I
I
SYNOPSIS.--The gradual narrowing of the miraculous element in the
Bible by recent discovery and discussion.--The alarm thereby excited
in the Church.--The fallacy which generates the fear.--The atheistic
conception of nature which generates the fallacy.--The present
outgrowing of this conception.
It is barely forty years since that beloved and fearless Christian
scholar, Dean Stanley, spoke thus of the miracles recorded of the
prophet Elisha: "His works stand alone in the Bible in their likeness to
the acts of mediaeval saints. There alone in the Sacred History the gulf
between Biblical and Ecclesiastical miracles almost disappears."[5] It
required some courage to say as much as this then, while the storm of
persecution was raging against Bishop Colenso for his critical work on
the Pentateuch. The evangelical clergymen in England and the United
States then prepared to confess as much as this, with all that it
obviously implies, could have been seated in a small room. But time has
moved on, and the Church, at least the scholars of the Church, have
moved with it. No scholar of more than narrowly local repute now
hesitates to acknowledge the presence of a legendary element both in the
Old Testament and in the New. While the extent of it is still
undetermined, many specimens of it are recognized. It is agreed that the
early narratives in Genesis are of this character, and that it is marked
in such stories as those of Samson, Elijah, and Elisha. Even the
conservative revisers of the Authorized Version have eliminated from the
Fourth Gospel the story of the angel at the pool of Bethesda, and in
their marginal notes on the Third Gospel have admitted a doubt
concerning the historicity of the angel and the bloody sweat in
Gethsemane.
Furthermore, some events, recognized as historical, have been divested
of the miraculous character once attributed to them,--the crossing of
the Red Sea, for instance, by the Hebrew host. A landslip in the
thirteenth century A.D. has been noted as giving historical character to
the story of the Hebrew host under Joshua's command crossing the Jordan
"on dry ground," but in a perfectly natural way. Other classes of
phenomena once regarded as miraculous have been transferred to the
domain of natural processes by the investigations and discoveries that
have been made in the field of psychical research. The forewarning which
God is said to have given the prophet Ahijah of the visit that the
queen was about to pay him in disguise[6] is now recognized as one of
many cases of the mysterious natural function that we label as
"telepathy." The transformations of unruly, vicious, and mentally
disordered characters by hypnotic influence that have been effected at
the Salpetriere in Paris, and elsewhere, by physicians expert in
psychical therapeutics are closely analogous to the cures wrought by
Jesus on some victims of "demoniac possession."[7] The cases of
apparition,[8] also, which have been investigated and verified by the
Society for Psychical Research have laid a solid basis of fact for the
Biblical stories of angels, as at least, a class of phenomena to be
regarded as by no means altogether legendary, but having their place
among natural though mysterious occurrences.
But this progressive paring down of the miraculous element in the Bible
has caused outcries of unfeigned alarm. Christian scholars who have
taken part in it are reproached as deserters to the camp of unbelief.
They are accused of banishing God from his world, and of reducing the
course of events to an order of agencies quite undivine. "Miracle,"
writes one of these brethren,[9] "is the personal intervention of God
into the chain of cause and effect." But what does this mean, except
that, when no miracles occur, God is not personally, _i.e._ actively, in
the chain of natural causes and effects? As Professor Drummond says, "If
God appears periodically, he disappears periodically." It is precisely
this view of the subject that really banishes God from his world. Those
who thus define miracle regard miracles as having ceased at the end of
the Apostolic age in the first century. Except, therefore, for the
narrow range of human history that the Bible covers in time and place,
God has not been personally in the chain of natural causes and effects.
Thus close to an atheistic conception of nature does zeal for
traditional orthodoxy unwittingly but really come.
The first pages of the Bible correct this error. "While the earth
remaineth," so God is represented as assuring Noah, "seedtime and
harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night,
shall not cease." The presence of God in his world was thus to be
evinced by his regular sustentation of its natural order, rather than by
irregular occurrences, such as the deluge, in seeming contravention of
it. To seek the evidence of divine activity in human affairs and to
ground one's faith in a controlling Providence in sporadic and cometary
phenomena, rather than in the constant and cumulative signs of it to be
seen in the majestic order of the starry skies, in the reign of
intelligence throughout the cosmos, in the moral evolution of ancient
savagery into modern philanthropy, in the historic manifestation
throughout the centuries of a Power not our own that works for the
increase of righteousness, is a mode of thought which in our time is
being steadily and surely outgrown. It is one of those "idols of the
tribe" whose power alike over civilized and uncivilized men is broken
less by argument than by the ascent of man to wider horizons of
knowledge.
It is for the gain of religion that it should be broken,--of the
spiritual religion whose God is not a tradition, a reminiscence, but a
living presence, inhabiting alike the clod and the star, the flower in
the crannied wall and the life of man. So thinking of God the religious
man may rightly say,[10] "If it is more difficult to believe in
miracles, it is less important. If the extraordinary manifestations of
God recounted in ancient history appear less credible, the ordinary
manifestations of God in current life appear more real. He is seen in
American history not less than in Hebrew history; in the life of to-day
not less than in the life of long ago."