FullReads

Let us pass on, gentlemen. There is no more to be said about this matter.

But next, it will be demanded of us that natural theology shall set forth a God whose character is consistent with all the facts of nature, and not only with those which are pleasant and beautiful. That challenge was accepted, and I think victoriously, by Bishop Butler as far as the Christian religion is concerned. As far as the Scripture is concerned, we may answer thus:

It is said to us–I know that it is said: You tell us of a God of love, a God of flowers and sunshine, of singing birds and little children. But there are more facts in nature than these. There is premature death, pestilence, famine. And if you answer: Man has control over these; they are caused by man’s ignorance and sin, and by his breaking of natural laws–what will you make of those destructive powers over which he has no control; of the hurricane and the earthquake; of poisons, vegetable and mineral; of those parasitic Entozoa whose awful abundance, and awful destructiveness in man and beast, science is just revealing–a new page of danger and loathsomeness? How does that suit your conception of a God of love?

We can answer: Whether or not it suits our conception of a God of love, it suits Scripture’s conception of Him. For nothing is more clear–nay, is it not urged again and again, as a blot on Scripture?–that it reveals a God not merely of love, but of sternness–a God in whose eyes physical pain is not the worst of evils, nor animal life (too often miscalled human life) the most precious of objects–a God who destroys, when it seems fit to Him, and that wholesale, and seemingly without either pity or discrimination, man, woman and child, visiting the sins of the fathers on the children, making the land empty and bare, and destroying from off it man and beast! This is the God of the Old Testament. And if any say (as is often too rashly said): This is not the God of the New: I answer, but have you read your New Testament? Have you read the latter chapters of St. Matthew? Have you read the opening of the Epistle to the Romans? Have you read the Book of Revelations? If so, will you say that the God of the New Testament is, compared with the God of the Old, less awful, less destructive, and therefore less like the Being–granting always that there is such a Being–who presides over nature and her destructive powers? It is an awful problem. But the writers of the Bible have faced it valiantly. Physical science is facing it valiantly now. Therefore natural theology may face it likewise. Remember Carlyle’s great words about poor Francesca in the Inferno: “Infinite pity, yet also infinite rigour of law. It is so Nature is made. It is so Dante discerned that she was made.”

There are two other points on which I must beg leave to say a few words. Physical science will demand of our natural theologians that they should be aware of their importance, and let (as Mr. Matthew Arnold would say) their thoughts play freely round them. I mean questions of Embryology and questions of Race.

On the first there may be much to be said, which is for the present best left unsaid, even here. I only ask you to recollect how often in Scripture those two plain old words, beget and bring forth, occur, and in what important passages. And I ask you to remember that marvellous essay on Natural Theology, if I may so call it in all reverence, the 139th Psalm, and judge for yourself whether he who wrote that did not consider the study of Embryology as important, as significant, as worthy of his deepest attention, as an Owen, a Huxley, or a Darwin. Nay, I will go farther still, and say, that in those great words–“Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect; and in Thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them,”- -in those words, I say, the Psalmist has anticipated that realistic view of embryological questions to which our most modern philosophers are, it seems to me, slowly, half unconsciously, but still inevitably, returning.