this is surely too mechanical a view. Natural law is not an entity, or subordinate agent, but a method, a uniformity of procedure. Bearing this in mind we may readily see that, so far as outward method is concerned, the distinction between a natural and a supernatural act is simply that between an act according to a protracted unformity and one that is not. Let any act, however astounding in its magnitude, be a long enough time in getting itself done, and it becomes, in the process, the natural or expected and established order of things. If the manna in the wilderness had not ceased at the end of the forty years' wandering, but were still a daily occurring fact, it would be set down as a merely natural phenomenon. A miracle or wonder-inspiring event, considered simply as a phenomenon, must be a sudden or brief production of an effect; one which can be seen from beginning to end by a single observer, or at least has a mysterious beginning within the observation of the one who finds it miraculous. More astounding results than any fabled in the wildest romance are wrought all about us by the ceaseless alchemy of cosmical forces; and yet, because these things are going on all the while and have become the very web and tissue of our experience, we call them natural, and thoughtlessly make their very uniformity an opaque veil obscuring the mighty Will that is working in them.

But if an event, to be miraculous in its phenomenal method, must be sudden or brief, we have surrendered our right to maintain the miraculous origin of the world. We have agreed to allow for each creative act a period of duration many thousand times as great as that during which human experience has been observing the sequences of nature. A human observer, though he attained the traditional age of the antediluvians, would have seen in any of the acts of the creative week, had he lived while they were in process, only a secular movement toward the production of some result, so slow as to exhibit little observable change in one lifetime, and so constant and uniform as to be the natural order to which all his manner of life and expectations spontaneously adjusted themselves. The truth is, the question of creation or evolution is not a question of phenomenal method at all, but a question of the relation of the unseen to phenomena. The method of the world's origin, so far as it can be observed, or inferred from observation, is substantially the same to the eye of the creationist and of the evolutionist. The real dispute is, as to whether the world at any given stage embodies all the forces necessary to account for the next higher, or whether, on the contrary, in

the introduction of at least the greater epochs of change there is not impressed on the emerging species from some higher source a new idea, thus implying the existence in the universe of some foretaste of its future, some anticipation of its plan and goal which works to lead it upward. In other words, the great difference between the two camps is as to how to account for that worldprocess and accomplished fact which is a matter of common observation; that is to say, when all this was produced, what was going on concomitantly or causally in the world of mind and will? As to this matter, pure natural science is agnostic, because its methods of observation do not reach to that unseen sphere; while it is only through religious sympathy with high spiritual purposes, or what the Bible calls faith, that we "understand that the worlds have been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things which do appear," but has its ultimate ætiology in an unseen and holy Will.

The act of calling the world into being, then, is by the very time allowed to it made a natural process, or capable of being called supernatural only in view of its relation to the resolves and purposes of an infinite Mind, which relation does not affect its outward method at all. But if it was natural or uniform, then either it must have been by the operation of the same natural laws that are now active, or else all our data for reading the testimony of the rocks are at fault, and a science of the past is impossible. There is no reason for supposing other natural laws or uniformities, contrasting with the present as creative labor with repose, to have ceased at the beginning of the present cosmic day. God is therefore not literally resting, even from creative activity, but is creating now as much as He ever did. The supposed divine rest is not a literal act.

The question now remains, Can that which is not a fact be made an imperative precedent, or in any way prescriptive of subsequent procedure? For the adequate consideration of this question we must direct our attention to the more general one of the different kinds and uses of history, or the bearing of the past as understood and expounded upon the relations and duties of later ages.

II.

It is to be observed that this story of a divine respite at the Creation is history with an imperative or prescriptive intent. It narrates the Creator's act as an example for human custom. It may be called an ancient exposition of the Natural History of the

Sabbath, that divine sabbatism being not simply the isolated act of a transcendent Artificer wholly detached from his Universe, but rather an inherently necessary time-division in the life of toiling beings described as a primordial event in the history of the Power that brought them into existence.

History thus meant as an imperative precedent, and containing in itself, as it were, the model or epitome of its whole future development, is quite different from the ordered narration of sterile events such as are witnessed and reported by human testimony. The very fact that as history it rises to the dignity of a working model, or principle for the future to embody, is an indication that a peculiar kind of history is to be found here. The two entirely different ways in which any development or structure may record its genesis for the instruction of future ages need to be pointed out, and the limitations as well as the validity of each kind of history defined.

