which Science emphasizes, as the inevitable conditions of the confined area to which our petty human experience is confined; while the compensating promise of endless advance in knowledge has in it the very note of scientific confidence.
The overriding Authority, for which Butler pleads, is the authority with which Science makes such dread play—the authority of stern unbending facts, and of the urgent pressure of past action; the authority expressed through the famous phrase, 'Things are what they are, and their consequences will be what they will be;' while the qualifications and corrections which can be brought to bear upon the necessities created by the Past take the scientific form of Remedy, which accepts the facts, and empowers them to rid themselves of their own poison and to work out their own cure.
So, again, the whole theology of Rewards and Punishments is identified by Butler with the sequence in Nature of Cause and Effect, flushed by the influng transfiguration of a divine intention. Thus, at every point, he lays himself alongside of the scientific temperament, and tallies with its outlook.
In throwing this mystical intensity into the experiential presentation of the world which is given through Natural Science, Butler had behind him the support of the Wisdom Literature with which he was so intimately in alliance. For there, too, the Vision of Truth which was so ardently pursued was no high metaphysic of the Absolute. The writers use language of such spiritual exaltation that we fancy ourselves to be engaged in some Platonic communion with the Idea of Intellectual Beauty. This Wisdom 'is more beautiful than the sun, and above all the order of the stars. She is the breath of the power of God, and a pure influence flowing from the glory of the Almighty. She is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of His goodness' (Wisd. vii). Yet, when we ask what it is which so enthralls its possessor,
