e strongly
affected by the change in the weather.

But whether for conviction, aid (or aid in the terrific form of
punishment), the essence of miracle is as the manifestation of a Power
which can direct or modify the otherwise constant phenomena of Nature;
and it is, I think, by attaching too great importance to what may be
termed the missionary work of miracle, instead of what may in
distinction be called its pastoral work, that many pious persons, no
less than infidels, are apt to despise, and therefore to deny,
miraculous power altogether.

274. "We do not need to be convinced," they say, "of the existence of
God by the capricious exertion of His power. We are satisfied in the
normal exertion of it; and it is contrary to the idea of His Excellent
Majesty that there should be any other."

But all arguments and feelings must be distrusted which are founded on
our own ideas of what it is proper for Deity to do. Nor can I, even
according to our human modes of judgment, find any impropriety in the
thought that an energy may be natural without being normal, and Divine
without being constant. The wise missionary may indeed require no
miracle to confirm his authority; but the despised pastor may need
miracle to enforce it, or the compassionate governor to make it
beneficial. And it is quite possible to conceive of Pastoral Miracle as
resulting from a power as natural as any other, though not as perpetual.
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and some of the energies granted to
men born of the Spirit may be manifested only on certain conditions and
on rare occasions; and therefore be always wonderful or miraculous,
though neither disorderly nor unnatural.

Thus St. Paul's argument to Agrippa, "Why should it be thought with you
a thing impossible that God should raise the dead?" would be suicidal,
if he meant to appeal to the miracle as a proof of the authority of his
mission. But, claiming no authority, he announces as a probable and
acceptable fact the opening of a dispensation in which it was as natural
for the dead to be raised as for the Gospel to be preached to the poor,
though both the one and the other were miraculous signs that the Master
of Nature had come down to be Emmanuel among men, and that no prophet
was in future to look for another.

We have indeed fallen into a careless habit of using the words
supernatural and superhuman, as if equivalent. A human act may be
super-doggish, and a Divine act superhuman, y