a check; that instance after instance of
apparent exception has been brought by further examination within its
province; that the hypothesis of uniformity has now been long on trial
and has never yet been found to fail; that no one who has so tried it
has the slightest hesitation in trusting it for the future, as he has
proved it in the past. But clearly as this evidence proves a general, it
never gets beyond a general, uniformity. It has not succeeded in showing
that the human will comes under the same rule. It has not succeeded in
silencing the voice within us, which claims superiority for the moral
over the physical. And when the utmost extent of human knowledge is
compared with the vastness of nature, the claim to extend the induction
from generality to universality is seen to be utterly untenable. So
much as this, indeed, Science has rendered highly probable, that the
uniformity of nature is never broken except for a moral purpose. It is
only for such a purpose that the will is ever free. It is only for such
a purpose that Revelation has ever claimed to be superior to nature. But
beyond this Science cannot go. Let it be granted that the claim for
freedom of the will has been often unduly pushed far beyond this limit,
and let it be granted that religions professing to be revelations have
included records of miracles which had no moral purpose. This does not
affect the general conclusion that the evidence for uniformity has never
succeeded, and can never succeed in showing, that the God who made and
rules the universe never sets aside a physical law for a moral purpose,
either by working through the human will or by direct action on external
nature.

Science will continue its progress, and as the thoughts of men become
clearer it will be perpetually more plainly seen that nothing in
Revelation really interferes with that progress. It will be seen that
devout believers can observe, can cross-question nature, can look for
uniformity and find it, with as keen an eye, with as active an
imagination, with as sure a reasoning, as those who deny entirely all
possibility of miracles and reject all Revelation on that account. The
belief that God can work miracles and has worked them, has never yet
obstructed the path of a single student of Science; nor has any student
who repudiated that belief found any aid in his study from that
repudiation. The rush of Science of late years has for the time made
many men fancy that Science