358 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



I trust I do not misrepresent tbe Bishop of Manchester in saying 

 that the essence of his remarkable discourse is the insistence upon the 

 "supreme importance of the purely spiritual in our faith," and of the 

 relative, if not absolute, insignificance of aught else. He obviously 

 perceives the bearing of his arguments against the alterability of the 

 course of outward Nature by prayer, on the question of miracles in 

 general ; for he is careful to say that " the possibility of miracles, of a 

 rare and unusual transcendence of tbe world order, is not here in ques- 

 tion " (p. 38). It may be permitted me to suppose, however, that, if 

 miracles were in question, the speaker who warns us *' that we must 

 look for the heart of the absolute religion in that part of it which pre- 

 Bcribcs our moral and religious relations " (p. 46), would not be disposed 

 to advise those who had found the heart of Christianity to take much 

 thought about its miraculous integument. 



My anonymous sermon will have nothing to do with such notions 

 as these, and its preacher is not too polite, to say nothing of charitable, 

 toward those who entertain them. 



Scientific men, therefore, are perfectly right in asserting that Christianity 

 rests on miracles. If miracles never happened, Christianity, in any sense which 

 is not a mockery, which does not make the terra of none effect, has no reality. I 

 dwell on this because there is now an effort making to get up a non-miraculous, 

 invertebrate Christianity, which may escape the ban of science. And I would 

 warn yon very distinctly against this new contrivance. Christianity is essentially 

 miraculous, and falls to the ground if miracles be impossible. 



Well, warning for warning. I venture to warn this preacher and 

 those who, with him, persist in identifying Christianity with the 

 miraculous, that such forms of Christianity are not only doomed to fall 

 to the ground, but that, within the last half-century, they have been 

 driving that way with continually accelerated velocity. 



The so-called religious world is given to a strange delusion. It 

 fondly imagines that it possesses the monopoly of serious and constant 

 reflection upon the terrible problems of existence ; and that those who 

 can not accept its shibboleths are either mere Gallios, caring for none 

 of these things, or libertines desiring to escape from the restraints of 

 morality. It does not appear to have entered the imaginations of these 

 people that outside their pale, and firmly resolved never to enter it, there 

 are thousands of men, certainly not their inferiors in character, capa- 

 city, or knowledge of the questions at issue, who estimate those purely 

 spiritual elements of the Christian faith of which the Bishop of Man- 

 chester speaks as highly as the bishop does, but who will have nothing 

 to do with the Christian churches, because in their apprehension, and 

 for them, the profession of belief in the miraculous, on the evidence 

 offered, would be simply immoral. 



So far as my experience goes, men of science are neither better nor 

 worse than the rest of the world. Occupation with the endlessly great 

 parts of the universe does not necessarily involve greatness of cbarac- 



