engagements, the claims to supreme absolute authority in religion; in short, the general claims which the Canonists express by the words, plenitude of power-whoever, I say, will consider Popery as it is professed at Rome, may see, that it is manifest, open usurpation of all human and divine authority. But even in those Roman Catholic countries where these monstrous claims are not admitted, and the civil power does, in many respects, restrain the papal; yet persecution is professed, as it is absolutely enjoined by what is acknowledged to be their highest authority, a general council, so called, with the Pope at the head of it; and is practised in all of them, I think, without exception, where it can be done safely. Thus they go on to substitute force instead of argument; and external profession made by force, instead of reasonable conviction. And thus corruptions of the grossest sort have been in vogue, for many generations, in many parts of Christendom; and are so still, even where Popery obtains in its least absurd form and their antiquity and wide extent are insisted upon as proofs of their truth; a kind of proof, which at best can only be presumptive, but which loses all its little weight, in proportion as the long and large prevalence of such corruptions have been obtained by force."*

In another part of the same Sermon, where he is again speaking of our ecclesiastical constitution, he reminds his audience that it is to be valued, "not because it leaves us at liberty to have as little religion as we please, without being accountable to human judicatories; but because it exhibits to our view, and enforces upon our consciences, genuine Christianity, free from the superstitions with which it is defiled in other countries; which superstitions, he observes, "naturally tend to abate its force." The date of this Sermon should here be attended to. It was preached in June, 1747; that is, four years before the delivery and publication of the Charge, which was in the year 1751; and exactly five years before the Author died, which was in June, 1752. We

* Serm. xx.

have then, in the passages now laid before the reader, a clear and unequivocal proof, brought down to within a few years of Bishop Butler's death, that Popery was held by him in the utmost abhorrence, and that he regarded it in no other light, than as the great corruption of Christianity, and a manifest, open usurpation of all human and divine authority. The argument is decisive; nor will any thing be of force to invalidate it, unless from some after-act during the short remainder of the Bishop's life, besides that of delivering and printing his Charge (which, after what I have said here, and in the Notes added to this Preface and to the Charge I must have leave to consider as affording no evidence at all of his inclination to Papistical doctrines or ceremonies), the contrary shall incontrovertibly appear.

III. One such after-act, however, has been alleged, which would effectually demolish all that we have urged in behalf of our Prelate, were it true, as is pretended, that he died in the communion of the Church of Rome. Had a story of this sort been invented and propagated by Papists, the wonder might have been less:

Hoc Ithacus velit, et magno mercentur Atridæ.

But to the reproach of Protestantism, the fabrication of this calumny, for such we shall find it, originated from among ourselves. It is pretty remarkable, that a circumstance so extraordinary should never have been divulged till the year 1767, fifteen years after the Bishop's decease. At that time Dr Thomas Secker was Archbishop of Canterbury; who of all others was the most likely to know the truth or falsehood of the fact asserted, having been educated with our Author in his early youth, and having lived in a constant habit of intimacy with him to the very time of his death. The good Archbishop was not silent on this occasion: with a virtuous indignation he stood forth to protect the posthumous character of his friend; and in a public newspaper, under the signature of Misopseudes, called upon his accuser to support what he had advanced, by whatever proofs he could. No proof, however, nor any thing like a proof, appeared in reply; and every man of sense and candour at that

time was perfectly convinced the assertion was entirely groundless. As a further confirmation of the rectitude

* When the first edition of this Preface was published, I had in vain endeavoured to procure a sight of the papers, in which Bishop Butler was accused of having died a Papist, and Archbishop Secker's replies to them; though I well remembered to have read both, when they first appeared in the public prints. But a learned Professor in the University of Oxford has furnished me with the whole controversy in its original form; a brief history of which it may not be unacceptable to offer here to the curious reader.

The attack was opened in the year 1767, in an anonymous pamphlet, entitled, "The Root of Protestant Errors examined;" in which the author asserted, that, "by an anecdote lately given him, that same Prelate” (who at the bottom of the page is called B-p of D-m) "is said to have died in the communion of a Church, that makes much use of saints, saints' days, and all the trumpery of saint worship." When this remarkable fact, now first divulged, came to be generally known, it occasioned, as might be expected, no little alarm; and intelligence of it was no sooner conveyed to Archbishop Secker, than in a short letter, signed Misopseudes, and printed in the St James's Chronicle of May 9, he called upon the writer to produce his authority for publishing" so gross and scandalous a falsehood." To this challenge an immediate answer was returned by the author of the pamphlet, who, now assuming the name of Phileleutheros, informed Misopseudes, through the channel of the same paper, that "such anecdote had been given him; and that he was yet of opinion, that there was nothing improbable in it, when it is considered that the same Prelate put up the Popish insignia of the cross in his chapel, when at Bristol; and in his last Episcopal Charge has squinted very much towards that superstition." Here we find the accusation fot only repeated, but supported by reasons, such as they are, of which it seemed necessary that some notice should be taken: nor did the Archbishop conceive it unbecoming his own dignity to stand up on this occasion, as the vindicator of innocence against the calumniator of the helpless dead. Accordingly, in a second letter in the same newspaper of May 23, and subscribed Misopseudes as before; after reciting from Bishop Butler's Sermon before the Lords the very passage here printed in the Preface, and observing, that "there are, in the same Sermon, declarations as strong as can be made against temporal punishments for heresy, schism, or even for idolatry;" his Grace expresses himself thus: "Now he (Bishop Butler) was universally esteemed throughout his life, a man of strict piety and honesty, as well as uncommon abilities. He gave all the proofs, public and private, which his station led him to give, and they were decisive and daily, of his continuing to the last a sincere member of the Church of England. Nor had ever any of his acquaintance, or most intimate friends, nor have they to this day, the least doubt of it." As to putting up a cross in his chapel, the Archbishop frankly owns, that for himself he wishes he had not; and thinks that in so doing the Bishop did amiss. But then he asks, “Can that be opposed, as any proof of Popery, to all the evidence on the other side; or even to the single evidence of the above-mentioned Sermon? Most of our churches have crosses upon them are they therefore Popish churches? The Lutherans have more than crosses in theirs are the Lutherans therefore Papists?" And as to the Charge, no Papist, his Grace remarks, would have spoken as Bishop Butler there does, of the observances peculiar to Roman Catholics, some of which he expressly censures as wrong and superstitious, and others, as made subservient to the purposes of superstition, and, on these accounts, abolished at the Reformation. After the publication of this letter Phileleutheros replied in a short defence of his own conduct, but without producing any thing new in confirmation of what he had advanced. And here the controversy, so far as the two principals were concerned, seems to have ended.

