Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/43

Rh by any external impulse; which can as little be accounted for by reflex action as they could by gravity or by chemical affinity. Then there are cases in which the action originates within, with no prompting from without. I awake in the morning and I think and conclude that some good cause, the cause of liberty, or of my country, or of religion, requires me to take a bold, decisive action, and I hasten to put my purpose in execution. How absurd to call this, with some physiologists, a reflex action! That able men should have fallen into this error can only be accounted for by a law of "expectancy;" they have explained so much by their law, and they think that they can explain everything.

Dr. Carpenter has unfolded, as Hume had done a century ago, the tendencies which predispose man to believe in preternatural occurrences. But are there no "prepossessions" and "expectations" which incline some scientific men in the present day to account for all things by natural agency, and prejudice them against calling in any thing preternatural? The business of science is to look into the causes of obvious or recondite phenomena, and, proceeding in the right method, they have discovered the natural causes of events which many regarded as supernatural. The men who have explained lightning and mysterious diseases, and resolved light into vibrations, and detected the composition of the sun's atmosphere, and of the distant stars, are led to spurn at the very idea of there being any thing which cannot be accounted for by mundane agency. Then they have seen, or heard, or read, of so many cases of religious pretension and imposture that they at once set down every reported case of divine interposition to illusion or delusion. Some have gone the length of maintaining that a miracle is not only an improbability, but an impossibility. A "prepossession" is produced, an "expectancy" is created, that the miracles of Scripture may be solved by some natural means. In the last age Paulus labored to prove that Jesus accomplished his cures by taking advantage of the secret agencies of Nature. But this theory has long ago been set aside by every one as inconsistent with the training, the position, and known character of Jesus. Then the mythic theory was started and stretched to its utmost capacity by Strauss; but it has been shown that no myths ever had the consistency, the purity, the spirituality of the gospel narratives, parables, and doctrines. Now it is averred that historical proof is wanting of the early date of the books of the New Testament. This objection has been met already by the great scholars of Germany, and is being met by Dr. Lightfoot and others among English-speaking divines. It is shown and is admitted that some of the epistles of Paul must have been written by their reputed author, and that they presuppose a belief throughout the Church of the leading events in Christ's life, and of a perfected system of evangelical belief. If the epistles are genuine, so must be the correlated Book of Acts, with its wonderful