The nature of the two forms of historical exposition may best be illustrated by examples. Suppose, for instance, we are describing the geometrical solid called a cone. In the very definition of that object we give one kind of history of it. We say, A cone is that figure which is generated by revolving a rightangled triangle about one of its perpendicular sides as an axis. Now here is the story of the production of the cone in idea and principle; but it is far from being the literal history of any particular tangible cone that ever existed. No solid cone could be produced in that way; it is only the idea or defined mental image that is thus produced. To get at the literal history of any cone in particular, we ascertain the more commonplace facts of the selection of the wood, the sawing it and shaping it in the lathe, or whatever were the particular operations by which the workman, with the idea in his mind, made it a tangible reality. Here, then, on the one hand, is a notional history of the cone, or genetic story of its idea, and on the other the literal history of some particular example. It will be observed that the notional history is not founded on fact at all; it is worthless as a means for learning the actual past. But the literal history, in its turn, while all that could be desired as a source of information with regard to the past of some particular object, can furnish us with no principle which can be imperative for any future fabrication of cones, nor can it of itself even impart an idea of the nature of the solid to begin with. After reading the whole story of the modeling of some particular cone from wood, another workman might produce

an equally good one out of tin or pasteboard, not following his predecessor's methods at all; but in order to know what he is making he must have some other source of information than this literal history so solidly founded on fact. In other words, the history which concerns itself with the actual past has no valid bearing on the future.

Let us take another illustration. The leading thinkers of the last century undertook to arrive at an understanding of the relation of the individual to the state by supposing that men began by being in what was called a state of nature, and that government arose by a general social compact in which the citizens agreed to surrender certain rights, which they possessed in that natural or ungoverned state, to be henceforth exercised solely by government as the authorized conservator of social order. It was thus that government acquired the right to exercise those public powers which are seen to belong to all, but not to each. The historical investigators of the present century have failed to find any actual examples of such a compact in the early times, and so declare the whole idea, from lack of a basis in fact, an exploded notion. No commonwealth ever created its authority by contract from a state of nature. The state arose, as is most likely, from the family, which, widening out into the clan, carried an authority that was unquestioned so long as it was strictly parental, and now holds a de facto jurisdiction which it has no occasion to justify in theory.

But it will readily be seen that we are here again confronted with our two kinds of history, the notional or metaphysical and the literal. The one tells us how government is generated, to use the mathematical term, the other informs us how particular examples actually arose. It is doubtful whether those who propounded the doctrine of a social compact ever supposed it to be literal history. It was rather a natural history of government or history of its idea, not, indeed, as the idea ever actually realized itself, but as the idea may be made to arise in the mind of the student of theory. As such it had a prescriptive purpose or bearing, as principle, on the future, and it may be questioned, with all deference to Sir Henry Maine, whether some such supposition as it embodies is not necessary in order to arrive at an understanding of public and private rights. We assume a state of nature as a starting-point for thought, rather than as the actual starting-point of concrete history. To concede that such a condition and transaction has no basis in fact is not to invalidate the doctrine for its

purpose. As notional or fictional history with a bearing on the future, it is valid as one kind of truth indispensable to the theorist. On the other hand, the literal history of government, as it actually evolved itself from the family, however valuable it may be for purposes of information as to the past, is singularly barren of ideas which can elucidate the nature of our present relations to the ruling power.

It is to be observed that all metaphysical contemplation and exposition of ideas belongs to this notional or genetic kind. Its aim is not to chronicle literal events in the genesis of things or in the growth of mind. It is rather the history of concepts, of the world as it expounds itself in human thought. In its study of origins it concerns itself with primary categories of space and time, with principles of identity and of contradiction and of excluded middle, with a score of things which never occurred to the mind of any one in the beginning of his mental activity, and which could hardly be explained to the majority of mankind. Though they are the ideal beginnings of thought, these principles are, nevertheless, not by any means the starting-points from which the young mind actually begins to think. The history thus generated from its underlying principle is rather the history of the human mind in idea, necessary to any command of logical processes, and yet of no use as information with regard to the literal past.

Now this story of God resting after his work seems to be given as a principle or prescriptive precedent for the future. In form it is a story of the past, but it is the past with the future contained in it, the past in the light of its creative idea. It thus wears the characteristics of what we have designated as notional history; history that is not dependent for its validity on literal fact, but is rather all the more vitally related to future practice, because it points out that origin which is an idea to be lived up into, rather than a finished event to be left behind.

It is erroneous to suppose that the only way to put ourselves into fruitful relation with the past is to ascertain the literal facts of early history. Under the influence of the inductive method all modern research is making the phenomenal fact its ultimate goal of effort; and it expects to find the key to all duty and aspiration in the ascertained actualities of the past and the pres

As the fact is worshiped, so with corresponding scorn all dogma is rejected as misleading, and all metaphysics vilified as useless. But it will be found sooner or later that early fact alone,