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 s