Philosophical Results of Denial of Miracles [pp. 85-94]

PHILOSOPHICAL RESULTS OF A DENIAL OF MIRA CLES. 93
The miracle and the answer to prayer are only the brightest
points of this general, pervasive, intellectual light.
Yes, but this is anthropomorphic. It is anthropomorphic,
and all the better for being so. It is simply searching the universe with a light, the light of our own clearest life, instead of
stumbling through it in darkness.
In this movement we need to restore to the foreground two
truths; first, the omnipresence of God. Beginnings, progressions, and ends that involve any change of methods are all
troublesome. What we deny in kind as present to-day we
shall find difficulty in restoring for the work of long ago. A
beginning that is divorced in method and law from the procession of forces that flow from it will put restrictions and banishments upon God, ruinous to the integrity of his nature. God is
omnipresent in his work, the immediate life and law of it. The
soul and body in man are the best analogon. What the mind is
to the eye it looks out at, to the ear it hears with, to the hand it
works with, that is God to the universe. The ordinary, equable
respiration of physical law in the living world about us does not
preclude the occasional waking up to a more intense spiritual
activity; it only prepares the way for it.
The second truth is the essential dualism of the world as
offered to us. Mind and matter are a first division of thought,
and it is useless to try to comprehend anything without them.
Many seem to forget that thought is a process of separation, of
poising one thing with another, and therefore that anything like
absolute unity would be its destruction. What the subject and
predicate are to a judgment, what the noumena and the phenomena are to the physical world, what cause and effect are to
science, what form and substance'are to art, that are mind and
matter, method and material, to the explanation and comprehension of the universe. The moment that order and adjustment cease with us to be the peculiar prerogatives of mind, we
shall strive to add them to the properties of matter, and so
obscure that fundamental distinction in which our intelligence
commenced. As children and as men we have understood all things by
virtue of the intellectually inert and the intellectually active,