Editorial note — LESSON XIV.
Reading edition
[Footnote A: "In the progress of science, all phenomena have been shown, by indisputable evidence, to be amenable to law, and even in the cases in which those laws have not yet been exactly ascertained, delay in ascertaining them is fully accounted for by the special difficulties of the subject; the defenders of miracles have adapted their argument to this altered state of things, by maintaining that a miracle need not necessarily be a violation of law. It may, they say, take place in fulfilment of a more recondite law, to us unknown.
"If by this it be only meant that the Divine Being, in the exercise of his power of interfering with and suspending his own laws, guides himself by some general principle or rule of action, this, of course, cannot be disproved, and is in itself the most probable supposition." ("Theism," in "Three Essays on Religion"—Mill,—pp. 223-4.)
Shedd treats upon the same theme and much in the same spirit; "The miracle is not contrary to all nature but only to nature as known to us," he represents the Apologists of early Christianity as saying, and then quotes a long and admirable passage from Augustine. ("History of Christian Doctrine," Vol. I, pp. 167-169.)]