Henry Scott Holland

“ Butler had looked, with serious eyes, into the black abyss of sin; he allowed no easy tolerance to blind him to the turbid disgrace of the story that man had made for himself. He loathed the airy optimism which would not face the fact. Nevertheless, after solemn survey of the whole tumultuous disarray, he deliberately pronounces that all the positive evidence of the facts declares for the right. The underlying principles of Nature are always working for virtue, and against vice. Judged, as they should be, by their tendency, they tally with the verdict of conscience. ”

“ Metaphysic itself, when it comes again to its own, will do so by verifying, with a closer intimacy than ever, its inevitable inherence within the very heart's core of our common average experience.
And it is within this human experience of ours that Butler does all his work. It is our daily Experience that he fastens on, clings to, accepts. For him, it holds the entire secret. He has no desire to go behind it, or beyond it. It is sufficient. It justifies itself. It supplies the standard to which reality must conform. ”

“ The moral law is the human equivalent of the coherence which knits the universe into unity of purpose; and this same Wisdom, which teaches the circuits of the sun, gives to the man, into whose soul it enters, knowledge of judgement and law, by 'which to frame his life in righteousness, and to execute judgement with an upright heart. She leads him soberly in all his ways; so that his works are acceptable, and he is worthy to sit in his father's seat'.
Butler would delight in bringing the moral life of humanity into this complete accord with the conception of Natural Law. ”

“ On every side our knowledge is confined and our means of enlarging it small. Of this the outer world takes no heed; Nature is "unfeeling"; her laws roll on; "beautiful and dumb," she passes forward and vouchsafes no sign. Indeed, she seems to hide, as one might fancy, the dark mysteries of life which seem to lie beneath; our feeble eyes strain to look forward, but her "painted veil" hangs over all, like an October mist upon the morning hills. Here, as it seems, revelation intervenes; God will break the spell that is upon us; will meet our needs ”

“ And yet, let us remember that this word, for all its doleful associations, stands for that indomitable optimism in man, which defies all misadventure. It is the expression of man's ineradicable conviction that the world exists for Good, and not for Evil; and that God will ever justify Himself, as victorious over adverse circumstances. Such a conviction, faced by pain and evil, and challenged by the heathen taunt, 'Where is, now, thy God?' bravely retorts by the word 'probation'. It is evil that has happened to us, and not good. ”

“ He distrusts profoundly, not reason, but the uninstructed reason—the reason that draws its knowledge out of itself. Reason has nothing of its own to draw upon. It is, itself, the faculty to know facts; and, in knowing facts, it carries with it its own guarantee. It knows them as they are meant to be known. So Butler's appeal is ever from the reason uninformed by experience to the reason which has accepted the facts set before it—from the reason e. g. which decrees what a Revelation must involve, to the reason which will be content to understand what a Revelation, in fact, actually is. ”

“ Is that the invariable type of your activities in contact with facts, in your natural existence? Well, then, why be surprised if you have to repeat exactly the like process in Religion; if here, too, you have to feel your way forward by hints, and suggestions, and experiments, and expectations, and probabilities? God is the same God, at whatever level of life you encounter Him. And always He will guide you by His eye, and not, as if you were a mule, by bit and bridle. Religion is no exception to what you already know so familiarly: it follows the same rule. ”

“ It holds, for him, the entire Universe together in a coherent and progressive Purpose, stretching from the lowest point of physical existence, through all the grades of Natural Development, up to the highest order of the Spiritual Heaven disclosed to us through the open door of Revelation. One secret makes itself known everywhere: one mind is everywhere reiterating its tireless delight: one pressure sets everywhere towards one far-off event. ”

“ He enjoys common things. He keeps close in touch with things as they are. He goes along with a healthy cheerfulness, resolute in his determination to be loyal to the actual, and to demand no exceptional treatment for Religion or Revelation, as if they lay apart from ordinary human life. Their strength lies in their conformity to natural conditions. The closer their coherence with the common type of human experience and human history, the greater is their reality and the more convincing their evidence. Everything that is most familiar to us in our daily habits reappears in them. ”

“ We act on them without a fear. Yes! and we are perfectly right, Butler would say. In all practical affairs we have no other way of acting.
And Religion is a practical affair. Religion is a problem of action. It is no metaphysic; it is a life. As action, as life, it conforms to all other types of life and action. It finds its certainties (that is) in what the metaphysician would condemn as probabilities. Religion is asking no more of you than your daily common practical experience does, when it invites you to trust to convictions that you cannot prove by syllogisms. ”

