When the floods came they must have swept away all these soft sands and gravels (possibly to make the Bagshot sands, of which I shall speak presently), and left the chalk downs bare; but while they had strength to move the finer particles, they had not generally strength to move these sandstone blocks, but let them drop through, and remain upon the freshly-bared floor of chalk, as the only relics of a tertiary land long since swept away; while some were carried off, possibly by icebergs, as far as Pirbright, and dropped, as the icebergs melted, both there, at Dogmersfield, and also, though few and small, in Eversley and the neighbourhood.

But how came these tertiary sandstones to be so very hard, while the strata around them are so soft?

Ladies and gentlemen, I know no more than you. Experience seems to say that stone will not harden into that sugary crystalline state, save under the influence of great heat: but I do not know how the heat should have got to that layer in particular. Possibly there may have been eruptions of steam, of boiling water holding silex (flint) in solution—a very rare occurrence: but something similar is still going on in the famous Geysers or boiling springs of Iceland. However, I have no proof that this was the cause. I suppose we shall find out some day how it happened; for we must never despair of finding out anything which depends on facts.

Part of the town of Odiham, and of North Warnborough, stands, I believe, upon these lower beds, which are called by geologists the Woolwich and Reading beds, and the Plastic clays, from the good brick earth which is so often found among them. But as soon as you get to Hook Common, and to Dogmersfield Park, you enter on a fresh deposit; the great bed of the London clay.

I give you a rough section, from a deep well at Dogmersfield House; from which you may see how steeply the chalk dips down here under the clay, so that Odiham stands, as it were, on the chalk beach of the clay sea.

In boring that well there were pierced:

Forty feet of the upper sands (the Bagshot sands), of which I shall speak presently.

Three hundred and thirty feet of London clay.

Then about forty feet of mottled clays and sands.

Whether the chalk was then reached, I do not know. It must have been close below. But these mottled clays and sands abound in water (being indeed the layer which supplies the great breweries in London, and those soda-water bottles on dumb-waiters which squirt in Trafalgar Square); and (I suppose) the water being reached, the boring ceased.

Now, this great bed of London clay, even more than the sands below it, deserves the title of a new creation.

As a proof—some of you may recollect, when the South-Western Railway was in making, seeing shells—some of them large and handsome ones—Nautili, taken out of the London clay cutting near Winchfield.

Nautili similar to them (but not the same) are now only found in the hottest parts of the Indian seas; and what is more, not one of those shells is the same as the shells you find in the chalk. Throughout this great bed of London clay, the shells, the remains of plants and animals, are altogether a new creation. If you look carefully at the London clay shells, you will be struck with their general likeness to fresh East Indian shells; and rightly so. They do approach our modern live shells in form, far more than any which preceded them; and indeed, a few of the London clay shells exist still in foreign seas; in the beds, again, above the clay, you will meet with still more species which are yet alive; while in the chalk, and below the chalk, you never meet, I believe, with a single recent shell. It is for this reason that the London clay is said to be Eocene, that is, the dawn of the new creation.

The chalk, I told you, seems to have been deposited at the bottom of a still and deep ocean. But the London clay, we shall find, was deposited in a comparatively shallow sea, least in depth toward High Clere on the west, and deepening towards London and the mouth of the Thames.

For not only is the clay deeper as you travel eastward, but—and this is a matter to which geologists attach great importance—the character of the shells differs in different parts of the clay.

You must know that certain sorts of shells live in deep water, and certain in shallow. You may prove this to yourselves, on a small scale, whenever you go to the seaside. You will find that the shell which crawl on the rocks about high-water mark are different from those which you find at low-tide mark; and those again different from the shells which are brought up by the oyster-dredgers from the sea outside. Now, the lower part of the clay, near here, contains shallow-water shells: but if you went forty miles to the eastward, you would find in the corresponding lower beds of the clay, deep- water shells, and far above them, shallow-water shells such as you find here: a fact which shows plainly that this end of the clay sea was shallowest, and therefore first filled up.

But again—and this is a very curious fact—between the time of the Plastic clays and sands, with their oyster-beds and black pebbles, and that of the London clay, great changes had taken place. The Plastic clay and sands were deposited during a period of earthquake, of upheaval and subsidence of ancient lands; and therefore of violent currents and flood waves, seemingly rushing down from, or round the shores of that Wealden island to the south of us, on the shore of which island Odiham once stood. We know this from the great irregularity of the beds: while the absence of that irregularity proves to us that the London clay was deposited in a quiet sea.

But more. A great change in the climate of this country had taken place meanwhile; slowly perhaps: but still it had taken place.

In the lowest clay above the chalk are found at Reading many leaves, and buds, and seeds of trees, showing that there was dry land near; and these trees, as far as the best botanists can guess, were trees like those we have in England now. Not of the same species, of course: but still trees belonging to a temperate climate, which had its regular warm summer and cold winter.

But before the London clay had been all deposited, this temperate climate had changed to a tropical one; and the plants and animals of the upper part of the London clay had begun to resemble rather those of the mouths of the African slave-rivers.

Extraordinary as this is, it is certainly true.

We know that the country near the mouth of the Thames, and probably the land round us here, was low rich soil, some half under water, some overflowed by rivers; some by fresh or brackish pools. We know all this; for we find the shells which belong to a shallow sea, mixed with fresh-water ones. We know, too, that the climate of this rich lowland was a tropical one. We know that the neighbourhood of the Isle of Sheppey, at the mouth of the Thames, was covered with rich tropic vegetation; with screw pines and acacias, canes and gourds, tenanted by opossums, bats, and vultures: that huge snakes twined themselves along the ground, tortoises dived in the pools, and crocodiles basked on the muds, while the neighbouring seas swarmed with sharks as huge and terrible as those of a West Indian shore.

It is all very wonderful, ladies and gentlemen: but be it is: and all we can say is, with the Mussulman—"God is great."

And then—when, none knows but God—there came a time in which some convulsion of nature changed the course of the sea currents, and probably destroyed a vast tract of land between England and France, and probably also, that sunken island of Atlantis of which old Plato dreamed—the vast tract which connected for ages Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany, and Portugal. That convulsion covered up the rich clays with those barren sands and gravels, which now rise in flat and dreary steppes, on the Beacon Hill, Aldershot Moors, Hartford Bridge Flat, Frimley ridges, and Windsor Forest. That rich old world was all swept away, and instead of it desolation and barrenness, piling up slowly on its ruins a desert of sand and shingle, rising inch by inch out of a lifeless sea. There is something very awful to me in the barrenness of those Bagshot sands, after the rich tropic life of the London clay. Not a fossil is to be found in them for miles. Save a few shells, I believe, near Pirbright, there is not a hint that a living being inhabited that doleful sea.

But do not suppose, gentlemen and ladies, that we have yet got our gravel-pit made, or that the way-worn pebbles of which it is composed are near the end of their weary journey. Poor old stones! Driven out of their native chalk, rolled for ages on a sea-beach, they have tried to get a few centuries' sleep in the Eocene sands on the top of the chalk hills behind us, while the London clay was being deposited peacefully in the tropic sea below; and behold, they are swept out, once more, and hurled pell-mell upon the clay, two hundred feet over our heads.

Over our heads, remember. We have come now to a time when Hartford Bridge Flats stretched away to the Beacon Hill, and many a mile to the south-eastward—even down into Kent, and stretched also over Winchfield and Dogmersfield hither.

