Desiring to approach the subject of miracles, you ask me whether I do
not accept the following sentence as a statement of my views concerning
nature: “The Universe is perennially renewed and created afresh by an
active energy of the Spirit of God, and what we call ‘laws of nature’
are the mode in which our limited minds are enabled to apprehend the
working of Creative Power.” If I accept it, you declare you cannot
understand why I should stumble at miracles. “It is a matter of
every-day experience,” you say, “and natural, that the human will should
suspend the laws of nature, as for example by arresting the motion of
gravitation; and consequently it seems unreasonable for you, or for
other believers in a personal God, to be scandalized if He also now and
then permits Himself the same liberty.”
I accept your statement, so far as concerns the perennial energy of the
Spirit of God upon the material and immaterial Universe; but I do not
quite agree with the thought, or perhaps I should say with the
expression, of the last part of your sentence—“the mode in which our
limited minds are enabled to apprehend the working of Creative Power.” I
should prefer to call the Laws of Nature “a revelation of Himself by God
to men, on the recognition of which our very existence depends.” The
Laws of Nature are indeed nothing but ideas of our own Imagination; but
they appear to me, more or less, true ideas, through which God has
revealed Himself to us as a God of Law and Order. I believe in the
fixity of natural Law as much (I think) as the man of science does; I
reverence a Law of Nature, not as a result of necessity, but as an
expression of God’s will. But your own remarks about the ordinary
“suspension of the law of nature by the human will” appear to me to
imply a little confusion of thought arising from a confused use of the
word “nature” in two or more senses. On this point therefore I should
like to say a few words.