MR. W. L. COURTNEY ON BISHOP BUTLER. 561 self-contradiction of such a principle as a guide to conduct unless it is understood to mean " following the highest part of our nature " in other words, obedience to Conscience. Where is the inconsistency of presenting his fundamental principle in a form adapted to bring out what was true and expose what was false in the popular philosophy which he found prevalent about him? Suppose a Hegelian writer of the present day were to take up the popular catch-words about " the evolution of morality," " gradual adaptation to environment," " accumulated experience of the race," and the like, and show how all that is true in such principle is recognised nay, insisted upon with all possible earnestness in the Hegelian view of a rational conception of moral good gradually unfolding itself in the consciousness of the race and stereotyping itself in the laws and institutions and accepted moral rules of conduct. Would such a writer be justly chargeable with deserting his fundamental principle and giving us two answers to the ethical problem instead of one ? And now as to Butler's theory of the " Love of God". Surely no one who admits with Butler that virtue consists in devotion to the good as such and that God wills what is essentially good, need have any difficulty in recognising the love of God, which Butler explains (Sermon xiv.) as a resting " in His will as an end, as being itself most just and right and good " as constituting the whole of morality and in a sense something more. The following of Conscience, not only in outward act, but with all the heart, with all the soul, with all the strength, is to a theist the love of God. When Butler goes on to speculate that hereafter " an infinite being may himself be, if he pleases, the supply to all the capacities of our nature," when he puts forward this " amor intellectuals " of God not so much as the immediate aim of the present life but as constituting the happi- ness of the future, he is no doubt on less certain ground. But there is nothing in such an idea, which (I must repeat) is nowhere put forward as an answer to the " Ethical Problem " which in the smallest degree justifies Mr. Courtney's assertion that " in Sermons xiii. and xiv. we are introduced to a fifth principle of ethics " (p. 110). I have no doubt that, duly tricked out in vague and sonorous Hegelian phrases and purged of too obvious a similarity to the ideas which ' popular philosophy ' has been in the habit of regarding as religious, it might be made acceptable even to more esoteric Hegelians than Mr. Courtney. Throughout Mr. Courtney's treatment of Butler there seems to be a lamentable lack of the genuinely historical spirit. Of course, if no moral system possesses any value which is not explicitly based upon a sound metaphysical system, the ethics of Butler will have no interest for the present-day Hegelian. But if Butler is not worth understanding, why write about him ? It is easy enough to criticise the ndioatk of the position that the ques- tion of the Tightness or wrongness of any particular action will "be answered agreeably to truth and virtue, by almost any fair man
