ion of the face of the world, and the whole
growth of intervening history, throw the miracles of the Gospel
into a remote perspective in which they are rather seen as a
picture than real occurrences. But as soon as they see that, if
these miracles are true, they once really happened, what they feel
then is the apparent sense of their impossibility. It is not a
question of evidence with them: when they realise, e.g., that
our Lord's resurrection, if true, was a visible fact or
occurrence, they have the seeming certain perception that it is an
impossible occurrence. "I cannot," a person says to himself in
effect, "tear myself from the type of experience and join myself
to another. I cannot quit order and law for what is eccentric.
There is a repulsion between such facts and my belief as strong as
that between physical substances. In the mere effort to conceive
these amazing scenes as real ones, I fall back upon myself and
upon that type of reality which the order of nature has impressed
upon me."

The antagonism to the idea of miracles has grown stronger and more
definite with the enlarged and more widely-spread conception of
invariable natural law, and also, as Mr. Mozley points out, with that
increased power in our time of realising the past, which is not the
peculiarity of individual writers, but is "part of the thought of the
time." But though it has been quickened and sharpened by these
influences, it rests ultimately on that sense which all men have in
common of the customary and regular in their experience of the world.
The world, which we all know, stands alone, cut off from any other; and
a miracle is an intrusion, "an interpolation of one order of things
into another, confounding two systems which are perfectly distinct."
The broad, deep resistance to it which is awakened in the mind when we
look abroad on the face of nature is expressed in Emerson's phrase--"A
miracle is a monster. It is not one with the blowing clouds or the
falling rain." Who can dispute it? Yet the rejoinder is obvious, and
has often been given--that neither is man. Man, who looks at nature and
thinks and feels about its unconscious unfeeling order; man, with his
temptations, his glory, and his shame, his heights of goodness, and
depths of infamy, is not one with those innocent and soulless forces so
sternly immutable--"the blowing clouds and falling rain." The two awful
phenom