ion. If it expands, its centre and its cradle dies, and on the
outer borders only do we find green shoots. But it is not impossible,
only difficult, for man, without renouncing the advantage of culture
itself, one day to make reparation for the injury which he has inflicted:
he is appointed lord of creation. True it is that thorns and thistles,
ill-favoured and poisonous plants, well named by botanists rubbish
plants, mark the track which man has proudly traversed through the earth.
Before him lay original nature in her wild but sublime beauty. Behind
him he leaves a desert, a deformed and ruined land; for childish desire
of destruction, or thoughtless squandering of vegetable treasures, has
destroyed the character of nature; and, terrified, man himself flies from
the arena of his actions, leaving the impoverished earth to barbarous
races or to animals, so long as yet another spot in virgin beauty smiles
before him. Here again, in selfish pursuit of profit, and consciously or
unconsciously following the abominable principle of the great moral
vileness which one man has expressed--'Apres nous le Deluge,'--he begins
anew the work of destruction. Thus did cultivation, driven out, leave
the East, and perhaps the deserts long ago robbed of their coverings;
like the wild hordes of old over beautiful Greece, thus rolls this
conquest with fearful rapidity from East to West through America; and the
planter now often leaves the already exhausted land, and the eastern
climate, become infertile through the demolition of the forests, to
introduce a similar revolution into the Far West."

As we proceed, we find nothing in the general tone of Scripture which can
hinder our natural Theology being at once scriptural and scientific.

If it is to be scientific, it must begin by approaching Nature at once
with a cheerful and reverent spirit, as a noble, healthy, and trustworthy
thing; and what is that, save the spirit of those who wrote the 104th,
147th, and 148th Psalms; the spirit, too, of him who wrote that Song of
the Three Children, which is, as it were, the flower and crown of the Old
Testament, the summing up of all that is most true and eternal in the old
Jewish faith; and which, as long as it is sung in our churches, is the
charter and title-deed of all Christian students of those works of the
Lord, which it calls on to bless Him, praise Him, and magnify Him for
ever?

What next will be demanded of us by physical science?