Natural law in the spiritual world / by Henry Drummond.

  • Henry Drummond
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Natural law in the spiritual world / by Henry Drummond. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    411/456 (page 379)
    Almost all the natural sciences have already passed through these stages ; and one or two which rested entirely on external characters have all but ceased to exist—Conchology, for example, which has yielded its place to Malacology. Following in the wake of the other sciences, the classifications of Theology may have to be remodelled in the same way. The popular classification, whatever its merits from a practical- point of view, is essentially a clas- sification based on Morphology. The whole ten- dency of science now is to include along with morphological considerations the profounder general- isations of Physiology and Embryology. And the contribution of the latter science especially has been found so important that biology henceforth must look for its classification largely to Embryological characters. But apart from the demand of modern scientific culture it is palpably foreign to Christianity, not merely as a Philosophy but as a Biology, to classify men only in terms of the former. And it is some- what remarkable that the writers of both the Old and New Testaments seem to have recognised the deeper basis. The favourite classification of the Old Testament was into “the nations which knew God ” and “ the nations which knew not God ”—a distinction which we have formerly seen to be, at