Six Sermons Preached upon Public Occasions

This small collection gathers sermons Joseph Butler delivered at various official and civic occasions over the course of his ecclesiastical career, brought together in 1749 when Butler was serving as Bishop of Bristol and Dean of St Paul's. Unlike the introspective, closely argued Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel that had made his reputation as a moral philosopher, these are occasional pieces, preached before institutional and public bodies rather than delivered as a sustained course of ethical reflection to a settled congregation. They belong to the genre of public or anniversary sermons common in the period: addresses tied to charitable societies, commemorative days, and gatherings of civic or ecclesiastical authority.

The sermons extend Butler's characteristic moral psychology outward, from the analysis of conscience and self-love that governs the Rolls Sermons toward questions of corporate and civic duty. He argues that benevolence and rightly understood self-interest are not opposed, and presses this claim into the practical register of charity, public spiritedness, and the obligations that bind individuals to the institutions and communities in which they live. Where his earlier work had dismantled the reduction of ethics to mere sentiment or mere calculation within the single soul, here he applies that same refusal of false opposites to the social body, treating national religion, charitable giving, and civic responsibility as extensions rather than departures from personal virtue.

The collection has never rivaled the Rolls Sermons or The Analogy of Religion in influence, and it is read far less often. Its interest lies chiefly in showing how a mind trained on the architecture of conscience turned, under the pressure of actual occasions, toward the practical and institutional life of eighteenth-century England — its charities, its government, its missionary societies. For historians of Anglican social thought and for readers already familiar with Butler's analytical ethics who want to see it applied rather than argued in the abstract, these sermons repay attention. They are not the place to begin with Butler: readers new to his thought should start with the Rolls Sermons or the Analogy, where the underlying moral psychology is actually built, before turning here to watch it put to civic use.