Butler, JOSEPH, one of the most eminent of English divines, was born 18th May 1692 at Wantage, in Berkshire, the youngest of the eight children of a retired draper. With a view to the ministry of the Presbyterian Church, he attended a dissenting academy at Gloucester, afterwards at Tewkesbury, where the future Archbishop Secker was his schoolfellow. At the age of twenty-two, he gave proof of high metaphysical ability in a letter to Dr Samuel Clarke, usually appended to that celebrated writer's a priori demonstration, to which it offers some objections. About this time he made up his mind to join the Church of England, and in March 1714 entered Oriel College, Oxford. He graduated in 1718, and took orders; in the same year he was appointed preacher at the Rolls Chapel, where he preached those remarkable sermons which he published in 1726. The first three, On Human Nature, constitute one of the most important contributions ever made to moral science. The scope of the reasoning is, briefly, that virtue is consonant with, and vice a violation of, man's nature. He became prebendary of Salisbury (1721), and rector of Haughton-le-Skerne near Darlington (1722); in 1725 he was presented to the 'golden rectory' of Stanhope, also in the county of Durham, to which he removed in the following year. Here he resided in great retirement till 1733, and is believed to have been busy on his Analogy. His friend Secker, the archbishop, desired to see him promoted to some more important position, and mentioned his name once to Queen Caroline. The queen thought he had been dead, and asked Archbishop Blackburne if it were not so. 'No, madam,' said the archbishop, 'he is not dead, but he is buried.' In 1733 Butler became chaplain to his friend Lord Chancellor Talbot, a D.C.L. of Oxford, and in 1736 a prebendary of Rochester, and clerk of the closet to Queen Caroline. In 1736 he published the great work of which the germs were contained in his three sermons, and which has entitled him, in the words of his eloquent disciple Chalmers, to be called the 'Bacon of theology.' The leading aim of the Analogy is to show that all the objections to revealed religion are equally applicable to the whole constitution of nature, and that the general analogy between the principles of divine government, as revealed in the Scriptures, and those manifested in the course of nature, warrants the conclusion that they have one Author. The argument is valid against the deists, but it lacks completeness as a defence of Christianity. Butler's greatness is mainly on the moral side. The deification of conscience is the beginning, middle, and end of his teaching. Duty is his last word. He puts the deists into a state of probation by plying them with arguments sufficient in reason to influence their practice, whether they may actually do so or not; whereas the true method of Christianity is to put something that tends to transform a man and his practice in such a way that he feels disposed and eager to lay hold of it. In 1738 he was made Bishop of Bristol; in 1740 Dean of St Paul's; in 1747 he is said to have been offered the primacy; and in 1750 he was translated to the see of Durham. In his charge in 1751 he pointed out, with characteristic depth of insight, the importance of a due maintenance of the externals of religion, as a means of keeping alive the thought of it in the minds of the people; but this subjected him to much censure as betraying a tendency to Roman Catholicism—an allegation unworthy now of serious notice. Butler's private character was such as became a Christian prelate; grave and judicious, he was at the same time meek and generous. He was kind and considerate to his clergy and people; his princely episcopal revenues he distributed munificently, as not his own. He died at Bath, June 16, 1752, and was buried in Bristol Cathedral.
His works are in a dry and uninteresting style. With a Life by Kippis, they were first published at Edinburgh (1804), and reprinted at Oxford (1807); there are separate editions of the Analogy, and of the Three Sermons; a Life by Bartlett (1839); and a short sketch by Collins (1881). Mr Gladstone published his monumental edition of the works in 1896 (2 vols., with a third volume of Studies Subsidiary to the works).