Mr. refine it. The larger and more varied the " European States." We will leave Mr number of readers, the greater becomes the Seward to settle with his Radical countrynecessity of consulting average tastes. This men as to the effect of the war upon slavery, is, we think, the main cause why most of and with President Johnson as to the possithe popular fiction of the present day is so bilities of disunion; but after the experiintensely commonplace in its general tone ence of the past summer we are not so sanwhy it so studiously avoids whatever bor-guine as as to suppose that the new method ders on the heroic. The noblest novel that of communication will have much more our generation has yet seen, Romola, is by influence upon Englishmen's knowledge of no means popular; we might almost say America than the existence of a telegraph that it is unpopular, considering its author's between Dover and Calais has had upon commanding reputation. And in Felix their knowledge of the Continent. Holt the same great writer has no doubt Reuter is an extremely useful person, but sacrificed popularity in presenting a hero the only contribution he has yet made to for whom the money-making, pushing the cause of political education consists in gigmanity" of this age has so little sym- the mental exercise that is occasionally propathy. But although contemporaneous fic- vided by the difficulty of making sense of tion is so far obliged to abdicate its proper his telegrams. functions and refrain from working counter to national prejudice, it may still claim the credit of reflecting the healthiest and heartiest aspects of the national character; for the sensational trash which is just now all the rage seems only an excresence which will pass away as suddenly as it appeared. And the present practical age scarcely does sufficient justice to the beneficial influence which fiction, even when it works only at the average level, may exercise upon the national mind. 66 From the Saturday Review. THE RECOVERY OF THE CABLE. The truth is that people who wish to moralize on the success of the Atlantic cable seem persistently to go to to work at the wrong end of the story. The lessons to be learnt from it have regard, not to the consequences, but to the causes of that success. Probably public affairs may for a long time to come goon, both in England and America, without any perceptible variation from the course they would have taken if the expedition of 1866 had been as unfortunate as that of 1865. But if we never get anything more from the promoters of the Atlantic Telegraph than the daily quotations of the price of gold at New York, with which the eager politician is as yet obliged to content himself, we should still be greatly indebted to them for the admirable example of perseverance that has been exhibited by all ATLANTIC concerned. The recovery of the cable of 1865 is in this respect even more interesting than the triumphant laying of its successor. We have never read a narrative which brought out more prominently the best features of commercial enterprise than the account which was published last Tuesday. From the day on which the expedition left the harbour of Heart's Content to the day on which the Great Eastern began once more to pay out the cable which she had parted company with the year before, the history of the voyage is an unbroken record of wisely directed energy, acting for the most part in the teeth of the most unfavourable circumstances. The ships started from Heart's Content on Thursday, August the 9th, and found themselves immediately in the midst of one of those dense Newfoundland fogs that scarcely allow the sailor to see more than a foot beyond the vessel's bow. By Sunday, the 12th, they had reached the scene of their labours, but the weather had changed, and a strong. MR. SEWARD'S message to Mr. Cyrus Field may be taken, we trust, as the last political moral which will be drawn from the laying of the Atlantic cable. At any other time it would be hard to see the reason of such a very obvious misstatement as that the existence of telegraphic intercourse between Europe and America in 1861 would have enabled us to foresee the issue of a war which was not finally decided till four years later. But, in the present position of American politics, every occasion is naturally seized for giving expression to what the speaker considers a telling bit of claptrap; and the arrival of the Great Eastern in Newfoundland supplied the Secretary of State with an opportunity which he was not the man to let slip. The "error of supposing that civil war in America could either perpetuate African slavery or divide the Republic" is not, however, confined to western gale was raising waves "at least twenty-five feet in height from hollow to crest.' Two days later, the wind had gone down, but only to be succeeded by a calm almost equally unsuited to the work that had to be done. At length, however, on Thursday the 16th, the cable was reported hooked, and the process of heaving in the grapnel commenced. A pause was made during the night, but by half-past ten the next morning only fifteen fathoms of the chain remained to be lifted. The next quarter of an hour was perhaps the most exciting of the whole undertaking. It was exactly one year since the Great Eastern had stopped off Crookhaven, and the despatch giving the details of the failure and the reasons for anticipating an eventual success had been sent on shore. Notwithstanding the sceptism which this prediction called forth, the promoters of the enterprise had kept to their point, and now what they had insisted upon as a possibility seemed on the eve of becoming an accomplished fact. The bows of the Great Eastern were crowded with anxious spectators, and at a quarter to eleven the cable of 1865 rose above the surface. One half of it was covered with a fine white ooze, soft as putty and full of minute shells; the other half, which had never been imbeded, showed its tarred surface absolutely unchanged from what it had been when lowered twelve months before. Professor Thomson calculated that nine miles of cable were, suspended by the