But the dispute was not suffered to die away quite so soon. For in the same year, and in the same newspaper of July 21, another letter appeared; in which the author not only contended that the cross in the Episcopal chapel at Bristol, and the Charge to the Clergy of Durham in 1751, amount to full proof of a strong attachment to the idolatrous communion of the Church of Rome, but, with the reader's leave, he would fain account for the Bishop's "tendency this way." And this he attempted to do, "from the natural melancholy and gloominess of Dr Butler's disposition; from his great fondness for the lives of Romish saints, and their books of mystic piety; from his drawing his notions of teaching men religion, rot from the New Testament, but

of this judgment, it may not be amiss to mention, there is yet in existence a strong presumptive argument at least in its favour, drawn from the testimony of those who attended our Author in the sickness of which he died. The last days of this excellent Prelate were passed at Bath; Dr Nathanael Forster, his chaplain, being continually with him; and for one day, and at the very end of his illness, Dr Martin Benson also, the then Bishop of Gloucester, who shortened his own life in his pious haste to visit his dying friend. Both these persons constantly wrote letters to Dr Secker, then Bishop of Oxford, containing accounts of Bishop Butler's declining health, and of the symptoms and progress of his disorder, which, as was conjectured, soon terminated in his death. from philosophical and political opinions of his own; and above all, from his transition from a strict Dissenter amongst the Presbyterians to a rigid Churchman, and his sudden and unexpected elevation to great wealth and dignity in the Church." The attack, thus renewed, excited the Archbishop's attention a second time, and drew from him a fresh answer, subscribed also Misopseudes, in the St James's Chronicle of August 4. In this letter, our excellent Metropolitan, first of all obliquely hinting at the unfairness of sitting in judgment on the character of a man who had been dead fifteen years; and then reminding his correspondent, that "full proof had been already published, that Bishop Butler abhorred Popery as a vile corruption of Christianity, and that it might be proved, if needful, that he held the Pope to be Antichrist;" (to which decisive testimonies of undoubted aversion from the Romish Church, another is also added in the Postscript, his taking, when promoted to the see of Durham, for his domestic Chaplain, Dr Nath. Forster, who had published, not four years before, a Sermon, entitled, Popery destructive of the Evidence of Christianity ;) proceeds to observe," that the natural inelancholy of the Bishop's temper would rather have fixed him amongst his first friends, than prompted him to the change he made: that he read books of all sorts, as well as books of mystic piety, and knew how to pick the good that was in them out of the bad: that his opinions were exposed without reserve in his Analogy and his Sermons, and if the doctrine of either be Popish or unscriptural, the learned world hath mistaken strangely in admiring both: that, instead of being a strict Dissenter, he never was a communicant in any Dissenting assembly; on the contrary, that he went occasionally, from his early years, to the established worship, and became a constant conformist to it when he was barely of age, and entered himself, in 1714, of Oriel College: that his elevation to great dignity in the Church, far from being sudden and unexpected, was a gradual and natural rise, through a variety of preferments, and a period of thirty-two years: that, as Bishop of Durham, he had very little authority beyond his brethren, and in ecclesiastical matters, had none beyond them; a larger income than most of them he had; but this he employed, not, as was insinuated, in augmenting the pomp of worship in his cathedral, where indeed it is no greater than in others, but for the purposes of charity, and in the repairing of his houses." After these remarks, the letter closes with the following words: "Upon the whole, few accusations, so entirely groundless, have been so pertinaciously, I am unwilling to say maliciously, carried on, as the present: and surely it is high time for the authors and abettors of it, in mere common prudence, to show some regard, if.not to truth, at least to shame."

It only remains to be mentioned, that the above letters of Archbishop Secker had such an effect on a writer, who signed himself in the St James's Chronicle of August 25, A Dissenting Minister, that he declared it as his opinion, that "the author of the pamphlet, called, The Root of Protestant Errors examined,' and his friends, were obliged in candour, in justice, and in honour to retract their charge, unless they could establish it on much better grounds than had hitherto appeared:" and he ex