the mysteries of his revelation, the wonders he wrought extended to
such large classes of phenomena, and for a time were so constant,
that they ceased to be miracles at all. As he could not add ubiquity
to his other attributes, few attached any importance to his declaration
that he was the author of such vast and distant operations, and fewer
absolutely believed him. Moreover, men became accustomed to phenomena
which they daily witnessed; for such, it seems, is the constitution of
human nature in any world, that things cease to be wonderful when they
cease to be novel. Were it otherwise, men would be always wondering;
for no miracles are more wonderful than the phenomena of every day
in every part of the universe. Not a few wise men, therefore, in this
community, succeeded in giving a perfectly plausible account of these
wholesale infractions of the uniformity of nature. Nature, it was said,
was unquestionably uniform, but only in the several larger portions
of her operations; that within certain cycles she varied her operations,
as was clearly seen in the introduction of new races, and so forth;
that the generation which had just witnessed such departures from what
seemed the established order of things were doubtless living at an
epoch in which the huge evolution of the universe was about to exhibit
one of these new phases, and that the series of sequences to which they
were just becoming accustomed would afterwards continue uniform for a
number of ages; that such things were no miracles, but merely
indicated that nature was, within certain limits, only variably uniform,
though she was also, within certain limits, uniformly invariable.
After this very clear deliverance of philosophy, few people troubled
themselves about the claims of this seer, and were so fast getting
accustomed to the new uniformity, that it seemed highly probable that
the very next generation, or at most the second, would begin to prate
in the old style about the invariable uniformity of nature, and to
treat all the ancient order of things which their progenitors had
seen changed as a lying fable of those remote ages. Enraged at such
an unexpected result of his operations, the projector changed his plan,
and broke in upon nature with such a startling explosion of single
miracles, that there could be no longer any doubt that nature was
neither 'variably uniform' nor 'uniformly invariable': the only
question was, whether nature was not 'uniformly vari