'Yes,' said the other; 'it is God's work whether he do it in one second or in eighty years.'" Such an attitude as this is now a commonplace with Christian folk. A vast and growing universe through which sweep the purposes of God is by far the most magnificent outlook for faith that man has ever had. The Gospel and Hebrew science are _not_ identical; the Gospel is not indissolubly bound to any science ancient or modern; for science and religion have separable domains. "A fire-mist and a planet, A crystal and a cell, A jelly-fish and a saurian, And caves where cave men dwell. Then a sense of Love and Duty And a face turned from the clod, Some call it Evolution And others--call it God." The same story of needless antagonism is now being written about religion and _natural law_. When science began plotting nature's laws, the control of the world seemed to be snatched from the hands of deity and given over to a system of impersonal rules. God, whose action had been defined in terms of miracle, was forced from one realm after another by the discovery of laws, until at last even comets were found to be not whimsical but as regular in their law-abiding courses as the planets, and God seemed to be escorted to the edge of the universe and bowed out. When Newton first formulated the law of gravitation, the artillery of many an earnest pulpit was let loose against him. One said that Newton took "from God that direct action on his works so constantly ascribed to him in Scripture and transferred it to material mechanism" and that he "substituted gravitation for Providence." But now, when science has so plainly won her case, in her own proper field; when we know to our glory and profit so many laws by which the world is governed, and use our knowledge as the most splendid engine of personal purpose and freedom which man ever had, we see how great our gain has been. _Nor is it more a practical than a religious gain._ God once was thought of chiefly in terms of miraculous action; he came into his world now and again, like the _deus-ex-machina_ of a Greek tragedy, to solve a critical dilemma in the plot. Now all the laws we know and many more are his regular ways of action, and through them all continuously his purpose is being wrought. As Henry Drummond exclaimed, "If God appears periodically, he disappears periodically. If he comes upon the scene at special crises, he is absent from the scene in the intervals. Whether is all-God or occasional God the nobler theory?"