"'But is it not the deepest law of Nature that she be constant?' cried an illuminated class: 'Is not the machine of the universe fixt to move by unalterable rules?' Probable enough good friends. . . . . And now of you, too, I make the old inquiry: What those same unalterable rules, forming the complete statute book of Nature, may possibly be?
"'They stand written in our works of science,' say you; 'in the accumulated record of man's experience.' Was man with his experience present at the creation, then, to see how it all went on? Have any deepest scientific individuals yet dived down to the foundations of the universe, and gauged everything there? Did the Maker take them into his counsel, that they read his ground-plan of the incomprehensible All, and can say, This stands marked therein, and no more than this? Alas, not in any wise!" . . . .
"To the minnow, every cranny and pebble and quality and accident, of its little native creek may have become familiar; but does the minnow understand the ocean tides and periodic currents, the trade winds and monsoons and moon's eclipses, by all which the condition of its little creek is regulated, and may, from time to time (unmiraculously enough) be quite upset and reversed? Such a minnow is man; his creek this planet earth; his ocean the immeasurable All; his monsoons and periodic currents the mysterious force of Providence through aeons of aeons."—Sartor Resartus, Natural Supernaturalism, pp. 275-278.
[3]. Gen. 1:3.
[4]. "Everybody recalls how the Red Sea was rolled aside in order that the Isaraelites under Moses might pass over safely; how the river Jordan, a few later, was driven back, that Joshua and his army might cross; and how Sodom and Gomorrah were overwhelmed with fire and brimstone for their sins . . . . Geologists are now inclined to believe that the recession of the sea might have been caused by an earthquake pushing up a rock stratum under tremendous pressure. The water would return in some degree upon the subsidence of the stratum. The various miraculous events referred to occurred about the year 1500 B. C., and there is a curious similarity between them. It now appears probable from scientific research that these occurrences were the last of a series of terrific earthquake disturbances that changed the entire surface of the globe."—W. H. Ballou, D. Sc.
[5]. Ex. 14:21-31.
[6]. Joshua 10:12.
[7]. Ib. vv. 13, 14.
[8]. James 5:14.