xiii.] SCKIPTURE AND ADVANCED SCIENCE. 317 



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, im- 

 possible, 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 