grapnel, each half of the curve from the angle formed by the grapnel to the point where the cable touched the bottom being four miles and a half long. There was but little time, however, in which to make observations, for before the cheers which welcomed its appearance had died away the cable had parted from the grapnel, and all the trouble had gone for nothing. After such a disappointment as this, we can hardly wonder that the ship's company never altogether recovered their first spirits, and that the final success was achieved in the midst of a silence which told of men who were almost afraid to hope. since the ship had passed over the cable during the night without hooking it. On the 27th fortune was a little kinder. A piece of the cable which had been cut off from the grapnel before buoying it on the preceding day was hooked and successfully landed on the deck of the Great Eastern. This success was of but little value in itself, but it served to establish the important fact that a year's submersion had not injured the cable in the smallest degree, even the guttapercha coating being" as new in appearance as when it left the manufactory." Meanwhile, however, the eight days which Captain Anderson had calculated would be enough for the task that lay before him had long expired, the consorts of the Great Eastern were running short of provisions, and the Terrible had to leave for St. Johns. On the 29th it was determined to give up any further attempts at that point, and to run a hundred miles to the eastward, with the view of recommencing operations in shallower water. By Friday, the 31st, the Great Eastern was over" the 1,600 fathom patch," and on Saturday the grapnel was lowered for the fiftieth time. The sea was perfectly calm, and all on board were impressed with a consciousness that if they failed this time there was little chance of doing anything during the present season. Happily, however, their experience of ill luck was at an end. From four in the afternoon, when the process of hauling in began, everything went forward with unbroken regularity and smoothness, and by midnight the bows of the ship were once more thronged in anticipation of the critical moment. Precisely at ten minutes to one, on the morning of Sunday, September the 2nd, the cable once more appeared above the water, but the recollection of the disappointment a fortnight before checked all display of enthusiasm, and "the men scarcely spoke above their breath." It took some time longer to secure the cable and pass it down to the chief electrician's room, and it was not till the latter gentleman had reported that communication was re-established with Valentia that the unnatural strain upon all present was at an end, and shouts and rockets announced to the attendant vessels that the principle object of the expedition had been attained. The next fortnight offers little else than a chronicle of disaster. The cable was caught on the 19th, but the weather had again become so threatening that no progress could be made in hauling it in. No further at- We fear it is but a partial compensation tempt was made till the 22nd, and then the to the shareholders of the Atlantic Telegraph grapnel only brought up a "piece of gran- Company for the depreciation of their propite-like stone." Saturday, the 25th, was erty, that the failure of last year has been spent in repairing the ropes, but in the even- the means of giving so much additional ing the grapnel was again lowered. The brilliancy to the triumph of this year. There next day saw only fresh discouragement, can be no question, however, that the re of Mr. Mozley, he possesses the sort of mind Infelix operis summa quia ponere totum covery of the old cable was in all respects a more remarkable achievement than the laying of the new one. The latter might have been the result of pre-eminent good luck; the former was from first to last a singular example of scientific foresight, and of the adaptation of means to ends. Few undertakings can show so careful a study of the necessary conditions of success on the part But, whatever be the reason, there is someof everybody concerned; few have exacted thing about this volume that is inconceivmore entire confidence from their promoters, ably tantalizing to the reader. Pages peror made so large a return for the concession. petually occur full of clear bright thought, We should be tempted to draw the inevit-written with a solid, restrained, compressed, able moral of the superiority of private over logical eloquence that leads one captive public enterprise, and to compare the history whether one will or not; and then perhaps of this Atlantic cable with some recent a broad prairie of tangled intellectual thicknaval experiences, if it were not for one et-thoughts started, followed out over human imperfection which serves to bring three-quarters of their course, and then let this great instance of commercial heroism a drop - which gives one the feeling that the little nearer our common level. The small- author has all but mastered his materials, ness of the results that have hitherto been and that, if just the finishing stroke had obtained from the opening of the telegraph been put to the work, it would have been is due, it seems, to the absence of any proper something nearly perfect of its kind. The communication between Newfoundland and very order of the Lectures is confusing; and the Continent. Since last year the wires it is the more annoying when the natural between those points have got out of work- order presented by the subject seems siming order, and consequently there is a very plicity itself. The possibility of miracles considerable delay in the transmission of (ie. the answer to all objections à priori), messages to and from the United States the probability of those of the Bible, and, It seems scarcely credible that, with the finally, the positive evidence of their occurfull knowledge that the attempt to lay a rence as matters of fact, make up a cable across the Atlantic would be renewed time-honoured and, we think, a tolerably this summer, this necessary link in the chain exhaustive line of argument. It is difficult should have been suffered to go to decay; to find anything worth saying on the subject and the only consolation to be drawn from which might not readily come under one or the circumstance is, that as Companies are other of these heads. On the other hand, sometimes not much wiser than Govern- one does not see what a reader new to the ments, Governments may in time come to be subject is likely to make out of a string of not much more foolish than Companies. essays headed-1. Miracles necessary for a Revelation. 