Now the question, Do miracles happen? presupposes a single, unambiguous meaning for the term, miracle. Yet to secure such a single meaning requires an effort. It is so tempting for the advocate of miracles to make qualifications when the argument goes against him, to say that he did not mean an act of a supernatural agent but only an extraordinary event, something marvelous and not easily accounted for. We shall concern ourselves primarily with what may be called a theological miracle, an occurrence confidently assigned to the will of a divine agent. Incidentally, however, we shall discuss the logical attitude to take toward marvels which cannot easily be fitted into the usual scheme of events. {125} To understand the ideas and sentiments associated with our term, we must go back to the past. We are sufficiently acquainted by now with the setting of the religious view of the universe to know that the gods were at first forces _in_ nature and only slowly became spiritual agents _outside_ of nature. We cannot too often remember that man had no instinctive knowledge of what energies operated in the world and what were the conditions of their operation. He peopled woods and fields and sky with invisible agents who could do almost all they wanted to do, and with no hindrance from distance. We may put it this way: man had no idea of spatial process but thought of all events as acts of will. The gods had _mana_, or power, just as the medicine man had, only greater. And miracles were, for ages, only extraordinary events due to the power of gods or other power-possessing beings. So long as this primitive view of things was prevalent, miracles were only especially significant events assigned to the will of the gods. They were events which transparently revealed their anger, or favor, or purposes. There was nothing illogical or puzzling about them. The forces which are so strongly working against the acceptance of miracles are just those forces which are antagonistic to the primitive view of the world. If nature is a self-contained spatial system, the complete mechanism of change should be open to study. Even human wills must be connected with human bodies, and shown to act in accordance with psychological and physiological laws. In the place of such vague terms as _mana_, we have chemical and electrical properties, bacterial infection, hypnosis. Magic and miracle are closely connected; and the replacement of magic by {126} science put miracles on the defensive. Nature became a realm of recurrent processes. The exceptional, alone, could be assigned to the old type of agency. Thus the contrast came out more clearly, as the religious view of the world found itself opposed to an orderly conception of natural process. Divine agency, on the one hand; uniform processes, on the other.