[47] Professor Borden P. Bowne has thus exhibited this great mistake and its grievous consequence:-- "In popular thought, religious and irreligious alike, the natural is supposed to be something that runs itself without any internal guidance or external interference. The supernatural, on the other hand, if there be any such thing, is not supposed to manifest itself through the natural, but by means of portents, prodigies, interpositions, departures from, or infractions of, natural law in general. The realm of law belongs to the natural, and the natural runs itself. Hence, if we are to find anything supernatural, we must look for it in the abnormal, the chaotic, the lawless, or that which defies all reduction to order that may be depended on. This notion underlies the traditional debate between naturalism and supernaturalism.... This unhappy misconception of the relation of the natural to the supernatural has practically led the great body of uncritical thinkers into the grotesque inversion of all reason--the more law and order, the less God."--_Zion's Herald_, August 22, 1900. VIII VIII SYNOPSIS.--The cardinal point in the present discussion, the reality not of miracles but of the supernatural.--Fallacy of pointing to physical events as essential characteristics of supernatural Revelation.--The character of a revelation determined not by its circumstances, but by its contents.--Moral nature supernatural to physical.--Nature a hierarchy of natures.--Supernatural Religion historically attested by the moral development it generates.--Transfer of its distinctive note from moral ideals to physical marvels a costly error.--Jesus' miracles _a_ revelation, of a type common with others before and since.--The unique Revelation of Jesus was in the higher realm of divine ideas and ideals.--These, while unrealized in human life, still exhibit the fact of a supernatural Revelation.--The distinction of natural and supernatural belongs to the period of moral progress up to the spiritual maturity of man in the image of God. The divine possibilities of humanity, imaged in Jesus, revealed as our inheritance and our prize.