Notice, too, how the gradual displacement of miracle has been brought about. So long as miracles appealed to the human mind as a moral and not a licentious expedient for the Creator of the universe to indulge in, they remained acceptable to the human understanding and were easily believed. Their real dethronement began when it was seen that a belief in them gave the greatest possible assistance to the cruel, grasping, and criminal instincts of the human race--that, from the social point of view, they opened a way for the terrorising of the weak, for fraud, for covetousness, for murder, for theft--in a word for priest-craft in all its worst forms. The belief in miracle enabled Samuel, with his punitive threats of divine vengeance, to terrorise first Eli and then Saul, and bring Israel to such a pass under his priestly government that at no period of that people’s early history were they more in subjection to their enemies. The belief in miracle enabled Elisha to cajole Elijah into the wilderness and there murder him, persuading subsequent inquirers that he had gone up to Heaven in a chariot of fire. Everybody believed him except the children; and when they mocked him and told him to go and do likewise, he threatened that bears would come and eat them. And Scripture, as a warning to us against like conduct, tells us that they did. That is how miracle was played under the old dispensation; and (as long as it could possibly be maintained) under the new also. Then, as the bad social results of a belief in miracles became accumulatively apparent--when carried outside the canon of Scripture into contemporary life--then it began to dawn upon some people how bad also a belief in them was for the mind of man in relation to the Deity. It began to be seen that the institution of a law of nature (in conjunction with an arbitrary suspension thereof whenever divinely convenient) was not compatible with what men have now come to regard as “moral conduct.” It was literally “discreditable”; for it made men disbelieve the law of their own being. In nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand a man was to be guided by experience, by thought, reason, and conscience--by a belief in cause and effect. Then--in the off case--unreason and inexperience were to descend upon him like a thunderbolt, and either beat him to dust, or lift him, an ingenuously amazed Ganymede to the seats of bliss. Now, we may admit--indeed we must--that there are many mysteries and secrets of nature which man has not yet fathomed; there may be many of which as yet he has no suspicion. A sudden exhibition of any of those powers and mysteries might even to-day seem “miraculous.” When in the past some fortuitous circumstance brought them about, “miracle” was the only explanation of them which human understanding was able to offer.