2. Order of Nature. Influence of the Imagination in Belief.__4. Belief in a God. 5. Testimony. 6. Unknown Law. 7. Miracles regarded in their Practical Result. 8. False Miracles. "Let not your good be evil spoken of," applies as much to literary as to moral working, and Mr. Mozley will have discovered the fact before now. criticism with a sneer that this logical writer A keen writer has edged a asserts the necessity of miracles before he has attempted to show their possibility; implying that the orthodox argument, feeling From the Saturday Review. We think this book will live; were it not one of the series of Bampton Lectures, we should add, it will live to be rewritten. Possibly it arises from the cramping effect of the Bampton regulations, under which whatever a writer has to say must be arranged in just eight lectures, neither less nor more; or possibly, as we rather think we gathered from one or two former works Eight Lectures on Miracles, preached before the University of Oxford at the Bampton Lecture in the Year 1865. By J. B. Mozley, B. D., Vicar of Old Shoreham, late Fellow of Magdalen College. London: Rivingtons. 1865. 3. that it must have a Revelation at all haz ards, accepts miracles as a sort of necessary evil, in ordine ad spiritualia, as Bellarmine The sneer is nothing more than a sneer, as says of certain other temporal accidents. Mr. Mozley incidentally shows more than once; but it is a grave inistake to have laid himself open to it, and this is very far from being a solitary example in his pages. To ourselves the question has always appeared as simple as a matter can be which involves at least one element as yet beyond our power of exact comprehension. The only difficulty, to a believer in a personal God, seems to arise from a fallacy in the use of the word world. We are accustomed to see it and speak of it as one world, and hence we look upon its laws as one and uniform for all its inhabitants, animate and inanimate. The truth is that we live, if we may so speak, in a multitude of worlds. The old nomenclature which spoke of the inorganic world, the vegetable world, the animal world, &c., had a real substratum of good sense in it. These are really as separate worlds as if they were located in separate spheres, instead of existing side by side on this one earth on which we see them all in operation together. They have some laws in common that of gravitation, for instance; but each has others peculiar to itself; and what are the rules of ordinary life to one are, in a very definite sense, miracles to those beneath it. What is an ordinary function of life to a tree is impossible to a stone; what is the commonest action to an animal is impossible to a tree. And if we go on to the higher stages of animal being -to the rational life of man, and the supernatural life of the spiritual man, a life shared in some small degree by "partakers of the Divine nature" here, but in its fulness only to be developed in a higher stage of existthe same rule holds. What is the common way of life to the higher is, when it happens, a miracle in the lower. In this view, the events which we commonly call miracles are simply interventions of the law of a higher life in that of a lower, just as the law of a man's being interferes with that of a stone's when he gives it a kick, and communicates to it for the moment a power which to it, left to itself, is impossible. And it is worth remarking how entirely the miracles of the New Testament fall in with what we have just been saying. The removal of disease, the making man independent of ordinary supplies of food, the renewal of life what are all these but the laws of the higher being, of which they are the familiar attributes, interfering in single instances with the ordinary life of the lower examples in the highest form of life of what familiarly happens in its lower ones? A man or a horse makes the law of his being impinge upon that of a stone when he gives it a kick, and no doubt the stone would think it a miracle, if it were equal to the operation of thinking at all; what more is it (save in degree) when the law of a world ence of eternal health and life impinges upon that of a world of sickness and death? This is only, after all, a development of a sentence of Bishop Butler: - "There may be beings in the universe whose capacities and knowledge and views may be so extensive as that the whole Christian dispensation may to them appear natural, i.e. analogous or conformable to God's dealings with other parts of His creation; as natural as the visible known course of things appears to us." Mr. Mozley quotes the sentence, and works it out much as we have done, only in two passages so widely severed as the third Lecture and the sixth. In the former he says: The record which this earth gives of itself shows that, after a succession of stages and periods of vegetable and animal change, a new being made his appearance in nature. Those who profess to trace the bodily frame of man to. a common animal source still admit that the rational and moral being, man, is separated from all other animal natures by a chasm in the chain of causation, which cannot be filled up; and that even if such a transition is only conceived as a leap from a lower to a higher level in the same species, such a leap is only another word for an inexplicable mystery." The first appearance of man in nature was the appearance of a new being in nature, and this fact was, relatively to the then order of things, miraculous; no more physical account can be given of it than could be given of a resurrection to life now. What