Westminster Sermons

Charles Kingsley

Westminster Sermons / with a Preface

PREFACE

I venture to preface these Sermons—which were preached either at Westminster Abbey, or at one of the Chapels Royal—by a Paper read at Sion College, in 1871; and for this reason.  Even when they deal with what is usually, and rightly, called “vital” and “experimental” religion, they are comments on, and developments of, the idea which pervades that paper; namely—That facts, whether of physical nature, or of the human heart and reason, do not contradict, but coincide with, the doctrines and formulas of the Church of England, as by law established.

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Natural Theology, I said, is a subject which seems to me more and more important; and one which is just now somewhat forgotten.  I therefore desire to say a few words on it.  I do not pretend to teach: but only to suggest; to point out certain problems of natural Theology, the further solution of which ought, I think, to be soon attempted.

I wish to speak, be it remembered, not on natural religion, but on natural Theology.  By the first, I understand what can be learned from the physical universe of man’s duty to God and to 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.

Bishop Butler certainly held this belief.  His Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature—a book for which I entertain the most profound respect—is based on a belief that the God of nature and the God of grace are one; and that therefore, the God who satisfies our conscience ought more or less to satisfy our reason also.  To teach that was Butler’s mission; and he fulfilled it well.  But it is a mission which has to be re-fulfilled again and again, as human thought changes, and human science develops; for if, in any age or country, the God who seems to be revealed by nature seems also different from the God who is revealed by the then popular religion: then that God, and the religion which tells of that God, will gradually cease to be believed in.

For the demands of Reason—as none knew better than good Bishop Butler—must be and ought to be satisfied.  And therefore; when a popular war arises between the reason of any generation and its Theology: then it behoves the ministers of religion to inquire, with all humility and godly fear, on which side lies the fault; whether the Theology which they expound is all that it should be, or whether the reason of those who impugn it is all that it should be.

For me, as—I trust—an orthodox priest of the Church of England, I believe the Theology of the National Church of England, as by law established, to be eminently rational as well as scriptural.  It is not, therefore, surprising to me that the clergy of the Church of England, since the foundation of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century, have done more for sound physical science than the clergy of any other denomination; or that the three greatest natural theologians with which I, at least, am acquainted—Berkeley, Butler, and Paley—should have belonged to our Church.  I am not unaware of what the Germans of the eighteenth century have done.  I consider Goethe’s claims to have advanced natural Theology very much over-rated: but I do recommend to young clergymen 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.  Meanwhile it seems to me that English natural Theology in the eighteenth century stood more secure than that of any other nation, on the foundation which Berkeley, Butler, and Paley had laid; and that if our orthodox thinkers for the last hundred years had followed steadily in their steps, we should not be deploring now a wide, and as some think increasing, divorce between Science and Christianity.

But it was not so to be.  The impulse given by Wesley and Whitfield turned—and not before it was needed—the earnest minds of England almost exclusively to questions of personal religion; and that impulse, under many unexpected forms, has continued ever since.  I only state the fact: I do not deplore it; God forbid.  Wisdom is justified of all her children; and as, according to the wise American, “it takes all sorts to make a world,” so it takes all sorts to make a living Church.  But that the religious temper of England for the last two or three generations has been unfavourable to a sound and scientific development of natural Theology, there can be no doubt.

We have only, if we need proof, to look at the hymns—many of them very pure, pious, and beautiful—which are used at this day in churches and chapels by persons of every shade of opinion.  How often is the tone in which they speak of the natural world one of dissatisfaction, distrust, almost contempt.  “Change and decay in all around I see,” is their key-note, rather than “O all ye works of the Lord, bless Him, praise Him, and magnify Him for ever.”  There lingers about them a savour of the old monastic theory, that this earth is the devil’s planet, fallen, accursed, goblin-haunted, needing to be exorcised at every turn before it is useful or even safe for man.  An age which has adopted as its most popular hymn a paraphrase of the mediæval monk’s “Hic breve vivitur,” and in which stalwart public-school boys are bidden in their chapel-worship to tell the Almighty God of Truth that they lie awake weeping at night for joy at the thought that they will die and see “Jerusalem the Golden,” is doubtless a pious and devout age: but not—at least as yet—an age in which natural Theology is likely to attain a high, a healthy, or a scriptural development.

