theologians identify the Divine Will with the Divine
Reason. Thus St. Augustine, "Lex aeterna est ratio divina vel voluntas
Dei,"[48] and St. Thomas Aquinas, "Lex aeterna summa ratio in Deo
existens."[49] It is by virtue of this law that the sick are healed,
whether by the prayer of faith or the prescription of a physician, by
the touch of a relic or by a shock from a galvanic battery; that the
Saint draws souls and that the magnet draws iron. The most ordinary
so-called "operations of Nature" may be truly described in the words of
St. Gregory as God's daily miracles;[50] and those events, commonly
denominated miraculous, of which we read in the Sacred Scriptures, in
the Lives of the Saints, and elsewhere, may as truly be called natural,
using the word in what, as I just now observed, Bishop Butler notes as
its only distinct meaning--namely, stated, fixed, or settled;[51] for
they are the normal manifestations of the order of Grace--an order
external to us, invisible, inaccessible to our senses and reasonings,
but truly existing and governed by laws, which, like the laws of the
physical and the intellectual order, are ordained by the Supreme
Lawgiver. Once purge the mind of anthropomorphic conceptions as to the
Divine Government, and the notion of any essential opposition between
the natural and the supernatural disappears. Sanctity, which means
likeness to God, a partaking of the Divine nature, is as truly a force
as light or heat, and enters as truly into the great order of the
universe. There is a passage in M. Renan's "Vie de Jesus" worth citing
in this connection. "La nature lui obeit," he writes; "mais elle obeit
aussi a quiconque croit et prie; la foi peut tout. Il faut se rappeler
que nulle idee des lois de la nature ne venait, dans son esprit ni dans
celui de ses auditeurs, marquer la limite de l'impossible.... Ces mots
de 'surhumain' et de 'surnaturel,' empruntes a notre theologie mesquine,
n'avaient pas de sens dans la haute conscience religieuse de Jesus. Pour
lui, la nature et le developpement de l'humanite n'etaient pas des
regnes limites hors de Dieu, de chetives realites assujetties aux lois
d'un empirisme desesperant. Il n'y avait pas pour lui de surnaturel, car
il n'y avait pas pour lui de nature. Ivre de l'amour infini, il oubliait
la lourde chaine qui tient l'esprit captif; il franchissait d'un bond
l'abime, infranchissable pour la plupart, que la mediocrite des facultes
humaines trace entre l'homme e