, and with no hindrance from distance. We may put it this
way: man had no idea of spatial process but thought of all events as
acts of will. The gods had _mana_, or power, just as the medicine man
had, only greater. And miracles were, for ages, only extraordinary
events due to the power of gods or other power-possessing beings. So
long as this primitive view of things was prevalent, miracles were only
especially significant events assigned to the will of the gods. They
were events which transparently revealed their anger, or favor, or
purposes. There was nothing illogical or puzzling about them.

The forces which are so strongly working against the acceptance of
miracles are just those forces which are antagonistic to the primitive
view of the world. If nature is a self-contained spatial system, the
complete mechanism of change should be open to study. Even human wills
must be connected with human bodies, and shown to act in accordance
with psychological and physiological laws. In the place of such vague
terms as _mana_, we have chemical and electrical properties, bacterial
infection, hypnosis. Magic and miracle are closely connected; and the
replacement of magic by {126} science put miracles on the defensive.
Nature became a realm of recurrent processes. The exceptional, alone,
could be assigned to the old type of agency. Thus the contrast came
out more clearly, as the religious view of the world found itself
opposed to an orderly conception of natural process. Divine agency, on
the one hand; uniform processes, on the other.

Etymologically, a miracle is something which awakens wonder because of
its strangeness. In former days, all events out of the ordinary were
naturally classed as miracles, that is, as events to be wondered at.
There was, of course, a routine aspect to nature. People expected the
sun to rise in the morning and pass unwaveringly over the sky; they
looked for the return of the seasons and had festivals to celebrate
them; they anticipated normal young from their animals. Thus the
routine aspect of things was fairly conspicuous, and they guided
themselves by reference to it. But, in those days, things were less
settled than they are in our well-organized society. People were more
nervous, as it were, more surrounded by rumor, more credulous. Both
the psychological and the social situation favored tales of marvelous
events. I cannot help feeling that the religious customs, the constan