Natural Religion

LORD GIFFORD’S munificent endowment of a Lectureship of Natural Theology, to which I have had the undeserved honour of being elected by the Senate of this ancient and illustrious University, must be reckoned among the signs of the times, pregnant with meaning.

This lectureship, with three others in the Universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews, and Aberdeen, was founded, as you know, by the late Lord Gifford, a Scotch lawyer, who by ability, hard work, and self-denial had amassed a large fortune, and attained the dignified position of a seat on the Bench.

I have not been able to gather from his friends much information about his personal character and the private circumstances of his life. Nor do they all agree in the estimate they formed of him. Some represented him to me as a keen, hardworking, and judicious man, engrossed by his professional work, yet with a yearning for quietness, for some hours of idleness that should allow him to meditate on the great problems of life, those ancient problems which the practical man may wave away from year to year, but which knock at our door louder and louder as we grow old, and will not allow themselves to be turned into the street, like beggars and vagabonds. We all know the practical man of the world, who tells us that he has no time to listen to these inward questionings, that he is satisfied with what the Church teaches or with what men wiser than himself have settled for him, that he has tried to do his duty to his neighbours, and that he trusts to God’s mercy for all the rest. Men like to entrench themselves in their little castles, to keep their bridges drawn and their portcullis ready to fall on any unwelcome guests. Or, to quote the words of my friend, Matthew Arnold, —