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rnent is at an end when supposititious miracle is introduced.” 
If we are to concede the right of the upholders of a universal 
deluge to fall back upon miraculous interpositions whenever 
they are hard pressed, of which interpositions we have no 
evidence whatever — if we are to concede this, it is vain to 
suppose that science and the Bible can ever be harmonized, 
or the intelligence of the age brought over to the side of 
divine truth. By a supposititious miracle you can stow into 
the Ark representatives of every species of beast, bird, and 
reptile. By a supposititious miracle you can transport them 
from the poles, the tropics, the temperate zones, the countless 
islands of the sea, to the spot where the Ark was built.. By a 
supposititious miracle you can float them across wide and tem- 
pestuous seas, and can reduce to plains, mountains like the 
Himalayahs, the Andes, and the Alps. By a supposititious 
miracle you can support them during the Flood with little, 
indeed, without any food, and can preserve fishes and plants, 
though conditions existed which in ordinary circumstances 
would have destroyed them. By a supposititious miracle, in a 
word, you can bring a universal deluge upon the world, and 
dissipate into nothingness, as with the fabled touch of a 
magician's wand, all the perplexing questions which might 
be pressed upon you. But I question whether you would 
thus render honour to the word and the power of God, or 
satisfy those thinking minds whose craving is after truth — 
truth which does violence neither to the revelation in Nature, 
nor to the revelation in the Bible — truth which recognises 
reason as well as faith. I have a strong conviction that this 
tendency among many religious people to fall back upon sup- 
posititious miracle, when objections to a universal deluge are 
advanced, is as unwise as it is unwarranted by the narrative in 
Genesis. Depend upon it, the age in which we live is not one 
to be satisfied with a solution of difficulties, which assumes 
miraculous interpositions whenever a Gordian knot presents 
itself. 
I yield to no man in my reverence for Holy Scripture, all 
of which we believe to have been given by inspiration of 
God.” The absolute power of God over every domain of 
Nature we cannot doubt ; and the miraculous forthputting of 
that power in the past we could deny only by recklessly setting 
sail on the tempestuous sea of an all but universal scepticism. 
We can conceive no limits to the power of Deity except those 
which indicate the boundary-line between right and wrong. 
But while subscribing thus heartily to a belief in the super- 
natural, and to the continual government of the world by God 
through those so-called laws of nature which are simply his 
