Bishop Butler certainly held this belief.  His “Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature”—­a book for which I entertain the most profound respect—­is based on a belief that the God of Nature and the God of Grace are one; and that, therefore, the God who satisfies our conscience ought more or less to satisfy our reason also.  To teach that was Butler’s mission, and he fulfilled it well.  But it is a mission which has to be re-filled again and again, as human thought changes and human science develops; for if in any age or country the God who seems to be revealed by Nature seems different from the God who is revealed by the then popular religion, then that God, and the religion which tells of that God, will gradually cease to be believed in.

For the demands of Reason (as none knew better than good Bishop Butler) must be and ought to be satisfied.  And when a popular war arises between the reason of a generation and its theology, it behoves the ministers of religion to inquire, with all humility and godly fear, on which side lies the fault:  whether the theology which they expound is all that it should be, or whether the reason of those who impugn it is all that it should be.

For me, as (I trust) an orthodox priest of the Church of England, I believe the theology of the National Church of England, as by law established, to be eminently rational as well as scriptural.  It is not, therefore, surprising to me that the clergy of the Church of England, since the foundation of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century, have done more for sound physical science than the clergy of any other denomination; or that the three greatest natural theologians with which I, at least, am acquainted—­Berkeley, Butler, and Paley—­should have belonged to our Church.  I am not unaware of what the Germans of the eighteenth century have done.  I consider Goethe’s claims to have advanced natural theology very much over-rated:  but I do recommend to young clergymen Herder’s “Outlines of the Philosophy of the History of Man” as a book (in spite of certain defects) full of sound and precious wisdom.  But it seems to me that English natural theology in the eighteenth century stood more secure than that of any other nation, on the foundation which Berkeley, Butler, and Paley had laid; and that if our orthodox thinkers for the last hundred years had followed steadily in their steps, we should not be deploring now a wide, and as some think increasing, divorce between Science and Christianity.

But it was not so to be.  The impulse given by Wesley and Whitfield turned (and not before it was needed) the earnest mind of England almost exclusively to questions of personal religion; and that impulse, under many unexpected forms, has continued ever since.  I only state the fact—­I do not deplore it; God forbid!  Wisdom is justified of all her children, and as, according to the wise American, “it takes all sorts to make a world,” so it takes all sorts to make a living Church.  But that the religious temper of England for the last two or three generations has been unfavourable to a sound and scientific development of natural theology, there can be no doubt.