The Contemporary Review, January 1883: Vol 43, No. 1Various
Science
The Contemporary Review, January 1883: Vol 43, No. 1
Various
Arts -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals; Political science -- Periodicals
If then things are so--as who can disprove?--we may reasonably demur to
the assertion that physical science throws discredit upon the position
that a Personal Will is the cause of the universe. Let us now glance at
the last of the propositions supposed to be condemned by the researches
of the physicists--namely, that this Personal Will has sometimes
interfered by miracles with the order of the universe. Now, here, as I
intimated in an earlier portion of this article, I find myself at
variance with the author of "Natural Religion" upon a question, and a
very important question, of terminology. I do not regard the
supernatural as an interference with, or violation of, the order of the
universe. I adopt, unreservedly, the doctrine that "nothing is that errs
from law." The phenomena which we call supernatural and those which we
call natural, I view as alike the expression of the Divine Will: a Will
which acts not capriciously, nor, as the phrase is, arbitrarily, but by
law, "attingens a fine usque ad finem, fortiter suaviterque disponens
omnia." And so the theologians identify the Divine Will with the Divine
Reason. Thus St. Augustine, "Lex æterna est ratio divina vel voluntas
Dei,"[48] and St. Thomas Aquinas, "Lex æterna summa ratio in Deo
existens."[49] It is by virtue of this law that the sick are healed,
whether by the prayer of faith or the prescription of a physician, by
the touch of a relic or by a shock from a galvanic battery; that the
Saint draws souls and that the magnet draws iron. The most ordinary
so-called "operations of Nature" may be truly described in the words of
St. Gregory as God's daily miracles;[50] and those events, commonly
denominated miraculous, of which we read in the Sacred Scriptures, in
the Lives of the Saints, and elsewhere, may as truly be called natural,
using the word in what, as I just now observed, Bishop Butler notes as
its only distinct meaning--namely, stated, fixed, or settled;[51] for
they are the normal manifestations of the order of Grace--an order
external to us, invisible, inaccessible to our senses and reasonings,
but truly existing and governed by laws, which, like the laws of the
physical and the intellectual order, are ordained by the Supreme
Lawgiver. Once purge the mind of anthropomorphic conceptions as to the
Divine Government, and the notion of any essential opposition between
the natural and the supernatural disappears. Sanctity, which means
likeness to God, a partaking of the Divine nature, is as truly a force
as light or heat, and enters as truly into the great order of the
universe. There is a passage in M. Renan's "Vie de Jésus" worth citing
in this connection. "La nature lui obéit," he writes; "mais elle obéit
aussi à quiconque croit et prie; la foi peut tout. Il faut se rappeler
que nulle idée des lois de la nature ne venait, dans son esprit ni dans
celui de ses auditeurs, marquer la limite de l'impossible.... Ces mots
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