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.  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?

We can answer—­Whether or not it suits our conception of a God of love, it suits Scripture’s conception of Him.  For nothing is more clear—­nay, is it not urged again and again, as a blot on Scripture?—­that it reveals a God not merely of love, but of sternness; a God in whose eyes physical pain is not the worst of evils, nor animal life—­too often miscalled human life—­the most precious of objects; a God who destroys, when it seems fit to Him, and that wholesale, and seemingly without either pity or discrimination, man, woman, and child, visiting the sins of the fathers on the children, making the land empty and bare, and destroying from off it man and beast?  This is the God of the Old Testament.  And if any say—­as is too often 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 Revelation?  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.”