  Butler was born in 1692 and attended a dissenting academy where he read current philosophy — including up to date logic, and works of John Locke and Samuel Clarke. While a student there Butler wrote a letter to Clarke pointing out two problems in Clarke’s arguments for God’s unicity and God’s omnipresence in Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God. Butler’s criticisms led to a mutually admiring correspondence. Clarke arranged to have the correspondence published in 1716, although Butler’s letters appeared anonymously. Shortly thereafter Butler joined the Church of England, attended Oxford, and was ordained. This led to his appointment as preacher at Rolls Chapel, the chapel associated with the London equity courts, where he served until 1726. During this period he also earned a law degree. In 1726 he published a selection of his sermons as Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel. It appeared in a second edition in 1729 with corrections and with the addition of an important synoptic “Preface”. In 1736 Butler published his major work of natural theology, the Analogy of Religion, the work for which he was best known in his lifetime, with two brief but important dissertations: “Of Personal Identity” and “Of the Nature of Virtue” (hence “Dissertation on Virtue”). In the same year he was appointed Queen Caroline’s cleric, and after her death the following year he rose to become Bishop of Bristol (1738) and eventually Bishop of Durham (1750). A number of his sermons from the latter part of his career were published individually. Some of them were collected as Six Sermons on Public Occasions and published in 1749. This was followed by the “Durham Charge” (a work exhorting the clergy of his diocese) published a year before Butler’s death in 1752 (For more on Butler’s life see Cunliffe 2008, from which most of the above information is derived; see also Cunliffe 1992 and Tennant 2011).