Revelation informs us of, and that System of Things and Dispensation of Providence, which Experience together with Reason informs us of, i.e. the known Course of Nature; this is a Presumption that they have both the same Author and Cause.

The Analogy is therefore no answer to Atheists, nor was it intended to be so, but it has always been considered to be a complete and masterly answer to those who recognise God as the Creator and ruler of the world, but who yet rejected the revelation of God in the Bible as being contrary to reason.

Butler felt that the evidence which he had offered was probable not demonstrative, and he gives in his introduction some pregnant remarks on probability.

Probable Evidence, in its very Nature, affords but an imperfect kind of Information, and is to be considered as relative only to Beings of limited Capacities. For Nothing which is the possible object of Knowledge, whether past, present, or future, can be probable to an infinite Intelligence; since it cannot but be discerned absolutely as it is in itself, certainly true, or certainly false. But to Us, Probability is the very Guide of Life. In Questions of Difficulty, or such as are thought so, where more satisfactory Evidence cannot be had, or is not seen; if the Result of Examination be that there appears upon the whole any, the lowest Presumption on One side and none on the Other, or a greater Presumption on One side, though in the lowest Degree greater, this determines the Question, even in matters of Speculation; and in matters of Practice will lay us under an absolute and formal Obligation, in point of Prudence and of Interest, to act upon that Presumption or low Probability, though it be so low as to leave the Mind in very great Doubt which is the Truth. For surely a Man is as really bound in Prudence to do what upon the whole appears, according to the best of his Judgment, to be for his Happiness, as what he certainly knows to be so.

In the opening chapter of the second part of the work, he speaks thus of the importance of Christianity:

Some Persons, upon Pretence of the Sufficiency of the Light of Nature avowedly reject all Revelation as in its very Notion incredible, and what

must be fictitious. And indeed it is certain no Revelation would have been given, had the Light of Nature been sufficient in such a Sense as to render one not wanting and useless.

But no Man, in Seriousness and Simplicity of Mind, can possibly think it so, who considers the State of Religion in the heathen World before Revelation, and its present State in those Places which have borrowed no Light from it: particularly the Doubtfulness of some of the greatest Men concerning things of the utmost Importance, as well as the natural Inattention and Ignorance of Mankind in general. It is impossible to say who would have been able to have reasoned out That whole System which we call natural Religion in its genuine Simplicity, clear of Superstition; but there is certainly no Ground to affirm that the Generality could. If they could, there is no Sort of Probability that they would. So that to say, Revelation is a thing superfluous, what there was no Need of, and what can be of no Service; is, I think, to talk quite wildly and at random. Nor would it be more extravagant to affirm that Mankind is so entirely at ease in the present State, and Life so compleatly happy, that it is a Contradiction to suppose our Condition capable of being, in any Respect, better.

In 1736 the Analogy' was published, and attracted much attention. Queen Caroline had always been fond of philosophical and theological discussions, and she read the work with interest, and two years later Butler was made Bishop of Bristol. In 1747 he was offered the primacy, but he declined the honour; two years later he was offered and he accepted the great see of Durham, the King himself pressing it upon him.

6

He held the see for less than two years, and the only memorial left us of this period is his Charge to the Clergy' in 1751. The tone of this Charge is melancholy and desponding.

It is impossible for Me, My Brethren, upon our first Meeting of this Kind, to forbear lamenting with You the general Decay of Religion in this Nation; which is now observed by every One, and has been for some Time the Complaint of all serious Persons. The Influence of it is more and more wearing out of the Minds of Men, even of those who do

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not pretend to enter into Speculations upon the Subject: But the number of those who do, and who profess themselves Unbelievers, increases, and with their Numbers their Zeal. Zeal-'tis natural to ask-for what? Why, truely, for nothing, but against every Thing that is Good and Sacred amongst us.

In 1752 his health rapidly failed, and he died at Bath after a short illness, and was buried in his old cathedral at Bristol.

