because the harvest is
come_" (Mark iv. 26-29). This is the daily miracle of nature, the
"sign" which is done daily before our eyes. There are those, and they
constitute a large and powerful school of thinkers in our day, who
refuse coldly to listen to any evidence as to the miracles of Scripture,
and who see this sign of an unseen energy at work around them and within
them each moment, but feel powerless even to inquire from what fountain
it springs. It is deeply unjust to brand the Positivist school of
philosophy as explicitly either materialistic or atheistic. They are by
no means blind to the fact that there is a hidden mystery in nature;
they see quite as clearly as we do its marvellous depths. There is
something quite as wonderful in their sight in the daily growth of the
corn and the assimilation of our daily bread, as in the feeding of five
thousand in the lonely wilderness by the word which came forth from the
mouth of the Saviour. But they say, this region is simply impenetrable
by the human intellect; in all its efforts at discovery it simply meets
with shadows projected under various conditions and at various angles by
itself. Our fair charge against them is, not that they are blind to the
fact of a mystery in nature, but that they dishonour the royal faculty
of the reason with which God has gifted them, by distrusting its ability
to deal with a vast class of phenomena--the manifestations of the
working of unseen powers with which God has surrounded them--which are
as definite and substantial as the physical facts out of which they
educe their laws. The world of spiritual experience and activity with
which mainly the Bible deals, claims from us, at any rate, observation,
thought, and deduction, as reverent as that which we joyfully devote to
the phenomena of nature; and we accept as eagerly the thoughts and
suggestions of seers who have insight into this world of mystery, as we
accept the teachings of science concerning things which are beyond our
sight. And if words come to us from this higher sphere, which harmonize
discordant elements and make the chaos of our spiritual consciousness
and experience a cosmos ruled by intelligence and love, we joyfully
accept the truth which sustains and explains the phenomena, and feel
that in proclaiming it we are "holding forth a word of life" to our
fellow-men. And the Scripture miracle is to us a flash of sunlight,
which illumines the darkness of the unknown: we see unv