Not a scriptural development.  Let me press on you, my clerical brethren, most earnestly this one point.  It is time that we should make up our minds what tone Scripture does take toward nature, natural science, natural Theology.  Most of you, I doubt not, have made up your minds already; and in consequence have no fear of natural science, no fear for natural Theology.  But I cannot deny that I find still lingering here and there certain of the old views of nature of which I used to hear but too much some five-and-thirty years ago—­and that from better men than I shall ever hope to be—­who used to consider natural Theology as useless, fallacious, impossible; on the ground that this Earth did not reveal the will and character of God, because it was cursed and fallen; and that its facts, in consequence, were not to be respected or relied on.  This, I was told, was the doctrine of Scripture, and was therefore true.  But when, longing to reconcile my conscience and my reason on a question so awful to a young student of natural science, I went to my Bible, what did I find?  No word of all this.  Much—­thank God, I may say one continuous undercurrent—­of the very opposite of all this.  I pray you bear with me, even though I may seem impertinent.  But what do we find in the Bible, with the exception of that first curse?  That, remember, cannot mean any alteration in the laws of nature by which man’s labour should only produce for him henceforth thorns and thistles.  For, in the first place, any such curse is formally abrogated in the eighth chapter and 21st verse of the very same document—­“I will not again curse the earth any more for man’s sake.  While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”  And next:  the fact is not so; for if you root up the thorns and thistles, and keep your land clean, then assuredly you will grow fruit-trees and not thorns, wheat and not thistles, according to those laws of nature which are the voice of God expressed in facts.

And yet the words are true.  There is a curse upon the earth:  though not one which, by altering the laws of nature, has made natural facts untrustworthy.  There is a curse on the earth; such a curse as is expressed, I believe, in the old Hebrew text, where the word “admah”—­correctly translated in our version “the ground”—­signifies, as I am told, not this planet, but simply the soil from whence we get our food; such a curse as certainly is expressed by the Septuagint and the Vulgate versions:  “Cursed is the earth”—­[Greek text]; “in opere tuo,” “in thy works.”  Man’s work is too often the curse of the very planet which he misuses.  None should know that better than the botanist, who sees whole regions desolate, and given up to sterility and literal thorns and thistles, on account of man’s sin and folly, ignorance and greedy waste.  Well said that veteran botanist, the venerable Elias Fries, of Lund:—­