NATURAL LAW AND MIRACLE. 



47 



Nature which is therein involved, in order to possess a canon 

 which will precisely and fully reconcile that which is charac- 

 teristic of one group of natural phenomena with all else that 

 we at present perceive in regard to it. 



A " Natural Law " wdiich has held good for a millennium 

 may need to be altered or modified to-morrow, through one 

 successful experiment or one single discovery. 



For the better appreciation of this, think of the revolution 

 wrought by Copernicus in the history of astronomy. Till his 

 time, the theory that the sun revolved around the earth held 

 good as a fixed " Natural Law.'"' But if anyone were to support 

 this " Natural Law " to-day every third class scholar would 

 assign him his place as scientifically obsolete. 



But not only the purport and argument of the Laws of Nature, 

 but also the view of the possible or impossible is probably 

 subject to the changes of time and the changes of the material 

 cosmos. Let us look only at the following facts. 



Mediaeval theology rejected the thought of the possibility of 

 an antipodes with righteous anger as impossible nonsense : yet 

 this truth now presents no difficulty to the credence of the 

 most illiterate Capuchin friar. 



In a legal manual of the eighteenth century an incidental 

 sentence declares that contracts wherein the undertaking of 

 one party includes an impossibility are invalid : and it cites as 

 an illustration : " as if for instance we should undertake to 

 perform a flight in the air." In a subsequent edition of the* 

 book the writer adds the foot-note, " This instance is no longer 

 suitable, for in the meantime M. Montgolfier has invented the 

 balloon." 



And if the apostle Paul in one of his admittedly genuine 

 epistles had related that Jesus had rendered Himself visible to 

 His disciples through a closed wooden door, the whole natural 

 and popular philosophy of the nineteenth century up to the 

 date of the discovery of X-rays by Professor Eontgen would 

 have declared with one voice that such a " miracle " was 

 ludicrously impossible, since it contradicted " the unalterable 

 Laws of Nature as known to us." 



When the first German railway was about to be built, the 

 medical faculty of Erlangen expressed their official opinion 

 that the prospective passengers would, through the rapid 

 transport, become en masse the victims of incurable brain 

 diseases. 



A traveller told the negroes in Central Africa that the water 

 in Europe became, at certain times of the year, so hard and 



