or 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 the 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 formerly 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." {320}

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? Belief,
certainly, just now, in the permanence of natural laws. Why, 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 wea