There is no doubt that the polytheistic religions postulated the existence of a vast number of superhuman beings by whose agency and caprice many natural occurrences were brought about. Such a belief indicates a very imperfect conception of “order” in nature. But these supposed interferences with it would by no means realize the notion of what we now designate a miracle, the very idea of which implies an order in nature to which the miracle forms an exception. If there is no order in nature, there can be no miracle. The Hebrew monotheism involved conceptions directly opposite to this. It viewed the action of God as the foundation of all the forces in nature. Whilst above and outside nature, He was everywhere present in nature. Its forces were the expressions of the energy of His will. Its order (for the Hebrew recognised a high order in nature) was the result of His good pleasure, and due to His constant working. In the Old Testament the commonest events in nature are no less ascribed to God than those which we designate miraculous. A Hebrew never conceived of a miracle as a deviation from the divine order, but as a consistent carrying out of a divine purpose in the government of the world. A modern conception of theism differs from this in supposing that there are certain forces in material nature which, when once called into action, go on energizing without any direct intervention of God. But when this conception comes to be minutely analysed, if we believe in a God, it is impossible to conceive of force, at least in its ultimate form, except as a direct expression of the divine energy.