THE OPTIMISM OF BUTLER'S 'ANALOGY'
The great and memorable statesman who devoted the overflowing energies of his leisure hours to the delivery of the first Romanes Lecture consecrated all the force of his last years of life, after his public career was closed, to an effort at recalling the attention of the world of thought to the significance of Bishop Butler.
He had grown to intellectual stature in the days when the influence of Butler had been for Oxford a sacred and inspiring inheritance. It stood for all that was manly, massive, and profound. It entered into the character and the life, as an abiding possession. 'About this time,' says J. H. Newman in the Apologia, 'I read Bishop Butler's Analogy, the study of which has been to so many, as it was to me, an era in their religious opinions.' That is a judgement characteristic of the time—a judgement which Mr. Gladstone would have adopted with whole-hearted ardour. And it was to him a deep and inexplicable wonder that such a judgement should have become strange and obsolete in the intellectual atmosphere of his own University. He could not tolerate or forgive the dismissal of Butler from his place of honour in the Philosophical School: nor could he understand how the younger generation could have suffered him to lapse out of their intellectual horizons. Indignantly, he toiled to repair the wrong. The weight of eighty years could not hold him back. To the very last moment of his working life, before he passed under the bitter discipline of pain in the very antechamber of death itself, he nursed the unconquerable hope, and brooded over the cause to which
