Westminster Sermons | Page 2

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 minds 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. "Change and decay in all around I see," is
their key- note, rather than "O all ye works of the Lord, bless Him,
praise Him, and magnify Him for ever." 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 some five-and-thirty years ago--and that from better men 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 21st 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
"admah"--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