cuits, absorbed and absorbing like plants, and forming a vast Whole
endowed with life and possessing a destiny.

"At that sight your man of science trembled! He knew that life is
produced by the union of the thing and its principle, that death or
inertia or gravity is produced by a rupture between a thing and the
movement which appertains to it. Then it was that he foresaw the
crumbling of the worlds and their destruction if God should withdraw the
Breath of His Word. He searched the Apocalypse for the traces of that
Word. You thought him mad. Understand him better! He was seeking pardon
for the work of his genius.

"Wilfrid, you have come here hoping to make me solve equations, or rise
upon a rain-cloud, or plunge into the fiord and reappear a swan. If
science or miracles were the end and object of humanity, Moses would
have bequeathed to you the law of fluxions; Jesus Christ would have
lightened the darkness of your sciences; his apostles would have told
you whence come those vast trains of gas and melted metals, attached
to cores which revolve and solidify as they dart through ether, or
violently enter some system and combine with a star, jostling and
displacing it by the shock, or destroying it by the infiltration of
their deadly gases; Saint Paul, instead of telling you to live in God,
would have explained why food is the secret bond among all creations and
the evident tie between all living Species. In these days the greatest
miracle of all would be the discovery of the squaring of the circle,--a
problem which you hold to be insoluble, but which is doubtless solved in
the march of worlds by the intersection of some mathematical lines whose
course is visible to the eye of spirits who have reached the higher
spheres. Believe me, miracles are in us, not without us. Here natural
facts occur which men call supernatural. God would have been strangely
unjust had he confined the testimony of his power to certain generations
and peoples and denied them to others. The brazen rod belongs to all.
Neither Moses, nor Jacob, nor Zoroaster, nor Paul, nor Pythagoras, nor
Swedenborg, not the humblest Messenger nor the loftiest Prophet of the
Most High are greater than you are capable of being. Only, there come to
nations as to men certain periods when Faith is theirs.

"If material sciences be the end and object of human effort, tell
me, both of you, would societies,--those great centres where men
congregate,--would they perpetua