habits, in all organized beings, from the lowest plant to the highest
animal. She is proving more and more the omnipresent action of the
differences between races: how the more "favoured" race--she cannot avoid
using the epithet--exterminates the less favoured; or at least expels it,
and forces it, under penalty of death, to adapt itself to new
circumstances; and, in a word, that competition between every race and
every individual of that race, and reward according to deserts, is, as
far as we can see, an universal law of living things. And she says--for
the facts of History prove it--that as it is among the races of plants
and animals, so it has been unto this day among the races of men.

The natural Theology of the future must take count of these tremendous
and even painful facts. She may take count of them. For Scripture has
taken count of them already. It talks continually--it has been blamed
for talking so much--of races; of families; of their wars, their
struggles, their exterminations; of races favoured, of races rejected; of
remnants being saved, to continue the race; of hereditary tendencies,
hereditary excellencies, hereditary guilt. Its sense of the reality and
importance of descent is so intense, that it speaks of a whole tribe or a
whole family by the name of its common ancestor; and the whole nation of
the Jews is Israel, to the end. And if I be told this is true of the Old
Testament, but not of the New: I must answer,--What? Does not St Paul
hold the identity of the whole Jewish race with Israel their forefather,
as strongly as any prophet of the Old Testament? And what is the central
historic fact, save One, of the New Testament, but the conquest of
Jerusalem; the dispersion, all but destruction of a race, not by miracle,
but by invasion, because found wanting when weighed in the stern balances
of natural and social law?

Think over this. I only suggest the thought: but I do not suggest it in