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."

There are two other points on which I must beg leave to say a few words.
Physical science will demand of our natural theologians that they should
be aware of their importance, and let--as Mr Matthew Arnold would
say--their thoughts play freely round them. I mean questions of
Embryology, and questions of Race.

On the first there may be much to be said, which is, for the present,
best left unsaid, even here. I only ask you to recollect how often in
Scripture those two plain old words--beget and bring forth--occur; and in