n unsolved wonder under the name of miracle is just
that,--_the natural product of an extraordinary endowment of life_. More
of its marvellous capability is latent in common men, in the
subconscious depths of being, than has ever yet flashed forth in the
career of uncommon men. Some scientists say that it depends on chemical
and physical forces. It indeed uses these to build the various bodies it
inhabits, but again it leaves these to destroy those bodies when it
quits them. The most constant and ubiquitous phenomenon in the world,
the ultimate reality in the universe, is _life_, revealing its presence
in innumerable modes of activity, from the dance of atoms in the rock to
the philosophizing of the sage and the aspirations of the saint,--the
creator of Nature, the administrator of the regular processes we call
the laws of Nature, the author of the wonders men call miraculous
because they are uncommon and ill understood.

The works of which any man is naturally capable are conditioned by the
psychical quality of his life, and its power to use the forces of
Nature. Through differences of vital endowment some can use color, as
wonderful painters, and others employ sound, as wonderful musicians, in
ways impossible to those otherwise endowed. So "a poet is born, not
made." So persons of feeble frame, stimulated by disease or frenzied by
passion, have put forth preternatural and prodigious muscular strength.
By what we call "clairvoyant" power life calls up in intelligent
perception things going on far beyond ocular vision. By what we call
"telepathic" power life communicates intelligence with life separated by
miles of space. Such are some of the powers that have been discovered,
and fully attested, but not explained, as belonging to the world's
master magician, _Life_. And when the poet asks,--

"Ah, what will our children be,
The men of a hundred thousand, a million summers away?"

we can only answer with the Apostle: "It doth not yet appear what we
shall be." But we cannot deem it likely that the powers of life,

"Deep seated in our mystic frame,"

and giving forth such flashes of their inherent virtue, have already
reached their ultimate development.

We look with wonder and awe into the secret shrine of life, where two
scarcely visible cells unite to form the human being whose thought shall
arrange the starry heavens in majestic order, and harness the titanic
energies of Nature for the wor