and bare, and
destroying from off it man and beast! This is the God of the Old
Testament. And if any say (as is often too rashly said): This is
not the God of the New: I answer, but have you read your New
Testament? Have you read the latter chapters of St. Matthew? Have
you read the opening of the Epistle to the Romans? Have you read
the Book of Revelations? If so, will you say that the God of the
New Testament is, compared with the God of the Old, less awful, less
destructive, and therefore less like the Being--granting always that
there is such a Being--who presides over nature and her destructive
powers? It is an awful problem. But the writers of the Bible have
faced it valiantly. Physical science is facing it valiantly now.
Therefore natural theology may face it likewise. Remember Carlyle's
great words about poor Francesca in the Inferno: "Infinite pity,
yet also infinite rigour of law. It is so Nature is made. It is so
Dante discerned that she was made."

There are two other points on which I must beg leave to say a few
words. Physical science will demand of our natural theologians that
they should be aware of their importance, and let (as Mr. Matthew
Arnold would say) their thoughts play freely round them. I mean
questions of Embryology and questions of Race.

On the first there may be much to be said, which is for the present
best left unsaid, even here. I only ask you to recollect how often
in Scripture those two plain old words, beget and bring forth,
occur, and in what important passages. And I ask you to remember
that marvellous essay on Natural Theology, if I may so call it in
all reverence, the 139th Psalm, and judge for yourself whether he
who wrote that did not consider the study of Embryology as
important, as significant, as worthy of his deepest attention, as an
Owen, a Huxley, or a Darwin. Nay, I will go farther still, and say,
that in those great words--"Thine eyes did see my substance, yet
being imperfect; and in Thy book all my members were written, which
in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them,"-
-in those words, I say, the Psalmist has anticipated that realistic
view of embryological questions to which our most modern
philosophers are, it seems to me, slowly, half unconsciously, but
still inevitably, returning.

Next, as to Race. Some persons now have a nervous fear of that
word, and of allowing any importance to difference of races. Some
dislik