MIRACLES, SCIENCE, AND PRAYER. 275 



on the will of their progenitors ? The fertilisation of the 

 <>vuni, the sex of the offspring, depend npon canses which 

 are entirely beyond the parent's control. And even the 

 conversion of food into living tissue follows the same 

 miraculous law. No one can tell by what process it is that, 

 within the living organism, dead food is converted into living 

 matter. He may point out the moment at which this in- 

 scrutable change takes place. But the forces which effect 

 it are altogether beyond his ken. 



We have so far argued that the physical world is very 

 largely under the dominion of forces which are of a supei- 

 natural or at least extra-physical nature, and that there is 

 evidence for the fact that a Divine Mind and Will is inces- 

 santly at work, guiding and developing and modifying the 

 physical order, and never leaving it to itself. AVe come next 

 to ask to what order these truths belong. We replay, to 

 an order of which the visible or physical in every shape is 

 subordinate — the moral order. And if we are asked the 

 meaning of that word, we must explain it as an order which 

 concerns itself with the happiness and perfection of rational 

 beings. In such an order, as we have seen, Purpose and 

 Will have a very definite place. To the materiahst all is 

 pure, unintelligent, invariable sequence. But the universe is 

 thus reduced to a mere machine, and life, under such dull 

 mechanical conditions, were not worth living. It is the play 

 of Purpose and Will, the hope of progress, the struggle 

 towards perfection, that are as the mighty suns which ir- 

 radiate the universe of mind. As Newton has said, *''the 

 first cause is certainly not mechanical." And it is equally 

 certain that in an universe called into being at the fiat of God, 

 what is mechanical cannot possibly be the highest part. The 

 physical, the natural, the mechanical, call it by which name 

 you will, is but the handmaid to that higher order Avhere 

 reason, and thonght, and conscience come into play. Man him- 

 self is a standing demonstration of the truth of this principle. 

 He has unquestionably, as Ave have seen, power over nature. 

 And though thispoAveris confined within narrow limits, yet it 

 stamps him as belonging to a higher order than nature itself. 

 If his poAver is limited, it is limited so far as he himself is a jjart 

 of the order of nature. So far as he rules nature, he derives his 

 poAver from some source above and beyond nature. Again, 

 the moral order to Avhich he unquestionably belongs, displays 



* Optics, p 384, 



