UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
The miracles of our theology do violence to our 
understanding, but it is a part of our faith to accept 
them. The miracle of the loaves and the fishes, and of 
the turning of water into wine, have their parallels in 
chemical reactions, as in the conversion of starch into 
sugar, or of sugar into an acid; the mystery is that 
of chemical transformations, and occurs in the every- 
day processes of nature, while the biblical miracles 
are exceptional occurrences, and are never repeated. 
The miracles of religion are to be discredited, not 
because we cannot conceive of them, but because 
they run counter to all the rest of our knowledge; 
while the mysteries of science, such as chemical 
affinity, the conservation of energy, the indivisibil- 
ity of the atom, the change of the non-living into 
the living, and the like, extend the boundaries of 
our knowledge, though the modus operandi of these 
changes remains idden. 
We do not know how the food we eat is trans- 
formed into the thoughts we think; in other words, 
the connection of the physical with the mental 
baffles us; but our familiarity with the phenomena 
causes us to look upon them as a matter of course. In 
fact, while most of the mysteries and marvels of the 
prescientific ages only served to measure the depth 
of the mental darkness of those ages, the mysteries 
and the marvels of modern science serve to measure 
the depths to which we have penetrated into the 
hidden processes of natural law. 
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