What broke them up? What furrowed out their steep side-valleys? What formed the magnificent escarpment of the Beacon Hill, or the lesser one of Finchamstead Ridges? What swept away all but a thin cap of them on the upper part of Dogmersfield Park, another under Winchfield House; another at Bearwood, and so forth?

The convulsions of a third world; more fertile in animal life than those which preceded it: but also, more terrible and rapid, if possible, in its changes.

Of this third world, the one which (so to speak) immediately preceded our own, we know little yet. Its changes are so complicated that geologists have as yet hardly arranged them. But what we can see, I will sketch for you shortly.

A great continent to the south—England, probably an island at the beginning of the period, united to the continent by new beds—the Mammoth ranging up to where we now stand.

Then a period of upheaval. The German Ocean becomes dry land. The Thames, a far larger river than now, runs far eastward to join the Seine, and the Rhine, and other rivers, which altogether flow northward, in one enormous stream, toward the open sea between Scotland and Norway.

And with this, a new creation of enormous quadrupeds, as yet unknown. Countless herds of elephants pastured by the side of that mighty river, where now the Norfolk fisherman dredges their teeth and bones far out in open sea. The hippopotamus floundered in the Severn, the rhinoceros ranged over the south-western counties; enormous elk and oxen, of species now extinct, inhabited the vast fir and larch forests which stretched from Norfolk to the farthest part of Wales; hyenas and bears double the size of our modern ones, and here and there the sabre-toothed tiger, now extinct, prowled out of the caverns in the limestone hills, to seek their bulky prey.

We see, too, a period—whether the same as this, or after it, I know not yet—in which the mountains of Wales and Cumberland rose to the limits of eternal frost, and Snowdon was indeed Snowdon, an alp down whose valleys vast glaciers spread far and wide; while the reindeer of Lapland, the marmot of the Alps, and the musk ox of Hudson's Bay, fed upon alpine plants, a few of whose descendants still survive, as tokens of the long past age of ice. And at every successive upheaval of the western mountains the displaced waters of the ocean swept over the lower lands, filling the valley of the Thames and of the Wey with vast beds of drift gravel, containing among its chalk flints, fragments of stone from every rock between here and Wales, teeth of elephants, skulls of ox and musk ox; while icebergs, breaking away from the glaciers of the Welsh Alps, sailed down over the spot where we now are, dropping their imbedded stones and silt, to confuse more utterly than before the records of a world rocking and throbbing above the shocks of the nether fire.

At last the convulsions get weak. The German Ocean becomes sea once more; the north-western Alps sink again to a level far lower even than their present one; only to rise again, but not so high as before; sea-beaches and sea-shells fill many of our lower valleys; whales by hundreds are stranded (as in the Farnham vale) where is now dry land. Gradually the sunken land begins to rise again, and falls perhaps again, and rises again after that, more and more gently each time, till as it were the panting earth, worn out with the fierce passions of her fiery youth, has sobbed herself to sleep once more, and this new world of man is made. And among it, I know not when, or by what diluvial wave out of hundreds which swept the Pleistocene earth, was deposited our little gravel-pit, from which we started on our journey through three worlds.

When?

Enough for us that He knows when, in whose hand are the times and the seasons—God the Father of the spirits of all flesh.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, take from hence a lesson. I have brought you a long and a strange road. Starting from this seemingly uninteresting pit, we have come upon the records of three older worlds, and on hints of worlds far older yet. We have come to them by no theories, no dreams of the fancy, but by plain honest reasoning, from plain honest facts. That wonderful things had happened, we could see: but why they had happened, we saw not. When we began to ask the reason of this thing or of that, remember how we had to stop, and laying our hands upon our mouths, only say with the Mussulman: "God is great." We pick our steps, by lanthorn light indeed, and slowly, but still surely and safely, along a dark and difficult road: but just as we are beginning to pride ourselves on having found our way so cleverly, we come to an edge of darkness; and see before our feet a bottomless abyss, down which our feeble lanthorn will not throw its light a yard.

Such is true science. Is it a study to make men conceited and self- sufficient? Believe it not. If a scientific man, or one who calls himself so, be conceited, the conceit was there before the science; part of his natural defects: and if it stays there long after he has really given himself to the patient study of nature, then is he one of those of whom Solomon has said: "Though you pound a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his folly depart from him."

For what more fit to knock the conceit out of a student, than being pounded by these same hard facts—which tell him just enough to let him know—how little he knows? What more fit to make a man patient, humble, reverent, than being stopped short, as every man of science is, after each half-dozen steps, by some tremendous riddle which he cannot explain—which he may have to wait years to get explained— which as far as he can see will never be explained at all?

The poet says: "An undevout astronomer is mad," and he says truth. It is only those who know a little of nature, who fancy that they know much. I have heard a young man say, after hearing a few popular chemical lectures, and seeing a few bottle and squirt experiments: Oh, water—water is only oxygen and hydrogen!—as if he knew all about it. While the true chemist would smile sadly enough at the youth's hasty conceit, and say in his heart: "Well, he is a lucky fellow. If he knows all about it, it is more than I do. I don't know what oxygen IS, or hydrogen, either. I don't even know whether there are any such things at all. I see certain effects in my experiments which I must attribute to some cause, and I call that cause oxygen, because I must call it something; and other effects which I must attribute to another cause, and I call that hydrogen. But as for oxygen, I don't know whether it really exists. I think it very possible that it is only an effect of something else—another form of a something, which seems to make phosphorus, iodine, bromine, and certain other substances: and as for hydrogen—I know as little about it. I don't know but what all the metals, gold, silver, iron, tin, sodium, potassium, and so forth, are not different forms of hydrogen, or of something else which is the parent of hydrogen. In fact, I know but very little about the matter; except this, that I do know very little; and that the more I experiment, and the more I analyse, the more unexpected puzzles and wonders I find, and the more I expect to find till my dying day. True, I know a vast number of facts and laws, thank God; and some very useful ones among them: but as to the ultimate and first causes of those facts and laws, I know no more than the shepherd-boy outside; and can say no more than he does, when he reads in the Psalms at school: "I, and all around me, are fearfully and wonderfully made; marvellous are Thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well."

And so, my friends, though I have seemed to talk to you of great matters this night; of the making and the destruction of world after world: yet what does all I have said come to? I have not got one step beyond what the old Psalmist learnt amid the earthquakes and volcanoes of the pastures and the forests of Palestine, three thousand years ago. I have not added to his words; I have only given you new facts to prove that he had exhausted the moral lesson of the subject, when he said:

These all wait upon thee, that thou mayest give them their meat in due season.

Thou givest, and they gather: thou openest thy hand, and they are filled with good.

Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled; thou takest away their breath; they die and return to their dust.

Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created; and thou renewest the face of the earth.

But—The glory of the Lord shall endure for ever. The Lord shall rejoice in his works. Amen.



HOW TO STUDY NATURAL HISTORY {290}



Ladies and gentlemen, I speak to you to-night as to persons assembled, somewhat, no doubt, for amusement, but still more for instruction. Institutions such as this were originally founded for the purpose of instruction; to supply to those who wish to educate themselves some of the advantages of a regular course of scholastic or scientific training, by means of classes and of lectures.

