conducting worlds in new paths, replenishing them with new operations-ever advancing with indications of greater future knowledge for the intelligent, and promises to the pure in heart of wider rule in manifold dominions of the Almighty. It is certain, so every kind of science seems to testify, that we are being educated, that intelligence is enlarging; the process is by involution and evolution. Let us rejoice in the light and power of it, and make good men out of bad ones: they will be our credentials as to the power of the world to come. Nor is science, nor are these the only testimonies: our seemingly fantastic and incoherent miseries, storm after earthquake, and after earthquake fire, conduct all of us, at least once in our lives, to a pit of utter darkness-that we may cry to God for light. Some of us can only so be made better. THOUGHT VIII. ARE MIRACLES UNNATURAL? "Dei Voluntas rerum natura est."-S. AUGUSTINE. "Laws are rules generally followed, and therefore, when anything inanimate takes repeatedly the same course, we conceive it as following a rule, or, as it cannot govern itself, obeying a law; but its being subject to any rule or law is really the dictate of our imagination: we make a kind of person of it, and, in some indistinct way, fancy it a person under government, rule, order."—HEY's Lectures on Divinity, i. xv. 4. THOUGHT has made it clear-that nature derives its origin and continuance from the Supernatural. It is certain that things were not always as they now are. The universe is a sphere for phases of progress. So soon as beings and existences are unsuitable for one stage they pass to another, according to their various capacities of advance. To admit this, however, brings in the miraculous; and, though by our process of reasoning, miracles assume an air of probability and reasonableness, they are nevertheless asserted to be somewhat unnatural -contrary to what, strangely enough, is called "the fixed course of things;" and may, therefore, be refused. The refusal is unwise. The miraculous is not more supernatural than is nature itself. The creation of nature was not a necessity, but a free act on God's part, it is the miracle of miracles-rendering every other miracle possible and natural. As to a fixed order of things, it is only a fixity compatible with ceaseless progress: an all-pervading elasticity and variety are remarkable and prevalent. The worlds, so far as we know them, never occupy for any two consecutive moments the same position in space; nor is any atom in our solar system acted upon in exactly the same direction, or with the same degree of force, for any two succeeding instants. The phenomena which accompany any particular event, will never, all of them, accompany it again, nor will the universe ever again return to exactly the same state in which it was at any previous moment. The same things even are not always done in the same way; and if miracles are a sort of by-path in connection with the common highway, a speciality, or kind of relief to uniformity and denial of fatality, they become instructive lessons in theology concerning natural variety. The point of contact with divine energy seems near and direct in the miracle, more distant and by manifold media in the natural, but it is only the mode of manifestation that varies, the energy in both cases is nigh at hand. The thought may be varied and enlarged : When we regard external objects, and consider the operation of forces, we are never able to discover any essential power or quality which binds the antecedent to the event, cause to effect, rendering the one an infallible sequence of the other: the energy moving nature and its work are both inscrutable. This admission, by science and philosophy, that the causes of things are inscrutable, is an admission that natural things are not really more explainable than the so-called miracles. At the first appearance of an object we cannot guess at the effect which will result, and that effect, whatever it be, is in no wise, so far as science can ascertain, a necessary or certain sequence; not until after many repetitions of apparently the same effect from apparently the same cause, do we say the recurrence is by a law-nature's customary way. Solidity, extension, motion, are known only by experience; and these qualities are so complete in themselves that we can never, beforehand, point out any other event that necessarily results from them. We cannot even be sure, in fact we know the contrary, that the same infinite multitude of phenomena, which accompany the production of any event, will, all and every, continue to accompany it in the future: so that it is impossible, either for science or philosophy, to prove that nature is uniform; or, if uniform, will continue to operate in the manner we suppose ourselves to have discovered that it now acts. The scenes of nature are continually shifting, one object follows another; but the energy actuating the whole is hidden—never prophecies of itself in any of the qualities of matter. Heat attends flame, but we do not know why, or the nature of their connection. Every natural event is inexplicable—both as to its cause and sequence—and would, apart from oft recurrence, be counted a miracle. Great or startling exceptions are not really unnatural, or contrary to nature, but exceptions akin to those which introduced first causes and first effects. Unthinking people imagine that the fall of heavy bodies, the growth of plants, the nourishment of animals, are by the very energy that seems connected with the effect; and when custom has allied the antecedent to the consequent, the belief arises, and then the strong assurance, that the two are and must always be joined together: but there is no visible tie, no necessary idea of transmitted power, or of union between any two ideas of the mind, or between any two operations of bodies, other than that arising from their ordinary connection or transition. Those who speak of miracles being contrary to nature, would have us think that they have been on the other side of nature and know all about it: but all that they can say is, "Miracles do not fall in with that usual order and sequence in nature with which we are personally acquainted." Granted that miracles are an innovation upon the ordinary course of nature, an innovation which is not merely apparent but real, what then? Why nature, itself, as a whole and in every of its parts, was and is an innovation on that which preceded, and does its work by being an innovation; the previous state on which it innovated being the ground which throws it out into relief. In like manner, miracles do their work by being innovations. We will now, as by experiment, verify the reasoning. Lucretius, with somewhat of oracular solemnity, predicted-and modern physicists, because of remarkable facts and analogies in nature, assert-the dissolution of all things; though the Roman poet supposed the eternity of his own atoms, "Materies igitur, solido que corpore constat, Esse æterna potest, cum cætera dissolvantur.” Suppose all authors in all languages agree that from the 1st of January, 1600, there was a total darkness |