Here, as in his other volumes, Dr. Newman displays that intellectual acumen and that plain common sense which are as characteristic of his writings as is the singular mastery over the English language which has caused him to be recognized as one of the classical writers of our day.
Valuable as this volume is to the careful student for its erudition and acute reasoning, and for the aid it gives in the polemical controversies that rise from time to time with Protestants, it is chiefly valuable, in our eyes, as a well-reasoned and, as it were, practical refutation of that rationalistic or materialistic system of false philosophy which is taught in some of our colleges, and is being spread through the land, and which either leaves God out of sight altogether, or at most acknowledges him only as the Creator and founder of the physical order. Dr. Newman, in discussing what some would term the philosophy of miracles, sets forth strongly and clearly the necessity of recognizing and taking into account the moral order, established by God, equally with the physical order, and superior to it in rank. The world is under both. To leave either out is to take only a partial view. To exclude the moral order from our consideration is to err at the very commencement of our course, and our progress will be but from error to error. The action of both orders may, and often does, coincide--would have always coincided had not sin brought in jarring and confusion. But in point of fact, they are sometimes found in opposition. A wise and good sovereign dies immaturely, leaving his sceptre to a wicked and unscrupulous successor; a good father dies early in life, and his orphans are left to grow up in ignorance and vice; a just and benevolent man dies or is ruined, and debts are left unpaid, and a stream of charity fails at the fount. And if we class the evil actions of men as belonging to this physical order, and the rationalists refuse to class them otherwise, do they not present a continual opposition between the physical and the moral orders? And if the physical order so asserts itself, should we not reasonably look for corresponding, if not greater, manifestations in the moral order?
Divine revelation itself is a fact in the moral order entirely beyond and above the physical order of nature--by its nature, a miracle. It can be proved only by miracles; and miracles are the appropriate accompaniment of its continuance as a dispensation of divine Providence. Hence, in the church--the kingdom of heaven--in which God specially reigns and rules, and in which the moral order is endowed with supernatural force, and interworks with the physical order of nature, we should as readily and as reasonably look for miracles, as, if we may be allowed a trivial comparison, we should expect, when examining a piece of complicated machinery, to find that one set of wheels will control and at times arrest the ordinary action of other wheels, and interpose some result due to their own special action in the general series of results. Not to take account of the moral and supernatural order in God’s ruling the world is not to recognize the highest and greatest of his acts. The rationalist is like a deaf man before an exquisite musical clock. His eye may follow the hands as they move round the dial; but he has closed his ears to the sweet melodies that float around him.