THE PRESIDENT S ADDRESS. 9 



canons of interpretation and critical analysis, applicable alike to sacred 

 and secular composition. The most utterly unsatisfactory part of the 

 book, and possibly that part to which scientific men will feel least 

 indulgent, is the laboured article against miracles, where the writer 

 speaks of all cultivated minds recognizing " the impossibility of any 

 modification whatsoever in the existing conditions of material agents, 

 unless through the invariable operation of a series of eternally im- 

 pressed cousequences, following in some necessary chain of orderly 

 connections, however imperfectly known to us ; " and again, " The 

 simple but grand truth of the law of Conservation and the stability 

 of the heavenly motions, now well understood by all sound cosmical 

 philosophers, is but the type of the universal, self-sustaining, and self- 

 evolving powers which pervade all nature." 



This is the key note of much to the same effect, and to my unspe- 

 culative mind the whole seems coloured by an inveterately hasty 

 adoption of conclusions as being indisputable and universal, whilst 

 still resting on very loosely established premises. The assumed 

 " immutability of the laws of nature," is the ground work, and an 

 exaggerated exultation of such "laws," and a practical depreciation of 

 the power and will of the Lawgiver, the result. The writer last quo- 

 ted has already passed from shadows to realities, and sees now may- 

 hap with clearer vision, having long, like ourselves, " seen as through 

 a glass darkly." 



Most of my hearers have read the very nobly expressed article on 

 the ^^Immutability of Nature,^' in a late periodical. The phrase 

 itself is denounced as " not only involving a violation of the first 

 laws of accurate inductive reasoning, but charged with most perilous 

 conclusions to Christion Faith unless it be carefully modified." Again, 

 " Incautious language is the dry-rot of the world. The historians and 

 philosophers of physical science remind us in every page, of the power 

 of words, mere words— warn us, how they necessarily contain the 

 sporules of mighty principles, how they give to those principles wings 

 to fly, and filaments to root them in the earth, and a power of pro- 

 pagation able to cover the whole field of truth with the most noxious 

 weeds, so that when once their hold is taken it is almost hopeless to 

 eradicate them," and very appositely is the great name of Newton 

 made to repeat how God acts in what is called Nature. '' Secundum 

 leges acciiratas ut natures totius fuiulamentum et causa, consianter 

 couperans, nisi ubi aliter agere bonum est,' according to uniform laws 

 except when it be good for Him to act otherwise. 



