t is related that God
revealed to Samuel that He would send Saul to him, yet God did not send
Saul to Samuel as people are wont to send one man to another. His
"sending" was merely the ordinary course of Nature. Saul was looking for
the asses he had lost, and was meditating a return home without them,
when, at the suggestion of his servant, he went to the Prophet Samuel,
to learn from him where he might find them. From no part of the
narrative does it appear that Saul had any command from God to visit
Samuel beyond this natural motive....

But perhaps some one will insist that we find many things in Scripture
which seem in nowise explicable by natural causes, as, for instance,
that the sins of men and their prayers can be the cause of rain and of
the earth's fertility, or that faith can heal the blind, and so on. But
I think I have already made sufficient answer: I have shown that
Scripture does not explain things by their secondary causes, but only
narrates them in the order and the style which has most power to move
men, and especially uneducated men, to devotion; and therefore it speaks
inaccurately of God and of events, seeing that its object is not to
convince the reason, but to attract and lay hold of the imagination. If
the Bible were to describe the destruction of an empire in the style of
political historians, the masses would remain unstirred, whereas the
contrary is the case when it adopts the method of poetic description,
and refers all things immediately to God. When, therefore, the Bible
says that the earth is barren because of men's sins, or that the blind
were healed by faith, we ought to take no more notice than when it says
that God is angry at men's sins, that He is sad, that He repents of the
good He has promised and done; or that on seeing a sign He remembers
something He had promised, and other similar expressions, which are
either thrown out poetically or related according to the opinion and
prejudices of the writer.

We may then be absolutely certain that every event which is truly
described in Scripture necessarily happened, like everything else,
according to natural laws; and if anything is there set down which can
be proved in set terms to contravene the order of Nature, or not to be
deducible therefrom, we must believe it to have been foisted into the
sacred writings by irreligious hands; for whatsoever is contrary to
Nature is also contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason
i