Part 11

If we seek the cause of these changes which fifty years have wrought in life in Constantinople, they may be summed up as the result of the constantly increasing influence of the European Powers at Constantinople and the corresponding decay of the Ottoman Empire. Sultan Mahmoud II. was one of the greatest as well as one of the most unfortunate of the sovereigns of Turkey; but he was a Sultan of the old school, whose many attempts at reform had no other object than to revive the power of Islam and restore his Empire to its former rank. He did not wish to Europeanize his people, as Peter the Great did, but simply to adopt such improvements, especially in the organization of his army, as would enable him the better to maintain himself against his European enemies. But, unhappily, he had to contend against Moslem as well as Christian foes, and to save himself from the former he had to call in the aid of the latter. His dynasty was saved by the intervention of Europe; but when Sultan Abd-ul-Medjid ascended the throne at the death of his father it was by the favour and under the protection of Europe, and from that day Turkey ceased to be the old Empire of the Ottoman Turks. Mahmoud was the last of the Sultans. Nothing remained to his successors but the shadow of a great name. Europe is undoubtedly responsible for the evils which have befallen the Empire since that day. She has neither allowed the Turks to rule in their own way, with fire and sword, as their ancestors did, nor forced them to emancipate the Christians and establish a civil government in place of their religious despotism. She has sought to maintain the Empire, but to maintain it as a weak and decaying Empire. Austria and Russia, and at times other Powers, have sought to hasten the process of disintegration, and the limits of the Empire have been gradually narrowed until they now approach the capital itself. The Turks are abused for their stupidity, as if it were all their fault; and no doubt they have done and are doing many unwise things; but after all they are not to be too harshly condemned. They have probably done what seemed to them wise and politic, and they have often outwitted the keenest statesmen; but they have been doomed by Europe to struggle against the inevitable. Turkey can never again be what she was fifty years ago, and as a Mohammedan despotism, ruled by Turks alone, she can never become a great or even a civilized Power and command the respect of Europe. She must soon disappear. But with the full emancipation of the Christians, the abolition of the present system of religious government, and the support of Western Europe, she might settle the Eastern Question for herself, win the loyal support of her own subjects and the respect of the world.

AN EASTERN STATESMAN.

MIRACLES, PRAYER, AND LAW.

In the following remarks I assume the existence of God, All-knowing and All-powerful; and of a spirit in men which is not matter. I do not say that either is demonstrated or can be demonstrated, still less do I presume to define either, but I address only those who already assent to both.

Many, however, of those who give such assent are troubled about the ways of God and the nature of man's relation to Him. On the one hand is the Bible, which declares that all things on earth as well as in heaven are regulated by Divine will at every moment, which records frequent miracles, and which bids men ask from Him whatsoever they would, in absolute confidence that they shall have their desires. On the other hand stands the Book of Nature, as Divine as that of Revelation, being in fact another revelation of God, which tells of an unchanging sequence of events, of laws incapable of modification by isolated acts of will, laws which, indeed, if subject to such modification, would fall into disorder. Which of these revelations shall they believe? Or can they be reconciled so that both are credible?

The tendency of recent belief in those who have studied the Book of Nature, and perhaps most decidedly in those who have only turned some of its pages, is that the two revelations are irreconcilable. The immutability of Nature's laws is to them a gospel taught by every stone, by every plant, by every animated being. All that they have learnt to know of matter rests on the assurance that its properties are absolutely fixed. The progress of science, of art, of civilization, of the human race, depends on the fact that what has been found to be true will be always true, that there is an ordered sequence of events which may be trusted to be invariable, to which we must conform our lives if we would be happy, and which, if we cross it in ignorance or defiance, will revenge the outrage by inevitable penalties. Those laws, which some call of matter, may by others be called laws of God, and the most devout minds find in their fixity only a confirmation of their faith in His unchanging promises. But if thus fixed, it seems to many who are devout as well as to many who are sceptical, that it becomes impossible to believe that their Author should ever set them aside by what are called miracles; still less that He should bid men pray for events which are, in fact, not regulated by wish or will, but by what has gone before up to the beginning of time. To meet this dilemma there seem to such minds only two courses, either to believe that Scripture is not the word of a God at all, or to give to its language an interpretation which is not the natural sense of the words, and which was certainly not meant or understood by those who first wrote or first heard it.

