salvation; they attest the truth of prophets, and the Divine Sonship of Christ.

The usual course of nature is in no respect commonplace, but full of marvels. These marvels are so akin to miracles that we do not know their essential cause, nor are their antecedents invariable. Dead inorganic matter is fashioned into living organisms; this, day by day, is a quickening of the dead-life is a miracle to the dead. What Müller said remains true-“ Only a miraculous interruption of the natural laws can form the living organism out of lifeless matter." Sleep is like death, and waking from sleep is newness of life; sleeping and awaking are a figurative dying and living in the same day-not the less marvellous but so common. "I am not so bold as to deny that a human body, keeping the circulation of the blood and other properties which are esteemed the marks of life, may nevertheless receive another nature wholly different from its former one. For no reason compels me to hold that the body dies not unless it become a corpse; nay, experience would seem to suggest the contrary" (Spinoza, by Frederick Pollock, p. 262).

"Miracles precede and follow all our steps;
To them we are so gradually, unconsciously
Inured, that they appear to us quite natural,
And unaccustomed only seems miraculous."

Slightly altered from RÜCKERT.

There are times when men breathe not, and the pulse is still; when coldness of the flesh, and absence of all vital functions, seem to prove that life is departed; the physician says, "Dead," but the man is alive. Resurrections are not uncommon: men of common sense, of

uncommon sense too, regard them as hinting of that great revival when the dead, returned to inorganic matter, shall come back living organisms of a wonderful spiritual nature; for the most exalted consciousness and the most elevated phenomena are effects of a complication which has come out of the simplest elements.

As to knowing of God by His works, we can and do know. The earliest use of this argument, if we except the Old Testament, is found in Xenophon (“Mem.,” i. 4, 5). We know Him, bringing the visible from the invisible— by Creation; by fashioning all things-as were He an Architect; by the painting of natural pictures—as were He an Artist; by making of organisms-as were He a wonderful Mechanic; by quickening into life-Himself being the Source of it. Chaucer said very well"Nature is the Vicar of Almighty God." Every theist probably allows this; yet every operation, whether wrought indirectly by means, or directly without means, is miraculous. Further-we know God as so fashioning our frame that we are consciously His children. What a marvel is the action of spirit on matter! What a wonder the law of conscience, it excels all the laws of nature! We think that as parents communicate to offspring their own nature, disposition, faculties, and character; so our sense of Divine life, love for, and desire to please Divinity, are a wonderful heredity. Nor is that all-Jean Reynaud says, “I have no doubt whatever that if there existed but one opening, through which we could behold the mysterious edifice of the universe, the people of the most distant countries would concentrate themselves on that privileged spot . . . what affects me most is not the splendour of powerful masses,

nor the prodigious distances that separate sun from sun, nor their accumulation, nor the duration of their revolutions, nor the marvellous pale nebulous clusters suspended in the heights-every particle a world: no! It is the presence of countless myriads of souls in those glorious dwellings . . . The scintillations of the stars seem to me an image of the looks which cross each other in the realms of space Thanks for the revelations of night." Ay, and thanks for the revelations of day: we do know of God. Countless beings through the same space, the same æther, precipitate themselves across the varied tumults of life towards the same end. What experiences! What alternations of good and ill! What passions! What varieties of fate! In all the immobility what wonderful change! In every destiny what a decree! Is it not the Almighty decreeing judgment? and are not His judgments actually in operation? and do not we, knowing but the elements of true science, call it-" Survival of the fittest?"

Some materialists answer, "Cause must be proportioned to the effect; and if we exactly and precisely proportion it, we shall never find in it any qualities which point further, or afford an inference concerning any other design and performance." This is a pretentious and erroneous saying: for we know neither the whole of any cause, nor the whole of any effect. Take it thus, and the error is seen at once-a hundred-ton steam-hammer cracks a nut, if we exactly and precisely apportion the cause to the effect we shall never find any qualities in the steam-hammer which point further, or afford an inference concerning any other design or performance. Dr. Johnson said of some one-" He was, no doubt, dull

naturally; but he must have taken a great deal of pains to become as dull as he is now." Not less dull are those who would "crib and cabin" the Almighty within their own little mechanical problems. We find antecedents and consequents in nature which go beyond nature, we acquire in this life approximate notions of the life to come, and ascend from created things to their Creator. Our ideas of nature are not necessarily and solely those of mechanical effect; they partake of that enlargement which life, intelligence, and moral responsibility bestow. The small eye of our body discerns the infinitude of space, and the eye of our understanding looks upon many glorious mental worlds. The present life may well be likened to a window whence we look into the future; and we are sure that future-physically, mentally, morally—will be the sum total of all that is good in the past, with other things added. We learn from nature itself, that the course of things is frequently altered; that no two things, nor any one thing in any two moments of time, can be precisely alike; so close, in the extremes so widely distant— 'usque adeo quod tangit idem est, tamen ultima distant;' "nature never repeats herself, like a recurring decimal; yet the modern doctrine concerning continuance of energy warrants our conviction that the unknown is connected with the known, and somewhat like-with other things added. We learn not only from the earthquake and the fire, but from the still small voice. The quiet passages of unobtrusive majesty, the deep, the calm, the perpetual, the sought ere it is seen, and the loved ere it is understood, teach us most. Things which angels work out for us daily, and vary eternally; things

never wanted, never repeated, every one found but once, yet all to be found always. In and through these, we chiefly learn the lessons of trust, of devotion, of heavenly beauty. We do not frame a religious hypothesis to account for them, do not look wholly backward while we argue forward. We use our knowledge to attain, and do attain, certainty that the whole course of nature is a passage to something further: a continuous development into other and higher forms of being, the continuity not being a drear and dead uniformity, but ever and ever intersected by marvellous change. Mrs. Gatty says, in her "Parables from Nature," "After this others went upwards in succession; for the time came to all when the lustrous eyes of the perfect creature shone through the masked face of the grub, and he must needs pass forward towards the fulfilment of his destiny." This, in essence, is miraculous.

The argument is capable of further physical verifica

tion :

We knew long ago that in a vacuum a column of water would ascend to the height of thirty-two feet— not higher. The universe, though it changes every moment in every part, is so wonderfully ordered that, for general mechanical purposes, atmospheric pressure may be regarded as always the same. Torricelli thought about this; took a glass tube, a yard in length, closed at one end, open at the other, and filled it with mercury; then, stopping the open end with his thumb, inverted it in a vessel filled with the liquid metal. He had the joy to find his thought realized in a fact never before revealed to human eyes. Every village pump is a proof of Torricelli's genius; and is proof that chance is ruled