SYNTHESIS OF THE NATURAL AND THE SUPERNATURAL 



will be trausfornied, and, when we hear it spoken, it will 

 suggest to us a Power which is as native to nature as 

 reason is to man. It will suggest to us the Power whose 

 activity is the creative energy of nature's process, and 

 whose laws are identical with the laws of nature. The 

 word, so regenerated, will quicken within us the root of 

 reason, which has given it a central and potent place in the 

 mind, life, and speech of mankind. Every word, which 

 has had a long life, has roots struck down deep into the soil 

 of reality, however rotten many of its branches may have 

 been. Alchemy pointed to chemistry. Astrology held on 

 its way till it cast off its garments of darkness and put on 

 its trailing robes of harmony and light. And in the same 

 manner science and philosophy are gradually unfolding to us 

 the truth that, in human existence, there is no supernatural 

 without the natural, and no natural without the super- 

 natural. Carlyle saw this when he flashed from his forge 

 the glowing chapter, in Sartor Resartus, on Natural Super- 

 naturalism. 



Science has done much during the last three hundred 

 years to bring a sane look into the eyes of the super- 

 naturalism of the middle ages. Up till the 15th century, 

 Lecky tells us, " a miraculous narrative was universally 

 accepted as perfectly credible, probable and ordinary." 

 And witchcraft was in those days as live an issue as 

 tubercular bacilli in Canada to-day. The dread of it was 

 on the learned as well as the common people, the Christian 

 as well as the pagan, the reformed as well as unreformed 

 church. To stamp it out, as I have said, the government 

 and the church united in terrible measures. Now all this 

 supernaturalism, divorced from the knowledge of nature, 

 has passed away, or is passing. It has come about, 

 through movements of thought, to which I shall refer in a 

 moment, that, when the word is used by intelligent men, it 

 no longer stands for tricksy spirits of the air which bewitch 

 the milk in the churn, blight the crops and turn all things 