I myself prize classes far higher than I do lectures. From my own experience, a lecture is often a very dangerous method of teaching; it is apt to engender in the mind of men ungrounded conceit and sciolism, or the bad habit of knowing about subjects without really knowing the subject itself. A young man hears an interesting lecture, and carries away from it doubtless a great many new facts and results: but he really must not go home fancying himself a much wiser man; and why? Because he has only heard the lecturer's side of the story. He has been forced to take the facts and the results on trust. He has not examined the facts for himself. He has had no share in the process by which the results were arrived at. In short, he has not gone into the real scientia, that is, the "knowing" of the matter. He has gained a certain quantity of second-hand information: but he has gained nothing in mental training, nothing in the great "art of learning," the art of finding out things for himself, and of discerning truth from falsehood. Of course, where the lecture is a scientific one, illustrated by diagrams, this defect is not so extreme: but still the lecturer who shows you experiments, is forced to choose those which shall be startling and amusing, rather than important; he is seldom or never able, unless he is a man of at once the deepest science and the most extraordinary powers of amusing, to give you those experiments in the proper order which will unfold the subject to you step by step; and after all, an experiment is worth very little to you, unless you perform it yourself, ask questions about it, or vary it a little to solve difficulties which arise in your own mind.

Now mind—I do not say all this to make you give up attending lectures. Heaven forbid. They amuse, that is, they turn the mind off from business; they relax it, and as it were bathe and refresh it with new thoughts, after the day's drudgery or the day's commonplaces; they fill it with pleasant and healthful images for afterthought. Above all, they make one feel what a fair, wide, wonderful world one lives in; how much there is to be known, and how little one knows; and to the earnest man suggest future subjects of study. I only ask you not to expect from lectures what they can never give; but as to what they can give, I consider, I assure you, the lecturer's vocation a most honourable one in the present day, even if we look on him as on a mere advertiser of nature's wonders. As such I appear here to-night; not to teach you natural history; for that you can only teach yourselves: but to set before you the subject and its value, and if possible, allure some of you to the study of it.

I have said that lectures do not supply mental training; that only personal study can do that. The next question is, What study? And that is a question which I do not answer in a hurry, when I say, The study of natural history. It is not, certainly, a study which a young man entering on the business of self-education would be likely to take up. To him, naturally, man is the most important subject. His first wish is to know the human world; to know what men are, what they have thought, what they have done. And therefore, you find that poetry, history, politics, and philosophy are the matters which most attract the self-guided student. I do not blame him, but he seems to me to be beginning at the middle, rather than at the beginning. I fell into the same fault myself more than once, when I was younger, and meddled in matters too high for me, instead of refraining my soul, and keeping it low; so I can sympathise with others who do so. But I can assure them that they will find such lofty studies do them good only in proportion as they have first learnt the art of learning. Unless they have learnt to face facts manfully, to discriminate between them skilfully, to draw conclusions from them rigidly; unless they have learnt in all things to look, not for what they would like to be true, but for what is true, because God has done it, and it cannot be undone—then they will be in danger of taking up only the books which suit their own prejudices—and every one has his prejudices—and using them, not to correct their own notions, but to corroborate and pamper them; to confirm themselves in their first narrow guesses, instead of enlarging those guesses into certainty. The son of a Tory turn will read Tory books, the son of a Radical turn Radical books; and the green spectacles of party and prejudice will be deepened in hue as he reads on, instead of being thrown away for the clear white glass of truth, which will show him reason in all honest sides, and good in all honest men.

But, says the young man, I wish to be wide-minded and wide-hearted— I study for that very purpose. I will be fair, I will be patient, I will hear all sides ere I judge. And I doubt not that he speaks honestly. But (I quote with all reverence) though the spirit be willing, the flesh is weak. Studies which have to do with man's history, man's thoughts, man's feelings, are too exciting, too personal, often, alas, too tragical, to allow us to read them calmly at first. The men and women of whom we read are so like ourselves (for the human heart is the same in every age), that we unconsciously begin to love or hate them in the first five minutes, and read history as we do a novel, hurrying on to see when the supposed hero and heroine get safely married, and the supposed villain safely hanged, at the end of the chapter, having forgotten all the while, in our haste, to ascertain which is the hero and which is the villain. Mary Queen of Scots was "beautiful and unfortunate"—what heart would not bleed for a beautiful woman in trouble? Why stop to ask whether she brought it on herself? She was seventeen years in prison. Why stop to ascertain what sort of a prison it was? And as for her guilt, the famous Casket Letters were, of course, a vile forgery. Impossible that they could be true. Hoot down the cold-hearted, and disagreeable, and troublesome man of facts, who will persist in his stupid attempt to disenchant you, and repeat—But the Casket Letters were not a forgery, and we can prove it, if you will but listen to the facts. Her prison, as we will show you (if you will be patient and listen to facts), consisted in greater pomp and luxury than that of most noblemen, with horses, hounds, books, music, liberty to hunt and amuse herself in every way, even in intriguing with every court of Europe, as we can show you again, if you will be patient and listen to facts. And she herself was a very wicked and false woman, an adulteress and a murderess (though fearfully ill-trained in early youth), who sowed the wind, poor wretch, from girlhood to old age, and therefore reaped the whirlwind, receiving the just reward of her deeds. Catherine of Russia, meanwhile, instead of being beautiful and unfortunate, was only handsome and successful. Brand her as a disgrace to human nature. The morals and ways of the two were pretty much on a par, with these exceptions in Catherine's favour— that she had strong passions, Mary none; that she lived in outer darkness and practical heathendom, while Mary had the light shining all round her, and refused it deliberately again and again. What matter to the sentimentalist? Hiss the stupid hard-hearted man of facts, by all means. What if he be right? He has no business to be right; we will consider him wrong accordingly, of our own sovereign will and pleasure. For after all, if we had the facts put before us (says the conscience of many a hearer), we could not judge of them; we read to be amused and instructed, not to study cases like so many barristers. So is history read. And so, alas, is history written, too often, for want of a steady and severe training which would enable people to judge dispassionately of facts. In politics the case is the same. In poetry, which appeals more directly to the feelings, it must needs be still worse; as has been shown sadly enough of late by the success of several poems, in which every possible form of bad taste has only met with unbounded admiration from the many who have not had their senses exercised to discern between good and evil.

Now what seems to me to be wanted for young minds, is a study in which no personal likes or dislikes shall tempt them out of the path of mental honesty; a study in which they shall be free to look at facts exactly as they are, and draw their conclusions patiently and dispassionately. And such a study I have found in that of natural history.

Do not fancy it, I beg you, an easy thing to judge fairly of facts; even to discover the facts at all, when they are staring you in the face; and to see what it is that you do see. Any lawyer will tell you, that if you ask three honest men to bear testimony concerning an event which happened but yesterday, none of them, if he be at all an interested party, will give you exactly the same account of it: not that he wishes to say what is untrue; but that different parts of the whole matter having struck each man with different force, a different picture has been left on each man's memory. I have been utterly astounded of late, in investigating these strange stories of table-turning and spirit-rapping, to find how even clear-headed and well-instructed persons (as one had fancied them) become unable to examine fairly into a thing, the moment the desire to believe has entered the heart; and how no amount of mere cultivation, if the scientific habit of mind be wanting, can prevent people from finding (as in table-turning) miracles in the most simple mechanical accidents; or from becoming (as in spirit-rapping) the dupes of the most clumsy, palpable, and degrading impostures, even after they have been exposed over and over again in print. Humiliating, indeed, it is, in this so self-confident and boastful nineteenth century, amid steam-engines, railroads, electric telegraphs, and all the wonders of our inductive science, to find exploded superstitions leaping back into life even more monstrous and irrational than in past ages, and to see our modern Pharisees and Sadducees, like those in Judea of old, seeking after a sign of an unseen world; and being unable to find one either in the heaven above or in the earth beneath, discovering it at last (I am almost ashamed to speak the words) under the parlour-table.

