SYNOPSIS.--The cardinal point in the present discussion, the reality
not of miracles but of the supernatural.--Fallacy of pointing to
physical events as essential characteristics of supernatural
Revelation.--The character of a revelation determined not by its
circumstances, but by its contents.--Moral nature supernatural to
physical.--Nature a hierarchy of natures.--Supernatural Religion
historically attested by the moral development it
generates.--Transfer of its distinctive note from moral ideals to
physical marvels a costly error.--Jesus' miracles _a_ revelation, of
a type common with others before and since.--The unique Revelation
of Jesus was in the higher realm of divine ideas and ideals.--These,
while unrealized in human life, still exhibit the fact of a
supernatural Revelation.--The distinction of natural and
supernatural belongs to the period of moral progress up to the
spiritual maturity of man in the image of God. The divine
possibilities of humanity, imaged in Jesus, revealed as our
inheritance and our prize.
It remains finally to emphasize the point of cardinal importance in the
considerations that have been presented. This is not the reality of
miracles, but the reality of the supernatural, what it really is, as
distinct from what it has been thought to be. The advance of science and
philosophy has brought to the front this question: "Have those who
reject the claims of supernatural Religion been misinformed as to what
it is?" Is it, as they have been told, dependent for its attestation on
signs and wonders occurring in the sphere of the senses? Does it require
acceptance of these, as well as of its teachings? Or is its
characteristic appeal wholly to the higher nature of man, relying for
its attestation on the witness borne to it by this, rather than by
extraordinary phenomena presented to the senses? There is at present no
intellectual interest of Christianity more urgent than this: to present
to minds imbued with modern learning the true conception of the
supernatural and of supernatural Religion.
Miracles, legitimately viewed as the natural product of extraordinary
psychical power, or, to phrase it otherwise, of an exceptional vital
endowment, belong not to the Hebrew race alone, nor did they cease when
the last survivor of the Jewish apostles of Christianity passed away at
the end of the first century. This traditional opinion ought by this
time to have been entombed together with its long defunct relative,
which represented this globe as the fixed centre of the revolving
heavens. Miracles have the same universality as human life. Nor will
their record be closed till the evolution of life is complete. Animal
life, advancing through geologic aeons to the advent of man, in him
reached its climax. Spiritual life, appearing in him as a new bud on an
old stock, is evidently far from its climax still. To believe in
miracles, as rightly understood, is to believe in spirit and life, and
in further unfoldings of their still latent powers.
This, however, is just now of subordinate importance. The present
interest of chief moment is a riddance of the hoary fallacy that
vitiates the current idea of a supernatural Revelation by looking for
its specific characteristics to the physical world. By this deplorable
fallacy Christian theology has blinded the minds of many scientific men
to the essential claims of Christianity, with immense damage in the
arrested development of their religious nature through the scepticism
inevitably but needlessly provoked by this great mistake. When Elijah
proclaims to idolaters that their deity is no God, and, as we read,
corroborates his words by calling down fire from heaven to consume his
sacrifice, it is reckoned as supernatural Revelation. But it is not so
reckoned when the sage in the book of Proverbs proclaims to a nation of
religious formalists the moral character of God: "To do righteousness
and justice is more acceptable to the LORD than sacrifice." This is
accounted as ethical teaching, somewhat in advance of the times. A pagan
rather than a Christian way of thinking is discoverable here. In each of
the cases cited the specific character of supernatural Revelation is
equally evident,--the disclosure of spiritual truth above the natural
thought of the natural men to whom it came. The character of any
revelation is determined by the character of the truth made known, not
by the drapery of circumstances connected with the making known. Clothes
do not make the man, though coarse or careless people may think so. What
belongs to the moral and spiritual order is supernatural to what
belongs to the material and physical order.
This way of thinking will be forced on common minds by thoughtful
observation of common things. Animate nature of the lowest rank, as in
the grass, is of a higher natural order than inanimate nature in the
soil the grass springs from. Sentient nature, as in the ox, is of a
higher order than the non-sentient in the grass. Self-conscious and
reflective nature in the man is of a higher order than the selfless and
non-reflective nature in his beast of burden. In the composite being of
man all these orders of nature coexist, and each higher is supernatural
to the nature below it. Nature, the comprehensive term for _all that
comes into being_, is a hierarchy of natures, rising rank above rank
from the lowest to the highest. The highest nature known to us,
supernatural to all below it, can only be the moral nature, whose full
satisfaction is necessary to the highest satisfaction of a man, and in
whose complete development only can be realized in permanency his
perfected welfare as a social being.
