"Disease, decay, and
death around I see," is their key-note, rather than "O all ye works
of the Lord, bless Him, praise Him, and magnify Him together."
There lingers about them a savour of the old monastic theory, that
this earth is the devil's planet, fallen, accursed, goblin-haunted,
needing to be exorcised at every turn before it is useful or even
safe for man. An age which has adopted as its most popular hymn a
paraphrase of the mediaeval monk's "Hic breve vivitur," and in which
stalwart public-school boys are bidden in their chapel worship to
tell the Almighty God of Truth that they lie awake weeping at night
for joy at the thought that they will die and see Jerusalem the
Golden--is doubtless, a pious and devout age; but not--at least as
yet--an age in which natural theology is likely to attain a high, a
healthy, or a scriptural development.
Not a scriptural development. Let me press on you, my clerical
brethren, most earnestly this one point. It is time that we should
make up our minds what tone Scripture does take toward Nature,
natural science, natural theology. Most of you, I doubt not, have
made up your minds already, and in consequence have no fear of
natural science, no fear for natural theology. But I cannot deny
that I find still lingering here and there certain of the old views
of nature of which I used to hear but too much here in London some
five-and-thirty years ago; not from my own father, thank God! for
he, to his honour, was one of those few London clergy who then faced
and defended advanced physical science; but from others--better men
too than I shall ever hope to be--who used to consider natural
theology as useless, fallacious, impossible, on the ground that this
Earth did not reveal the will and character of God, because it was
cursed and fallen; and that its facts, in consequence, were not to
be respected or relied on.
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