Against such extravagances, and against the loose sentimental tone of mind which begets them, hardly anything would be a better safeguard than the habitual study of nature. The chemist, the geologist, the botanist, the zoologist, has to deal with facts which will make him master of them, and of himself, only in proportion as he obeys them. Many of you doubtless know Lord Bacon's famous apothegm, Nature is only conquered by obeying her; and will understand me when I say, that you cannot understand, much less use for scientific purposes, the meanest pebble, unless you first obey that pebble. Paradoxical; but true.

See this pebble which I hold in my hand, picked up out of the street as I came along; it shall be my only object to-night. There the thing is; and is as it is, and in no other way; and such it will be, and so it will behave and act, in spite of me, and all my fancies about it, and notions of what it ought to have been like, and what it ought to have done. It is a thought of God's; and strong by the eternal laws of matter, which are the will of God. It has the whole universe, sun, and stars, and all, backing it by God's appointment, to keep it where it is and what it is; and till (as Lord Bacon has it) I have discovered and obeyed the will of God revealed in that pebble, it is to me a riddle more insoluble than the Sphinx's, a fortress more impregnable than Sevastopol. I may crush it: but destroying is not conquering: but I cannot even mend the road with it prudently, until I have discovered whether Almighty God has made it fit to mend roads with. I may have the genius of a Plato or of a Shakespeare, but all my genius will not avail to penetrate that pebble, or see anything in it but a little round dirty stone, until I have treated the pebble with reverence, as a thing independent of my likes and dislikes, fancies, and aspirations; and have asked it humbly to tell me its story, taking counsel meanwhile of hundreds of kindred pebbles, each as silent and reserved as this one; and watched and listened patiently, through many mistakes and misreadings, to what it has to say for itself, and what God has made it to be. And then at last that little black rounded pebble, from the street outside, may, and will surely, if I be patient and honest enough, tell me a tale wilder and grander than any which I could have dreamed for myself; will shame the meanness of my imagination, by the awful magnificence of God's facts, and say to me:

"Ages and AEons since, thousands on thousands of years before there was a man to till the ground, I the little pebble was a living sponge, in the milky depths of the great chalk ocean; and hundreds of living atomies, each more fantastic than a ghost-painter's dreams, swam round me, and grew on me, and multiplied, till I became a tiny hive of wonders, each one of which would take you a life to understand. And then, I cannot yet tell you how, and till I tell you you will never know, the delicate flint-needles in my skin gathered other particles of flint to them, and I and all my inhabitants became a stone; and the chalk-mud settled round us, I know not how, and covered us in; and for ages on ages I lay buried in the nether dark, and felt the glow of the nether fires, and was cracked and tossed by a hundred earthquakes. Again and again I have been part of an island, and then again sunk beneath the sea, to be upheaved again after long centuries, till I saw the light once more, and dropped from the face of some chalk cliff far away among high hills which have long since been swept off the face of the earth, and was tossed by currents till I became a pebble on the beach, while Reading was a sand-bank in a shallow sea. There I lay and rolled till I was rounded, for many a century more; till flood after flood past over me, and a new earth was made; and I was mixed up with fresh flints from wasting chalk-hills, and with freestones from the Gloucestershire wolds, and with quartz-boulders from the mountains of Wales, while over me swept the carcases of drowned elephants and bisons, and many a monstrous beast; and above me floated uprooted palms, and tropic fruits and seeds, and the wrecks of a dying world. And then there came another age—

And it grew wondrous cold; And ice mast-high came floating by, As green as emerald;

and as the icebergs melted in the sun, the stones and the silt fell out of them, and covered me up; and I was in darkness once more, vexed by many an earthquake, till I became part of this brave English land. And now I am a pebble here in Reading street, to be ground beneath the wheels of busy men: and yet you cannot kill me, or hinder my fulfilling the law which cannot be broken. This year I am a pebble in the street; and next year I shall be dust upon the fields above; and the year after that I shall be alive again, and rise from the ground as fair green wheat-stems, bearing up food for the use of man. And even after that you cannot kill me. The trampled and sodden straw will rot only to enter into a new life; and I shall pass through a fresh cycle of strange adventures, age after age, till time shall be no more; doing my work in my generation, and fulfilling to the last the will of God, as faithfully as when I was the water-breathing sponge in the abysses of the old chalk sea." All this and more, gentlemen and ladies, the pebble could tell to you, and will: but he is old and venerable, and like old men, he wishes to be approached with respect, and does not like to be questioned too much or too rapidly; so that you must not be offended if you meet with more than one rebuff from him; or if he keeps stubborn silence, till he has seen that you are a modest and attentive person, to whom it is worth while to open a little of his forty or fifty thousand years' experience.

Second only to the good effect of this study on the logical faculty, seems to me to be its effect on the imagination. Not merely in such objects as the pebble, whose history I have so hastily, but I must add faithfully, sketched; but in the tiniest piece of mould on a decayed fruit, the tiniest animalcule from the stagnant pool, will imagination find inexhaustible wonders, and fancy a fairy-land. And I beg my elder hearers not to look on this as light praise. Imagination is a valuable thing; and even if it were not, it is a thing, a real thing, a faculty which every one has, and with which you must do something. You cannot ignore it; it will assert its own existence. You will be wise not to neglect it in young children; for if you do not provide wholesome food for it, it will find unwholesome food for itself. I know that many, especially men of business, are inclined to sneer at it, and ask what is the use of it? The simple answer is, God has made it; and He has made nothing in vain. But you will find that in practice, in action, in business, imagination is a most useful faculty, and is so much mental capital, whensoever it is properly trained. Consider but this one thing, that without imagination no man can possibly invent even the pettiest object; that it is one of the faculties which essentially raises man above the brutes, by enabling him to create for himself; that the first savage who ever made a hatchet must have imagined that hatchet to himself ere he began it; that every new article of commerce, every new opening for trade, must be arrived at by acts of imagination; by the very same faculty which the poet or the painter employs, only on a different class of objects; remember that this faculty is present in some strength in every mind of any power, in every mind which can do more than follow helplessly in the beaten track, and do nothing but what it has seen others do already: and then see whether it be not worth while to give the young a study which above all others is fitted to keep this important and universal faculty in health. Now, from fifty to five-and-twenty years ago, under the influence of the Franklin and Edgeworth school of education, imagination was at a discount. That school was a good school enough: but here was one of its faults. It taught people to look on imagination as quite a useless, dangerous, unpractical, bad thing, a sort of mental disease. And now, as is usual after an unfair depreciation of anything, has come a revolution; and an equally unfair glorifying of the imagination; the present generation have found out suddenly that the despised faculty is worth something, and therefore are ready to believe it worth everything; so that nowadays, to judge from the praise heaped on some poets, the mere possession of imagination, however ill regulated, will atone for every error of false taste, bad English, carelessness for truth; and even for coarseness, blasphemy, and want of common morality; and it is no longer charity, but fancy, which is to cover the multitude of sins.

