So said John Henry Newman in his 1832 sermon 'On Justice, as a Principle of Divine Governance'. It may, of course, be due to my rather engrained prejudice against Newman and his tiresome, perpetual angst, particularly in the 1830s, but one does get the impression that benevolence and cheerfulness were not exactly welcome guests in Newman's mind.
The phrase "false cheerfulness" is directed by Newman against William Paley's Natural Theology (1802). My initial reaction, however, is to - admittedly rather unfashionably - instinctively warm to and be grateful for the vision of benevolence and cheerfulness in Paley's great work. In his 2024 paper 'Revisiting Paley', John Hedley Brooke has set out the case for moving beyond the caricatures and immediate dismissal of Paley:
Paley still repays a visit as a subject who transcends the stereotypes frequently applied to him. Four caricatures particularly invite correction: that Paley wrote in culpable neglect of Hume; that he presented his “proof” as if it were a deductive demonstration of God's existence; that by making his Natural Theology a stand‐alone book, he implied the genre was independent of revelation and therefore of little consequence for Christian theology; and that Paley was so preoccupied with the minutiae of anatomical specificity that he was blind to the laws connecting natural phenomena. The latter sections of the article will introduce several nuances in Paley's thinking that help to explain the sympathetic recognition he continued to enjoy, even in the scientific community, until the end of the nineteenth century.
On the subject of the relationship between Paley's natural theology and revelation, Brooke states:
Contrary to the caricature, Paley did not see his Natural Theology as a stand‐alone work. It was one of three substantial texts that he saw as interrelated ... In the second, his 'Evidences of Christianity' (1794), he had defended the gospels as an authentic revelation. This had required a chapter in which he explicitly responded to Hume's attack on reported miracles. Natural Theology was published last. In his dedication of the book to Shute Barrington, Bishop of Durham, Paley said that he had offered the public “the evidences of natural religion, the evidences of revealed religion, and an account of the duties that result from both.” And then the revealing statement: “they have been published in an order, the very reverse of that in which they ought to be read”. What Paley hoped to accomplish with his Natural Theology was the encouragement of belief in the existence of a deity whose attributes were such that it would be reasonable to expect a revelation of greater theological significance than that to be found in nature alone.
In Paley's own words, his account of natural theology "facilitates the belief of the fundamental articles of Revelation".
Today's short post on this Rogation Wednesday desires to encourage such a renewed appreciation of Paley in general and of his Natural Theology in particular. Casually dismissing him, as did Newman, is to lose a vision of benevolence and cheerfulness that, I would suggest, has something significant to contribute to a church and culture shadowed by angry ideologies, secular and religious. We might add that recognition of God's benevolence and the call to cheerfulness have deep scriptural roots.
As Rogationtide draws to a close, therefore, I turn to a beautiful passage from the conclusion of Natural Theology:
in a moral view, I shall not, I believe, be contradicted when I say, that, if one train of thinking be more desirable than another, it is that which regards the phænomena of nature with a constant reference to a supreme intelligent Author. To have made this the ruling, the habitual sentiment of our minds, is to have laid the foundation of every thing which is religious. The world thenceforth becomes a temple, and life itself one continued act of adoration. The change is no less than this, that, whereas formerly God was seldom in our thoughts, we can now scarcely look upon any thing without perceiving its relation to him.
(The picture is of George Romney's portrait of Paley, c.1789.)
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