Westminster Sermons | Page 4

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 too often 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 Revelation? 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--namely, the
119th 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 further 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 organized 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