Joseph Butler

Joseph Butler (1692–1752) was an English theologian and moral philosopher, bishop of Bristol and then of Durham. Born into a Presbyterian family in Berkshire, he conformed to the Church of England to study at Oxford and became preacher at the Rolls Chapel in London, where the Fifteen Sermons (1726) laid out his account of conscience and human nature. The Analogy of Religion (1736) answered the deists by arguing that the difficulties in revealed religion have their parallels in nature and that probability must guide belief. He was clerk of the closet to Queen Caroline and later to George II, and his influence on nineteenth-century thought, including Newman's, was profound.