September 5.—" Since Waterloo, there has been no such event in Europe. I await with awe and pity the Parisian news of the next few days. As for the Emperor, while others were bowing down to him, I never shrank from expressing my utter contempt of him. His policy is now judged, and he with it, by fact, which is the 'voice of God revealed in things,' as Bacon says; and I at least, instead of joining the crowd of curs who worry where they lately fawned, shall never more say a harsh word against him. Let the condemned die in peace if possible, and he will not, I hear, live many months— perhaps not many days. Why should he wish to live? This very surrender may be the not undignified farewell to life of one who knows himself at his last."

TO ALFRED WALLACE, ESQ., F.L.S.

"October 22, 1870.—I have read your 'Essay on Natural Selection' with equal delight and profit. . . . . The facts, of course, are true, as all yours are sure to be; but I have never been able to get rid of the belief, that every grain of sand washed down by a river-by the merest natural laws— is designedly put in the exact place where it will be needed some time or other; or that the ugliest beast (though I confess the puzzle here is stranger), and the most devilish, has been created because it is beautiful and useful to some being or other. In fact, I believe not only in special providences,' but in the whole universe as one infinite complexity of special providences. I only ask you to extend to all nature the truth you have so gallantly asserted for man-That the laws of organic development have been occasionally used for a special end, just as man uses them for his special ends.' Page 370. Omit 'occasionally,' and say 'always,' and you will complete your book and its use. In any case, it will be a contribution equally to science and to natural theology."

·

CHAPTER XXV.

1871.

AGED 52.

LECTURE AT SION COLLEge-CorrespoNDENCE-EXPEDITIONS OF THE CHESTER NATURAL SCIENCE SOCIETY-LECTURES ON TOWN GEOLOGY-A LUMP OF COAL-THE RACE WEEK AT CHESTERLETTERS ON BETTING-CAMP AT BRAMSHILL-PRINCE OF WALES'S ILLNESS-SERMON ON LOYALTY AND SANITARY SCIENCE-LECTURES AT BIDEFORD, WOOLWICH, AND WINCHESTER.

"To conclude, therefore, let no man, out of a weak conceit of sobriety, or an ill-applied moderation, think or maintain that a man can search too far, or be too well studied in the book of God's word, or in the book of God's works, divinity or philosophy, but rather let men endeavour at endless progress or proficience in both."

BACON, ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING.

"Who art thou that complainest of thy life of toil? Complain not! Look up, my wearied brother. To thee Heaven, though severe, is not unkind. Heaven is kind, as a noble mother, as that Spartan mother, saying when she gave her son his shield, 'With it, my son, or upon it!' Thou, too, shalt return home in honour. Doubt it not,—if in the battle thou keep thy shield."

CARLYLE.

IN January he gave a lecture on "The Theology of the Future,”* at Sion College; which made a profound impression, and brought hope and comfort to many. In it he asserted his own belief in final causes, and urged on

*This lecture, or rather part of it, is incorporated into the preface of his "Westminster Sermons," published in 1874. (Macmillan's.)

the clergy the necessity of facing the scientific facts of the day, and accepting the great work of reconciling science and the creeds.

"I wish to speak," he says, "not on natural religion, but on natural theology. By the first I understand what can be learnt from the physical universe of man's duty to God and his neighbour; by the latter I understand what can be learned concerning God Himself. Of natural religion I shall say

nothing. I do not even affirm that a natural religion is possible; but I do very earnestly believe that a natural theology is possible; and I earnestly believe also that it is most important that natural theology should, in every age, keep pace with doctrinal or ecclesiastical theology. . .

...

He goes on to speak of Bishop Butler, Berkeley, and Paley, as three of our greatest natural theologians, and of the important fact, that the clergy of the Church of England, since the foundation of the Royal Society in the 17th century, have done more for sound physical science than the clergy of any other denomination; and expresses his conviction that if our orthodox thinkers for the last hundred years had followed steadily in the same steps, we should not now be deploring the wide and, as some think, widening gulf between science and Christianity. He very strongly recommends to the younger clergy "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. He presses the study of Darwin's Fertilization of Orchids (whether his main theory be true or not) as a most valuable addition to natural theology. He speaks of certain popular hymns of the present day as proofs of an unhealthy view of the natural world, with a savour hanging about them of the old monastic theory of the earth being

1871.]

SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE.

257

the devil's planet instead of God's, giving characteristic instances, and contrasting their keynote with that of the 104th, 147th, and 148th Psalms, and the noble Benedicite Omnia Opera of our Prayer-book. He contrasts the Scriptural doctrine about the earth being cursed with the popular fancies on the same point. He speaks of the 139th Psalm as a "marvellous essay on natural theology," and of its pointing to the important study of embryology, which is now occupying the attention of Owen, Huxley, and Darwin. Then he goes on to "Race," and "the painful and tremendous facts" which it involves, which must all be faced; believing that here, too, Science and Scripture will not ultimately be found at variance. Then, after an eloquent protest against the "child-dream of a dead universe governed by an absent God," which Carlyle and even Goethe have "treated with noble scorn," he speaks of that "nameless, invisible, imponderable, yet seeming omnipresent thing which scientific men are finding below all phenomena which the scalpel and the microscope can show"-the life which shapes and makes-that "unknown and truly miraculous element in nature, the mystery of which for ever engrossing, as it does, the noblest minded of our students of science, is yet for ever escaping them while they cannot escape it." He calls on the clergy to have courage to tell them-what will sanctify, while it need never hamper, their investigations-that this perpetual and omnipresent miracle is no other than the Breath of God-The Spirit who is The Lord, and the Giver of Life. "Let us only wait," he says "let us observe— let us have patience and faith. Nominalism, and that 'sensationalism' which has sprung from Nominalism, are running fast to seed; Comtism seems to me its supreme effort, after which the whirligig of Time may

VOL. II.

S

bring round its revenges; and Realism, and we who hold the Realist creeds, may have our turn.

"I sometimes dream," he adds, "of a day when it will be considered necessary that every candidate for ordination should be required to have passed creditably in at least one branch of physical science, if it be only to teach him the method of sound scientific thought. And if it be said that the doctrine of evolution, by doing away with the theory of creation, does away with that of final causes-let us answer boldly, Not in the least. We might accept what Mr. Darwin and Professor Huxley have written on physical science, and yet preserve our natural theology on exactly the same basis as that on which Butler and Paley left it. That we should have to develop it, I do not deny. That we should have to relinquish it, I do. . . . .”

The correspondence of this year shows that his West Indian experiences and his Chester life acted as a fresh stimulus to his accustomed rapid thinking on every sort of subject. He was much occupied with the distribution of plants-with the existence of a Palæo-tropic belt of land round the world-a Palæo-tropic civilization of an immensely remote epoch-with raised beaches-and sunken forests, &c., &c., besides the questions of the day, social, sanitary, political. His lectures were more brilliant than ever. And but for his power of sleeping at any moment and for any length, of time, the brain could not have held out even so long against the amount of intensity which he carried into his varied work. For some years past he had been in the habit of sleeping profoundly for two hours before dinner.

To Sir C. Bunbury, Feb. 7, 1871.]-"I received your most pleasant letter at Sandringham, whence I had hoped to have come to Barton, even if only for an hour or two; but I had to run all the way home yesterday.

"I do not think I undervalue, or have overlooked, any diffi