SUPEENATUEAL IN" NATURR. 149 



which creation is chanting to its anthor. Now, just as a ready compensation has been 

 provided to restore the wonted equipoise of the planetary system, momentarily disturbed by 

 a vagrant comet, so a remedy, which in itself is amply sufficient, has been prepared to coun- 

 teract the disturbances induced in the moral order by a perverse use of human free will. 

 That remedy is the law of extraordinary intervention of the divine power, to remind men 

 that the Creator lives and rules. And as men in all epochs have been marring the harmony 

 of creation by moral oblicpiity, so tlie Creator in all ages has been manifesting his pro- 

 prietorship by miraculous events. Hence the universal and time-enduring belief in them. 



Viewed in the calm light of metaphysical science the world is no enigma, and the destiny 

 of man no riddle. In ordered seqi;ence the succession of finite and secondary causes con- 

 tinued during the silent eons of preparation of the globe. The merely physical was then the 

 only order ; all the facts and phenomena of that period were the regular products of physical 

 laws. When the stage of development had been reached that was adapted to the require- 

 ments of the human organism, man appeared on the earth, by the intervention of the divine 

 power. Intellectual and moral laws then took their allotted place in the plan of creation — 

 not as an excrescence, or as a piece of patchwork on the web, but as weft, that gave colour, 

 and design, and a reason for its existence. Irrational creation is guided to its end bv firm 

 fixed laws that impel it onward with inexorable relentlessness ; but man, the high priest of 

 the universe, should use it as a censer to waft heavenward the frankincense of his own and 

 the world's tribute to the Creator. Taking man as he is, the preservation of this great moral 

 order, the attainment of this end, can in no conceivable way be so effectively assured as by 

 the law of the extraordinary intervention of the divine power in the order of created things, 

 whence miracles result. 