Not a scriptural development.  Let me press on you, my clerical brethren, most earnestly this one point.  It is time that we should make up our minds what tone Scripture does take toward nature, natural science, 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 expressed, I believe, in the old Hebrew text, where the word “admah”—correctly translated in our version “the ground”—signifies, as I am told, not this planet, but simply the soil from whence we get our food; such a curse as certainly is expressed by the Septuagint and the Vulgate versions: “Cursed is the earth”—εν τοις ερyοις σου; “in opere tuo,” “in thy works.”  Man’s work is too often the curse of the very planet which he misuses.  None should know that better than the botanist, who sees whole regions desolate, and given up to sterility and literal thorns and thistles, on account of man’s sin and folly, ignorance and greedy waste.  Well said that veteran botanist, the venerable Elias Fries, of Lund:—

“A broad band of waste land follows gradually in the steps of cultivation.  If it expands, its centre and its cradle dies, and on the outer borders only do we find green shoots.  But it is not impossible, only difficult, for man, without renouncing the advantage of culture itself, one day to make reparation for the injury which he has inflicted: he is appointed lord of creation.  True it is that thorns and thistles, ill-favoured and poisonous plants, well named by botanists rubbish plants, mark the track which man has proudly traversed through the earth.  Before him lay original nature in her wild but sublime beauty.  Behind him he leaves a desert, a deformed and ruined land; for childish desire of destruction, or thoughtless squandering of vegetable treasures, has destroyed the character of nature; and, terrified, man himself flies from the arena of his actions, leaving the impoverished earth to barbarous races or to animals, so long as yet another spot in virgin beauty smiles before him.  Here again, in selfish pursuit of profit, and consciously or unconsciously following the abominable principle of the great moral vileness which one man has expressed—‘Après nous le Déluge,’—he begins anew the work of destruction.  Thus did cultivation, driven out, leave 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 earnest sense of the permanence of natural law.  But more: the fact is expressly asserted again and again.  “They continue this day according to Thine ordinance, for all things serve Thee.”  “Thou hast made them fast for ever and ever.  Thou hast given them a law which shall not be broken—”

Let us pass on.  There is no more to be said about this matter.

But next: it will be demanded of us that natural Theology shall set forth a God whose character is consistent with all the facts of nature, and not only with those which are pleasant and beautiful.  That challenge was accepted, and I think victoriously, by Bishop Butler, as far as the Christian religion is concerned.  As far as the Scripture is concerned, we may answer thus—

It is said to us—I know that it is said—You tell us of a God of love, a God of flowers and sunshine, of singing birds and little children.  But there are more facts in nature than these.  There is premature death, pestilence, famine.  And if you answer—Man has control over these; they are caused by man’s ignorance and sin, and by his breaking of natural laws:—What will you make of those destructive powers over which he has no control; of the hurricane and the earthquake; of poisons, vegetable and mineral; of those parasitic Entozoa whose awful abundance, and awful destructiveness, in man and beast, science is just revealing—a new page of danger and loathsomeness?  How does that suit your conception of a God of love?

We can answer—Whether or not it suits our conception of a God of love, it suits Scripture’s conception of Him.  For nothing is more clear—nay, is it not urged again and again, as a blot on Scripture?—that it reveals 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 what important passages.  And I ask you to remember that marvellous essay on Natural Theology—if I may so call it in all reverence—namely, the 119th Psalm; and judge for yourself whether he who wrote that did not consider the study of Embryology as important, as significant, as worthy of his deepest attention, as an Owen, a Huxley, or a Darwin.  Nay, I will go further still, and say, that in those great words—“Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect; and in Thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them,”—in those words, I say, the Psalmist has anticipated that realistic view of embryological questions to which our most modern philosophers are, it seems to me, slowly, half unconsciously, but still inevitably, returning.

Next, as to Race.  Some persons now have a nervous fear of that word, and of allowing any importance to difference of races.  Some dislike it, because they think that it endangers the modern notions of democratic equality.  Others because they fear that it may be proved that the Negro is not a man and a brother.  I think the fears of both parties groundless.

As for the Negro, I not only believe him to be of the same race as myself, but that—if Mr Darwin’s theories are true—science has proved that he must be such.  I should have thought, as a humble student of such questions, that the one fact of the unique distribution of the hair in all races of human beings, was full moral proof that they had all had one common ancestor.  But this is not matter of natural Theology.  What is matter thereof, is this.

