McCOSH IN REPLY TO CARPENTER. 29 



the whole makes every part cohere. He who assails Christianity has 

 to attack a phalanx. The pure morality fits in to the character of 

 God, revealed as a spirit, revealed as light, revealed as love. The 

 miracles, being almost all of them meant to remove evil, most of them 

 to heal diseases, adapt themselves to the manifest disorder in the 

 world, to our consciousness of sin, and the doctrine which reveals an 

 atonement. The supernatural system is higher than the natural, but 

 it is in accordance with it. The higher joins on beautifully to the 

 lower quite as fittingly as vegetable life superinduces itself on inani- 

 mate Nature, as animal life completes vegetable life, as the soul fits 

 into the body. Science and philosophy may not be able to go back 

 to a beginning, but they require a source. It is not more certain that 

 " ex nihilo nihil Jit " than it is that what produces must have power to 

 produce. All these later discussions as to force and cause show that 

 there must be some intimate connection between the effect and its 

 cause. Mayer wrought out the grand doctrine of the conservation 

 of force by the principle that " cause equals effect." This is not, 

 as it appears to me, the correct expression of the law, but it points 

 to a deep law lying at the basis of that development which men 

 are studying so eagerly in the present day. All that is in the effect 

 has come from the causes it may be the successive causes. We 

 are thus carried back to an inherent power, not created by develop- 

 ment, but the source or spring of development. This source may 

 surely be declared supernatural. The Bible simply speaks of the con- 

 tinuance of that supernatural in revelation and in inspiration. This 

 supernatural is not inconsistent with the natural; it is the comple- 

 ment of it. The higher world overarches the lower world as the sky 

 does the earth. The world to come consummates what is begun in 

 the present world provides a place for the immortal soul, and for the 

 body raised to join it. 



The conclusion of the whole matter is, that we are to weigh the 

 evidence in behalf of revelation in the same way as we weigh any 

 other evidence, laying aside all " prepossessions " and " expectancies " 

 for and against supernaturalism ; and that the evidence for Christian- 

 ity, so large, so varied, so compact, is not to be summarily set aside 

 by any physiological doctrine sufficient to explain mesmerism and 

 spirit-rappin< 





