Belief, certainly,
just now, in the permanence of natural laws. That is taken for granted,
I hold, throughout the Bible. I cannot see how our Lord's parables,
drawn from the birds and the flowers, the seasons and the weather, 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. 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