Word: butlered
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Economist G.D.H. Cole's brief study of Samuel Butler (which is one of a new British list named the English Novelists Series) is, like Butler himself, full of pig-headed notions, but clear, brisk and never dull...
Good Shepherd. Butler's crusty father, a Church of England canon, intended his son for the ministry. He was outraged when the young man refused ordination on the grounds that infant baptism was probably ineffectual and that the Gospel stories told by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were too contradictory to be credible. The canon then ordered his son to become a schoolmaster or a barrister. Instead, Butler set sail for New Zealand and, helped by money from his father, became a prosperous sheep rancher. Five years later he returned to England, having sold...
...Butler accused the canon of encouraging in him the despicable traits of unquestioning faith and conventional obedience, while damping down every speculative impulse. Once independent of the old man, Butler flew to the opposite extreme, making speculation his whole career...
Author Cole notes that Butler, for all his audacity, "was by nature a timid soul, and never ceased to be afraid of his own deviations from the normal." Yet Butler did not fly from the safety of the conventional world into the equally safe and, in its own way, equally conventional bosom of the latest "progressive" movement. He called himself Ishmael, and prepared to take on all comers...
...Positive Benefit. "Do not expend much powder and shot on Mr. Butler," Charles Darwin advised one of his supporters, "for he is really not worthy of it. His work is merely ephemeral." But Butler, who hated Darwin's evolutionary theory of "natural selection" as much as he hated the Established Church, expressed his own views early in his career by denouncing, in four large volumes, the idea that man "survived or perished according to a process of 'natural selection' into which neither God's will nor man's nor any being's appeared...