We find a spontaneousness in nature by which doing and not doing, permanence and change, rest and motion, birth—life—death in usual, unusual, conflicting manners, are wrought; and these are so far analogous to miracles that, but for experience, we should declare their occurrence impossible; and are so far capable of explanation that we confidently say, "The raising of our present human powers; a greater knowledge, use, and application of nature's forces in their co-ordinations, affinities, and repulsions; would effectuate marvels partly similar to some of the miracles recorded in Holy Scripture." The automatism and spontaneity do not reveal the miraculous process; they are no better than blanks to the common mind, but to the prudent-hieroglyphical of wisest secrets. We know that as religion, without mystery and apart from the Supernatural, would be a temple without God

"Excessere omnes, adytis arisque relictis

Di, quibus imperium hoc steterat ;"

VIRGIL, Eneid, ii. 351.

so nature, without marvels, would be work without a masterpiece. We are sure of this from the fact, that in Christ the miraculous appears as His true nature. The divine-human love leads us, by the humanity, to the divine internal source. There are other marvels which in Christ partake of the natural, being worked by the power of God in the holy human nature. For example-His reading of thought; and again—not having sinned, it seems natural—as if demanded by His perfection-that He should not see corruption; so His resurrection, one of the greatest miracles, becomes natural as, at the same time, the object of His own will

while wrought by the power of God; He Himself taking His own life again, even as He Himself had laid it down. The power and spirit of this life are for nourishment of God's people in reverence and genial nobleness; that they grow high, be sacred, have wisdom and insight to know that miracles are everywhere, from "the daisy and the heather-bell up unto men."

"Men, my brothers, men, the workers, ever reaping something new :

That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do." TENNYSON.

THOUGHT XIX.

DWARFED MEN.

“O man, born of woman! is there a heart that thinks without pity of thee? Why live long months and years in slow wasting ignominy? Why should the bloom on thy fair face be wasted, the brightness of thine eyes be quenched, and then be stony-pale as one living in death? Has not God called thee to have faith in Him, as His child, and promised that thy foot shall light on happy land, and thy eye brighten in ever-living splendour?" From Note-Book.

CHRISTIANITY is the only religion which possesses internal and external evidence, convincing European intelligence, of having come from God-of being a Supernatural Religion. It is not a system of moral precepts, but a remarkable series of facts, and the only religion in the world which was originated and continued by miracles. Christians rationally accept miracles as that divine evidence and guarantee which render unbelief utterly inexcusable, even as our Lord stated, in reproof of His opponents, "If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin" (John xv. 24). Butler ("Analogy," Part II. ch. vii.) says, "These miracles are a satisfactory account of those events; of which no other satisfactory account

Q

can be given, nor any account at all, but what is imaginary merely and invented."

When a human being gives up the hopes, marvellous powers, and priceless privilege of immortality; asserts that he is conscious of nothing more than matter and material mechanism in the world; and numbering himself with the lower animals, "Epicuri de grege porcum," says, "We die and are no more seen;" that human being loses the sense of presiding goodness, and the pure trust which brings both peace and joy. His whole life is twisted and overshadowed. He becomes, little by little, dwarfed and blind.

Blind, not discerning the various shades and grades of existence. Blind, not from physical weakness-as those colour-blind persons who discern but few of the beams that light up and glorify the earth, but blind mentally, through neglect of spiritual insight—“ Η δ ̓ ἕξις τῷ ὄμματι τούτῳ γίνεται τῆς ψυχῆς, οὐκ ἄνευ ἀρετῆς διαστρέφει

γὰρ ἡ μοχθηρία καὶ διαψεύδεσθαι ποιξι περὶ τὰς πρακτικὰς apxác" (Aristotle, "Ethics," vi. 12). That neglect renders him incapable of the far-sighted discernment, that it would be impossible for human beings to create the ideas of God and of Immortality were there not in nature, and in man, signs and tokens of Divinity and Eternity. In the very notion of a self-conscious being is already involved a virtual or potential infinitude.

The man is dwarfed, moreover, with the worst kind of diminishment: intellectual and moral vulgarity cleaves to him "like an hereditary odour:" he is without or deprives himself of-that God-consciousness, those feelings of awe, those aspirations after holiness, and those yearnings for higher, truer life, which are the

grand attributes of all truly great men. He hinders his own life, and other men's lives from having nobleness in them.

We pursue the thought with a sort of semi-seriousness, reason according to the principles of natural selection, and conduct these intellectual dwarfs, who gladly have it so, to their original irrationality. Little by little, through survival of the fittest, they had acquired, by growth of intelligence, consciousness of God and of future life; but now, not advancing in that consciousness, they lose the intelligence with which it had been acquired. Failures-they see holy things with souls unstirred and unbelieving.

The process of deterioration, which eliminates them from the noble, may thus be traced:-A mind, for any length of time self-limited to the brute sensual range, becomes unable to rise above brute nature:

"Dem Wurme gleich ich, der den Staub durchwühlt;"

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GOETHE, Faust, i.

'Affigit humo divinæ particulam auræ ;"

HORACE, 2 Sat., ii. 79.

cannot find the path of ascent to that high thought by which Philosophy enters Theology. If there are any human creatures, not thus self-degraded, but really, as they assert, of mere animal birth, these must be regarded as not yet human beings in fulness; not yet possessed with consciousness of God; but lineal and unmixed descendants from the hypothetical brute ancestors of Adam. Otherwise, they manifest a marvellous atavism; are a most interesting and striking example how loss of consciousness, as to God and future life, causes