Main texts: Fifteen Sermons (first edition, 1726; second edition, 1729)

Introduction and biography

It is noteworthy that Butler's entry to the clerical profession did not take the usual route of a college fellowship followed by preferment: it continued the hesitant and improvised nature of his life since Tewkesbury. To remember that it was John Wesley, not he, who was ‘ordained as a Fellow of a College’ and launched his career by publishing a university sermon preached in St Mary's is to identify the curiously lumbering quality of his life. He graduated B.A. on 11 October 1718. He was ordained by William Talbot (Bishop of Salisbury and the father of his close friend Edward): deacon on 26 October and priest, in Clarke's church, St James's, Piccadilly, on 21 December 1718. Thus, he bypassed the full year's service as deacon prescribed by the Church of England (‘except for reasonable causes it shall otherwise seem good unto the Bishop’), perhaps because on the excuse of his occasional service, formal or informal, in Edward's parish. On 27 March 1721 Talbot also presented him with the prebendal stall of Yetminster Prima in Salisbury Cathedral. Butler did not end his studies, taking bachelor's and doctor's degrees in the law, which, together with his interest in mathematics and economics, was to colour his works. His first significant appointment had come at the age of twenty-seven: through Clarke's influence he became lecturer at the Rolls Chapel in Chancery Lane.

Weinreb and Hibbert note that the chapel was ‘not only a place of worship for the Master of the Rolls and his family, but for the masters, clerks, and registrars of the Court of Chancery … The preacher was practically a domestic chaplain, though occasionally special sermons were preached to large congregations.’ Cunliffe adds that, ‘The Rolls Chapel … became a chapel for the legal profession as well as a record repository’ (ODNB, Joseph Butler). In a guidebook contemporary with Butler's tenure, William Stow records that the chapel was ‘a Repository now of Charters, Patents, Commissions, and other Matters, made up in Rolls of Parchment, from the beginning of King Richard the Third, in 1484’ and that services were held ‘every Sunday in term time at 10am [this service including a sermon] and 3pm’, the Sacrament being given ‘every second Sunday of the 4 Terms, [and] on Christmas day, Easter Sunday, and Whitsunday’.