THOMAS GRAY

THE age which immediately succeeded Pope was unfavourable to poetry, and though a crowd of writers appeared, Glover and Mason, and Shenstone and Akenside, and others, they are scarcely worthy of mention. It was an age of prose, and it has been doubted if even the great master Pope himself was fully worthy of the name of poet. Coleridge describes the poetry of the period as 'translations of prose thoughts into poetic language,' and says its excellence consisted in just and acute observations on men and manners in an artificial state of society as its matter and substance; and, in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and epigrammatic couplets as its form.'1

In this unpropitious time fell the life of Gray, a man of exquisite taste and of genuine poetic spirit, who yet achieved so little; and Matthew Arnold traces this poverty of achievement to the chilling influence of the time. Coming when he did, and endowed as he was, he was a man born out of date, a man whose full spiritual flowering was impossible.'

14

Biographia Literaria.'

Gray was born in Cornhill in 1716, and his father, like Milton's, was a scrivener. He was unkind to his wife, and neglectful of his children. Thomas was the only child who lived out of a family of twelve, and he owed much more to his uncles and aunts than to his father.

In 1727 he went to Eton, and there commenced the friendship with Horace Walpole which, save for one interval, lasted till Gray's death. In 1734 they proceeded to Cambridge, where two of Gray's uncles were Fellows of colleges. Another Eton companion, named West, whom Gray dearly loved, had gone to Oxford; and now began that series of letters which, more than his poems, reveal to us the fine sympathetic nature of Gray.

Gray spent his summer vacations at his uncle's house at Burnham in Buckinghamshire, and in a letter to Walpole we get a pleasant picture of the youth studying at the feet of the famous Burnham Beeches.

I have, at the distance of half a mile through a green lane, a forest (the vulgar call it a common) all my own, at least as good as so, for I spy no human thing in it but myself. It is a little chaos of mountains and precipices; mountains, it is true, that do not ascend much above the clouds, nor are the declivities quite so amazing as Dover cliff; but just such hills as people who love their necks as well as I do, may venture to climb, and crags that give the eye as much pleasure as if they were dangerous; both vale and hill are covered with most venerable beeches, and other very reverend vegetables, that, like most other ancient people, are always dreaming out their old stories to the winds.

At the foot of one of these squats me (I Penseroso), and there grow to the trunk for a whole morning. The timorous hare and sportive squirrel gambol around me like Adam in Paradise, before he had an Eve; but I think he did not use to read Virgil as I commonly do there.

In 1739 he accompanied Walpole on a tour to the Continent, and in a series of thirty letters to his mother and father, and to his friend West, he gives a full and pleasant account of his travels. The following extract is from a letter to his mother from Rheims.

The other evening we happened to be got together in a company of eighteen people, men and women of the best fashion here, at a garden in the town to walk, when one of the ladies bethought herself of asking, 'Why should not we sup here?' Immediately the cloth was laid by the side of a fountain under the trees, and a very elegant supper served up, after which another said, 'Come, let us sing,' and directly began herself; from singing we insensibly fell to dancing, and singing in a round, when somebody mentioned the violins, and immediately a company of them was ordered. Minuets were begun in the open air, and then came country dances, which held till four o'clock next morning, at which hour the gayest lady there, proposed that such as were weary should get into their coaches, and the rest of them should dance before them with the music in the van; and in this manner we paraded through all the principal streets of the city, and waked everybody in it.

The two friends crossed the Alps and spent a considerable time in Genoa, Rome, Naples, and Florence. Gray returned home alone in 1741, having quarrelled with and parted from Walpole, but their friendship was renewed a few years later.

In 1742 Gray suffered a severe loss in the death of his friend West. His father also had recently died, and his mother and her sister retired from Cornhill to the home of another widowed sister at Stoke Pogis, and Gray spent a good portion of the spring and summer in this pleasant village, and wrote there his earliest English odes 'On the Spring,' 'On a distant Prospect of Eton College,' and To Adversity,' and he also in the same year began his famous Elegy.'