"No, Charley; you were only a little rude from being a little over eager. If she had been seriously advocating dishonesty, you would have been quite right to take it up so; and you thought she was." Yes; but it was very silly of me. dare say it was because I had been so dishonest myself just before. How dreadful it is that I am always taking my own side, 66 I even when I do what I am ashamed of in another. I suppose I think I have got my horse by the head, and the other has not." "I don't know. That may be it," I answered. "I'm afraid I can't think about it to-night, for I don't feel well. What if it should be your turn to nurse me now, Charley?” He turned quite pale, his eyes opened wide, and he looked at me anxiously. Before morning I was aching all over: I "I behaved like a brute this morning, had rheumatic fever. Wilfrid." THE Chinese immigrants to America are reported to be peculiarly clean in their habits, and are largely employed in laundry work; yet it would seem from Consul Sinclair's report on the British and foreign trade at the port of Foo-chow-foo for the year 1869, which has just been printed, that the Chinese experience of the domestic laundry is rather limited, and that even the Emperor himself sets an example of rigid economy as regards his washing bill. Speaking of the Nankeen, or "Soochow " cloths, Mr. Sinclair states that they enter very largely into competition with foreign made shirtings, being much stronger, and hence more durable, since they are woven by handloom and contain a greater proportion of the raw material. These Soochow cottons give more warmth, without costing much more at first than our own cotton manufactures, while they prove in the long run a cheaper article. Mr. Sinclair expresses his surprise that a small attempt has not been made at Manchester to imitate these Nankeen cloths, both in width and texture, for sale against the real Soochow stuffs, for it can hardly be doubted that steam power is a cheaper mode of production than manual labour. Woollens, such as broadcloths, Spanish stripes, &c., are not the fashion with the upper and well-to-do classes at Fo-chow, who in winter prefer garments made of furs of various costly kinds, which last for generations in families without renewal; or else they wear their Chinese silks and satins padded with cotton wool, both for underclothing and their leggings. Few of these grandees have more than two or three cotton shirts, and these are mainly of Nankeen cloth, because warmer, which they probably change and send to the wash only once during the winter; and as for wearing flannel next the skin for keeping their persons warm, or for warding off rheumatism, they scorn the idea, perhaps because these stuffs wear out in the process of constant washing, and therefore would cost money. A respectable Chinaman who had spent many years of his life in Peking once assured Mr. Sinclair that the Emperor himself could not have more than one or two cotton shirts in his wardrobe. Mr. Sinclair supposes that, like many of the well-to-do Chinese people in that vast empire, their august Sovereign wears silks and pongees for underclothing, while foreigners employ flannels and merinos. Pall Mall Gazette. From Macmillan's Magazine. THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE. BY CANON KINGSLEY. (A Paper read in the Hall of Sion College, Jan. 10, 1871.) WHEN I accepted the unexpected and undeserved honour of being allowed to lecture here, the first subject which suggested itself to me was Natural Theology. It is one which has taken up much of my thought for some years past, which seems to me more and more important, and which is just now somewhat forgotten. I therefore determined to say a few words on it to-night. 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, remember, 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 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 be lieved in. For the demands of Reason (as none knew better than good Bishop Butler) must be and ought to be satisfied. And when a popular war arises between the reason of a generation and its theology, 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 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. But 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. "Disease, decay, and death around I see," is their key-note, | any such curse is formally abrogated in rather than "O all ye works of the Lord, the eighth chapter and 21st verse of the bless Him, praise Him, and magnify Him very same document -"I will not again together." There lingers about them a curse the earth any more for man's sake. savour of the old monastic theory, that While the earth remaineth, seed-time and this earth is the devil's planet, fallen, ac- harvest, cold and heat, summer and wincursed, goblin-haunted, needing to be ex- ter, day and night shall not cease." And orcised at every turn before it is useful or next, the fact is not so; for if you root up even safe for man. An age which has the thorns and thistles, and keep your adopted as its most popular hymn a para- land clean, then assuredly you will grow phrase of the mediaval monk's "Hic breve fruit-trees and not thorns, wheat and not vivitur," and in which stalwart public- thistles, according