everyday
work and what we commonly call miracles
are two. One has to do with the part that
we suppose we play in initiating causes,
and the other has to do with the lapse
of time that we believe necessary between
the causes and their effects. The more
we learn about the laws that govern the
doing of anything, the less we see ourselves
as initiating agents, and the more the
time lapse shrinks.
We previously classified as a miracle the instantaneous occurrence of an event that we have been accustomed to seeing occur slowly. But we cease to call things miracles when we see them as consistent results of the operation of laws, even when we bring the time lapse down to the fraction of a second.
Let us go a step further with this idea. Electric light, as now apparently "produced" by the touching of a button, would have been a miracle in the days before men learned the laws back of the phenomenon. A hundred years ago it took perhaps a month to send a message across the Atlantic; today a man speaks in London and is simultaneously heard in New York. Miracle? Not at all; radio.
It is difficult to understand how any one even vaguely familiar with the scientific progress of the last fifty years can doubt the possibility of so-called miracles, or question, on the ground of impossibility, the miracles of Jesus of Nazareth. Whether the historical accounts that we have of Jesus' miracles are correct to the last detail or not is beside the point. One can hardly look at what is today commonly
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