Yet it is not possible to abandon the conviction that the words and the acts of God cannot really be at variance. Before surrendering His words contained in the Scripture, as either spurious or misunderstood, no effort can be too often reiterated to show them to be compatible with what we have learned of His works. I propose to make one more such effort, based on the closest examination of what both really tell, or imply.

Let us first understand accurately what it is we are to deal with, both as facts and as expressed in language. The inquiry is to be limited (with exceptions which will be noted as they occur) to the laws of matter. It will be assumed that matter exists as our ordinary perceptions inform us, but if it shall hereafter be proved to be only a form of motion, or of force, the arguments will still be applicable. By laws, we shall understand what in a different expression we call the properties of matter. The advantage of thus explaining law is that it excludes some other senses of a vague and misleading character, while it includes the sense in which alone law can properly be applied to physical nature. Thus, the law of gravity is the same thing as the property of matter which we call weight, and if there be any matter or ether which is imponderable, then the law of gravity does not apply to it. So the law of attraction, in its different forms, expresses the property of cohesion, and of capillary ascent, and so on; the law of chemical affinities expresses the property of the combination of one species of matter with another in definite proportions; the laws of sound, light, or electricity express the properties of vibrations, either of air or of subtler forms of matter, as they affect our senses. In thus limiting the meaning of law, it is therefore obvious that we embrace all which the materialist can desire to include when he insists that law is permanent and unchangeable.

This, in fact, is the first proposition which we must all accept. No human being can add to or subtract a single property of any species of matter. To do so were, indeed, to create. For matter is an aggregate of properties; each species of matter is differentiated only by its properties, and could we alter one of these we should really turn it into different matter. It is true there are what are called allotropic forms, such as oxygen and ozone, the yellow and red phosphorus, the forms of sulphur as modified by heat, and a considerable number of organic compounds, and we can by certain arrangements turn the one into the other. But when we ask what allotropism is, we find that it is itself one of the properties (however obscure to us) of the matter we deal with. Oxygen would not be oxygen, but something else, if it had not the inherent property of becoming ozone under certain conditions. Given these conditions, and there is nothing we can do which will prevent the change occurring. If, as chemists believe, allotropism depends on the different arrangement of the ultimate atoms of matter, then the capacity of assuming two arrangements in its atoms is clearly one of the ultimate properties of that species of matter.

It follows, then, that if a miracle were really a suspension of a physical law, or a change, temporary or permanent, of any property of matter, it would really be an act of creation--the creation of something having different properties from any matter that before existed. If iron were to float on water by suspension of the law of gravity, it would be in fact the creation of something having (at least for the time required) the physical and chemical properties of iron, but with a specific gravity less than water--and therefore something not iron.

But, without creation, man has enormous power over Nature. He can, and daily does, overpower her laws, or seemingly make them work as he pleases. Despite the law of gravity, he ascends to the sky in a balloon; he makes water spring up in fountains; he makes vessels, weighing thousands of tons, float on the seas. Despite cohesion, he grinds rocks to powder; despite chemical affinity, he transmutes into myriads of different forms the few elements of which all matter consists; despite the resistless power of the thunderbolt, he tames electricity to be his servant or his harmless toy. With water and fire he moulds into shape mighty masses of metal; he shoots, at a sustained speed beyond that of birds, across valleys and through mountain ranges; he unites seas which continents had separated; there is nothing in the whole earth which he has not subdued, or does not hope to subdue, to his use. There is hardly a physical miracle which he does not feel he can, or may yet, perform.

But all this wonderful, this boundless, power over material laws is gained by these laws. He alters no property of matter, but he uses one property or another as he needs, and he uses one property to overpower another. It is by knowing that gravity is more powerful in the case of air than in the case of hydrogen gas, that he makes air sustain him as he floats, beneath a bag of hydrogen, above the earth; it is by knowing that it is more powerful in water than in air that he sails in iron ships; it is by knowing chemical affinity or repulsion that he makes the compounds or extracts the simple elements he desires; it is by knowing that affinity is force, and that force is transmutable into electricity, that he makes a messenger of the obedient lightning shock; it is by knowing that heat, itself unknown, causes gases to expand, that he makes machines of senseless iron do the work of intelligent giants. He subdues Nature by understanding Nature. He creates no property; he therefore performs no miracle, though he does marvels.

