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be applied, — matter, and not allowing it to be really and properly applied 
to that from which the term itself is borrowed ,— mmd and moral agency. 
Butler says a miracle is something different from a settled course of 
nature ; he does not say it is something contrary to it, nor that it does 
not range under “higher laws” in the scheme of Divine Government 
God cannot, it seems to me, act “ contrary ” to Himself, nor violate His 
own ways or acts ; but, in saying this, I do not mean to confine Him 
material sequence. In using the terms an “Eternal now, and saying that 
with God there can be neither past nor future, I did but use the langua 
of the great Augustine, Toplady, and philosophical writers of the present 
century God’s own definition of Himself, “I am,” is very near to an 
“ Eternal note ;” and as our notions of past and future are got from our 
connection with matter, I can conceive of the disembodied Spirit bemg 
unconscious of the lapse of time altogether. With it “a thousand years 
may be as one day ;” and when we read in Holy Scripture, which l w, 
and which was , and which is to come, the Almighty ”-I would say that 
God here speaks, as St. Paul elsewhere affirms, “after the manner of 
men.” It only remains for me to thank the members of the Institute 
for the kind way in which they listened to my paper. 
