What, then, are the limits of personal agency? The limits set to that incarnated intelligence which organisms possess. The ability to re-direct and distribute the energies which surround them in accordance with laws which study reveals, the ability to build dwellings for shelter and for adornment, the ability to use medicines for healing, the ability to drain marshes, dig canals, girdle the earth with iron roads, the ability to conceive things of beauty and to translate these { 122} conceptions into sensuous form, all these abilities are theirs. Such agency works within nature as a highly gifted part within a whole to which it is not alien. But experience gives us no hint of a transcendent agent for whom the earth is as a footstool and who whirls stars and planets through space to their appointed orbits.
Do miracles happen? I am often asked this question by young people who are trying to combine religious tradition with modern thought, and find a disharmony. Ecclesiastical authority urges them to the acceptance of miracles, while the principles and conclusions of science as obviously militate against any such belief. Many halt half-way between these two opinions and drift through life without having been able to come to a decision. In their moments of mysticism, when the past religious view of the world with its prestige and emotional appeal gains the upper hand, they are persuaded that all things are possible. They lose sight of nature with its massive constancy, and float back into the sentiment of personal agency so natural to man. As they listen to the poetry of the familiar passage read by the clergyman, their memories awaken, and vague hopes for they know not what are stirred to a restless life. All the surroundings and accompaniments reënforce these suggestions, for that is the transformed purpose of modern rites. The music throbs in their ears, now plaintive and low, now bursting into triumphant peals. Incense fills the air, and the lights burn dimly. Then a new psychological world is created within them. The erstwhile solid earth with its blind driving power becomes transparent and a thing { 124} to despise. The Lord reigneth to Whom all things are possible. His the power to create or to destroy, to bind or to loose, to wither or to make whole.