ed, on one point, has surrendered more than can
reasonably be asked.

I suppose I must be prepared to face the reproach which attaches to
those who criticise a gift, if I venture to observe that I do not
think that the Bishop of Manchester need have been so much alarmed, as
he evidently has been, by the objections which have often been raised
to prayer, on the ground that a belief in the efficacy of prayer is
inconsistent with a belief in the constancy of the order of nature.

The Bishop appears to admit that there is an antagonism between the
"regular economy of nature" and the "regular economy of prayer" (p.
39), and that "prayers for the interruption of God's natural order"
are of "doubtful validity" (p. 42). It appears to me that the Bishop's
difficulty simply adds another example to those which I have several
times insisted upon in the pages of this Review and elsewhere, of the
mischief which has been done, and is being done, by a mistaken
apprehension of the real meaning of "natural order" and "law of
nature."

May I, therefore, be permitted to repeat, once more, that the
statements denoted by these terms have no greater value or cogency
than such as may attach to generalisations from experience of the
past, and to expectations for the future based upon that experience?
Nobody can presume to say what the order of nature must be; all that
the widest experience (even if it extended over all past time and
through all space) that events had happened in a certain way could
justify, would be a proportionally strong expectation that events will
go on happening, and the demand for a proportional strength of
evidence in favour of any assertion that they had happened otherwise.

It is this weighty consideration, the truth of which every one who is
capable of logical thought must surely admit, which knocks the bottom
out of all _a priori_ objections either to ordinary "miracles" or to
the efficacy of prayer, in so far as the latter implies the miraculous
intervention of a higher power. No one is entitled to say _a priori_
that any given so-called miraculous event is impossible; and no one is
entitled to say _a priori_ that prayer for some change in the ordinary
course of nature cannot possibly avail.

The supposition that there is any inconsistency between the acceptance
of the constancy of natural order and a belief in the efficacy of
prayer, is the more unaccountable as it is obviously contradicted by
analogies furni