Mr. Mozley points out, with that increased power in our time of realising the past, which is not the peculiarity of individual writers, but is “part of the thought of the time.”  But though it has been quickened and sharpened by these influences, it rests ultimately on that sense which all men have in common of the customary and regular in their experience of the world.  The world, which we all know, stands alone, cut off from any other; and a miracle is an intrusion, “an interpolation of one order of things into another, confounding two systems which are perfectly distinct.”  The broad, deep resistance to it which is awakened in the mind when we look abroad on the face of nature is expressed in Emerson’s phrase—­“A miracle is a monster.  It is not one with the blowing clouds or the falling rain.”  Who can dispute it?  Yet the rejoinder is obvious, and has often been given—­that neither is man.  Man, who looks at nature and thinks and feels about its unconscious unfeeling order; man, with his temptations, his glory, and his shame, his heights of goodness, and depths of infamy, is not one with those innocent and soulless forces so sternly immutable—­“the blowing clouds and falling rain.”  The two awful phenomena which Kant said struck him dumb—­the starry heavens, and right and wrong—­are vainly to be reduced to the same order of things.  Nothing can be stranger than the contrast between the rigid, inevitable sequences of nature, apparently so elastic only because not yet perfectly comprehended, and the consciousness of man in the midst of it.  Nothing can be stranger than the juxtaposition of physical law and man’s sense of responsibility and choice.  Man is an “insertion,” an “interpolation in the physical system”; he is “insulated as an anomaly in the midst of matter and material law.”  Mr. Mozley’s words are striking:—­

The first appearance, then, of man in nature was the appearance of a new being in nature; and this fact was relatively to the then order of things miraculous; no more physical account can be given of it than could be given of a resurrection to life now.  What more entirely new and eccentric fact, indeed, can be imagined than a human soul first rising up amidst an animal and vegetable world?  Mere consciousness—­was not that of itself a new world within the old one?  Mere knowledge—­that nature herself became known to a being within herself, was not that the same?  Certainly man was not all at once the skilled interpreter of nature, and yet there is some interpretation of nature to which man as such is equal in some degree.  He derives an impression from the sight of nature which an animal does not derive; for though the material spectacle is imprinted on its retina, as it is on man’s, it does not see what man sees.  The sun rose, then, and the sun descended, the stars looked down upon the earth, the mountains climbed to heaven, the cliffs stood upon the shore, the same as now, countless ages before a single