SYNOPSIS.--The present net results of the discussion of the
miraculous element in the Bible.--Evaporation of the former
evidential value of miracles.--Further insistence on this value a
logical blunder.--The transfer of miracles from the artillery to the
baggage of the Church.--Probability of a further reduction of the
list of miracles.--Also of a further transfer of events reputed
miraculous to the domain of history.
The cultivation of scientific and historical studies during the last
century, especially in its latter half, has deepened the conviction that
"Through the ages one increasing purpose runs;"
has disposed a growing number of thoughtful minds to regard occasional
signs and wonders, reported from ancient times, as far less evidential
for the reasonableness of religious faith than the steady sustentation
of the Providential order and the moral progress of the world. Fully
convinced of this, we should now estimate, before proceeding further,
the present net results of the discussion, so far as it has gone, of
what is called the miraculous element in the Bible.
First, its former evidential value in proof of divine Revelation is gone
for the men of to-day. The believer in a divine Revelation does not now,
if he is wise, rest his case at all on the miracles connected with its
original promulgation, as was the fashion not very long since. This for
two reasons; chiefly this: that _the decisive criterion of any truth,
ethical or physical, must be truth of the same kind_. Ethical truth must
be ethically attested. The moral and religious character of the
Revelation presents its credentials of worth in its history of the
moral and religious renovations it has wrought both in individuals and
in society. This is its proper and incontrovertible attestation, in need
of no corroboration from whatever wonderful physical occurrences may
have accompanied its first utterance. Words of God are attested as such
by the work of God which they effect. It may well be believed that those
wonderful occurrences--the Biblical name for which is "signs," or
"powers," terms not carrying, like "miracles," the idea of something
contra-natural[11]--had an evidential value for those to whom the
Revelation originally came. In fact, they were appealed to by the
bearers of the Revelation as evidencing its divine origin by the mighty
works of divine mercy which they wrought for sufferers from the evils of
the world. But whatever their evidential value to the eye-witnesses at
that remote day, it was of the inevitably volatile kind that exhales
away like a perfume with lapse of time. Historic doubts attack remote
events, especially when of the extraordinary character which tempts the
narrator to that magnifying of the marvellous which experience has found
to be a constantly recurring human trait. It is simply impossible that
the original evidential value of the "signs" accompanying the Revelation
should continue permanently unimpaired. To employ them now as
"evidences of Christianity," when the Revelation has won on ethical
grounds recognition of its divine character and can summon history to
bear witness of its divine effects in the moral uplift of the world, is
to imperil the Christian argument by the preposterous logical blunder of
attempting to prove the more certain by the less certain.
A second net result consequent on the preceding may be described as the
transference of miracles from the ordnance department to the
quartermaster's department of the Church. Until recently they were
actively used as part of its armament, none of which could be dispensed
with. Now they are carried as part of its baggage, _impedimenta_, from
which everything superfluous must be removed. It is clearly seen that to
retain all is to imperil the whole. That there are miracles and
miracles is patent to minds that have learned to scan history more
critically than when a scholar like John Milton began his _History of
England_ with the legend of the voyage of "Brute the Trojan." One may
reasonably believe that Jesus healed a case of violent insanity at
Gadara, and reasonably disbelieve that the fire of heaven was twice
obedient to Elijah's call to consume the military companies sent to
arrest him. Cultivated discernment does not now put all Biblical
miracles on a common level of credibility, any more than the historical
work of Herodotus and that of the late Dr. Gardiner. To defend them all
is not to vindicate, but to discredit all alike. The elimination of the
indefensible, the setting aside of the legendary, the transference of
the supposedly miraculous to the order of natural powers and processes
so far as vindicable ground for such critical treatment is discovered,
is the only way to answer the first of all questions concerning the
Bible: How much of this is credible history? Thus it is not only
thoroughly reasonable, but is in the interest of a reasonable belief
that divine agency is revealed rather by the upholding of the
established order of Nature than by any alleged interference therewith.
With what God has established God never interferes. To allege his
interference with his established order is virtually to deny his
constant immanence therein, a failure to recognize the fundamental fact
that "Nature is Spirit," as Principal Fairbairn has said, and all its
processes and powers the various modes of the energizing of the divine
Will.
A third net result now highly probable is a still further reduction of
the list of reputed miracles. The critical process of discriminating
the historical from the legendary, and the natural from the non-natural,
is still so comparatively recent that it can hardly be supposed to have
reached its limit. Nor can it be stayed by any impeachment of it as
hostile to Christianity, whose grand argument appeals to its present
ethical effects, not to ancient thaumaturgical accompaniments. There is,
however, a considerable class of cases in which the advancing critical
process is likely even to gain credibility for the Biblical narrative in
a point where it is now widely doubted--the resuscitations of the
apparently dead. Among all the Biblical miracles none have more probably
a secure historical basis.