"At that sight your man of science trembled! He knew that life is
produced by the union of the thing and its principle, that death or
inertia or gravity is produced by a rupture between a thing and the
movement which appertains to it. Then it was that he foresaw the
crumbling of the worlds and their destruction if God should withdraw
the Breath of His Word. He searched the Apocalypse for the traces of
that Word. You thought him mad. Understand him better! He was seeking
pardon for the work of his genius.

"Wilfrid, you have come here hoping to make me solve equations, or
rise upon a rain-cloud, or plunge into the fiord and reappear a swan.
If science or miracles were the end and object of humanity, Moses
would have bequeathed to you the law of fluxions; Jesus Christ would
have lightened the darkness of your sciences; his apostles would have
told you whence come those vast trains of gas and melted metals,
attached to cores which revolve and solidify as they dart through
ether, or violently enter some system and combine with a star,
jostling and displacing it by the shock, or destroying it by the
infiltration of their deadly gases; Saint Paul, instead of telling you
to live in God, would have explained why food is the secret bond among
all creations and the evident tie between all living Species. In these
days the greatest miracle of all would be the discovery of the
squaring of the circle,--a problem which you hold to be insoluble, but
which is doubtless solved in the march of worlds by the intersection
of some mathematical lines whose course is visible to the eye of
spirits who have reached the higher spheres. Believe me, miracles are
in us, not without us. Here natural facts occur which men call
supernatural. God would have been strangely unjust had he confined the
testimony of his power to certain generations and peoples and denied