Jane Eyre's Natural Theology

http://www.film-intel.com/2011/09/jane-eyre-cinema-review.html

"Night was come, and her planets were risen: a safe, still night: too serene for the companionship of fear.  We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence...  Looking up, I, with tear-dimmed eyes, saw the mighty Milky Way.  Remembering what it was - what countless systems there swept space like a soft trace of light - I felt the might and strength of God.  Sure was I of His efficiency to save what He had made: convinced I grew that neither earth should perish, nor one of the souls it treasured.  I turned my prayer to thanksgiving: the Source of Life was also the Saviour of spirits."

- Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, 2006, pp. 324-5)

Graphing natural theology

The Google Books N-Gram Viewer is a new tool for examining cultural trends by searching for the frequency of words and phrases in published books over time.  Here's a couple of results relevant to my research interests:

The first graph is based on a search for "natural theology" in books published between 1600 and 2000; the second adds "natural religion", a related term sometimes used interchangeably with natural theology, sometimes used for something quite different.  "Physico-theology", another related term, didn't show up at all, since only phrases appearing in 40 or more books are included.  The graphs are a bit small to see here, but there is a massive spike for natural theology (blue)  around 1750.  Natural religion (red) far outstrips natural theology, but by 2000, natural theology is slightly higher.

I can imagine that this could be quite interesting and perhaps useful for someone like me who is interested in the history of a concept (although I know nothing about statistical analysis).  I've done searches in Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online to find all uses of these terms in published works, but it's also interesting to see the overall trends.  I hope that Google Books will continue to add to the number of books included in the search results.  I think I'm going to have a lot of fun with this!