Butler, Joseph

Butler, Joseph (1692–1752). Bishop. Butler attended a dissenting academy in Gloucestershire before conforming to the Church of England and graduating from Oriel College, Oxford. He advanced in his profession under the patronage of Bishop Talbot (of Salisbury and Durham) and Lord Chancellor Talbot, and also gained the favour of Queen Caroline, who commended him to George II on her deathbed. He was appointed bishop of Bristol in 1738, dean of St Paul's in 1740, and bishop of Durham in 1750. His major publications were Fifteen Sermons (1726) and The Analogy of Religion (1736). His contribution to the deistic controversy stressed the role of conscience in opposition to Hobbesian self-interest. Though Butler's reasoning was greatly admired, for example by Gladstone, who spent the last years of his life editing his works, he assumed too readily that conscience always speaks clearly and that it says the same thing in all societies, and his argument that conscience and self-interest necessarily coincide seems facile: ‘conscience and self-love, if we understand our true happiness, always lead us the same way.’

J. A. Cannon