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extend beyond tbe natural to the sphere of the supernatural, 
if miracles are to be included. And why not take in Revelation 
and Christianity — whole and entire ? I will quote a passage 
here in reference to miraculous agency from Principal 
Tulloch: — 
“ The stoutest advocate for interference can mean nothing more than that 
the supreme Will has so moved the hidden springs of nature that a new issue 
arises on given circumstances. The ordinary issue is supplanted by the higher 
issue. The essential facts before us are a certain set of phenomena, and a 
higher Will moving them. How moving them ? is a question for human 
definition ; but the answer to which does not and cannot affect the Divine 
meaning of the change. Yet when we reflect that this higher Will is everywhere 
reason and wisdom, it seems a juster, as well as a more comprehensive 
view, to regard it as operating by subordination and evolution, rather than 
‘ interference ’ and ‘ violation.’ According to this view, the idea of law, so far 
from being contravened by the Christian miracles, is taken up and made their 
very basis.”* 
The Christian miracles are but a species of the supernatural, 
like player, regeneration, conversion, and the fundamental 
doctrine of atonement. And I venture to think that the inter- 
actions and relations of ethical philosophy extend to all these 
forms or phases of the supernatural. In the great central 
fact of atonement, we see the highest form of that friendly 
help and mediation, which, by nature, Cod has taught us to 
render to each other. In the spiritual regeneration of the 
soul, we see that new birth into the Church of God in which 
the child is as helplessly passive as when nature gave it to the 
world. In the spiritual conversion of the sinner to God, we 
see a return bearing a strict analogy to that of the reckless 
son who came first to himself and then to his father. In that 
great principle of action, faith, we see an extension to what 
is spiritual, of that confidence, which, by nature, man was 
formed to repose in his fellow-man. In fact, the whole system 
of Christian edification is governed by those same general laws 
of assimilation, according to which we become like those we 
love, and with whom we associate. The same great principles 
of social and personal morality which interpenetrate the 
natural, extend also to the system of the supernatural. In 
short, the relations and interactions of ethical philosophy may 
be said to be universal, showing us that all truth originates 
in God, and that ethics, physics, metaphysics, and theologjq 
natural and revealed, have one common source. Nay, 
* Beginning of Life, &c., pp. 85, 8b*. 
