The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others | Page 3

Divine

Presence, and that God is really out of our sight. If there is a God, who
is ever around us and within us, why does He not communicate with us
through the medium of our senses, as He enables us to communicate
with one another? Our souls hold mutual communion through the
intervention of this corporal frame, with such a distinct and undeniable
reality, that we are as conscious of our intercourse as of the contact of a
material substance with our material bodies. Why, then,--since it is so
infinitely more important to us to hold ceaseless communication with
our Maker,--why is it that our intercourse with Him is of a totally
different nature? Why is it that the material creation is not the ordinary
instrument by which our souls converse with Him? Let any man
seriously ponder upon this awful question, and he must hasten to the
conclusion, that though experience has shown us that the world of
matter is not the ordinary channel of converse between God and man,
there yet remains an overwhelming probability that some such
intercourse takes place occasionally between, the soul and that God
through whose power alone she continues to exist.
In other words, the existence of miracles is probable rather than
otherwise. A miracle is an event in which the laws of nature are
interrupted by the intervention of Divine agency, usually for the
purpose of bringing the soul of man into a conscious contact with the
inhabitants of the invisible world. With more or less exactness of
similitude, a miracle establishes between God and man, or between
other spiritual beings and man, that same kind of intercourse which
exists between different living individuals of the human race. Such a
conscious intercourse is indeed asserted by infidels as well as by
atheists, to be, if not impossible, at least so utterly improbable, that it is
scarcely within the power of proof to make it credible to the unbiased
reason. Yet surely the balance of probability inclines to the very
opposite side. If there is a God, and our souls are in communication (of
some kind) with Him, surely, prior to experience, we should have
expected to be habitually conscious of this communion. And now that
we see that we are not at any rate habitually so, still the burden of proof
rests with those who allege that such conscious intercourse never takes
place. Apart from all proof of the reality of any one professed miracle,
the infidel is bound to show why all miracles are improbable or
impossible; in other words, why man should never be conscious of the

presence and will of his ever-present God.
Protestants, however, and even weak Catholics, regard the record of
one of those mysterious lives, in which the soul of a man or woman has
been repeatedly brought into this species of communion with invisible
beings, as a tale which, though it is just possible that it may be true, is
yet, on the face of it, so flagrant a violation of the laws of nature, as to
be undeserving of positive hearty belief. They confound the laws of
physical nature with the laws of universal nature. They speak of the
nature of this material earth, as if it was identical with the nature of
things. And this confusion of thought it is to which I would especially
call attention. Miracles are contrary to the ordinary laws of physical
nature, and therefore are so far improbable, but they are in the strictest
conformity with the nature of things, and therefore in themselves are
probable. If the laws of nature rule God as they control man, a miracle
is almost an impossibility; but if God rules the laws of nature, then it is
wonderful that something miraculous does not befall us every day of
our lives.
Again, it is in a high degree probable that miraculous events will
generally, so to say, take their colour from the special character of that
relation which may exist between God and man at the time when they
come to pass. If, in the inscrutable counsels of the Almighty, man is
placed, during different eras in his history, in different circumstances
towards his Creator and Preserver, it would seem only natural that the
variations in those circumstances should be impressed upon the
extraordinary intercourse between God and His people. Or, to use the
common Christian term, each dispensation will have its peculiar
supernatural aspect, as well as its peculiar spiritual and invisible
relationship. If man was originally in a higher and more perfect state of
being than he is now, it is probable that his communion with God was
singularly, if not totally, unlike what it has been since he fell from
primeval blessedness. If after his fall, two temporary states have