By what means, then, does man bring one property, or law, into play instead of, or against, another? By one means only, that of changing the position of matter.

This is Bacon's aphorism (Nov. Org. Book i. 4): "Man contributes nothing to operations except the applying or withdrawing of natural bodies: Nature, internally, performs the rest."

In order to trace and recognize the truth of this fact, let us follow in rough and rapid outline the operations by which man effects his purposes. We will begin at the beginning, and suppose him to have only reached the stage when a knowledge of the effects of fire enables him to work with metals. He produces fire by friction--that is, by bringing one piece of wood to another, and rapidly moving the one on the other; or else by striking two flints on each other, which also is merely rapid motion and shock. He carries the wood to a hearth, he brings to it the lump of crude metal or the ore; he urges the fire by a blast of air--still his acts are only those of imparting motion. Then the fire acts on the metal, it excites some affinities and enfeebles other affinities, which result in removing impurities; it softens the purified metal. Then the workman lifts it on a stone, and by beating it with another stone--still motion--he moves its particles so that it assumes the form of a hammer, an axe, a chisel, or a file. Then by rubbing with a rough stone--still motion--he moves away some particles from the edge, and makes it sharp and fit for cutting. By plunging it in water when hot--still only motion--he tempers it to hardness. With the edge thus obtained he cuts wood into the forms he requires for various purposes, and by degrees he learns how to fashion other pieces of metal into other and more elaborate tools. Yet all this is done by no other means than giving motion to the material on which, or by which, he works. From tools he advances to machines, by which his power of giving motion is increased, and as he learns more of the properties of matter he constructs engines, by which these properties work for him in the directions in which he guides them. Meantime he has learned that clay, when heated, becomes hard as stone, and the arts of pottery take their rise; while glass-making follows on the discovery that ashes and sand fuse into a transparent mass. Yet, whether in their rude beginning or finished elegance, man in these arts does no more than bring together the rough materials and apply to them heat, then their own inherent properties effect the result. Science--that is, knowledge of natural laws of matter--guides his hand, but his hand only moves matter; it gives no property and takes away none; it does not even enable one property to work; it does absolutely nothing except to place matter where its own laws work, to bring or to remove matter which is needed, or to remove matter which is superfluous. Let us analyze every complicated triumph of human knowledge and skill, and we shall find it all reduced to the knowledge of what the properties of matter are, and the skill which imparts to it motion just sufficient to permit these properties to operate. Man's power over Nature is therefore limited to the power of giving motion to matter, or of stopping or resisting motion in matter.

Now, to give motion or to resist motion is itself either a breach or a use of a law of Nature, according as we express that law. The law is (as usually expressed), that matter at rest remains at rest till moved by a force, and that matter in motion continues in motion till stayed by a force. This is the law of inertia. If we consider that rest or motion when once established is the normal state of matter, then the force which causes a change causes a breach of the law of inertia. But if we consider that the liability to be moved, or to have motion stopped by force, is itself a property of matter, then the application of force with such result is merely calling into operation the law of inertia. It really does not signify which view we take, so long as we recognize that such are the facts. But since it is more familiar to associate rest with inertia, it will perhaps be most convenient and simple to consider rest and motion as the laws of matter, till the law is interfered with. Therefore in what follows we shall say, that when matter at rest is moved, or when matter in motion is stayed, or its movement by a natural force is prevented, a breach of the law of inertia is committed.

We come, then, to these propositions:--1st, That human power is utterly unable to break any law of matter except the law of inertia. 2nd, That when, by breaking only the law of inertia--_i.e._, by moving or by resisting the motion of matter--any operation is accomplished, no other law of matter is broken. 3rd, That to break the law of inertia by Force, directed by Will, is no interference with the properties of matter. 4th, That by breaking the law of inertia only, man has power to call into play properties which make matter subservient to his objects.

