Bath.
[Footnote 4: Your correspondent may be referred to _Memoirs of the Life of
Bishop Butler_, by a connexion of his own, the Rev. Thomas Bartlett, A.M.,
published in 1839; and to a review of the same work in the _Quarterly
Review_, vol. lxiv. p. 331.]
In reference to the Query by X. Y. Z., as to whether Bishop Butler died in
the Roman Catholic communion, allow me to refer your correspondent to the
contents of the letters from Dr. Forster and Bishop Benson to Secker, then
Bishop of Oxford, concerning the last illness and death of the prelate in
question, deposited at Lambeth amongst the private MSS. of Archbishop
Seeker, "as negative arguments against the calumny of his dying a Papist."
Than the allegations that Butler died with a Roman Catholic book of
devotion in his hand, and that the last person in whose company he was seen
was a priest of that persuasion, nothing can be more unreasonable, if at
least it be meant to deduce from these unproved statements that the bishop
agreed with the one and held communion with the other. Dr. Forster, his
chaplain, was with him at his death, which happened about 11 A.M., June 16;
and this witness observes (in a letter to the Bishop of Oxford, June 18)
that "the last four-and-twenty hours preceding which [_i. e._ his death]
were divided between short broken slumbers, and intervals of a calm but
disordered talk when awake." Again (letter to Ditto, June 17), Forster says
that Bishop Butler, "when, for a day or two before his death, he had in a
great measure lost the use of his faculties, was perpetually talking of
writing to your lordship, though without seeming to have anything which, at
least, he was at all capable of communicating to you." Bishop Benson writes
to the Bishop of Oxford (June 12) that Butler's "attention to any one or
anything is immediately lost and gone;" and, "my lord is incapable, not
only of reading, but attending to anything read or said." And again, "his
attention to anything is very little or none."
There was certainly an interval between this time (June 12) and "the last
four-and-twenty hours" preceding his death, during which, writes Bishop
Benson (June 17), Butler "said kind and affecting things more than I could
bear." Yet, on the whole, I submit that these extracts, if fully weighed
and considered with all the attending circumstances, contain enough of even
positive evidence to refute conclusively the injurious suspicions alluded
to by X. Y. Z., if such are still current.