, 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 ev