to those laws of Nature school boys are bidden in their chapel wor- which the voice of God expressed in facts. ship 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. - and greedy waste. Well said that veteran botanist, the venerable Elias Fries, of Lund: 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 "adamah" (correctly translated in our version "the ground ") Not a scriptural development. Let me signifies, as I am told, not this planet, but press on you, my clerical brethren, most simply the soil from whence we get our earnestly this one point. It is time that food; such a curse as certainly is exwe should make up our minds what tone pressed by the Septuagint and the Vulgate Scripture does take toward Nature, natural versions: "Cursed is the earth"-V TOLS science, natural theology. Most of you, I čpyoɩ σoù; “in opere tuo," as the Vulgate doubt not, have made up your minds al- has it "in thy works." Man's work is ready, and in consequence have no fear of too often the curse of the very planet natural science, no fear for natural theol- which he misuses. None should know ogy. But I cannot deny that I find still that better than the botanist, who sees lingering here and there certain of the old whole regions desolate, and given up to views of nature of which I used to hear but sterility and literal thorns and thistles, on too much here in London some five-and-account of man's sin and folly, ignorance thirty years ago-not from my own father, thank God! for he, to his honour, was one of those few London clergy who then faced and defended advanced physical - but from others- better men too 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, science "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 the 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 | As we proceed, we find nothing in the general tone of Scripture which can hinder our natural theology being at once scriptural and scientific. Let us pass on, gentlemen. 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 If it is to be scientific, it must begin by approaching Nature at once with a cheer-will you make of those destructive powers ful and reverend 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. Why, 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 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 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 Revelations? 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 Quoted from Schleiden's "The Plant, a Biog-destructive powers? It is an awful probraphy." Lecture XI. in fine. lem. But the writers of the Bible have faced it valiantly. Physical science is fac- Physical science is proving more and ing it valiantly now. Therefore natural more the immense importance of Race; theology may face it likewise. Remember the importance of hereditary powers, heCarlyle's great words about poor Francesca reditary organs, hereditary habits, in all in the Inferno: "Infinite pity: yet also organized beings, from the lowest plant to infinite rigour of law. It is so Nature is the highest animal. She is proving more made. It is so Dante discerned that she and more the omnipresent action of the was made." 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. 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 The natural theology of the future must I ask you to remember that marvellous take count of these tremendous and even essay on Natural Theology, if I may so painful facts; and she may take count of call it in all reverence, the 139th Psalm; them. For Scripture has taken count of and judge for yourself whether he who them already. It talks continually — it wrote that did not consider the study of has been blamed for talking so much - of Embryology as important, as significant, races, of families; of their wars, their as worthy of his deepest attention as an struggles, their exterminations; of races Owen, a Huxley, or a Darwin. Nay, I favoured, of races rejected; of remnants will go further still, and say, that in those being saved, to continue the race; of hegreat words. "Thine eyes did see my reditary tendencies, hereditary excellensubstance, yet being imperfect; and in cies, hereditary guilt. Its sense of the Thy book all my members were written, reality and importance of descent is so which in continuance were fashioned, when intense, that it speaks of a whole tribe or as yet there was none of them," in a whole family by the name of its common those words, I say, the Psalmist has antic-ancestor, and the whole nation of the Jews ipated that realistic view of embryologi-is Israel, to the end. And if I be told this cal questions to which our most modern is true of the Old Testament, but not of philosophers are, it seems to me, slowly, the New, I must answer, What? Does half unconsciously, but still inevitably, re-not St. Paul hold the identity of the whole turning. 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? 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. Gentlemen, think of this. I only suggest the thought; but I do not suggest it in haste. Think over it- by the light which our Lord's parab'es, 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 hereof" - may not be the supreme instance, the most complex development, of |