Joseph Butler (1692–1752) is a major figure in the history of the anglophone world. In terms of influence and the sales of his works he was perhaps the most successful British theologian and moral philosopher of the eighteenth century. Later, in the nineteenth century, his influence grew further, in the British Empire and the USA, because of the rapid increase in university-level education. The question was asked seriously and frequently, whether he or Newton were the greater thinker. It is probable that more copies of his works were produced in the nineteenth century than of all other eighteenth-century British theological and philosophical writers combined. He is also generally agreed to be of continuing relevance, and arguably the greatest moral philosopher whom Britain has yet produced, deploying a methodology of the most extraordinarily fruitful suggestiveness. He provides, more than almost any other early modern writer, shocks of recognition: the things he says, and the way he formulates them, simply seem right – they have been taken into the common stock of our thinking – and yet remain exciting and persuasive. However, it has often been forgotten, and sometimes even doubted, that he was committed to the supreme and sufficient moral authority of the Bible; to the spiritual economy of the Church of England's liturgy; and to the systematic theology of Protestant Christianity. His works are the product of his profession: teaching and guiding his congregations and junior clergy and helping set out the mission of the Church in the language and priorities of his day. Reading Butler with this in mind is a core strategy of the present book.

His works are best considered in three groups. The first is his prentice work: the correspondence with Samuel Clarke (1713–17), about metaphysics, and Fifteen Sermons (1726), about Christian ethics and human nature. The second, his main achievement, is a corpus comprising the second edition of Fifteen Sermons (1729), The Analogy (1736) and the two dissertations appended to it. Taken together, these offer a more integrated approach to those same subjects, but in an apologetic context and with a reconsidered methodology. The third group, from his years as a bishop, is the six occasional sermons (1739–1748), which we will sometimes refer to collectively as Six Sermons. These applied his doctrine and extended his thought into various social issues. Associated with them is a clutch of minor publications, letters and fragments.