Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/47

Rh the whole makes every part cohere. He who assails Christianity has to attack a phalanx. The pure morality fits in to the character of God, revealed as a spirit, revealed as light, revealed as love. The miracles, being almost all of them meant to remove evil, most of them to heal diseases, adapt themselves to the manifest disorder in the world, to our consciousness of sin, and the doctrine which reveals an atonement. The supernatural system is higher than the natural, but it is in accordance with it. The higher joins on beautifully to the lower quite as fittingly as vegetable life superinduces itself on inanimate Nature, as animal life completes vegetable life, as the soul fits into the body. Science and philosophy may not be able to go back to a beginning, but they require a source. It is not more certain that "ex nihilo nihil fit" than it is that what produces must have power to produce. All these later discussions as to force and cause show that there must be some intimate connection between the effect and its cause. Mayer wrought out the grand doctrine of the conservation of force by the principle that "cause equals effect." This is not, as it appears to me, the correct expression of the law, but it points to a deep law lying at the basis of that development which men are studying so eagerly in the present day. All that is in the effect has come from the causes—it may be the successive causes. We are thus carried back to an inherent power, not created by development, but the source or spring of development. This source may surely be declared supernatural. The Bible simply speaks of the continuance of that supernatural in revelation and in inspiration. This supernatural is not inconsistent with the natural; it is the complement of it. The higher world overarches the lower world as the sky does the earth. The world to come consummates what is begun in the present world—provides a place for the immortal soul, and for the body raised to join it.

The conclusion of the whole matter is, that we are to weigh the evidence in behalf of revelation in the same way as we weigh any other evidence, laying aside all "prepossessions" and "expectancies" for and against supernaturalism; and that the evidence for Christianity, so large, so varied, so compact, is not to be summarily set aside by any physiological doctrine sufficient to explain mesmerism and spirit-rapping.