232 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



Exactly so with God in the natural and supernatural, or what is the same thing, the 

 habitual and the exceptional. 



Generally, of course, he pursues one way, as we see would be best for his 

 creatures, but sometimes his infinite wisdom inclines him to take another method 

 and work what the scriptures call " signs and wonders." He works these mira- 

 cles only when there is good reason for them, and when there is reason for them, 

 none can prevent him. 



But now we come to 



A PSYCHOLOGICAL WONDER. 



Certain men of materialistic pursuits, chiefly, tell us that they have taken a deep 

 look into what they are pleased to call "Nature," and they do not see reason to 

 believe that God can, in any way, interrupt the system which he has started. 

 They have looked even with a microscope, and do not find a miracle possible. 

 Some find no evidence of the existence of any God or possible interrupter of the 

 universal system of law. Thomas Henry Huxley, for example, though he himself 

 interrupts the law of gravitation every time he moves hand or foot, utterly rejects 

 the statement that God did on one occasion cause an iron ax to swim upon the 

 surface of a river. 



Huxley could lift an ax above his head, but when he is told that Almighty 

 God sustained an ax upon the surface of water, he says "impossible." In his 

 New York addresses, he tells us that "the conception of the constancy of the 

 order of Nature has become the dominant idea of modern thought." He begins 

 the word nature with a capital " N." He remarks further, " To any person who 

 is familiar with the facts, and competent to estimate their significance, it has 

 ceased to be conceivable that events should depend upon any but the natural 

 sequence of cause and effect." " The present is the child of the past and the 

 parent of the future." "We ignore even as a possibility the notion of any inter- 

 ference with the order of Nature." 



In a similar way Prof. Tyndall has come to regard Elijah on his knees pray- 

 ing for drought and rain, as only a "noble savage" ignorant of the principle of 

 conservation of forces which he thinks destroys the possibility of a miracle. He 

 has written to defend the sense-bound English clergymen who refused to take 

 part in services of fasting and prayer on account of the calamity of a bad har- 

 vest. He concludes if free prayer can "produce changes in external Nature 

 (capital N), it necessarily follows that natural laws are more or less at the mercy 

 of man's volition, and no conclusion founded on the assumed permanence of 

 those laws would be worthy of confidence. These are the insuperable difficulties 

 presented to us. (i.) The principle of correlation of forces shuts out the possi- 

 bility of supernatural interference. (2.) If God should work a miracle, the whole 

 industrial and scientific world would forthwith be confused, and no scientific con- 

 clusion would be worthy of confidence. 



Where now shall we seek for a bra?ia sufficiently strong to refute these tre- 

 mendous arguments ? Who can liberate the Almighty from these adamantine 

 chains of impossibility ? 