more entirely new and eccentric fact, indeed, can be imagined than a human soul first rising up amidst an animal and a vegetable world? -was not that of itself a Mere consciousness Mere knowlthat nature herself became known to a new world within the old one? being within herself was not that the same? edge The sun rose and the sun descended, the stars looked down upon the earth, the mountains climbed to heaven, the cliffs stood upon the shore, the same as now, countless ages before a single being existed who saw it. The counterpart of this whole scene was wanting the understanding mind; that mirror in which the whole was to be reflected; and when this arose, it was a new birth for creation itself that it became known an image in the mind of a conscious being. But even consciousness and knowledge were a less strange and miraculous introduction into the world than conscience. Thus wholly mysterious in his entrance into this scene, man is now an insulation in it; he came in by no physical law, and his freewill is in utter contrast to that law. What can be more incomprehensible, more heterogeneous, of right and wrong? ... But man's situa more ghostly resident in nature than the sense ation in nature being such, his original entrance a miracle, his sojourn an interpolation in the physical system, a world within a world — a life of consciousness, free-will, conscience, rea son, communion with God, sense of immortality, entrance into the world? In the latter passage he carries on the argu ment thus: Head; man is her highest point; he finishes her ascent; though by this very supremacy he falls, for under fate he is not free himself; all nature either ascends to God or descends to law. Is there above the level of material causes a region of Providence? If there is, nature there is moved by the Supreme Free Agent; and of such a realm a miracle is the natural production. We have quoted these two passages at length, because, taken together, they appear to us to supply the simple rationale of miracles to all who believe in a personal God a God with a will. In another place Mr. Mozley says: "It is indeed avowed by those who reduce man in common with matter to law, and abolish his insulation in nathe objection to the miraculous is over, and ture, that upon the admission of free-will that it is absurd to allow exception to law He should The constitution of nature, then, disproves the in man, and reject it in nature." incredibility of the Divine suspension of physi- have quoted some authority for this avowal, cal law; but, more than this, it creates a pre- though (whether any particular writer has sumption for it. For the laws of which we confessed the fact or not) we take the statehave experience are themselves in an ascending ment to be unquestionably true, and the scale. First come the laws which regulate whole question is thus limited to one simple unorganized matter; next, the laws of vegeta- issue. If man has free-will, he performs uption; then, by an enormous leap, the laws of on creatures living under a lower law actions animal life with its voluntary motion, desire, which (though quite matters of course to expectation, fear; and above these, again, the laws of moral being which regulate a totally him) are miracles to them; if God has freedifferent order of creatures. Now suppose an will, He does the same to man. To a person intelligent being whose experience was limited who denies free-will to man, or makes the to one or more lower classes in this ascending Divine Being to be either equivalent to law, scale of laws he would be totally incapable of or the subject of law, of course miracles are conceiving the action of the higher classes. A à priori impossible. And to this aspect the thinking piece of granite would be totally incap-course of modern controversy is rapidly narable of conceiving the action of chemical laws, rowing the question. which produce explosions, contacts, repulsions. A thinking mineral would be totally incapable of conceiving the laws of vegetable growth; a That the Scripture miracles have nothing thinking vegetable could not form an idea of to fear from hence, Mr. Mozley abundantly moral and intellectual truth. All this progressive succession of laws is perfectly conceivable backward, and an absolute mystery forward; and therefore when in the ascending series we arrive at man, we ask, Is there no higher sphere of law, as much above him as he is above the lower natures in the scale? The analogy would lead us to expect that there was, and supplies a presumption in favour of such a belief. - And so we arrive again by another route at the old turning question; for the question whether man is or is not the vertex of nature is the question whether there is or is not a God. Does free agency stop at the human stage, or is there a sphere of free-will above the human, in which, as in the human, not physical law but spirit moves matter? And does that free-will penetrate the universal frame invisibly to us, an omnipresent agent? If so, every miracle in Scripture is as natural an event in the universe as any chemical experiment in the physical world; if not, the seat of the great Presiding Will is empty, and nature has no Personal shows in passages for which we have no space. And he is felicitous also in sweeping away those inconvenient encumbrances of a controversy the half-and-half adherents of either side. This particular question is more than ordinarily hampered with impediments of the sort. On the one hand, there are those who wish to get rid of miracles (some for intellectual, some for moral reasons), but who flinch from a thoroughgoing denial of the miraculous. On the other hand, there are those who do not wish to disbelieve, who perhaps are fairly impartial on the subject, but who do not see the answer to Hume's celebrated objection from experience," or to the new shape it has latethere are those again, like Renan and some ly assumed as "the inductive principle ;" and others nearer home, whose intense realization of (more especially) the history of our Lord gives them a sort of feeling that the miraculous part might be omitted without |