Page:Moral Obligation to be Intelligent.djvu/143

 it does not display a tendency to make use—a more subtle use—of those primitive transformations which Homer rejected; whether it does not show a perverse delight in substituting the miraculous for the normal—preferring, that is, to give such an account of the outer and inner world as we know to be false, instead of the account which we know to be true.

I ask your attention, then, to the inconsistency between our faith that the universe is orderly and wonderful, and our pleasure in that literature which represents life as miraculous and magical—between, that is, our conviction that miracles are the measure of wonder, and our disposition to treat them as the products of magic. The difference is great. If we love the poetry of life, there is a sense in which we cannot get along without miracles; without them as