In the first place, we help to establish the full recognition of that direct religious consciousness and sensation which is not only characteristic of the pious men of Scripture, but which yet characterizes all genuine religiousness; and this consists in the fact that the religious man sees {364} _miracles of God in all that turns his attention to God's government_,--in the sea of stars, in rock and bush, in sunshine and storm, in flower and worm, just as certainly as in the guidance of his own life and in the facts and processes of the history of salvation and of the kingdom of the Lord. In this idea of miracles, the essential thing is not that the phenomena and processes are inconceivable to him--although certainly in all that comes into appearance there is still an incomprehensible and uncomprehended remainder. For a form of nature, _e.g._, which turns his attention to a creator, is of course a miracle, even if he is able to look upon it with none other eye than that of the unlearned: but it even then remains a miracle,--nay, it is increased to a still greater miracle, if he has learned to contemplate and investigate it with all the auxiliary means of science. A hearing of his prayers remains a miracle, whether or not he is able to perceive the natural connection of the process in which he sees his prayers answered, or even to trace it back to the remotest times which preceded his prayers. The events and facts of the history of salvation remain miracles to him, whether the history of nature and the world offers to him auxiliary means of explaining them or not. The pious man, therefore, does not find the essential characteristic of miracles in their relative inconceivableness, but in the fact that they refer him to a living God who stands above this process, whether perceived or unperceived in its relative causal connection, and unites it with the course of things in order to reach his ends and to manifest himself to man. Now, in our attempt at a scientific reproduction of the idea of miracles, if we return to that Biblical conception, we see no longer in this just {365} mentioned religious conception of miracles a pious sophistry which avoids the difficulty of the idea, or a child-like _naivete_ worthy of being partly envied and partly pitied, which does not at all see the difficulties and remains on the child-stage of Biblical conceptions; but we only perceive in it a confirmation and fulfilment of that profound and beneficent word of our Lord: "Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein." Of course, piety as well as science makes _distinctions_ among miracles. The former separates the _mere products and processes of nature_ which, through what is explicable as well as what is inexplicable in their qualities and processes, point to an almighty and all-wise Creator, and thereby become miracles to the religious view of the world, from the