The fact is, that youth will always be the period of imagination; and the business of a good education will always be to prevent that imagination from being thrown inward, and producing a mental fever, diseasing itself and the whole character by feeding on its own fancies, its own day dreams, its own morbid feelings, its likes and dislikes; even if it do not take at last to viler food, to French novels, and lawless thoughts, which are but too common, alas! though we will not speak of them here.

To turn the imagination not inwards, but outwards; to give it a class of objects which may excite wonder, reverence, the love of novelty and of discovering, without heating the brain or exciting the passions—this is one of the great problems of education; and I believe from experience that the study of natural history supplies in great part what we want. The earnest naturalist is pretty sure to have obtained that great need of all men, to get rid of self. He who, after the hours of business, finds himself with a mind relaxed and wearied, will not be tempted to sit at home dreaming over impossible scenes of pleasure, or to go for amusement to haunts of coarse excitement, if he have in every hedge-bank, and wood land, and running stream, in every bird among the boughs, and every cloud above his head, stores of interest which will enable him to forget awhile himself, and man, and all the cares, even all the hopes of life, and to be alone with the inexhaustible beauty and glory of Nature, and of God who made her. An hour or two every day spent after business-hours in botany, geology, entomology, at the telescope or the microscope, is so much refreshment gained for the mind for to-morrow's labour, so much rest for irritated or anxious feelings, often so much saved from frivolity or sin. And how easy this pursuit. How abundant the subjects of it! Look round you here. Within the reach of every one of you are wonders beyond all poets' dreams. Not a hedge-bank but has its hundred species of plants, each different and each beautiful; and when you tire of them—if you ever can tire—a trip into the meadows by the Thames, with the rich vegetation of their dikes, floating flower-beds of every hue, will bring you as it were into a new world, new forms, new colours, new delight. You ask why this is? And you find yourself at once involved in questions of soil and climate, which lead you onward, step by step, into the deepest problems of geology and chemistry. In entomology, too, if you have any taste for the beauties of form and colour, any fondness for mechanical and dynamical science, the insects, even to the smallest, will supply endless food for such likings; while their instincts and their transformations, as well as the equally wondrous chemical transformation of salts and gases into living plants, which agricultural chemistry teaches you, will tempt you to echo every day Mephistopheles's magic song, when he draws wine out of the table in Auersbach's cellar:

Wine is grapes, and grapes are wood— The wooden board yields wine as good: It is but a deeper glance Into Nature's countenance. All is plain to him who seeth; Lift the veil and look beneath, And behold, the wise man saith, Miracles, if you have faith.

Believe me you need not go so far to find more than you will ever understand. An hour's summer walk, in the company of some one who knows what to look for and how to look for it, by the side of one of those stagnant dikes in the meadows below, would furnish you with subjects for a month's investigation, in the form of plants, shells, and animalcules, on each of which a whole volume might be written. And even at this seemingly dead season of the year, fancy not that nature is dead—not even that she sleeps awhile. Every leaf which drops from the bough, to return again into its gases and its dust, is working out chemical problems which have puzzled a Boyle and a Lavoisier, and about which a Liebig and a Faraday will now tell you that they have but some dim guess, and that they stand upon the threshold of knowledge like (as Newton said of himself) children gathering a few pebbles, upon the shore of an illimitable sea. In every woodland, too, innumerable fungi are at work, raising from the lower soil rich substances, which, strewed on the surface by quick decay, will form food for plants higher than themselves; while they, by their variety and beauty, both of form and colour, might well form studies for any painter, and by the obscure laws of their reproduction, studies for any philosopher. Why, there is not a heap of dead leaves among which by picking it through carefully you might not find some twenty species of delicate and elegant land-shells; hardly a tree-foot at which, among the moss and mould, you might not find the chrysalides of beautiful moths, where caterpillars have crawled down the trunk in autumn, to lie there self-buried and die to live again next spring in a new and fairer shape. And if you cannot reach even there, go to the water-but in the nearest yard, and there, in one pinch of green scum, in one spoonful of water, behold a whole "Divina Commedia" of living forms, more fantastic a thousand times than those with which Dante peopled his unseen world: and then feel, as you should feel, abashed at the ignorance and weakness of mortal man; abashed still more at that rash conceit of his, which makes him fancy himself the measure of all things; and say with me: "Oh Lord, thy works are manifold; thy ways are very deep. In wisdom hast thou made them all, the earth is full of thy riches. Thou openest thy hand, and fillest all things living with plenteousness; they continue this day according to thine ordinance, for all things serve thee. Thou hast made them fast for ever and ever; thou hast given them a law which shall not be broken. Let them praise the name of the Lord; for he spake the word and they were made, he commanded, and they were created."

This I shall say, but little more than this, on the religious effect of the study of natural history. I do not wish to preach a sermon to you. I can trust God's world to bear better witness than I can, of the Loving Father who made it. I thank him from my own experience for the testimony of His Creation, only next to the testimony of His Bible. I have watched scientific discoveries which were supposed in my boyhood to be contrary to revelation, found out one by one to confirm and explain revelation, as crude and hasty theories were corrected by more abundant facts, and men saw more clearly what both the Bible and Nature really did say; and I can trust that the same process will go on for ever, and that God's earth and God's word will never contradict each other. I have found the average of scientific men, not less, but more, godly and righteous men than the average of their neighbours; and I can trust that this will be more and more the case as science deepens and widens. And therefore I can trust that every patient, truthful, and healthful mind will, the more it contemplates the works of God, re- echo St. Paul's great declaration that the Invisible things of God are clearly seen from the foundation of the world, being understood by the things which are made, even His eternal power and Godhead. And so trusting, I pass on to a lower view of the subject, and yet not an unnecessary one.

In an industrial country like this, the practical utility of any study must needs be always thrown into the scale; and natural history seems at first sight somewhat unpractical. What money will it earn for a man in after life?—is a question which will be asked; and which it is folly to despise. For if the only answer be: "None at all," a man has a right to rejoin: "Then let me take up some pursuit which will train and refresh my mind as much as this one, and yet be of pecuniary benefit to me some day." If you can find such a study, by all means follow it: but I say that this study too may be of great practical benefit in after life. How much money have I, young as I am, seen wasted for want of a little knowledge of botany, geology, or chemistry. How many a clever man becomes the dupe of empirics for want of a little science. How many a mine is sought for where no mine could be; or crop attempted to be grown, where no such crop could grow. How many a hidden treasure, on the other hand, do men walk over unheeding. How many a new material, how many an improved process in manufacture is possible, yet is passed over, for want of a little science. And for the man who emigrates, and comes in contact with rude nature teeming with unsuspected wealth, of what incalculable advantage to have if it be but the rudiments of those sciences, which will tell him the properties, and therefore the value, of the plants, the animals, the minerals, the climates with which he meets? True—home-learnt natural history will not altogether teach him about these things, because most of them must needs be new: but it will teach him to compare and classify them as he finds them, and so by analogy with things already known to him, to discover their intrinsic worth.

