With these brief statements before us, we are now prepared for turning in a different direction to ascertain what is the special view of miracle which has found currency within some scientific circles, carrying the explanation of intense antipathy to its acknowledgment, and unhesitating declaration that the whole body of scientific teaching, and even the characteristics of scientific method, are adverse to the very conception of miracle. For the purpose now in view it may be well to present in close connection the successive utterances of a single author, who may be taken as representative of a class. The work of Professor Schmidt on _The Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism_ will supply illustrations of the kind to which reference has been made, as this author states at the outset that the doctrine of descent finds its antagonists among those "who perceive, more or less distinctly, the danger with which the new doctrine threatens their standpoint of miracle."[DK] From this allusion it appears that he regards a doctrine of descent as opposed to what he describes as an "incomprehensible act of creation."[DL] Accordingly he celebrates the praises of this theory in these terms,--"it interprets by a single principle those great phenomena which without its aid remain a mass of unintelligible miracles."[DM] In harmony with these utterances he speaks of gradual evolution of the organs of special sense, such as the organs of hearing and smell, as giving a negative to "the sudden and incomprehensible origination of these organs in an immediate state of completion."[DN] These few extracts may suffice to indicate the mental attitude of those who show aversion to the acknowledgment of miracle. With Schmidt the "miraculous" is another name for the incomprehensible; to him the suggestion of miracle is disagreeable as implying the impossibility of scientific explanation. If these things be kept in mind, it will be clear how widely apart this notion is from the Christian conception of miracle. The one view is that observational science can make no account of miracle: the other is that thought concerning a supernatural Being really involved the conception of miracle. Science can assign no place to the incomprehensible, can make no account of it. Religion finds a higher sphere of comprehensibility in the action of supernatural power. The two positions are radically distinct, and do not come into actual conflict. Hence religion has no opposition to the view of miracle just stated, which amounts to little more than a negative definition of science. To say that science can take no account of the miraculous, is only in other words to say that science is explanation of natural phenomena by recognition of the action of natural causes, consequently