that the eyes of Vesalius and of Harvey might be dazzled by the sight of the tree that has grown out of their grain of mustard-seed” (pp. 628, 629).
Such being the state of things, we might have expected a sermon on the means of diffusing and promoting natural knowledge; but a sermon laying stress on such a triviality as the advisableness of improving natural knowledge, when natural knowledge is quite flourishing and dazzling, seems to us to have no object at all. Unfortunately, the lay preacher did not see that it was a triviality, or, if he saw that it was, thought that his own way of dealing with it was so new and untrivial that the merit of his novel conceptions would redeem the triviality of the subject. Let us see, then, what such novel conceptions are.
That natural knowledge may help us to keep back pestilences and to extinguish fires is not a discovery of the lay preacher; we all knew it. His first discovery is that pestilences are not punishments of God, and that fires have little to do with human malice.
“Our forefathers had their own ways of accounting for each of these calamities. They submitted to the plague in humility and in penitence, for they believed it to be the judgment of God. But towards the fire they were furiously indignant, interpreting it as the effect of the malice of man, as the work of the republicans or of the Papists, according as their prepossessions ran in favor of loyalty or of Puritanism. It would, I fancy, have fared but ill with one who, standing where I now stand, in what was then a thickly-peopled and fashionable part of London, should have broached to our ancestors the doctrine which I now propound to you—that all their hypotheses were alike wrong; that the plague was no more, in their sense, a divine judgment than the fire was the work of any political or of any religious sect; but that they were themselves
the authors of both plague and fire, and that they must look to themselves to prevent the recurrence of calamities to all appearance so peculiarly beyond the reach of human control—so evidently the result of the wrath of God or of the craft and subtlety of an enemy” (pp. 626, 627).
We think that natural knowledge will not be much improved by this Huxleyan discovery. God’s existence and providence are notoriously a most substantial part of natural knowledge; so the relegation of Deity out of the world, and the suppression of his providence over it, is no less a crime against science than against God himself, and shows no less ignorance than impiety. We cannot admit that pestilences “will only take up their abode among those who have prepared unswept and ungarnished residences for them,” nor that “their cities must have narrow, unwatered streets, foul with accumulated garbage,” nor that “their houses must be ill-drained, ill-lighted, ill-ventilated,” nor that “their subjects must be ill-washed, ill-fed, ill-clothed” (p. 630). Our reasons for denying such conclusions are many. To cite one only—of which we think that Mr. Huxley will not fail to appreciate the value—we read in one of the most authentic historical books the following:
“The word of the Lord came to Gad the prophet and the seer of David, saying: Go, and say to David: Thus saith the Lord: I give thee the choice of three things: choose one of them which thou wilt, that I may do it to thee. And when Gad was come to David, he told him, saying: Either seven years of famine shall come to thee in thy land: or thou shalt flee three months before thy adversaries: or for three days there shall be a pestilence in thy land. Now therefore deliberate, and see what answer I shall return to him that sent me. And David said to Gad: I am in a great strait: but
it is better that I should fall into the hands of the Lord (for his mercies are many) than into the hands of men. And the Lord sent a pestilence upon Israel, from the morning unto the time appointed, and there died of the people from Dan to Bersabee seventy thousand men. And when the angel of the Lord had stretched out his hand over Jerusalem to destroy it, the Lord had pity on the affliction, and said to the angel that slew the people: It is enough: now hold thy hand” (2 Kings xxiv.)
This fact is as historical as the London plague; nor is it the only one that could be adduced. Hence we are at a loss to understand how natural knowledge can be improved by a theory which is annihilated by the most positive facts.
The next discovery of the lay preacher is no less remarkable: “I say that natural knowledge, seeking to satisfy natural wants, has found the ideas which can alone still spiritual cravings” (p. 632). What great ideas has natural knowledge introduced into men’s minds? 1st. That the earth is but an atom among atoms, whirling no man knows whither, through illimitable space (p. 634); 2d, that what we call the peaceful heaven above us is but that space, filled by an infinitely subtle matter, whose particles are seething and surging like the waves of an angry sea (ibid.); 3d, that there are infinite regions where nothing is known, or ever seems to have been known, but matter and force (ibid.); 4th, that phenomena must have had a beginning, and must have an end; but their beginning is, to our conception of time, infinitely remote, and their end is as immeasurably distant (ibid.); 5th, that all matter has weight, and that the force which produces weight is co-extensive with the universe (ibid.); 6th, that matter is indestructible (p. 635);