For natural history stands to man's power over Nature, that is, to his power of being useful to himself and to mankind, in the same relation as do geography, grammar, arithmetic, geometry, political economy; none of them, perhaps, bearing directly on his future business in life; but all training his mind for his business, all giving him the rudiments of laws which he will hereafter work out and apply to his profession. And even at home, be sure that such studies will bear fruit in after life. The productive wealth of England is not exhausted, doubt it not; our grandchildren may find treasures in this our noble island of which we never dreamed, even as we have found things of which our forefathers dreamed not. Recollect always that a great market town like this is not merely a commercial centre; not perhaps even a commercial centre at all: but that she is an agricultural centre, and one of the most important in England; that the increase of science here will be sure more or less to extend itself to the neighbourhood: and then lay to heart this one fact. A friend of mine, and one whom I am proud to call my friend, succeeding to an estate, thought good to cultivate it himself. And being a man of common sense, he thought good to know something of what he was doing. And he said to himself: The soil, and the rain, and the air are my raw materials. I ought surely then to find out what soil, and rain, and air are; so I must become a geologist and a meteorologist. Vegetable substances are what I am to make. And I ought surely to know what it is that I am making; so I must become a botanist. The raw material does somehow or other become manufactured into the produce; the soil into the vegetable. I ought surely to know a little about the processes of my own manufacture; so I must learn chemistry. Chance and blind custom are not enough for me. At best they can but leave me where they found me, at their mercy. Science I need; and science I will acquire. What was the result? After many a mistake and disappointment, he succeeded in discovering on his own estate a mine of unsuspected wealth—not of gold indeed, but of gold's worth—the elements of human food. He discovered why some parts of his estate were fertile, while others were barren; and by applying the knowledge thus gained, he converted some of his most barren fields into his most fertile ones; he preserved again and again his crops from blight, while those of others perished all around him; he won for himself wealth, and the respect and honour of men of science; while those around him, slowly opening their eyes to his improvements, followed his lessons at second-hand, till the whole agriculture of an important district has become gradually but permanently improved, under the auspices of one patient and brave man, who knew that knowledge was power, and that only by obeying nature can man conquer her.

Bear in mind both these last great proverbs; and combine them in your mind. Remember that while England is, and ever will be, behindhand in metaphysical and scholastic science, she is the nation which above all others has conquered nature by obeying her; that as it pleased God that the author of that proverb, the father of inductive science, Bacon Lord Verulam, should have been an Englishman, so it has pleased Him that we, Lord Bacon's countrymen, should improve that precious heirloom of science, inventing, producing, exporting, importing, till it seems as if the whole human race, and every land from the equator to the pole must henceforth bear the indelible impress and sign manual of English science.

And bear in mind, as I said just now, that this study of natural history is the grammar of that very physical science which has enabled England thus to replenish the earth and subdue it. Do you not see, then, that by following these studies you are walking in the very path to which England owes her wealth; that you are training in yourselves that habit of mind which God has approved as the one which He has ordained for Englishmen, and are doing what in you lies toward carrying out, in after life, the glorious work which God seems to have laid on the English race, to replenish the earth and subdue it?

One word more, and I have done. Unless you are already tired of hearing me, I would suggest a few practical hints before we part. The best way of learning these matters is by classes, in which men may combine and interchange their thoughts and observations. The greatest savants find this; and have their Microscopic Society, Linnaean, Royal, Geological Societies, British Associations, and what not, in which all may know what each has done, and each share in the learning of all; for as iron sharpeneth iron, so a man sharpens the face of his friend. I have nothing to say against debating societies: perhaps it was my own fault that whenever I belonged to one as a young man, I found them inclined to make me conceited, dictatorial, hasty in my judgments, trying to state a case before I had investigated it, to teach others before I had taught myself, to make a fine speech, not to find out the truth; till in, I think, a wise moment for me, I vowed at twenty never to set foot in one again, and kept my vow. Be that as it may, I wish that side by side with the debating society, I could see young men joining in natural history societies; going out in company on pleasant evenings to search together after the hidden treasures of God's world, and read the great green book which lies open alike to peasant and to peer; and then meeting, say once a week, to debate, not of opinions but of facts; to show each what they had found, to classify and explain, to learn and to wonder together. In such a class many appliances would be possible. A microscope, for instance, or chemical apparatus, might belong to the society, which each individual by himself would not be able to afford; while as for books—books on these subjects are now published at a marvellous cheapness, which puts them within the reach of every one, and of an excellence which twenty years ago was impossible. Any working man in this town might now, especially in a class, consult scientific books, for which I, as a lad, twenty years ago, was sighing in vain; nay, many of which, twenty years ago, the richest nobleman could not have purchased; for the simple reason, that, dear or cheap, they did not exist. Such classes, too, would be the easiest, cheapest, and pleasantest way of establishing what ought to exist, I think, in connection with every institution like this, namely, a museum. If the young men were really ready and willing to collect objects of interest, I doubt not that public-spirited men would be found, who would undertake the expense of mounting them in a museum. And you cannot imagine, I assure you, how large and how interesting a museum might be formed of the natural curiosities of a neighbourhood like this, I may say, indeed, of any neighbourhood or of any parish: but your museum need not be confined to the neighbourhood. Societies now exist in every part of England, who will be happy to exchange their duplicates for yours. As your collection increased in importance, old members abroad would gladly contribute foreign curiosities to your stock. Neighbouring gentlemen would send you valuable objects which had been lumbering their houses, uncared for, because they stood alone, and formed no part of a collection; and I, for one, would be happy to add something from the fauna and flora of those moorlands, where I have so long enjoyed the wonders of nature; never, I can honestly say, alone; because when man was not with me, I had companions in every bee, and flower, and pebble; and never idle, because I could not pass a swamp, or a tuft of heather, without finding in it a fairy tale of which I could but decipher here and there a line or two, and yet found them more interesting than all the books, save one, which were ever written upon earth.



THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE



Read at Sion College, January 10th, 1871.

When I accepted the unexpected and undeserved honour of being allowed to lecture here, the first subject which suggested itself to me was Natural Theology.

It is one which has taken up much of my thought for some years past, {313} which seems to me more and more important, and which is just now somewhat forgotten; I therefore determined to say a few words on it to-night. I do not pretend to teach but only to suggest; to point out certain problems of Natural Theology, the further solution of which ought, I think, to be soon attempted.

I wish to speak, remember, not on natural religion, but on natural theology. By the first, I understand what can be learned from the physical universe of man's duty to God and to his neighbour; by the latter, I understand what can be learned concerning God Himself. Of natural religion I shall say nothing. I do not even affirm that a natural religion is possible: but I do very earnestly believe that a natural theology is possible; and I earnestly believe also that it is most important that natural theology should, in every age, keep pace with doctrinal or ecclesiastical theology.

Bishop Butler certainly held this belief. His "Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature"—a book for which I entertain the most profound respect—is based on a belief that the God of Nature and the God of Grace are one; and that, therefore, the God who satisfies our conscience ought more or less to satisfy our reason also. To teach that was Butler's mission, and he fulfilled it well. But it is a mission which has to be re-filled again and again, as human thought changes and human science develops; for if in any age or country the God who seems to be revealed by Nature seems different from the God who is revealed by the then popular religion, then that God, and the religion which tells of that God, will gradually cease to be believed in.

