hology._

"When we find the definition for which we are searching, the miraculous
will no longer be a problem."--PROFESSOR W. SANDAY, at the Anglican
Church Congress, 1902.

[28] For exceptions see Matthew xxi. 19; Acts xiii. 10, 11.

[29] _A Christian Apologetic_, p. 97.

[30] John i. 47-50.

[31] In the opinion of such psychologists as Professor William James, of
Harvard, the late Professor Henry Sidgwick, of Cambridge, England, and
others of like eminence.

[32] A hint of this was given by Augustine: "Portentum non fit contra
naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura."--_De Civitate Dei._

[33] Consult the late F. W. H. Myers's remarkable volumes on _Human
Personality and Survival after Death_ (Longmans, Green & Co.).

V

V

SYNOPSIS.--Biblical miracles the effluence of extraordinary
lives.--Life the world's magician and miracle worker; its miracles
now termed _prodigies_.--Miracle the natural product of an
extraordinary endowment of life.--Life the ultimate reality.--What
any man can achieve is conditioned by the psychical quality of his
life.--Nothing more natural, more supernatural, than life.--The
derived life of the world filial to the self-existent life of God,
"begotten, not made."--Miracle, as the product of life, the work of
God.

Be it noted, now, that the marvellous phenomena of the Biblical record,
whatever else be thought of them, are, even to a superficial view, the
extraordinary effluence of extraordinary lives. Here at length we gain a
clearer conception of miracle. _Life_ is the world's great
magician,--life, so familiar, yet so mysterious; so commonplace, yet so
transcendent. No miracle is more marvellous than its doings witnessed in
the biological laboratory, or more inexplicable than its transformation
of dead matter into living flesh, its development of a Shakespeare from
a microscopic bit of protoplasm. But its mysterious processes are too
common for general marvel; we marvel only at the uncommon. The boy Zerah
Colburn in half a minute solved the problem, "How many seconds since the
beginning of the Christian era?" We prefer to call this a prodigy rather
than a miracle,--a distinction more verbal than real; and we fancy we
have explained it when we say that such arithmetical power was a
peculiar endowment of his mental life. Now all of the inexplicable,
inimitable reality that at any time has to be left by the baffled
intellect as a