The gist of the Butler lectures is considerably less clear, and, if only for that reason, it cannot be succinctly stated or answered. In particular, it requires rather careful "collection" in order to discover what our friend the Zeit-Geist has to do in this galley. I should imagine that, though an Edinburgh audience is by no means alarmed at philosophy, the majority, perhaps the enormous majority, of Mr Arnold's hearers must have had a singularly dim idea as to his exact drift. Indeed I cannot say that after reading the piece when it first appeared, and again, twenty years later, for the purposes of this book, I have any very distinct notion of that drift myself. If it merely means that Butler, being an eighteenth-century person, was afflicted with the eighteenth-century limitations by the Zeit-Geist, eighty-six pages, and an imposing German compound at the head of every other one of them, seem a good deal for telling us this. If it is a sort of indirect attack upon--an oblique demurrer to--Butler's constructive-aggressive orthodoxy in psychology and religion, one is bound to say with all politeness, first, that it is a case of _impar congressus_, and secondly, that the adventurous knight does not give himself a fair chance. It will take more than eighty-six not very large pages, and a German word at the top of the alternate ones, to do that! In the opening sketch of Butler himself Mr Arnold could not but be agreeable and even delightful. It gives us, indeed, most pleasant promise of work in this same good kind soon to follow; but for the rest we grope till we find, after some seventy-three of the eighty-six, that what Mr Arnold wanted to say is that Butler did not handle, and could not then have handled, miracles and the fulfilment of prophecy satisfactorily. Butler, like St Paul, is undoubtedly inconvenient for those who believe that miracles do not happen, and that prophecies were either not made or not fulfilled. So he must be got rid of. But whether he is got rid of,--whether Mr Arnold and the Zeit-Geist have put him on the shelf as a venerable but antiquated object,--that is another question.