UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 



The miracles of our theology do violence to our 

 understanding, but it is a part of our faith to accept 

 them. The miracle of the loaves and the fishes, and of 

 the turning of water into wine, have their parallels in 

 chemical reactions, as in the conversion of starch into 

 sugar, or of sugar into an acid; the mystery is that 

 of chemical transformations, and occurs in the every- 

 day processes of nature, while the biblical miracles 

 are exceptional occurrences, and are never repeated. 



The miracles of religion are to be discredited, not 

 because we cannot conceive of them, but because 

 they run counter to all the rest of our knowledge; 

 while the mysteries of science, such as chemical 

 affinity, the conservation of energy, the indivisibil- 

 ity of the atom, the change of the non-living into 

 the living, and the like, extend the boundaries of 

 our knowledge, though the modus operandi of these 

 changes remains hidden. 



We do not know how the food we eat is trans- 

 formed into the thoughts we think; in other words, 

 the connection of the physical with the mental 

 baffles us; but our familiarity with the phenomena 

 causes us to look upon them as a matter of course. In 

 fact, while most of the mysteries and marvels of the 

 prescientific ages only served to measure the depth 

 of the mental darkness of those ages, the mysteries 

 and the marvels of modern science serve to measure 

 the depths to which we have penetrated into the 

 hidden processes of natural law. 



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