Nor is this man's power only. Inferior animals can also move matter, and by moving it can cause prodigious results. A minute insect, by secreting lime from sea waters, makes a coral reef, or aids in forming a cliff of chalk. A beaver cuts down a tree, and forms a swamp that changes the climate of a district; a bird carries a seed, and makes a forest on an island. Inanimate life has the same power. The plant opens its leaves to the sun, and abstracts the carbon that forms fruitful soils and beds of coal. Matter itself can by motion work on matter. The great physical powers, heat and electricity, are modes of motion. Radiation of heat causes freezing, and freezing crumbles rocks into soil, or it forms the clouds in the air, whose deluges hollow valleys; while electricity cleaves and splinters the summits of the mountain peaks. Everywhere motion, sharp or slow, works with matter; everywhere the law of inertia is broken; and everywhere the miracles of Nature are wrought out by Nature's unbroken laws, set in action or withheld by only the movement which matter has received, be it from Will in man or beast, or be it from forces which themselves are part of matter's properties.

Now, since we have started from the assumption that God does exist, it is impossible to make Him an exception to the rule which holds of the spirits of inferior creatures, and even of inanimate matter. If, therefore, He can cause or stop movement, He can, without further breach of any law of Nature, bring into play the laws of Nature. Or, to state the same proposition conversely, we must admit that whatever wonders God may cause by bringing into operation a law of Nature through the means of affecting motion in matter, cannot be called a breach of the laws of Nature. It is, of course, understood that this proposition is limited to the results of motion; it does not affirm that the cause of the motion may not be a breach of a law of Nature. This question will remain for future examination; at present it is neither affirmed nor denied.

Let us in the meantime, however, consider what we have reached by the proposition above stated. What are called miracles may be divided into three classes. The first are purely spiritual, affecting mind without the intervention of matter, such as visions (though these _may_ originate in the brain, and therefore belong to the next class), gifts of tongues, inspirations, mental resolutions. The second affect mind in connection with matter, such as, perhaps, the healing of paralytic or epileptic affections, and certainly the restoration of life to the dead. The third affect matter solely; they include the healing of wounds, or of corporeal disease, such as blindness, or fever; the dividing of waters; the walking on water, or raising an iron axe-head from the bottom of water; the falling of walls or trees; the opening of prison-doors, and such like.

The first two classes we may, in any discussion limited to the laws of Nature, leave out of view, because it cannot be said that we know any laws of Nature affecting mind by itself, or even mind in relation to matter. Metaphysicians have interested themselves in trying to trace the origin or sequence of intellectual processes, but I hardly think any would assert they had discovered or defined what can properly be called a law; and certainly, if any do assert it, the accuracy of the assertion is controverted by as many philosophers on the other side. Any direct influence of God on mind cannot, therefore, be charged with being in violation of natural law. Nor can it even be declared to be contrary to universal experience, since in this case the negative evidence of those who have not experienced it would only be set against the positive evidence of innumerable persons who affirm that they have experienced it.

The influence of mind on matter, and matter on mind, are also so obscure, that it cannot be affirmed that anything which mental operation can effect on one's own body is contrary to natural law. No physiologist will assert that mental resolution, or conviction, tending towards recovery from sickness, is without some power to bring that result to pass. They will admit also that this is peculiarly the case in regard to those disorders which, in pure ignorance of their actual source, they are fain to call hysterical, neuralgic, or generally nervous. They are all acquainted with many cases in their own experience of recovery from such disorders in which no physical cause for recovery can be imagined. If, then, God should convey to the mind of a patient an impression which brings about recovery, there would clearly be no violation of natural law. With regard to the restoration of life, it is quite true that this is beyond the ordinary power of man's volition. Nevertheless, at each moment of our lives there is a communication of life to the dead matter which has formed our food, but which, after digestion, becomes a part of our living organs; and this is true even in the nutrition of plants. How or at what moment the mind enters or becomes capable of affecting our frames, we do not know. But this happens at some moment before or during birth; its doing so at a subsequent period is, therefore, not a breach of natural law, but is only an instance of natural law coming into operation, by the same cause, at a period differing from that which is customary. The _act_, whatever it is, is not exceptional, but ordinary. The _time_ is alone exceptional.

We have now to consider the strictly physical phenomena to which the name of miracles is in this discussion confined, and to which the objection that they are contrary to natural laws is commonly stated.

A very large number of these are at first glance seen to be only instances of inertia being affected. To walk on water, to make water stand in a heap, to raise a body from the ground, to cast down walls, or move bolts and doors, are obviously exertions of simple mechanical force such as we ourselves daily employ. Their effective cause is neither more nor less than an interference with the law of inertia, and by the previous demonstration they are therefore not to be reckoned as breaches of any law of Nature.