[To THE EDITOR Or THU "SPECTATOR.") SIR,—I shall be grateful
if you will kindly allow me to make two remarks upon the letter of Mr. F. R. Cave in your issue of last Saturday.
(1) Mr. Cave rightly points out that Huxley did not regard changes in the order of Nature as impossible, though he held them to be improbable, on the ground of the "great act of faith" in the uniformity of Nature, on which he Considered- " the validity of all our reasonings" to depend. But such possible, though improbable, variations of the course of Nature are by no means what Christians understand by miracles.. They believe them to be, not mere natural variations, but exceptions to the ordinary mode in which natural forces are directed by divine power, expreasly designed to exhibit the supremacy of the Creator over all His works. But since Huxley could find no evidence of the existence of a divine Creator, it follows that the occurrence of miracles in this sense was in hi a opinion impossible. No event in Nature, however extraordinary, can rightly be attributed to the power- of a supernatural Being whose existence is "not proven."
(2) The ground which "C. S. B." asserts to be common to agnostics and Modernists is of much wider extent than that covered by the particular question of the credibility of miracles. Both alike reject the transcendental doctrines of theology, and confine their view to the sphere of phenomena, in which the Modernist perceives a sufficient basis for his peculiar doctrine of "immanence," and the agnostic for the above-mentioned "act of faith,"—a conviction that "all scientific evidence points to the fact that the laws of Nature are invariable." Thus, even if a discrepancy could be shown to exist between the respective views of agnosticism and Modernism in regard to the abstract possibility of miracles, the fundamental identity of their positions would still be sufficiently apparent.
May I add that I am not "C. S. B.," whose opinion on this subject may possibly (though, I think, not probably) differ from mine ?--I am, Sir, Sze., A. B. SHAMPE.• Carshalton House, Carshalton, Surrey.
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