For the demands of Reason (as none knew better than good Bishop Butler) must be and ought to be satisfied. And when a popular war arises between the reason of a generation and its theology, it behoves the ministers of religion to inquire, with all humility and godly fear, on which side lies the fault: whether the theology which they expound is all that it should be, or whether the reason of those who impugn it is all that it should be.

For me, as (I trust) an orthodox priest of the Church of England, I believe the theology of the National Church of England, as by law established, to be eminently rational as well as scriptural. It is not, therefore, surprising to me that the clergy of the Church of England, since the foundation of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century, have done more for sound physical science than the clergy of any other denomination; or that the three greatest natural theologians with which I, at least, am acquainted—Berkeley, Butler, and Paley—should have belonged to our Church. I am not unaware of what the Germans of the eighteenth century have done. I consider Goethe's claims to have advanced natural theology very much over-rated: but I do recommend to young clergymen Herder's "Outlines of the Philosophy of the History of Man" as a book (in spite of certain defects) full of sound and precious wisdom. But it seems to me that English natural theology in the eighteenth century stood more secure than that of any other nation, on the foundation which Berkeley, Butler, and Paley had laid; and that if our orthodox thinkers for the last hundred years had followed steadily in their steps, we should not be deploring now a wide, and as some think increasing, divorce between Science and Christianity.

But it was not so to be. The impulse given by Wesley and Whitfield turned (and not before it was needed) the earnest mind of England almost exclusively to questions of personal religion; and that impulse, under many unexpected forms, has continued ever since. I only state the fact—I do not deplore it; God forbid! Wisdom is justified of all her children, and as, according to the wise American, "it takes all sorts to make a world," so it takes all sorts to make a living Church. But that the religious temper of England for the last two or three generations has been unfavourable to a sound and scientific development of natural theology, there can be no doubt.

We have only, if we need proof, to look at the hymns—many of them very pure, pious, and beautiful—which are used at this day in churches and chapels by persons of every shade of opinion. How often is the tone in which they speak of the natural world one of dissatisfaction, distrust, almost contempt. "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. This, I was told, was the doctrine of Scripture, and was therefore true. But when, longing to reconcile my conscience and my reason on a question so awful to a young student of natural science, I went to my Bible, what did I find? No word of all this. Much—thank God, I may say one continuous undercurrent—of the very opposite of all this. I pray you bear with me, even though I may seem impertinent. But what do we find in the Bible, with the exception of that first curse? That, remember, cannot mean any alteration in the laws of nature by which man's labour should only produce for him henceforth thorns and thistles. For, in the first place, any such curse is formally abrogated in the eighth chapter and twenty-first verse of the very same document—"I will not again curse the earth any more for man's sake. While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease." And next, the fact is not so; for if you root up the thorns and thistles, and keep your land clean, then assuredly you will grow fruit-trees and not thorns, wheat and not thistles, according to those laws of Nature which are the voice of God expressed in facts.

And yet the words are true. There is a curse upon the earth, though not one which, by altering the laws of nature, has made natural facts untrustworthy. There is a curse on the earth; such a curse as is expressed, I believe, in the old Hebrew text, where the word "adamah" (correctly translated in our version "the ground") signifies, as I am told, not this planet; but simply the soil from whence we get our food; such a curse as certainly is expressed by the Septuagint and the Vulgate versions: "Cursed is the earth"— [Greek]; "in opere tuo," as the Vulgate has it—"in thy works." Man's work is too often the curse of the very planet which he misuses. None should know that better than the botanist, who sees whole regions desolate, and given up to sterility and literal thorns and thistles, on account of man's sin and folly, ignorance and greedy waste. Well said that veteran botanist, the venerable Elias Fries, of Lund:

"A broad band of waste land follows gradually in the steps of cultivation. If it expands, its centre and its cradle dies, and on the outer borders only do we find green shoots. But it is not impossible, only difficult, for man, without renouncing the advantage of culture itself, one day to make reparation for the injury which he has inflicted: he is appointed lord of creation. True it is that thorns and thistles, ill-favoured and poisonous plants, well named by botanists rubbish plants, mark the track which man has proudly traversed through the earth. Before him lay original Nature in her wild but sublime beauty. Behind him he leaves the desert, a deformed and ruined land; for childish desire of destruction, or thoughtless squandering of vegetable treasures, has destroyed the character of nature; and, terrified, man himself flies from the arena of his actions, leaving the impoverished earth to barbarous races or to animals, so long as yet another spot in virgin beauty smiles before him. Here again, in selfish pursuit of profit, and consciously or unconsciously following the abominable principle of the great moral vileness which one man has expressed— 'Apres nous le Deluge'—he begins anew the work of destruction. Thus did cultivation, driven out, leave the East, and perhaps the deserts formerly robbed of their coverings; like the wild hordes of old over beautiful Greece, thus rolls this conquest with fearful rapidity from East to West through America; and the planter now often leaves the already exhausted land, and the eastern climate, become infertile through the demolition of the forests, to introduce a similar revolution into the Far West." {320}

As we proceed, we find nothing in the general tone of Scripture which can hinder our natural theology being at once scriptural and scientific.

If it is to be scientific, it must begin by approaching Nature at once with a cheerful and reverent spirit, as a noble, healthy, and trustworthy thing: and what is that, save the spirit of those who wrote the 104th, 147th, and 148th Psalms—the spirit, too, of him who wrote that Song of the Three Children, which is, as it were, the flower and crown of the Old Testament, the summing up of all that is most true and eternal in the old Jewish faith; and which, as long as it is sung in our churches, is the charter and title-deed of all Christian students of those works of the Lord, which it calls on to bless Him, praise Him, and magnify Him for ever?

What next will be demanded of us by physical science? Belief, certainly, just now, in the permanence of natural laws. Why, that is taken for granted, I hold, throughout the Bible. I cannot see how our Lord's parables, drawn from the birds and the flowers, the seasons and the weather, have any logical weight, or can be considered as aught but capricious and fanciful illustrations—which God forbid—unless we look at them as instances of laws of the natural world, which find their analogues in the laws of the spiritual world, the kingdom of God. I cannot conceive a man's writing that 104th Psalm who had not the most deep, the most earnest sense of the permanence of natural law. But more: the fact is expressly asserted again and again. "They continue this day according to Thine ordinance, for all things serve Thee." "Thou hast made them fast for ever and ever. Thou hast given them a law which shall not be broken—"

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.

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

Strive upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die;

if he will be even as wise as the social animals; as the ant and the bee, who have risen, if not to the virtue of all-embracing charity, at least to the virtues of self-sacrifice and patriotism, {326} then he will rise towards a higher sphere; toward that kingdom of God of which it is written: "He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him."

Whether that be matter of natural theology, I cannot tell as yet. But as for all the former questions—all that St. Paul means when he talks of the law, and how the works of the flesh bring men under the law, stern and terrible and destructive, though holy and just and good,—they are matter of natural theology; and I believe that on them, as elsewhere, Scripture and science will be ultimately found to coincide.

But here we have to face an objection which you will often hear now from scientific men, and still oftener from non-scientific men; who will say: It matters not to us whether Scripture contradicts or does not contradict a scientific natural theology; for we hold such a science to be impossible and naught. The old Jews put a God into Nature, and therefore of course they could see, as you see, what they had already put there. But we see no God in Nature. We do not deny the existence of a God; we merely say that scientific research does not reveal Him to us. We see no marks of design in physical phenomena. What used to be considered as marks of design can be better explained by considering them as the results of evolution according to necessary laws; and you and Scripture make a mere assumption when you ascribe them to the operation of a mind like the human mind.

