are not day-light; and like the strong contrasts of early morning will all disappear as the full day approaches. The question of miracles seems to be one of the admissibility of the partial and transient in the spiritual world, a question therefore at bottom one of development.

The miracle has a far more transient service than the kindred fact of prayer. The one ministers to general conviction, the other to private faith, while both involve the submission of the natural to the supernatural. Plainly, universal laws can not be, and are not, fortunate in all their results, since they do not contemplate specific cases, but general relations. Equally clearly, universal laws would lose all their advantage, if they were to be set aside in behalf of ignorance, indolence and caprice. Is it not, then, plain that universal laws may be advantageously handled by Supreme Wisdom and Love in behalf of diligent faith, that freely commits itself to this Personal Presence? To think otherwise is to overlook spiritual relations; is to give an independent value to the inflexibility of physical things, and an importance to laws aside from the purposes they subserve. This is to submit higher spiritual ends to more gross and physical ones is to affirm a constructive necessity in law beyond the purposes of reason. Reason does not by one exercise in shaping law wave its power and lock up its wisdom forever. The superiority of reason as expressed in reasons, lies in their flexibility; its inferiority as expressed in causes in their inflexibility.

As the supernatural discloses itself more perfectly