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