Now it is precisely in the progress of moral development that
supernatural Religion manifests itself as a reality. Religion, indeed,
is as natural to man as Art. But there is religion and Religion, as
there is art and Art--the sexual religion of the primitive Semites, the
animistic religion of China, the spiritual Religion that flowered on the
Mount of the Beatitudes, embryonic religion and Religion adult; all,
indeed, natural, yet of lower and of higher grade. Doubtless, Religion
of whatever grade outranks all other human activities by its distinctive
aspiration to transcend the bounds of space and time and sense, and to
link the individual to the universal; and so all Religion sounds, feebly
or distinctly, the note of the supernatural. But this is the resonant
note of the spiritual Religion which unfolds in the moral progress of
the world. As moral nature is supernatural to the psychical and the
physical, so is its consummate bloom of spiritual Religion to be ranked
as such, relatively to the religions which more or less dimly and
blindly are yearning and groping toward the light that never was on sea
or land. Thus defining the word according to the nature of the thing,
supernatural Religion, with its corollary of supernatural Revelation not
as an apparition from without, but as an unfolding from within, is both
a fact and a factor in the development of spiritual man.
The term _supernatural Religion_ has been rightly applied to that system
of religious conceptions, ideals, and motives, whose effective culture
of the moral nature is attested historically by a moral development
superior to the product of any other known religion. Whether the
greatest saints of Christianity are all of them whiter souls than any
that can be found among the disciples of any other religion, may be
matter for argument. There can be no gainsaying the fact that, of great
and lowly together, no other religion shows so many saints, or has so
advanced the general moral development in lands where it is widely
followed. But its essential character has been obscured, its appeal to
man's highest nature foiled, and its power lamed by the wretched fallacy
that has transferred its distinctive note of the supernatural from its
divine ideals to the physical marvels embedded in the record of its
original promulgation, even conditioning its validity and authority upon
their reality. Such is the false issue which, to the discredit of
Christianity, theology has presented to science. Such is the confusion
of ideas that in the light of modern knowledge inevitably blocks the way
to a reasonable religious faith in multitudes of minds thereby offended.
From this costly error Christian theology at length shows signs that it
is about to extricate itself.[48]
As to the Christian miracles, there can be no reasonable doubt that
"mighty works," deemed by many of his contemporaries superhuman, were
wrought by Jesus. These, whatever they were, must be regarded as the
natural effluence of a transcendently endowed life. Taking place in the
sphere of the senses, they were _a_ revelation of the type seen before
and since in the lives of wonder-workers ancient and modern, in whom the
power of mind over matter, however astonishing and mysterious, is
recognized as belonging to the natural order of things no less than the
unexplored Antarctic belongs to the globe. But _the_ Revelation which he
gave to human thought as a new thing, a heavenly vision unprecedented,
was in the higher realm of the moral and spiritual life. This was the
true supernatural, whose reality and power are separable from all its
environment of circumstances, and wholly independent thereof. The
characteristic ideals of Jesus, his profound consciousness of God, his
filial thought of God, his saturation with the conviction of his moral
oneness with God,[49] his realization of brotherhood with the meanest
human being, still transcend the common level of natural humanity even
among his disciples. As thus transcendent they are supernatural still.
Till reached and realized, they manifest the fact of a supernatural
Revelation in that peerless life as plainly as the sun is manifest in
the splendor of a cloudless day.
In the coming but distant age, when man's spiritual nature, now so
embryonic, shall have become adult, it will doubtless so pervade and
rule the physical and psychical natures which it inhabits that the
distinction between natural and supernatural, so important in the
period of its development, will become foreign alike to thought and
speech. But until the making of man in the image of God is complete,
when the spiritual element in our composite being, now struggling for
development, shall be manifest in its ultimate maturity and ascendency
as the distinctive and proper nature of humanity, it is of supreme
importance for the Christian teacher, who would point and urge to the
heights of being, to free men's minds of error as to what the real
supernatural is. Not the fancied disturber of the world's ordered
harmonies, but that highest Nature which is the moulder, the glory, and
the crown of all the lower.
Imaged to us in the human perfectness of Jesus, the ideal Son of man, it
is revealed as the distinctive inheritance and prize of the humanity
that essays to think the thoughts and walk the ways of God. To each of
us is it given in germ by our human birth, to be fostered and nourished
in converse with the Infinite Presence that inhabits all things, till
its divine possibilities appear in the ultimate "revealing of the sons
of God,"[50] full grown "according to the measure of the stature of the
fulness of Christ."[51]