ABSTRACT
The most common judgment of the Analogy, even among those who still read it, is that since it was addressed to an audience that no longer exists, it is obsolete. As Mossner has put it, ‘The Analogy is dead now chiefly because it was a Tract for the times.’1 I think this judgment is quite mistaken. It is true that Butler’s work was a Tract for the times, as any apologetic work is bound to be. Its arguments are directed against objections to Christianity that were current in Butler’s own place and time, just as, for example, those left to us in Pascal’s Pensées, to which it is sometimes compared, were directed against sceptical attitudes current in France in the previous century. This means that many of the arguments arise in a context that is not a live one now, and a full understanding of them requires us to recognise the nature of that context. But it does not mean that these arguments have no value or application when the transitory features of their original setting are removed. I hope to show that their permanent value is much greater than this: that it is instructive to ponder them now, just as it is instructive to ponder those of Pascal.
