XX11 PREFACE. 



exigency will be remembered ; and the award be made not to those 

 treatises that so easily trace the parallelism between certain views of 

 science and the God of fancy, but between the integral sciences 

 themselves and the God of Revelation. 



If the judges upon the important occasion referred to, adopt the 

 standard which we suggest, the end of natural theology will be al- 

 tered, and the effects upon science may be of the most considerable 

 kind. At present, natural theology has undertaken the impossible 

 task of "finding out God," Who can only be found in so far as He 

 has been pleased to reveal Himself. The Deity thus elicited, or as 

 Fichte rightly says, " constructed," is a scientific abstraction an- 

 swering to the concrete figure of the Vulcan of the Greeks — that is 

 to say, a universal Smith. The course of the natural theologians is 

 as follows : they see in the human body and the world the principles 

 and applications of the arts in a surpassing degree : the skull dis- 

 plays the virtues of the arch, and the hand embodies wondrous 

 pulleys and levers; whence they infer that God is acquainted with 

 mechanics. And from all the other parts of man, the clay patron- 

 izes the Potter in the same way, and the Deity which arises out of 

 the whole is at best an infinite handicraftsman. This is anthro- 

 pomorphism, or the distillation of God out of our own limits and 

 thoughts, our own space and time. The Paleys, Broughams, and 

 the authors of the Bridgewater Treatises, seem to have been satisfied 

 with this vulgarity of heathenism. 



We hold, on the other hand, that a scientific natural theology is 

 different, and that it accepts the living Lord of Revelation, and 

 consists in tracing the correspondency of His revealed attributes in 

 the sciences; being in effect the synthesis of the knowledge of the 

 real God with the sciences of real nature. In this case it leads the 

 waters of life into science, ancPis the most indispensable of all the 

 single studies of the natural world. As for the evidences which it 

 affords of God's existence, these do not consist in demonstrations 

 of artistry and carpentry, but in symbols of spirit and love pervad- 

 ing creation, and reconstructing the natural mind of man upon 

 spiritual models. The proof that nature is full of Deity, lies in 

 its power, when rightly seen, to soften the heart and moisten the 

 eyes of the unbelieving world, and without a controversy to send 



