THE ATTITUDE OF SCIENCE TOWARDS MIRACLES. 107 
miracles were certain. Was the revelation certain? There 
could be no doubt about the need of man. The character of 
God was that of the Almighty, and was that of the Good— 
the Good after whom Plato had longed, the Good who was, 
from the very moment of the Fall, continually working to 
bring man back to Himself. God’s character being such, and 
the matter of such supreme importance to man, can there be 
any question that an effective revelation, i.e, a revelation 
accompanied by miracle, was actually given ? 
The facts that, in’ the interests of his higher nature, the 
material universe is continually being modified by human will, 
and that man’s spiritual well-being is vastly more important 
than uniformity among natural phenomena, may fairly be held 
to remove any difficulty that may be felt with regard to Divine 
alteration of any of them. There is no violation of law, 
but the introduction of a new force under new circumstances, 
so that in these new circumstances, “the laws of nature ” 
may be in harmony with a higher law. It has been pointed 
out (by Trench)* that the miracles performed by our Lord, 
as credentials of His mission, were the very opposite of 
violations of nature; for they all tended to bring man back 
to Godf and restore that original harmony between man 
and nature which had been violated by sin, eg., when the 
Lord caused the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak, and 
healed the paralytic, He to that extent undid the violation 
caused by sin, and brought the physical state of the sufferer 
into harmony with nature. 
Having revard to God’s known character, it were impossible 
to believe that, when circumstances had arisen in which man’s 
highest interests required a manifestation of God’s will enforced 
by miracles, such miracles did not take place. 
The ordinary uniformities of nature have been arranged by 
infinite Love as best for him in ordinary circumstances ; the 
extraordinary exceptional occurrences called miracles were 
similarly arranged as lest for him in those extraordinary 
circumstances in which they took place. These two classes of 
phenomena are no more opposed to each other than is the huge 
Nasmyth steam hammer to the humble tool which serves to 
illustrate a schoolroom lecture on elementary mechanics. They 
* Notes. 
+ “Atheism . .. deadened the understanding, while it disgusted the 
heart.” Frederick Harrison, in (1902) New Year’s Day address to the 
Positivist Society. 
