* * * * *

It is a fallacy of the suppressed relative to describe virtue as determined by the moral nature of God, as opposed to his arbitrary will.  The essence of Morality is obedience to a superior, to a Law; where there is no superior there is nothing either moral or immoral.  The supreme power is incapable of an immoral act.  Parliament may do what is injurious, it cannot do what is illegal.  So the Deity may be beneficent or maleficent, he cannot be moral or immoral.

* * * * *

Among the various ways, proposed in the seventeenth century, of solving the difficulty of the mutual action of the heterogeneous agencies—­matter and mind—­one was a mode of Divine interference, called the “Theory of Occasional Causes”.  According to this view, the Deity exerted himself by a perpetual miracle to bring about the mental changes corresponding to the physical agents operating on our senses—­light, sound, &c.  Now in the mode of action suggested there is nothing self-contradictory; but in the use of the word “miracle” there is a mistake of relativity.  The meaning of a miracle is an exceptional interference; it supposes an habitual state of things, from which it is a deviation.  The very idea of miracle is abolished if every act is to be alike miraculous.

* * * * *

[MYSTERY CORRELATES WITH THE INTELLIGIBLE.]

We shall devote the remainder of this exposition to a still more notable class of mistakes due to the suppression of a correlative member in a relative couple—­those, namely, connected with the designation, “Mystery,” a term greatly abused, in various ways, and especially by disregarding its relative character.  Mystery supposes certain things that are plain, intelligible, knowable, revealed; and, by contrast to these, refers to certain other things that are obscure, unintelligible, unknowable, unrevealed.  When a man’s conduct is entirely plain, straightforward, or accounted for, we call that an intelligible case; when we are perplexed by the tortuosities of a crafty, double-dealing person, we say it is all very mysterious.  So, in nature, we consider that we understand certain phenomena:  such as gravity, and all its consequences, in the fall of bodies, the flow of rivers, the motions of the planets, the tides.  On the other hand, earthquakes and volcanoes are very mysterious; we do not know what they depend upon, how or in what circumstances they are produced.  Some of the operations of living bodies are understood,—­as the heart’s action in the mechanical propulsion of the blood; others, and the greater number, are mysterious, as the whole process of germination and growth.  Now the existence of the contrast between things plainly understood, and things not understood, gives one distinct meaning to the term Mystery.  In some cases, a mystery is formed by an apparent contradiction, as in the Theological mystery of Free-will and Divine