“‘But is not a real Miracle simply a violation of the Laws of Nature?’ ask several.  Whom I answer by this new question:  What are the Laws of Nature?  To me perhaps the rising of one from the dead were no violation of these Laws, but a confirmation; were some far deeper Law, now first penetrated into, and by Spiritual Force, even as the rest have all been, brought to bear on us with its Material Force.

“Here too may some inquire, not without astonishment:  On what ground shall one, that can make Iron swim, come and declare that therefore he can teach Religion?  To us, truly, of the Nineteenth Century, such declaration were inept enough; which nevertheless to our fathers, of the First Century, was full of meaning.

“‘But is it not the deepest Law of Nature that she be constant?’ cries an illuminated class:  ’Is not the Machine of the Universe fixed to move by unalterable rules?’ Probable enough, good friends:  nay I, too, must believe that the God, whom ancient inspired men assert to be ’without variableness or shadow of turning,’ does indeed never change; that Nature, that the Universe, which no one whom it so pleases can be prevented from calling a Machine, does move by the most unalterable rules.  And now of you, too, I make the old inquiry:  What those same unalterable rules, forming the complete Statute-Book of Nature, may possibly be?

“They stand written in our Works of Science, say you; in the accumulated records of Man’s Experience?—­Was Man with his Experience present at the Creation, then, to see how it all went on?  Have any deepest scientific individuals yet dived down to the foundations of the Universe, and gauged everything there?  Did the Maker take them into His counsel; that they read His ground-plan of the incomprehensible All; and can say, This stands marked therein, and no more than this?  Alas, not in anywise!  These scientific individuals have been nowhere but where we also are; have seen some hand breadths deeper than we see into the Deep that is infinite, without bottom as without shore.

“Laplace’s Book on the Stars, wherein he exhibits that certain Planets, with their Satellites, gyrate round our worthy Sun, at a rate and in a course, which, by greatest good fortune, he and the like of him have succeeded in detecting,—­is to me as precious as to another.  But is this what thou namest ‘Mechanism of the Heavens,’ and ‘System of the World;’ this, wherein Sirius and the Pleiades, and all Herschel’s Fifteen thousand Suns per minute, being left out, some paltry handful of Moons, and inert Balls, had been—­looked at, nick-named, and marked in the Zodiacal Way-bill; so that we can now prate of their Whereabout; their How, their Why, their What, being hid from us, as in the signless Inane?