in time and place,
God has not been personally in the chain of natural causes and effects.
Thus close to an atheistic conception of nature does zeal for
traditional orthodoxy unwittingly but really come.

The first pages of the Bible correct this error. "While the earth
remaineth," so God is represented as assuring Noah, "seedtime and
harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night,
shall not cease." The presence of God in his world was thus to be
evinced by his regular sustentation of its natural order, rather than by
irregular occurrences, such as the deluge, in seeming contravention of
it. To seek the evidence of divine activity in human affairs and to
ground one's faith in a controlling Providence in sporadic and cometary
phenomena, rather than in the constant and cumulative signs of it to be
seen in the majestic order of the starry skies, in the reign of
intelligence throughout the cosmos, in the moral evolution of ancient
savagery into modern philanthropy, in the historic manifestation
throughout the centuries of a Power not our own that works for the
increase of righteousness, is a mode of thought which in our time is
being steadily and surely outgrown. It is one of those "idols of the
tribe" whose power alike over civilized and uncivilized men is broken
less by argument than by the ascent of man to wider horizons of
knowledge.

It is for the gain of religion that it should be broken,--of the
spiritual religion whose God is not a tradition, a reminiscence, but a
living presence, inhabiting alike the clod and the star, the flower in
the crannied wall and the life of man. So thinking of God the religious
man may rightly say,[10] "If it is more difficult to believe in
miracles, it is less important. If the extraordinary manifestations of
God recounted in ancient history appear less credible, the ordinary
manifestations of God in current life appear more real. He is seen in
American history not less than in Hebrew history; in the life of to-day
not less than in the life of long ago."

FOOTNOTES:

[5] _Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church_, Vol. II, p. 362,
American edition.

[6] 1 Kings xiv. 1-7.

[7] It is not intended to intimate that there is no such darker reality
as a "possession" that is "demoniac" indeed. It cannot be reasonably
pronounced superstitious to judge that there is some probability for
that view. At any rate, it is certain that the problem is not to be
settle