REFLECTIONS ON PRATER AND NATURAL LAW. 343 
was the consequence, and sacrifice was offered to the 
demons of earth and air. 
But observation tends to chasten the emotions and to 
check those structural efforts of the intellect which have 
emotion for their base. One by one natural phenomena 
came to be associated with their proximate causes; the 
idea of direct personal volition mixing itself with the 
economy of nature retreating more and more. Many of us 
fear this change. Our religious feelings are dear to us, 
and we look with suspicion and dislike on any philosophy, 
the apparent tendency of which is to dry them up. Prob- 
ably every change from ancient savagery to our present 
enlightenment has excited, in a greater or less degree, fears 
of this kind. But the fact is, that we have not yet deter- 
mined whether its present form is necessarv to the life and 
warmth of religious feeling. We may err in linking the 
imperishable with the transitory, and confound the living 
plant with the decaying pole to which it clings. My 
object, however, at present is not to argue, but to mark a 
tendency. We have ceased to propitiate the powers of 
nature ceased even to pray for things in manifest contra- 
diction to natural laws. In Protestant countries, at least, 
I think it is conceded that the age of miracles is past. 
At an auberge near the foot of the Rhone glacier, I met, 
in the summer of 1858, an athletic young priest, who, 
after a solid breakfast, including a bottle of wine, informed 
rne that he had come up to " bless the mountains." This 
was the annual custom of the place. Year by year the 
Highest was entreated, by official intercessors, to make 
such meteorological arrangements as should ensure food 
and shelter for the flocks and herds of the Valaisians. A 
diversion of the Rhone, or a deepening of the river's bed, 
would, at the time I now mention, have been of incalcu- 
lable benefit to the inhabitants of the valley. But the 
priest would have shrunk from the idea of asking the 
Omnipotent to open a new channel for the river, or to 
cause a portion of it to flow over the Grirnsel pass, and 
down the valley of Oberhasli to Brientz. This he would 
have deemed a miracle, and he did not come to ask the 
Creator to perform miracles, but to do something which he 
manifestly thought lay quite within the bounds of the 
natural and nou-miruculous. A Protestant gentleman who 
was present at the time smiled at this recital. He had no 
