In the following remarks I assume the existence of God, All-knowing and All-powerful; and of a spirit in men which is not matter. I do not say that either is demonstrated or can be demonstrated, still less do I presume to define either, but I address only those who already assent to both. Many, however, of those who give such assent are troubled about the ways of God and the nature of man's relation to Him. On the one hand is the Bible, which declares that all things on earth as well as in heaven are regulated by Divine will at every moment, which records frequent miracles, and which bids men ask from Him whatsoever they would, in absolute confidence that they shall have their desires. On the other hand stands the Book of Nature, as Divine as that of Revelation, being in fact another revelation of God, which tells of an unchanging sequence of events, of laws incapable of modification by isolated acts of will, laws which, indeed, if subject to such modification, would fall into disorder. Which of these revelations shall they believe? Or can they be reconciled so that both are credible? The tendency of recent belief in those who have studied the Book of Nature, and perhaps most decidedly in those who have only turned some of its pages, is that the two revelations are irreconcilable. The immutability of Nature's laws is to them a gospel taught by every stone, by every plant, by every animated being. All that they have learnt to know of matter rests on the assurance that its properties are absolutely fixed. The progress of science, of art, of civilization, of the human race, depends on the fact that what has been found to be true will be always true, that there is an ordered sequence of events which may be trusted to be invariable, to which we must conform our lives if we would be happy, and which, if we cross it in ignorance or defiance, will revenge the outrage by inevitable penalties. Those laws, which some call of matter, may by others be called laws of God, and the most devout minds find in their fixity only a confirmation of their faith in His unchanging promises. But if thus fixed, it seems to many who are devout as well as to many who are sceptical, that it becomes impossible to believe that their Author should ever set them aside by what are called miracles; still less that He should bid men pray for events which are, in fact, not regulated by wish or will, but by what has gone before up to the beginning of time. To meet this dilemma there seem to such minds only two courses, either to believe that Scripture is not the word of a God at all, or to give to its language an interpretation which is not the natural sense of the words, and which was certainly not meant or understood by those who first wrote or first heard it.