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are one; but nature is not eternal and God is. The affirmative side is not more accurate: for to say that our conception and knowledge of God and Nature are so allcontaining and assured that nothing in heaven or earth escapes us; and that everything in the past, the present, the future, may be thus comprehensively formulated— "God is natura naturans, and Nature is natura naturata; God was never without the world, and the world is God;" shocks our common sense-"sensus moresque repugnant.”

In contrast with such boastful statements concerning God and the world, and in proof that even a small part of that world cannot be fully searched out, take littles to measure the great. No one can tell the secret of atomic obedience in the familiar changes from ice to steam; nor the acting law of the pressures and resistances which a flying bird encounters, all around, from the atmosphere; nor are the forces at work in our finger nail, or in our hairs, or in the hair of a nettle, scientifically understood. The entomologist, Pierre Lyonnet, devoted many years to the study of one insect, Phalana cossus, a caterpillar which infests the willow tree. The book, describing and figuring it, is a quarto volume of more than six hundred pages, adorned with eighteen plates. The number of muscles alone, all described and figured, is four thousand and forty-one. The labour, nevertheless, did not acquire all the knowledge; nor does the book narrate all that is to be narrated; nor do the plates, nor the muscles described and figured, reveal more than a small part of the mystery and the wonder contained in that one insect.

A further fact-every event, even the most trifling, is so complicate and multiform in its antecedents, that it is impossible to state the real cause of anything; we,

therefore, repudiate the following inaccurate and presumptuous statement:-"Miracles, or the intervention of the Deity in human affairs, are, to the scientific thinker, a priori, so improbable, that no amount of testimony suffices to make him entertain the hypothesis for an instant." This assertion is utterly unscientific, and based upon pure ignorance. Indeed, so far are we from being able to explain all things without God, whose foreseeing wisdom is conscious of Himself and of His action in creating and ruling the world, that we cannot give an exhaustive scientific statement of the continuous behaviour of the acting energies of any three masses, or forcepoints, in any cubical quarter-inch of force-locus, animate or inanimate, in air, or earth, or sea, for one minute preceding or following any moment that man may select. As to miracles, it is certain that the present state of things is derivative—is not what it originally was, the whole pomp of stars and all the variety of life having been originated. There is nothing so firmly established as the miraculous nature, on the whole, and in every part, is a splendid miracle. The universe is proved, on mechanical principles, to have had a beginning in a state of things where and when the laws known to us were not in being; nor could have been originated therein except by energy from without. Professor P. G. Tait states ("Recent Advances in Physical Science," p. 26), “All portions of our science, and especially that beautiful one the Dissipation of Energy, point unanimously to a beginning, to a state of things incapable of being derived by present laws (of tangible matter and its energy) from any conceivable previous arrangement," the beginning was miraculous.

The beginning of nature was miraculous, so also is the continuance. Professor Huxley said, at the opening of Sir Josiah Mason's College, "Nature is the expression - of a definite order with which nothing interferes." Such a statement, even if true, can never be verified; and, as it is not less opposed to science than it is disproved by fact, ought not to have been made. Nature, really, is that expression of definite, ever progressing order in which no time and no place are without interference, and in which everything exists for the sake of something else. Nature is that sphere wherein all the visible came from the invisible into which it is returning; the invisible ever interfering with the visible, the visible ever re-entering the invisible. Nature continues to be nature because of this everlasting interference: is that domain of ceaseless and universal change which, in no two consecutive moments of time, nor in any two points of space, ever was or ever will be exactly the same. Every force in every atom, in every moment, acts for ever and ever along a different line of direction and through a different place in space. Instead of Nature being that with which and within which nothing interferes, it is that in which and with which everything interferes, the constitution and continuance of nature are based upon interference. The highest intellects in the world well know this, and that no branch of science-not even that of involution and evolution, which some pervert to ungodly use—could exist apart from this interference ;—an interference well ordered and sure. Scientific men plainly tell mankind that selfishness, impurity, and vice curse the world; but that when true religion everywhere prevails the wreathed surges of oceans of misery, the massy dark undulations

of poverty and toil, will melt into a widespread clear reflection of beautiful order in which man will be as king. "Da Fidei quæ Fidei sunt."

"Hail, universal Lord! be bounteous still
To give us only good; and, if the night
Have gathered aught of evil, or concealed,
Disperse it, as new light dispels the dark."

MILTON, Paradise Lost.

We have established our argument-"the denial of miracles is unscientific." The assertion that they are impossible is simply absurd. Only by them can we account for the world's present mechanical arrangement : both origin and continuance are from unlike former conditions. To say "there is no God"-denies Divinity, yet attributes it to matter, energy, space. To assume that God and Nature are one from eternity to eternity, imputes Godhead to every particle of matter. To teach that Nature is without interference, contradicts the most established and universal of scientific facts: Nature exists and continues to exist by means of ceaseless and universal interference. Science affirms the greatest of all miracles-a Beginning, a Creation-in which an arranged all-pervading dependence, and an ever-acting yet ever-changing adaptation and correlation of the parts with the whole and of the whole with the parts, prove that the whole is a splendid aggregate of miracles.

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THOUGHT II.

NATURALISM AND SUPERNATURALISM.

"Our notions of what is natural will be enlarged in proportion to our greater knowledge of the works of God and the dispensations of His providence."-BISHOP BUTLER.

"Miracles upon earth are nature in heaven."

JEAN PAUL RICHTER.

NATURALISM, maintaining that the laws of matter, of space, of energy, either had no beginning, or began and exist by their own originative and continuative power, is convicted of inadequacy. It professes to explain, by the limited measure of human intellect and the inaccuracy of human knowledge, that infinitude which can neither be measured nor fully known. It says, "There was nothing before matter, there is no existence apart from it, there will be nothing after it. Matter, driven by force within space, is the whole of nature." is the whole of nature." Lucretius said the same long ago (i. 430)—

"Præterea nihil est, quod possis dicere ab omni

Corpore sejunctum, secretumque esse ab Inani,
Quod quasi tertia sit rerum natura reperta.”

"All within is mechanism, but there is no mechanic; and outside of it is no being-no life." Such a theory narrows the universe into a mechanical system, and makes human

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