Physical science is proving more and more the immense importance of Race; the importance of hereditary powers, hereditary organs, hereditary 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 haste.  Think over it, by the light which our Lord’s parables, His analogies between the physical and social constitution of the world, afford; and consider whether those awful words—fulfilled then, and fulfilled so often since—“The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof,” may not be the supreme instance, the most complex development, of a law which runs through all created things, down to the moss which struggles for existence on the rock.

Do I say that this is all?  That man is merely a part of nature, the puppet of circumstances and hereditary tendencies?  That brute competition is the one law of his life?  That he is doomed for ever to be the slave of his own needs, enforced by an internecine struggle for existence?  God forbid.  I believe not only in nature, but in Grace.  I believe that this is man’s fate only as long as he sows to the flesh, and of the flesh reaps corruption.  I believe that if he will

Strive upward, working out the beast,And let the ape and tiger die;

if he will be even as wise as the social animals; as the ant and the bee, who have risen, if not to the virtue of all-embracing charity, at least to the virtues of self-sacrifice and patriotism: then he will rise towards a higher sphere; towards that kingdom of God of which it is written—“He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him.”

Whether that be matter of natural Theology, I cannot tell as yet.  But as for all the former questions; and all that St Paul means when he talks of the law, and how the works of the flesh bring men under the law, stern and terrible and destructive, though holy and just and good,—they are matter of natural Theology; and I believe that here, as elsewhere, Scripture and Science will be ultimately found to coincide.

But here we have to face an objection which you will often hear now from scientific men, and still oftener from non-scientific men; who will say—It matters not to us whether Scripture contradicts or does not contradict a scientific natural Theology; for we hold such a science to be impossible and naught.  The old Jews put a God into nature; and therefore of course they could see, as you see, what they had already put there.  But we see no God in nature.  We do not deny the existence of a God.  We merely say that scientific research does not reveal Him to us.  We see no marks of design in physical phenomena.  What used to be considered as marks of design can be better explained by considering them as the results of evolution according to necessary laws; and you and Scripture make a mere assumption when you ascribe them to the operation of a mind like the human mind.

Now on this point I believe we may answer fearlessly—If you cannot see it, we cannot help you.  If the heavens do not declare to you the glory of God, nor the firmament show you His handy-work, then our poor arguments will not show them.  “The eye can only see that which it brings with it the power of seeing.”  We can only reassert that we see design everywhere; and that the vast majority of the human race in every age and clime has seen it.  Analogy from experience, sound induction—as we hold—from the works not only of men but of animals, has made it an all but self-evident truth to us, that wherever there is arrangement, there must be an arranger; wherever there is adaptation of means to an end, there must be an adapter; wherever an organization, there must be an organizer.  The existence of a designing God is no more demonstrable from nature than the existence of other human beings independent of ourselves; or, indeed, than the existence of our own bodies.  But, like the belief in them, the belief in Him has become an article of our common sense.  And that this designing mind is, in some respects, similar to the human mind, is proved to us—as Sir John Herschel well puts it—by the mere fact that we can discover and comprehend the processes of nature.

But here again, if we be contradicted, we can only reassert.  If the old words, “He that made the eye, shall he not see? he that planted the ear, shall he not hear?” do not at once commend themselves to the intellect of any person, we shall never convince that person by any arguments drawn from the absurdity of conceiving the invention of optics by a blind man, or of music by a deaf one.

So we will assert our own old-fashioned notion boldly: and more; we will say, in spite of ridicule—That if such a God exists, final causes must exist also.  That the whole universe must be one chain of final causes.  That if there be a Supreme Reason, he must have reason, and that a good reason, for every physical phenomenon.

We will tell the modern scientific man—You are nervously afraid of the mention of final causes.  You quote against them Bacon’s saying, that they are barren virgins; that no physical fact was ever discovered or explained by them.  You are right: as far as regards yourselves.  You have no business with final causes; because final causes are moral causes: and you are physical students only.  We, the natural Theologians, have business with them.  Your duty is to find out the How of things: ours, to find out the Why.  If you rejoin that we shall never find out the Why, unless we first learn something of the How, we shall not deny that.  It may be most useful, I had almost said necessary, that the clergy should have some scientific training.  It may be most useful—I sometimes dream 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.  But our having learnt the How, will not make it needless, much less impossible, for us to study the Why.  It will merely make more clear to us the things of which we have to study the Why; and enable us to keep the How and the Why more religiously apart from each other.