“ We shall be baffled by the same objections; we shall be tangled in the like bewilderment. For Revelation must approach us under the same guise and by the same methods. It cannot but make its offer on the same terms. For it, too, cannot but be 'imperfectly comprehended'. It, too, must be obviously incomplete. It will leave, therefore, a thousand issues unresolved. It will be content to prompt, suggest, invite, where certainty is impossible. It will offer partial evidence of just the same type and quality as that which is familiar to us on the plane of Nature. ”

“ The immanent reality of the Universe is not to be found in the cold exhibition of changeless, mathematical law, but in the infinite diversities of a living and growing organism. The Universe is a vast, dramatic experiment. At its base is volcanic energy, holding in itself infinite potentialities, which storm their way into gradual realization, and under the terrible processes of unceasing strife, by efforts which are often effectual by the very blindness of their insistent stress, work out their fitness to survive. Such was the picture which Science unveiled. ”

“ Wisdom has shown him, moreover, that 'the principal things for the whole use of man's life are water, fire, iron, and salt, flower of wheat, honey, milk, and the blood of the grape, and oil, and clothing' (Ecclus. xxxix) . Herein lies his intellectual delight. It is Natural Science that is his mistress. Knowledge is, for him, above all things progressive. It draws all things one way, according to a practical determination of the will; it goes through from end to end, sweetly ordering all things. It makes of the universe a co-ordinate scheme which can only be understood in its entire sum. ”

“ The closer we look into this literature of the Wisdom, the nearer we seem to draw to the inspiration that speaks to us in phrase after phrase of the Analogy, and to the temper, the mood, the judgement, the insight, which create its characteristic atmosphere. As we ponder over the old refrains, we seem to catch Bishop Butler at work; we feel ourselves to be inside the process of thought by which he arrived at his special and dominant formulae. ”

“ So Butler continually argues; and all the force of his mind comes out in this splendid confidence that he has in facts, in experience, in the validity of our faculties. He was no metaphysician. We feel this in the chapters on the Future Life, and on Necessity. He is here at his weakest. He fails to convince. He is not in his true atmosphere or element. He comes to himself, and to his full power, when he is flinging aside all the metaphysical problem which underlies life, as freely as the plain man does in practice, in daily experience, in science. ”

“ He counts on human effort in the one case; why not in the other? Difficulty, struggle, doubt—these are our probation. Through them we have worked out our secular Civilization. Why should not the same methods be equally available in the spiritual sphere? Why should we isolate Religious development from the normal and natural and customary order of things? Why should we imagine for it some special and fantastic dignity, which would forbid it from conforming to our habitual experience?
Again and again, Butler's strong common sense keeps him true and realistic in this way. He is never on stilts. ”

“ Butler therefore absolutely repudiates the Agnostic argument for our ignorance. If we were wholly without knowledge, we could not say that there was an unknowable world. It is partial ignorance, not total ignorance, from which he argues. For, indeed, 'total ignorance would preclude all argument for or against.' His position is that we know enough of reality to know that we imperfectly comprehend it. It is our knowledge which sets itself its own frontiers by virtue of what it already knows. It knows when it touches its limit ”

“ They spring up out of the very nature of experience itself. They are asserted by virtue of the facts themselves, which, in being known as what they are, declare themselves to be but partially known. The limitations come, not from any defects in our intellectual organs, but from the evident and undeniable narrowness of the area over which they have, as yet, been exercised.
There is, therefore, optimism, still, even in the recognition of limitation. Our capacities only need the widening of their area of exercise, to prove themselves adequate to new knowledge. ”

“ The imperfections that man encounters in his rise from the lower level to the higher will increase rather than diminish; for the rise in thought has admitted him into a scheme of yet vaster proportions than he had hitherto experienced. And, if vaster than the world already within his experience, then, also, it must be still more imperfectly comprehended. The part that falls under his comprehension bears a still smaller proportion than ever to the enormous whole. ”

“ He himself uses the unfortunate metaphor of stakes or odds at one moment in the argument, where he is illustrating his point from common experience. And, always, the word probability evokes the thought of dialectical ingenuity, rather than of massive reasoning. It is the Apologist that it recalls, not the Thinker. We feel, as we start off on an estimate of the convergent probabilities, as if we were to be captured by craft, drawn by subtle complications into a position for which we shall not be able wholly to account. ”

“ Butler thus reaches his characteristic conclusion, that every possible act of knowledge reveals itself as being but partial and incomplete. He defies you to know even this world that lies within our human experience, without knowing something of the world that lies beyond it. For every atom that exists demands the entire Universe to explain it. ”