“At that sight your man of science trembled!  He knew that life is produced by the union of the thing and its principle, that death or inertia or gravity is produced by a rupture between a thing and the movement which appertains to it.  Then it was that he foresaw the crumbling of the worlds and their destruction if God should withdraw the Breath of His Word.  He searched the Apocalypse for the traces of that Word.  You thought him mad.  Understand him better!  He was seeking pardon for the work of his genius.

“Wilfrid, you have come here hoping to make me solve equations, or rise upon a rain-cloud, or plunge into the fiord and reappear a swan.  If science or miracles were the end and object of humanity, Moses would have bequeathed to you the law of fluxions; Jesus Christ would have lightened the darkness of your sciences; his apostles would have told you whence come those vast trains of gas and melted metals, attached to cores which revolve and solidify as they dart through ether, or violently enter some system and combine with a star, jostling and displacing it by the shock, or destroying it by the infiltration of their deadly gases; Saint Paul, instead of telling you to live in God, would have explained why food is the secret bond among all creations and the evident tie between all living Species.  In these days the greatest miracle of all would be the discovery of the squaring of the circle,—­a problem which you hold to be insoluble, but which is doubtless solved in the march of worlds by the intersection of some mathematical lines whose course is visible to the eye of spirits who have reached the higher spheres.  Believe me, miracles are in us, not without us.  Here natural facts occur which men call supernatural.  God would have been strangely unjust had he confined the testimony of his power to certain generations and peoples and denied them to others.  The brazen rod belongs to all.  Neither Moses, nor Jacob, nor Zoroaster, nor Paul, nor Pythagoras, nor Swedenborg, not the humblest Messenger nor the loftiest Prophet of the Most High are greater than you are capable of being.  Only, there come to nations as to men certain periods when Faith is theirs.

“If material sciences be the end and object of human effort, tell me, both of you, would societies,—­those great centres where men congregate,—­would they perpetually be dispersed?  If civilization were the object of our Species, would intelligence perish? would it continue purely individual?  The grandeur of all nations that were truly great was based on exceptions; when the exception ceased their power died.  If such were the End-all, Prophets, Seers, and Messengers of God would have lent their hand to Science rather than have given it to Belief.  Surely they would have quickened your brains sooner than have touched your hearts!  But no; one and all they came to lead the nations back to God; they proclaimed the sacred Path in simple words that showed the way to heaven; all were wrapped in love and faith, all were inspired by that word which hovers above the inhabitants of earth, enfolding them, inspiriting them, uplifting them; none were prompted by any human interest.  Your great geniuses, your poets, your kings, your learned men are engulfed with their cities; while the names of these good pastors of humanity, ever blessed, have survived all cataclysms.