For me, as—­I trust—­an orthodox priest of the Church of England, I believe the Theology of the National Church of England, as by law established, to be eminently rational as well as scriptural.  It is not, therefore, surprising to me that the clergy of the Church of England, since the foundation of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century, have done more for sound physical science than the clergy of any other denomination; or that the three greatest natural theologians with which I, at least, am acquainted—­Berkeley, Butler, and Paley—­should have belonged to our Church.  I am not unaware of what the Germans of the eighteenth century have done.  I consider Goethe’s claims to have advanced natural Theology very much over-rated:  but I do recommend to young clergymen Herder’s Outlines of the Philosophy of the History of Man as a book—­in spite of certain defects—­full of sound and precious wisdom.  Meanwhile it seems to me that English natural Theology in the eighteenth century stood more secure than that of any other nation, on the foundation which Berkeley, Butler, and Paley had laid; and that if our orthodox thinkers for the last hundred years had followed steadily in their steps, we should not be deploring now a wide, and as some think increasing, divorce between Science and Christianity.

But it was not so to be.  The impulse given by Wesley and Whitfield turned—­and not before it was needed—­the earnest minds of England almost exclusively to questions of personal religion; and that impulse, under many unexpected forms, has continued ever since.  I only state the fact:  I do not deplore it; God forbid.  Wisdom is justified of all her children; and as, according to the wise American, “it takes all sorts to make a world,” so it takes all sorts to make a living Church.  But that the religious temper of England for the last two or three generations has been unfavourable to a sound and scientific development of natural Theology, there can be no doubt.

We have only, if we need proof, to look at the hymns—­many of them very pure, pious, and beautiful—­which are used at this day in churches and chapels by persons of every shade of opinion.  How often is the tone in which they speak of the natural world one of dissatisfaction, distrust, almost contempt.  “Change and decay in all around I see,” is their key-note, rather than “O all ye works of the Lord, bless Him, praise Him, and magnify Him for ever.”  There lingers about them a savour of the old monastic theory, that this earth is the devil’s planet, fallen, accursed, goblin-haunted, needing to be exorcised at every turn before it is useful or even safe for man.  An age which has adopted as its most popular hymn a paraphrase of the mediaeval monk’s “Hic breve vivitur,” and in which stalwart public-school boys are bidden in their chapel-worship to tell the Almighty God of Truth that they lie awake weeping at night for joy at the thought that they will die and see “Jerusalem the Golden,” is doubtless a pious and devout age:  but not—­at least as yet—­an age in which natural Theology is likely to attain a high, a healthy, or a scriptural development.