Now, that is just what Academicus and Theophilus and Theogenes have been saying to us in their own powerful way in their incomparable dialogue.
All sin and all misery; all covetousness, envy, pride, and wrath,--trace it all back to its roots, travel it all up to its source, and, as sure as you do that, self and self-love are that source, that root, and that black bottom.

I do not forget that Butler has said in some stately pages of his that self-love is morally good; that self-love is coincident with the principle of virtue and part of the idea; and that it is a proper motive for man.

But the deep bishop, in saying all that, is away back at the creation-scheme and Eden-state of human nature.

He has not as yet come down to human nature in its present state of overthrow, dismemberment, and self-destruction.

But when he does condescend and comes close to the mind and the heart of man as they now are in all men, even Butler becomes as outspoken, and as eloquent, and as full of passion and pathos as if he were an evangelical Puritan.