the East, and perhaps the deserts long ago robbed of their coverings;
like the wild hordes of old over beautiful Greece, thus rolls this
conquest with fearful rapidity from East to West through America; and the
planter now often leaves the already exhausted land, and the eastern
climate, become infertile through the demolition of the forests, to
introduce a similar revolution into the Far West."

As we proceed, we find nothing in the general tone of Scripture which can
hinder our natural Theology being at once scriptural and scientific.

If it is to be scientific, it must begin by approaching Nature at once
with a cheerful and reverent spirit, as a noble, healthy, and trustworthy
thing; and what is that, save the spirit of those who wrote the 104th,
147th, and 148th Psalms; the spirit, too, of him who wrote that Song of
the Three Children, which is, as it were, the flower and crown of the Old
Testament, the summing up of all that is most true and eternal in the old
Jewish faith; and which, as long as it is sung in our churches, is the
charter and title-deed of all Christian students of those works of the
Lord, which it calls on to bless Him, praise Him, and magnify Him for
ever?

What next will be demanded of us by physical science? Belief, certainly,
just now, in the permanence of natural laws. That is taken for granted,
I hold, throughout the Bible. I cannot see how our Lord's parables,
drawn from the birds and the flowers, the seasons and the weather, have
any logical weight, or can be considered as aught but capricious and
fanciful "illustrations"--which God forbid--unless we look at them as
instances of laws of the natural world, which find their analogues in the
laws of the spiritual world, the kingdom of God. I cannot conceive a
man's writing that 104th Psalm who had not the most deep, the most