The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (Classic Reprint)

Note. The following Essay was originally prepared as a Review of Butler s Analosry, 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 A nalogy. PM adelphia, Sept. 6, 1S32. I xNT 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 A nalogy, 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 ard wholesome fare o
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