ons take place. Thus, in miracles, no law of nature is
overcome, but only a force which otherwise would have been active according
to the law of its activity, is for the time hindered from action by another
force becoming active. Moreover, through the conscious and unconscious
connection of the idea of irregularity and lack of plan with the idea of
miracles, not only the idea of a God who works miracles, but also that of a
personal Creator and Ruler of the world, in general, has come into
discredit. For that reason, Haeckel, for instance, when he attacks the
Christian idea of creation, never fails to speak of the "capricious
arbitrariness" of the Creator; and Oskar Schmidt also speaks of the
"caprice" of the God of Christians.

With these criticisms, which we have made in reference to the treatment of
the question of miracles, we certainly have undertaken only to characterize
the superficial skirmishing which took place between the two opposing views
of the world, but not the labors of more recent theological science. But
that skirmish has made, like all superficiality, the most noise in the
world; and since the adversaries of the faith in {361} miracles endeavored
almost exclusively to reflect in this manner, and almost ignored the deeper
deductions of theological science, they succeeded in making the idea of
miracles almost the most dreaded object of antipathy to modern education,
and many of those who feel that the conceptions of traditional dogmatics
are in need of revision, and religion and science of a reconciliation,
endeavor to find that revision and reconciliation especially in the fact,
that religion gives up miracles. On the other hand, _theology as science_,
in its main advocates, long ago gave up these insufficient and misleading
categories and conceptions, and established a conception of miracles which
can easily be received into the science of the processes of nature, as well
as into our reasoning about God and the divine. The first who adopted this
mode of treatment, is one of the pioneers of more recent positive theology,
and of a theology still uninfluenced by science--Karl Immanuel Nitzsch. It
is certainly interesting to read what this man, as early as 1829, said, in
the first edition of his "System der Christlichen Lehre" ("System of
Christian Doctrine"), and also in the succeeding edition printed without
alteration. He says, on page 64: "The miracles of revelation are, in spite
of all objective supern