This volume attempts to correct and complicate several facets of the standard picture of Bishop Butler. Chief among them are the popular understandings of Butler's apologetics as a rational demonstration of the existence of God, and Sidgwick's presentation of Bulterian conscience as a responsive appetite primarily oriented toward personal good. In contrast, Bob Tennant argues that Butler sought not so much to defeat as to appropriate skeptical arguments by founding all human knowledge—including both science and religious faith—on inductive judgment, and that Butler understood conscience to be an active faculty; as concerned with public benevolence as with self-interest.

For Tennant, the chief source of these and similar errors is the partial way in which Butler has been read. To present a more complete picture, Tennant thus undertakes a roughly chronological consideration of Butler's intellectual development and influence through close reading of Butler's letters, Fifteen Sermons, Apology, and Six Sermons, and a statistical examination of the annual sermons preached before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in the century and a half following Butler's death. Drawing extensively on both primary and secondary sources, this volume is scholarly in the best sense of the term, and makes a compelling case that Butler's corpus deserves a second look from both philosophers and theologians.