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They represent the position of the Creator, as if He were seated at the head 
of an interminable avenue of pillars, and the utmost that we can do is to 
get an extremely distant view of Him. This idea may be all very well, if God 
is no thing but a perfect mechanist, who has contrived a machine so marvellous 
that it goes on grinding out its results in so admirable a manner as to dis- 
pense with the necessity of His presence in His works. Such, however, is 
certainly not the God of the Christian Revelation. If there is one thing 
which the Bible affirms more strongly than another, it is the constant 
presence of God in His works. The forces of nature are His forces. “ In 
Him, ’ not simply by His agency, “ we live and move and exist and this 
idea seems to me to permeate Revelation from one end of it to the other ; 
affirming, as it does, His constant presence and energy, not only outside, but 
also in everything that exists. I also fully concur with the remark made in 
the following paragraph, that the views in question are inconsistent with 
regarding miracles as acts determined by personal will. The authors in 
question, if I remember rightly, have at any rate partially adopted Mr. 
Babbage’s theory of miracles. This, as you will remember, consists in apply- 
ing to the laws and order of the universe, the principles of his calculating 
mill. Its Auctor in fact has constructed the universe so as to grind out 
miracles, whenever occasion arises for them, in the same manner as Mr. 
Babbage’s machine will grind out a new series of numbers differing from 
those which it habitually grinds, and then quietly return again to the first 
series. This idea of Mr. Babbage is a most ingenious one, and precisely such 
as one might have expected would commend itself to his mechanical mind. 
Viewed in this aspect, the universe may be designated a miracle-working 
machine, which is capable of producing events which will answer the 
purposes of miracles, without any interference whatever with the action of 
its ordinary forces. The author of Sxepernatural Religion objects to this 
miracle-working machine, as an evasion of the real point at issue, and, I 
think, justly ; for the plain fact is, that whatever things of an apparently 
miraculous character such a machine might be able to produce, it would be 
utterly unable to give out the most important miracles of the New Testa- 
ment, as, for example, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. With abstract 
theories about miracles generally, we have little concern ; but the very 
existence of Christianity is involved in the objective reality of some of the 
facts which are affirmed in the New Testament. These, no cunningly-de- 
vised operations of Mr. Babbage’s^miracle- working machine could possibly 
have effectuated ; and therefore, however wonderful a piece of mechanism 
such a machine may be, it is useless to us, for it is plain that the great super- 
natural events recorded in the New Testament require the intervention of 
personal will, which no piece of mechanism, however ingenious, can possess. 
I now turn to Professor Challis’s theory of miracles, embodying the 
assertion that the conception of a miracle involves an exertion of creative 
power, by which I understand him to mean, that the conception of a miracle 
