[27] "Early and mediaeval theologians agree in conceiving the miraculous
as being above, not contrary to, nature. The question entered on a new
phase when Hume defined a miracle as a violation of nature, and asserted
the impossibility of substantiating its actual occurrence. The modern
discussion has proceeded largely in view of Hume's destructive
criticism. Assuming the possibility of a miracle, the questions of fact
and of definition remain."--_Dictionary of Psychology._
"When we find the definition for which we are searching, the miraculous
will no longer be a problem."--PROFESSOR W. SANDAY, at the Anglican
Church Congress, 1902.
[28] For exceptions see Matthew xxi. 19; Acts xiii. 10, 11.
[29] _A Christian Apologetic_, p. 97.
[30] John i. 47-50.
[31] In the opinion of such psychologists as Professor William James, of
Harvard, the late Professor Henry Sidgwick, of Cambridge, England, and
others of like eminence.
[32] A hint of this was given by Augustine: "Portentum non fit contra
naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura."--_De Civitate Dei._
[33] Consult the late F. W. H. Myers's remarkable volumes on _Human
Personality and Survival after Death_ (Longmans, Green & Co.).
V
V
SYNOPSIS.--Biblical miracles the effluence of extraordinary
lives.--Life the world's magician and miracle worker; its miracles
now termed _prodigies_.--Miracle the natural product of an
extraordinary endowment of life.--Life the ultimate reality.--What
any man can achieve is conditioned by the psychical quality of his
life.--Nothing more natural, more supernatural, than life.--The
derived life of the world filial to the self-existent life of God,
"begotten, not made."--Miracle, as the product of life, the work of
God.
Be it noted, now, that the marvellous phenomena of the Biblical record,
whatever else be thought of them, are, even to a superficial view, the
extraordinary effluence of extraordinary lives. Here at length we gain a
clearer conception of miracle. _Life_ is the world's great
magician,--life, so familiar, yet so mysterious; so commonplace, yet so
transcendent. No miracle is more marvellous than its doings witnessed in
the biological laboratory, or more inexplicable than its transformation
of dead matter into living flesh, its development of a Shakespeare from
a microscopic bit of protoplasm. But its mysterious processes are too
common for general marvel; we marvel only at the uncommon. The boy Zerah
Colburn in half a minute solved the problem, "How many seconds since the
beginning of the Christian era?" We prefer to call this a prodigy rather
than a miracle,--a distinction more verbal than real; and we fancy we
have explained it when we say that such arithmetical power was a
peculiar endowment of his mental life. Now all of the inexplicable,
inimitable reality that at any time has to be left by the baffled
intellect as an unsolved wonder under the name of miracle is just
that,--_the natural product of an extraordinary endowment of life_. More
of its marvellous capability is latent in common men, in the
subconscious depths of being, than has ever yet flashed forth in the
career of uncommon men. Some scientists say that it depends on chemical
and physical forces. It indeed uses these to build the various bodies it
inhabits, but again it leaves these to destroy those bodies when it
quits them. The most constant and ubiquitous phenomenon in the world,
the ultimate reality in the universe, is _life_, revealing its presence
in innumerable modes of activity, from the dance of atoms in the rock to
the philosophizing of the sage and the aspirations of the saint,--the
creator of Nature, the administrator of the regular processes we call
the laws of Nature, the author of the wonders men call miraculous
because they are uncommon and ill understood.
The works of which any man is naturally capable are conditioned by the
psychical quality of his life, and its power to use the forces of
Nature. Through differences of vital endowment some can use color, as
wonderful painters, and others employ sound, as wonderful musicians, in
ways impossible to those otherwise endowed. So "a poet is born, not
made." So persons of feeble frame, stimulated by disease or frenzied by
passion, have put forth preternatural and prodigious muscular strength.
By what we call "clairvoyant" power life calls up in intelligent
perception things going on far beyond ocular vision. By what we call
"telepathic" power life communicates intelligence with life separated by
miles of space. Such are some of the powers that have been discovered,
and fully attested, but not explained, as belonging to the world's
master magician, _Life_. And when the poet asks,--
"Ah, what will our children be,
The men of a hundred thousand, a million summers away?"
we can only answer with the Apostle: "It doth not yet appear what we
shall be." But we cannot deem it likely that the powers of life,
"Deep seated in our mystic frame,"
and giving forth such flashes of their inherent virtue, have already
reached their ultimate development.
We look with wonder and awe into the secret shrine of life, where two
scarcely visible cells unite to form the human being whose thought shall
arrange the starry heavens in majestic order, and harness the titanic
energies of Nature for the world's work. There we behold the real
supernatural. Nothing is more natural than life, and nothing also more
supernatural. Biology studies all the various forms that the world shows
of it, and affirms that life, though multiform, is one. This embryology
attests, showing that the whole ascent of life through diverse forms
from the lowest to the highest, during the millions of years since life
first manifested its presence on this globe, is recapitulated in the
stages of growth through which the human being passes in the few months
before its birth. And philosophy, which does not seek the living among
the dead, affirms, _omne vivum ex vivo_. The varied but unitary life of
the world is the stream of an exhaustless spring. It is filial to the
life of God, the Father Almighty. What the ancient creed affirmed of the
Christ as the Son of God--whom his beloved disciple recognized as "the
eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested unto
us[34]"--may be truly affirmed of the mysterious reality that is known
as life: "Begotten not made; being of one substance with the Father;
through whom [or which] all things were made." Looking from the derived
and finite life of the world, visible only in the signs of its presence,
but in its reality no more visible than him "whom no man hath seen, nor
can see," up to the life underived, aboriginal, infinite, we recognize
_God_ and _Life_ as terms of identical significance. How superficial the
notion of miracles as "the personal intervention of God into the chain
of cause and effect," in which he is the constant vital element. If an
event deemed miraculous is ever ascribed, as of old, to "the finger of
God," the reality behind the phenomenon is simply a higher or a stronger
power of life than is recognized in an event of a common type--life that
is one with the infinite and universal Life,
"Life that in me has rest,
As I, undying Life, have power in Thee."