y be sure the clue to them, the revelation of them, in some way would
have been put into Nature. If, on the contrary, they are not to be of
immediate use to man, it is better they should not embarrass him. After
all, then, our knowledge of higher Law must be limited by our knowledge
of the lower. The Natural Laws as at present known, whatever additions
may yet be made to them, give a fair rendering of the facts of Nature.
And their analogies or their projections in the Spiritual sphere may
also be said to offer a fair account of that sphere, or of one or two
conspicuous departments of it. The time has come for that account to be
given. The greatest among the theological Laws are the Laws of Nature in
disguise. It will be the splendid task of the theology of the future to
take off the mask and disclose to a waning scepticism the naturalness of
the supernatural.

It is almost singular that the identification of the Laws of the
Spiritual World with the Laws of Nature should so long have escaped
recognition. For apart from the probability on _a priori_ grounds, it is
involved in the whole structure of Parable. When any two Phenomena in
the two spheres are seen to be analogous, the parallelism must depend
upon the fact that the Laws governing them are not analogous but
identical. And yet this basis for Parable seems to have been overlooked.
Thus Principal Shairp:--"This seeing of Spiritual truths mirrored in the
face of Nature rests not on any fancied, but in a real analogy between
the natural and the spiritual worlds. They are _in some sense which
science has not ascertained_, but which the vital and religious
imagination can perceive, counterparts one of the other."[25] But is not
this the explanation, that parallel Phenomena depend upon identical
Laws? It is a question indeed whether one can speak of Laws at all as
being analogous. Phenomena are parallel, Laws which make them so are
themselves one.

In discussing the relations of the Natural and Spiritual kingdom, it has
been all but implied hitherto that the Spiritual Laws were framed
originally on the plan of the Natural; and the impression one might
receive in studying the two worlds for the first time from the side of
analogy would naturally be that the lower world was formed first, as a
kind of scaffolding on which the higher and Spiritual should be
afterward raised. Now the exact opposite has been the case. The first in
the field was the Spiritual World.

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