Even the miracles which do not belong simply to the less explicable phenomena of the nervous system tend increasingly to appear to the historian as having been possessed of some foundation in fact. All that was subjective in them is the element of the marvellous and the providential. The miracles really were produced, but in the human heart; and instead, in any proper sense, of engendering faith they proceeded from it and are explicable by it. An English missionary[41] who made a journey in Siberia relates that at the moment of his arrival at Irkutsk a fire was consuming three-fourths of the town; a chapel, however, had been spared and the Russian clergy saw in this fact a miracle; the English missionary explained it very simply by the observation that the rest of the town had been built up of wood, and that the chapel was of brick. But the missionary, who denies anything like providential intervention in the above mentioned case, admits providential intervention the same day in regard to another point; for he relates that but for one of his horses having run away he would have arrived too soon at Irkutsk, and would have had his baggage burned in the fire, and offers thanks to God because his horse had been inspired to break the traces. The same natural causes which suffice, according to this excellent gentleman, to explain why the Russian church was spared, suffice no longer when the luggage of an Anglican missionary, the special _protégé_, is involved. Every believer is inclined thus to interpret miraculously the mercies that have been shown to him. From the height of a stall or the pulpit of a church one sees the events of this world at a particular angle; from the stall or pulpit of another church one sees them at another angle, and for purposes of scientific verity the events must be looked down upon from the stalls and pulpits of every church—unless one rejects churches altogether. [41] _Through Siberia_, by Henry Lansdell, with illustrations and maps; London, 1882. [Sidenote: Miracles essential to religion.]