Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1843 edition. Excerpt: ... The analogy of religion Joseph Butler INTRODUCTORY ESSAY BY ALBERT BARNES. [note. The following Essay was originally prepared as a Review of Butler's Analogy, for ths Quarteily Christian Spectator, and appeared in that work in the Numbers for December, 1830, and March, 1631. 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 distingu