1 68 MAN'S PRIMITIVE STATE 



includes human nature and all inferior natures, along 

 with the forces and capacities that are resident in them 

 and native to them. The supernatural is superhuman 

 as well as superphysical. Thus defined, the super- 

 natural depends for its reality upon the existence of 

 higher natures, higher forces and higher laws than are 

 discoverable or explainable by physical, animal, and 

 human forms of being, life, and capacity. No doubt 

 the word supernatural has other uses, and such uses 

 are allowable, although they are modern, and ought 

 carefully to be distinguished from this the historical 

 and theological use of the term.^ 



You can perceive that the reality of the supernatural 

 is involved in discussing the cathohc doctrine of man's 

 primitive state, because that doctrine implies the work- 

 ing of factors which transcend the resident forces and 

 capacities that go to make human nature what it is in 

 itself. In asserting the reality and operation of these 

 higher factors we assume that man's nature is not the 

 highest nature, and that its resident capacities are 

 transcended in the divine ordering of human history. 



Men can and do repudiate the doctrine that the 

 supernatural, in the sense I have defined, is required 

 to account for the miracles of sacred history, but not 

 on purely scientific grounds. Physical science is 



1 The author has treated more fully of the supernatural in his 

 Introd. to Dog. Theol., ch. ii, where numerous references are given. 

 Among suggestive treatments of the subject may be mentioned, 

 Chas. Gore, Incarnation, Lee. ii; Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 

 pp. 100-145; Geo. Fisher, Supernatural Origin of Christianity, Ess. 

 xi. 



