THE SCRIPTURAL IDEA OF MIRACLES. 



81 



But we have also Statute Law which supersedes commou law 

 whenever the interests of the State require it. 



Such a supreme law we find set forth in the Scriptures, and 

 miracles are always linked in with some declaration of the divine 

 will, or the}^ take place as answers to prayer, according to the 

 gracious laws which regulate the intei'course of the heavenh' Father 

 with His children. 



In neither case is there any violation of law, but a fulfilment. 



Mr. M. L. Rouse. — Science constantly brings us to a borderland 

 where wholly secret forces are in operation. As I heard Lord 

 Rayleigh say in an address to the British Association, after he had 

 alluded to the " life-long beliefs of Xewton, Faraday and Maxwell." 

 " In his heart the man of science knows that underneath the theories 

 that he consti ucts there lie contradictions which he cannot reconcile. 

 The higher mysteries of being, if penetrable at all by human 

 intellect, require other weapons than those of calculation and 

 experiment." 



Chemical affinities are still a mystery ; and so is the impalpable, 

 imponderable ether, which transmits the electric current and light 

 when air is altogether absent. But what of life, with its marvels of 

 nutrition, growth and reproduction — the nutrient fluids, as the late 

 Professor Beale delighted to tell us constantly working against gravity; 

 the creature (as he showed us in the case of a caterpillar) developing 

 day by day out of a drop of liquid in which no microscope can 

 detect any structure at all ; and every normal plant and animal 

 having stored up within itself and one within the other a creature 

 of like form to its parents for a thousand generations 1 Paley 

 likened a living creature to a watch, and appealed to the sceptic to 

 acknowledge that it equally required a purposeful maker ; but what 

 should we say of a watch that had stored within itself, barrel within 

 barrel, a thousand machines ready to take its place one after another 1 



If the original gospel that our modern rationalists speak of really 

 existed in the first century and the four gospels were introduced in 

 its place, as they make out, at the beginning of the second century 

 (when, as we gather from Tacitus and Pliny, there were about a 

 million Christians in the Roman world), do we suppose (knowing 

 upon what far slighter groimds Christian sects have been readily 

 formed) that a sect would not at once have sprung up contending 

 for the use of the original Gospel in its simplicity ^ 



