Every spore that unfolds itself into a fern, every seed that gives origin to another tenant of the forest, every egg that peoples earth or air or sea with another life, is an instance of development. It is only abbreviated evolution; evolution which gives a written record of its laws in every stage, down to the primitive ovum. There the record of the organism in itself ceases. The primitive ovum is a simple cell. The worm, the grayling, the eagle, the man, are evolved from such.
But can the egg unfold itself from this protoplasmic speck by any process save that of predetermined law and energy? Is not every law that shall act, and all the unchangeable power to enforce it, contained potentially in that globule of matter which we cannot see? Every change that is wrought, from the first that is discoverable, to the last that ensues, in the evolving egg, is one unbroken stream of method; force, with mandates, as it were, acting on matter, with special adaptations. Never did human mechanist strive more visibly to embody his prescribed purpose than do the progressive activities of the embryo lead straight to the final result. They did not, as movements, determine their own actions, or the actions of each other; they all lay together potentially from the first.
In this, if you will carry back the conception of Divine law and purpose to the beginning, and apply it to the incomprehensible majesty of the universe, I can see a miniature of suggestion as to the creative method.
Can it strip theology of one ray of the splendour of Deity, to find, from the evidence of nature, that He thought, and willed into action, the balanced forces and immutable laws, which were so related to each other, and to the foreseen requirements of onward and upward movement, that their progress is music, and their products are harmonies?—perfect adjustments—and, amidst ever-changing circumstances, ever-changing adaptations and self-adjusted design?
Can there be any splendour of the Infinite mind more ineffable and effulgent than the evidence, in His works, that in the beginning He determined the potency and prevision of all the life, and all the adaptations, that ever have emerged or can emerge?
Will it be urged that this one comprehensive law of creative action, with all its methods and potentialities complete in the beginning, must denude history of miracle? must make all things inevitable sequences, and every outcome in nature through all time only what must be, when the moment for its emergence had come? And that therefore the unforeseen would be impossible. I submit that such an inference is not inevitable. The universe becomes one lasting act of the unsearchable but immanent Eternal. The power by which the self-adjusting mechanism of the universe acts, took its rise, and has its continuity, in Him.
A miracle, in its broadest aspect, is a wonderful event; something, which from the known course of phenomena, science could not previse. Science would stultify her past and make impossible her future, if she affirmed that the unprevised and marvellous could not happen. Says Professor Huxley: ‘A miracle, in the sense of a sudden and complete change in the customary order of nature, is intelligible, can be distinctly conceived, implies no contradiction; and therefore, according to Hume’s own showing, cannot be proved false by any demonstrative argument.’[31]
Our knowledge of the observed processes of nature erects no mental barrier to the occurrence of something never before observed. Miracles are not, it is now broadly admitted, dependent on science, but on evidence for their possibility and truth. Nay, more, it is conceivable that, what to us might be profoundly miraculous, might be the outcome of sheer and unmodified natural law.
If we could annul the interval of time between the great minds of the long past and bring them into direct and intelligent contact with the most marked victories of modern research and genius, what would be the effect? Let it be imagined that Aristotle or Plato could stand by while Tyndall demonstrated to them in Athens, that they could hold direct and instant intercourse with a friend in India; or proved to them, that we can demonstrate the actual constituents of the sun and stars, and their physical conditions, with the same certainty as we can determine the analysis of an earthly compound; or bid the sunbeam paint the portrait of a bird or beast in rapid motion; or let them gaze upon the marvellous world of the minute unfolded by the modern microscope; and I do not hesitate to say that if he were the Aristotle or Plato of his own age, standing before these triumphs of this age, he would be standing in the presence of absolute miracles. Yet how have these, to Plato, unforeseen and wonderful events arisen? Only by discovery of, and absolute obedience to, the laws of nature as they are for ever and immutably acting. Man has created nothing, interrupted nothing, violated nothing: he has obeyed; and by obedience conquered.
Then grant that mind, by infinite wisdom and will, gave origin to this ever-unfolding universe, by methods that are all and for ever known to Him, as they can never be known to us, is it according to reason to contend that nothing shall ever happen even according to the strict methods of natural phenomena which past experience has never known?