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Next, as to Race. Some persons now have a nervous fear of that word, and of allowing any importance to difference of races. Some dislike it, because they think that it endangers the modern notions of democratic equality. Others because they fear that it may be proved that the negro is not a man and a brother. I think the fears of both parties groundless. As for the negro, I not only believe him to be of the same race as myself, but that–if Mr. Darwin’s theories are true–science has proved that he must be such. I should have thought, as a humble student of such questions, that the one fact of the unique distribution of the hair in all races of human beings, was full moral proof that they had all had one common ancestor. But this is not matter of natural theology. What is matter thereof, is this:

Physical science is proving more and more the immense importance of Race; the importance of hereditary powers, hereditary organs, hereditary habits, in all organised beings, from the lowest plant to the highest animal. She is proving more and more the omnipresent action of the differences between races; how the more favoured race (she cannot avoid using the epithet) exterminates the less favoured, or at least expels it, and forces it, under penalty of death, to adapt itself to new circumstances; and, in a word, that competition between every race and every individual of that race, and reward according to deserts, is (as far as we can see) an universal law of living things. And she says–for the facts of history prove it– that as it is among the races of plants and animals, so it has been unto this day among the races of men.

The natural theology of the future must take count of these tremendous and even painful facts: and she may take count of them. For Scripture has taken count of them already. It talks continually–it has been blamed for talking so much–of races, of families; of their wars, their struggles, their exterminations; of races favoured, of races rejected, of remnants being saved to continue the race; of hereditary tendencies, hereditary excellences, hereditary guilt. Its sense of the reality and importance of descent is so intense, that it speaks of a whole tribe or a whole family by the name of its common ancestor, and the whole nation of the Jews is Israel, to the end. And if I be told this is true of the Old Testament, but not of the New, I must answer: What! does not St. Paul hold the identity of the whole Jewish race with Israel their forefather, as strongly as any prophet of the Old Testament? And what is the central historic fact, save One, of the New Testament, but the conquest of Jerusalem–the dispersion, all but destruction of a race, not by miracle, but by invasion, because found wanting when weighed in the stern balances of natural and social law?

Gentlemen, think of this. I only suggest the thought; but I do not suggest it in haste. Think over it–by the light which our Lord’s parables, His analogies between the physical and social constitution of the world, afford–and consider whether those awful words, fulfilled then and fulfilled so often since–“The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits hereof”–may not be the supreme instance, the most complex development of a law which runs through all created things, down to the moss which struggles for existence on the rock!

Do I say that this is all? That man is merely a part of Nature, the puppet of circumstances and hereditary tendencies? That brute competition is the one law of his life? That he is doomed for ever to be the slave of his own needs, enforced by an internecine struggle for existence? God forbid. I believe not only in Nature, but in Grace. I believe that this is man’s fate only as long as he sows to the flesh, and of the flesh reaps corruption. I believe that if he will