among a haughty and luxurious people, contemptuous of all new forms of belief; the higher orders priding themselves on philosophy and power; the lower, impassioned and excitable; all indolent, worldly, and voluptuous. To spread and sustain Christianity in the Roman empire, the local learning and close reasoning of St. Paul were no longer required. A race of men were now raised up, trained in the popular schools of Greece and Rome, and masters of the philosophy and the feelings of the time. The general character of the writings of the Fathers is, ardent and eloquent application to human sensibilities. They denounce, they supplicate, they defy; they appeal to the justice, the fears, and the sympathies of the empire. The works of the early Apologists contain some of the finest examples of that power of picturing, and magnificent Asiatic diffusion, which form the natural address to a people whose languid curiosity must be roused, whose slow feelings must be touched, and whose capricious taste must be soothed, before an impression can be made upon their understandings.

The long interval from the fall of the Western Empire to the German reformation, displayed only the depth of ignorance into which the human mind can sink; or the hazardous and criminal riot of the imagination, when it is inflamed by the passions. The Scriptures were persecuted or forgotten. Night

covered the world; a solid darkness, illumined only by the clashings of the sword and the spear. A thousand years were equally lost to literature, religion, and civilization; the most extraordinary blank ever exhibited in the history of the mind. Yet even in this period the church existed, however obscured; and Claude of Turin, and the early Italian and Narbonese reformers, protested boldly against the domination of Rome. But in ages when education was limited to the lowest rudiments of knowledge, the learning or the eloquence of the ancient Apologists would have been thrown away. The great antagonist was Rome; the great corruption, her worship; and the great obstacle to religion, her refusal of the Scriptures to the people. The qualities of the reformers were suited to the exigency of the time;-plain, sincere, and resolute, they laboured less to refute the subtleties of the reigning power, than to explain and propagate the Scriptures. Even the comparative rudeness of their language and habits was adapted to the simplicity of their task. To convert the princes of the Romish church, clothed in purple and fine linen, was hopeless. Their teaching was for the Lazarus at the gate they went forth to the scorned and abject multitude, the serfs of the noble households; the mountaineers and shepherds, living under the difficulties of a life of solitude and labour; and appealing to them, scarcely less by their lives than by

their doctrine, roughly rebuilt that church, of which the foundations had never totally disappeared.

The German reformation revived the learning of the Scriptures. Rome was still the prominent adversary; but she had changed the ground of her title. She no longer reposed upon the mere arrogant assumption of power, nor attempted to silence all question by the sword. Her orb was falling into the wane: it could now no more scorch than enlighten. She now grounded her claims upon antiquity, the promise of miracles, and the deposit of ecclesiastical supremacy in the hands of St. Peter. To break through those barriers, the rustic hands of the Italian reformers would have been inadequate learning, vigorous research, and practised intellectual activity, were the true means: and a race of scholars suddenly raised their heads in Europe, the vastness, variety, and perseverance, of whose learned toils still rank among the wonders of the human mind.

Another age brought the struggle into our own country. The spiritual empire of Rome had been shattered by the bold assaults of the German reformers. But a new enemy was now to be encountered, in the infidelity of France. In that country, memorable in every age for violent contrasts of character, the most ostentatious devotion to the

Romish church was suddenly succeeded by the most unqualified contempt for its tenets. All who professed to lead the intellectual progress of the people were open deists. England was now summoned to take the place of Germany in the championship of the truth. The unhappy results of her sectarian government, in the seventeenth century, which had driven the King and his chief adherents to seek an asylum in France, and had disgusted the nation until it charged religion with the crimes committed in its offended name, had been found stubborn obstacles to the returning piety of England. The dissolute manners of a French court, transferred to our country, at once enervated the national habits, corrupted the national mind, and repelled the national religion. Infidelity always shuns a direct collision with Scripture; and the force of the tempter was developed in leading the national understanding into metaphysical mysteries, obscure inquiries into the origin of things, and arrogant presumptions of the designs of Providence. The direct doctrines, and plain facts of Revelation were thus equally avoided; and the controversy was absorbed in enquiries into foreknowledge, freewill, and fate; those exciting, yet bewildering subjects, which the great poet of England not unsuitably assigns for the endless and melancholy employment of the fallen angels. But, in this crisis the manlier virtue of the country nobly vin

dicated itself by the genius of its church. Stillingfleet, Conybeare, Cumberland, and a crowd of divines, whose learning had not blunted their original sagacity, nor their sagacity had been too fastidious for the labour of learning, stood forward to clear religion of the clouds raised by the malice of infidelity, to convict the deist out of his own lips, and to reinstate the national faith on the foundations of the Bible. Among those highly gifted men, the foremost in force of understanding, the most fortunate in immediate and acknowledged victory, and the most permanently useful in laying down principles applicable in every future age to the great system of the divine dealings with man, was the author of the volume of the ANALOGY.

Joseph Butler was born in the year 1692, at Wantage, in Berkshire. His origin was humble; his father being a small trader in that town; and further straitened in his circumstances by a family of eight children, of whom the future bishop was the youngest: but a more formidable obstacle to his public distinction seemed to exist in his father's presbyterianism. The child's acuteness, at an early age, was so conspicuous as to attract general notice; and his father determined to make him a minister of his own persuasion: but the Church of England had the merit of giving his earliest scholarship to a mind which was destined to repay it with such signal honour.

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