Note 113 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

How far the process of reasoning had gone among quiet thinking people before the Revolution may be gathered from the essay entitled Miracles no Violations of the Laws of Nature, published in 1683.113 Its thesis is that put explicitly by Montaigne and implicitly by Bacon, that Ignorance is the only worker of miracles; in other words, “that the power of God and the power of Nature are one and the same”—a simple and straightforward way of putting a conception which Cudworth had put circuitously and less courageously a few years before. No Scriptural miracle is challenged qua event. “Among the many miracles related to be done in favour of the Israelites,” says the writer, “there is (I think) no one that can be apodictically demonstrated to be repugnant to th’ establisht Order of Nature”;114 and he calmly accepts the Biblical account of the first rainbow, explaining it as passing for a miracle merely because it was the first. He takes his motto from Pliny: “Quid non miraculo est, cum primum in notitiam venit?”115 This is, however, a preliminary strategy; as is the opening reminder that “most of the ancient Fathers ... and of the most learned Theologues among the moderns” hold that the Scriptures as regards natural things do not design to instruct men in physics but “aim only to excite pious affections in their breasts.”