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 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, 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?