health, knowledge, goodness and beauty. Many virtues and ideals
which religion has sheltered and encouraged will find themselves at
home in this valiant and intelligent world, but the religion of the
past must shed many things before it will feel in harmony with its new
setting. Will sufficient identity remain to make the term still
significant? Frankly, it is very hard to say--impossible to say with
certainty.

What, then, are the limits of personal agency? The limits set to that
incarnated intelligence which organisms possess. The ability to
re-direct and distribute the energies which surround them in accordance
with laws which study reveals, the ability to build dwellings for
shelter and for adornment, the ability to use medicines for healing,
the ability to drain marshes, dig canals, girdle the earth with iron
roads, the ability to conceive things of beauty and to translate these
{122} conceptions into sensuous form, all these abilities are theirs.
Such agency works within nature as a highly gifted part within a whole
to which it is not alien. But experience gives us no hint of a
transcendent agent for whom the earth is as a footstool and who whirls
stars and planets through space to their appointed orbits.

{123}

CHAPTER X

DO MIRACLES HAPPEN?

Do miracles happen? I am often asked this question by young people who
are trying to combine religious tradition with modern thought, and find
a disharmony. Ecclesiastical authority urges them to the acceptance of
miracles, while the principles and conclusions of science as obviously
militate against any such belief. Many halt half-way between these two
opinions and drift through life without having been able to come to a
decision. In their moments of mysticism, when the past religious view
of the world with its prestige and emotional appeal gains the upper
hand, they are persuaded that all things are possible. They lose sight
of nature with its massive constancy, and float back into the sentiment
of personal agency so natural to man. As they listen to the poetry of
the familiar passage read by the clergyman, their memories awaken, and
vague hopes for they know not what are stirred to a restless life. All
the surroundings and accompaniments reenforce these suggestions, for
that is the transformed purpose of modern rites. The music throbs in
their ears, now plaintive and low, now bursting into triumphant peals.
Incense fills the air, and the lights