n the fall of
a cataract the savage saw the leap of a spirit, and the echoed
thunder-peal was to him the hammer-clang of an exasperated god.
Propitiation of these terrible powers was the consequence, and
sacrifice was offered to the demons of earth and air.

But observation tends to chasten the emotions and to check those
structural efforts of the intellect which have emotion for their base.
One by one natural phenomena came to be associated with their
proximate causes; the idea of direct personal volition mixing itself
with the economy of nature retreating more and more. Many of us fear
this change. Our religious feelings are dear to us, and we look with
suspicion and dislike on any philosophy, the apparent tendency of
which is to dry them up. Probably every change from ancient savagery
to our present enlightenment has excited, in a greater or less degree,
fears of this kind. But the fact is, that we have not yet determined
whether its present form is necessary to the life and warmth of
religious feeling. We may err in linking the imperishable with the
transitory, and confound the living plant with the decaying pole to
which it clings. My object, however, at present is not to argue, but
to mark a tendency. We have ceased to propitiate the powers of
nature--ceased even to pray for things in manifest contradiction to
natural laws. In Protestant countries, at least, I think it is
conceded that the age of miracles is past.

At an auberge near the foot of the Rhone glacier, I met, in the summer
of 1858, an athletic young priest, who, after a solid breakfast,
including a bottle of wine, informed me that he had come up to 'bless
the mountains.' This was the annual custom of the place. Year by year
the Highest was entreated, by official intercessors, to make such
meteorological arrangements as should ensure food and shelter for the
flocks and herds of the Valaisians. A diversion of the Rhone, or a
deepening of the river's bed, would, at the time I now mention, have
been of incalculable benefit to the inhabitants of the valley. But
the priest would have shrunk from the idea of asking the Omnipotent to
open a new channel for the river, or to cause a portion of it to flow
over the Grimsel pass, and down the valley of Oberhasli to Brientz.
This he would have deemed a miracle, and he did not come to ask the
Creator to perform miracles, but to do something which he manifestly
thought lay quite within the bounds of the n