atural and non-miraculous.
A Protestant gentleman who was present at the time smiled at this
recital. He had no faith in the priest's blessing; still, he deemed
his prayer different in kind from a request to open a new river-cut,
or to cause the water to flow up-hill.

In a similar manner the same Protestant gentleman would doubtless
smile at the honest Tyrolese priest, who, when he feared the bursting
of a glacier dam, offered the sacrifice of the Mass upon the ice as a
means of averting the calamity. That poor man did not expect to
convert the ice into adamant, or to strengthen its texture, so as to
enable it to withstand the pressure of the water; nor did he expect
that his sacrifice would cause the stream to roll back upon its source
and relieve him, by a miracle, of its presence. But beyond the
boundaries of his knowledge lay a region where rain was generated, he
knew not how. He was not so presumptuous as to expect a miracle, but
he firmly believed that in yonder cloud-land matters could be so
arranged, without trespass on the miraculous, that the stream which
threatened him and his people should be caused to shrink within its
proper bounds.

Both these priests fashioned that which they did not understand to
their respective wants and wishes. In their case imagination came
into play, uncontrolled by a knowledge of law. A similar state of
mind was long prevalent among mechanicians. Many of these, among whom
were to be reckoned men of consummate skill, were occupied a century
ago with the question of perpetual motion. They aimed at constructing
a machine which should execute work without the expenditure of power;
and some of them went mad in the pursuit of this object. The faith in
such a consummation, involving, as it did, immense personal profit to
the inventor, was extremely exciting, and every attempt to destroy
this faith was met by bitter resentment on the part of those who held
it. Gradually, however, as men became more and more acquainted with
the true functions of machinery, the dream dissolved. The hope of
getting work out of mere mechanical combinations disappeared: but
still there remained for the speculator a cloud-land denser than that
which filled the imagination of the Tyrolese priest, and out of which
he still hoped to evolve perpetual motion. There was the mystic store
of chemic force, which nobody understood; there were heat and light,
electricity and magnetism, all competent to prod