Now, on this point I believe we may answer fearlessly: If you cannot see it we cannot help you. If the heavens do not declare to you the glory of God, nor the firmament show you His handy-work, then our poor arguments about them will not show it. "The eye can only see that which it brings with it the power of seeing." We can only reassert that we see design everywhere, and that the vast majority of the human race in every age and clime has seen it. Analogy from experience, sound induction (as we hold) from the works not only of men but of animals, has made it an all but self-evident truth to us, that wherever there is arrangement, there must be an arranger; wherever there is adaptation of means to an end, there must be an adapter; wherever an organisation, there must be an organiser. The existence of a designing God is no more demonstrable from Nature than the existence of other human beings independent of ourselves, or, indeed, the existence of our own bodies. But, like the belief in them, the belief in Him has become an article of our common sense. And that this designing mind is, in some respects, similar to the human mind, is proved to us (as Sir John Herschel well puts it) by the mere fact that we can discover and comprehend the processes of Nature.

But here again, if we be contradicted, we can only reassert. If the old words, "He that made the eye, shall He not see? He that planted the ear, shall He not hear?" do not at once commend themselves to the intellect of any person, we shall never convince that person by any arguments drawn from the absurdity of conceiving the invention of optics by a blind race, or of music by a deaf one.

So we will assert our own old-fashioned notion boldly; and more: we will say, in spite of ridicule, that if such a God exists, final causes must exist also. That the whole universe must be one chain of final causes. That if there be a Supreme Reason, He must have a reason, and that a good reason, for every physical phenomenon.

We will tell the modern scientific man—You are nervously afraid of the mention of final causes. You quote against them Bacon's saying, that they are barren virgins; that no physical fact was ever discovered or explained by them. You are right as far as regards yourselves; you have no business with final causes, because final causes are moral causes, and you are physical students only. We, the natural theologians, have business with them. Your duty is to find out the How of things; ours, to find out the Why. If you rejoin that we shall never find out the Why, unless we first learn something of the How, we shall not deny that. It may be most useful, I had almost said necessary, that the clergy should have some scientific training. It may be most useful, I sometimes dream of a day when it will be considered necessary, that every candidate for ordination should be required to have passed creditably in at least one branch of physical science, if it be only to teach him the method of sound scientific thought. But our having learnt the How, will not make it needless, much less impossible, for us to study the Why. It will merely make more clear to us the things of which we have to study the Why; and enable us to keep the How and the Why more religiously apart from each other.

But if it be said: After all, there is no Why; the doctrine of evolution, by doing away with the theory of creation, does away with that of final causes—let us answer, boldly: Not in the least. We might accept all that Mr. Darwin, all that Professor Huxley, has so learnedly and so acutely written on physical science, and yet preserve our natural theology on exactly the same basis as that on which Butler and Paley left it. That we should have to develop it, I do not deny. That we should have to relinquish it, I do.

Let me press this thought earnestly on you. I know that many wiser and better men than I have fears on this point. I cannot share in them.

All, it seems to me, that the new doctrines of Evolution demand is this. We all agree, for the fact is patent, that our own bodies, and indeed the body of every living creature, are evolved from a seemingly simple germ by natural laws, without visible action of any designing will or mind, into the full organisation of a human or other creature. Yet we do not say, on that account: God did not create me; I only grew. We hold in this case to our old idea, and say: If there be evolution, there must be an evolver. Now the new physical theories only ask us, it seems to me, to extend this conception to the whole universe: to believe that not individuals merely, but whole varieties and races, the total organised life on this planet, and it may be the total organisation of the universe, have been evolved just as our bodies are, by natural laws acting through circumstance. This may be true, or may be false. But all its truth can do to the natural theologian will be to make him believe that the Creator bears the same relation to the whole universe as that Creator undeniably bears to every individual human body.

I entreat you to weigh these words, which have not been written in haste; and I entreat you also, if you wish to see how little the new theory, that species may have been gradually created by variation, natural selection, and so forth, interferes with the old theory of design, contrivance, and adaptation, nay, with the fullest admission of benevolent final causes—I entreat you, I say, to study Darwin's "Fertilisation of Orchids"—a book which (whether his main theory be true or not) will still remain a most valuable addition to natural theology.

For suppose, gentlemen, that all the species of Orchids, and not only they, but their congeners—the Gingers, the Arrowroots, the Bananas—are all the descendants of one original form, which was most probably nearly allied to the Snowdrop and the Iris. What then? Would that be one whit more wonderful, more unworthy of the wisdom and power of God, than if they were, as most believe, created each and all at once, with their minute and often imaginary shades of difference? What would the natural theologian have to say, were the first theory true, save that God's works are even more wonderful than he always believed them to be? As for the theory being impossible: we must leave the discussion of that to physical students. It is not for us clergymen to limit the power of God. "Is anything too hard for the Lord?" asked the prophet of old: and we have a right to ask it as long as time shall last. If it be said that natural selection is too simple a cause to produce such fantastic variety: that, again, is a question to be settled exclusively by physical students. All we have to say on the matter is, that we always knew that God works by very simple, or seemingly simple, means; that the whole universe, as far as we could discern it, was one concatenation of the most simple means; that it was wonderful, yea, miraculous in our eyes, that a child should resemble its parents, that the raindrops should make the grass grow, that the grass should become flesh, and the flesh sustenance for the thinking brain of man. Ought God to seem less or more august in our eyes, when we are told that His means are even more simple than we supposed? We held Him to be Almighty and Allwise. Are we to reverence Him less or more, if we hear that His might is greater, His wisdom deeper, than we ever dreamed? We believed that His care was over all His works; that His Providence watched perpetually over the whole universe. We were taught—some of us at least—by Holy Scripture, to believe that the whole history of the universe was made up of special Providences. If, then, that should be true which Mr. Darwin writes: "It may be metaphorically said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up that which is good, silently and incessantly working whenever and wherever opportunity offers at the improvement of every organic being"—if that, I say, were proven to be true, ought God's care and God's providence to seem less or more magnificent in our eyes? Of old it was said by Him without whom nothing is made: "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." Shall we quarrel with Science if she should show how those words are true? What, in one word, should we have to say but this?—We knew of old that God was so wise that He could make all things; but behold, He is so much wiser than even that, that He can make all things make themselves.

But it may be said: These notions are contrary to Scripture. I must beg very humbly, but very firmly, to demur to that opinion. Scripture says that God created. But it nowhere defines that term. The means, the How of Creation, is nowhere specified. Scripture, again, says that organised beings were produced each according to their kind. But it nowhere defines that term. What a kind includes, whether it includes or not the capacity of varying (which is just the question in point), is nowhere specified. And I think it a most important rule in scriptural exegesis, to be most cautious as to limiting the meaning of any term which Scripture itself has not limited, lest we find ourselves putting into the teaching of Scripture our own human theories or prejudices. And consider, Is not man a kind? And has not mankind varied, physically, intellectually, spiritually? Is not the Bible, from beginning to end, a history of the variations of mankind, for worse or for better, from their original type?