Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/150

134 XIII

——,

Desiring to approach the subject of miracles, you ask me whether I do not accept the following sentence as a statement of my views concerning nature: "The Universe is perennially renewed and created afresh by an active energy of the Spirit of God, and what we call 'laws of nature' are the mode in which our limited minds are enabled to apprehend the working of Creative Power." If I accept it, you declare you cannot understand why I should stumble at miracles. "It is a matter of every-day experience," you say, "and natural, that the human will should suspend the laws of nature, as for example by arresting the motion of gravitation; and consequently it seems unreasonable for you, or for other believers in a personal God, to be scandalized if He also now and then permits Himself the same liberty."

I accept your statement, so far as concerns the perennial energy of the Spirit of God upon the material and immaterial Universe; but I do not quite agree with the thought, or perhaps I should say with the expression, of the last part of your sentence—"the mode in which our limited minds are enabled to apprehend the working of Creative Power." I should prefer to call the Laws of Nature "a revelation of Himself by God to men, on the recognition of which our very existence depends." The Laws of Nature are indeed nothing but ideas of our own Imagination; but they appear to me, more or less, true