Excerpt from The Analogy of Religion: Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature
[Note. The following Essay was originally prepared as a Review of Butler's Analogy, for the Quarterly Christian Spectator, and appeared in that work in the Numbers for December, 1830, and March, 1831. With some slight alterations and additions, it is now reprinted as an Introductory Essay to this Edition of the Analogy.]
Philadelphia, Sept. 6, 1832.
In directing the attention of our readers to the great work whose title we have placed at the head of this article, we suppose we are rendering an acceptable service chiefly to one class. The ministers of religion, we presume, need not our humble recommendation of a treatise so well known as Butler's Analogy. It will not be improper, however, to suggest that even our clerical readers may be less familiar than they should be, with a work which saps all the foundations of unbelief; and may, perhaps, have less faithfully carried out the principles of the Analogy, and interwoven them less into their theological system, than might reasonably have been expected. Butler already begins to put on the venerable air of antiquity. He belongs, in the character of his writings at least, to the men of another age. He is abstruse, profound, dry, and, to minds indisposed to thought, is often wearisome and disgusting. Even in clerical estimation, then, his work may sometimes be numbered among those repulsive monuments of ancient wisdom, which men of this age pass by indiscriminately, as belonging to times of barbarous strength and unpolished warfare.
But our design in bringing Butler more distinctly before the public eye, has respect primarily to another class of our readers In an age pre-eminently distinguished for the short-lived productions of the imagination; when reviewers feel themselves bound to serve up to the public taste, rather the deserts and confectionaries of the literary world, than the sound and wholesome fare of other times; when, in many places, it is even deemed stupid and old-fashioned to notice an ancient book, or to speak of the wisdom of our fathers; we desire to do what may lie in our power to stay the headlong propensities of the times, and recall the public mind to the records of past wisdom. We have, indeed, no blind predilection for the principles of other days. We bow down before no opinion because it is ancient. We even feel and believe, that in all the momentous questions pertaining to morals, politics, science, and religion, we are greatly in advance of past ages. And our hearts expand with joy at the prospect of still greater simplicity and clearness, in the statement and defence of the cardinal doctrines of the reformation.
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