ther, have any logical weight, or can be
considered as aught but capricious and fanciful illustrations--which
God forbid--unless we look at them as instances of laws of the
natural world, which find their analogues in the laws of the
spiritual world, the kingdom of God. I cannot conceive a man's
writing that 104th Psalm who had not the most deep, the most earnest
sense of the permanence of natural law. But more: the fact is
expressly asserted again and again. "They continue this day
according to Thine ordinance, for all things serve Thee." "Thou
hast made them fast for ever and ever. Thou hast given them a law
which shall not be broken--"

Let us pass on, gentlemen. There is no more to be said about this
matter.

But next, it will be demanded of us that natural theology shall set
forth a God whose character is consistent with all the facts of
nature, and not only with those which are pleasant and beautiful.
That challenge was accepted, and I think victoriously, by Bishop
Butler as far as the Christian religion is concerned. As far as the
Scripture is concerned, we may answer thus:

It is said to us--I know that it is said: You tell us of a God of
love, a God of flowers and sunshine, of singing birds and little
children. But there are more facts in nature than these. There is
premature death, pestilence, famine. And if you answer: Man has
control over these; they are caused by man's ignorance and sin, and
by his breaking 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