The Catholic apologists maintain that God can be known by the exercise of reason, but the miracle helps, as it were, to clinch the conviction. The persistent attachment of the Catholic Church to miracles is significant. It has a longer unbroken experience with human nature than any other institution in the western world. It has adapted itself to many circumstances, and under the profession of an unalterable creed it has abandoned and then added much. But it has never ceased to insist upon the need of a physical manifestation of the divine power. For with an unerring instinct for realities, Catholic churchmen have understood that there is a residuum of prosaic, matter-of-factness, of a need to touch and to see, which verbal proofs can never quite satisfy. They have resolutely responded to that need. They have not preached God merely by praising him; they have brought God near to men by revealing him to the senses, as one who is great enough and good enough and sufficiently interested in them to heal the sick and to make the floods recede. But to-day scientists are ever so much superior to churchmen at this kind of demonstration. The miracles which are recounted from the pulpit were, after all, few and far between. There are even theologians who teach that miracles ceased with the death of the Apostles. But the miracles of science seem to be inexhaustible. It is not surprising, then, that men of science should have acquired much of the intellectual authority which churchmen once exercised. Scientists do not, of course, speak of their discoveries as miracles. But to the common man they have much the same character as miracles. They are [p121] wonderful, they are inexplicable, they are manifestations of a great power over the forces of nature. It cannot be said, I think, that the people at large, even the moderately educated minority, understand the difference between scientific method and revelation, or that they have decided upon reflection to trust science. There is at least as much mystery in science for the common man as there ever was in religion; in a sense there is more mystery, for the logic of science is still altogether beyond his understanding, whereas the logic of revelation is the logic of his own feelings. But if men at large do not understand the method of science, they can appreciate some of its more tangible results. And these results are so impressive that scientific men are often embarrassed by the unbounded popular expectations which they have so unintentionally aroused. Their authority in the realm of knowledge has become virtually irresistible. And so when scientists teach one theory and the Bible another, the scientists invariably carry the greater conviction. 4. _On Reconciling Religion and Science_