Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel
Joseph Butler preached these fifteen sermons to the lawyers and Chancery officials who worshipped at the Rolls Chapel in London, where he served as Preacher from 1719 until 1726, the year he gathered the sermons and published them. A second edition in 1729 added the long Preface that has since become inseparable from the work. The occasion behind them was intellectual as much as pastoral: Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville had made it fashionable to argue that every apparently generous act is self-interest wearing a mask, and that virtue is a useful fiction imposed on creatures who are, underneath, only appetite. Butler set out to answer this not by asserting revelation against it but by examining what human beings are actually like.
The method is stated in the Preface: morals can be argued from abstract relations of fitness, or from a matter of fact — the observed constitution of human nature — and Butler chooses the second. The first three sermons, on human nature, lay out an anatomy of the soul: particular affections and passions, each with its own object; cool self-love, which considers our happiness as a whole; benevolence, which is as native to us as self-love; and above them conscience, the principle of reflection by which we approve and condemn our own actions. His decisive move is to distinguish a principle's strength from its authority. Conscience is often the weakest thing in us and is nonetheless the governing thing, superior by nature rather than by force — "had it strength, as it has right; had it power, as it has manifest authority; it would absolutely govern the world." He also dismantles the egoist's premise from inside: particular passions aim at their objects, not at our pleasure, so self-love cannot be the root of them all, and rightly understood self-love and benevolence coincide rather than compete. The later sermons apply this anatomy — resentment and its lawful use, forgiveness, compassion, the character of Balaam, self-deceit, the love of neighbour, the love of God — and close on the ignorance of man, where Butler's confidence in analysis gives way to a sober account of how little we can see.
The sermons became a founding text of British moral philosophy and shaped Anglican moral theology for two centuries; Sidgwick treated Butler's refutation of psychological egoism as settled, and Newman and Gladstone both read him closely. For spiritual formation their enduring value lies elsewhere: in the sermon on self-deceit, which describes the mechanics of a conscience quietly corrupted by partiality toward oneself, and in the refusal to let anyone claim they simply cannot help what they are.
Who should read this: anyone who examines conscience seriously and wants to understand what conscience is, and preachers who want a model of moral argument that never condescends. Not for readers seeking devotional warmth — Butler's prose is dense, careful, eighteenth-century, and entirely unwilling to console.