What is true of each of us beyond all question—what every man who walks
with open eyes and open heart knows to be true of himself—must be true
also of Christ. And so, though we may reject the stories of the clay
birds, which he modeled as a child, taking wing and bursting into song
round him, (as on a par with St. Francis’ address to his sisters,
the swallows, at Alvia, or the flocks in the marshes of Venice, who
thereupon kept silence from their twitterings and songs till his sermon
was finished), we cannot doubt that in proportion as Christ was more
perfectly in sympathy with God’s creation than any mediæval saint, or
modern naturalist, or man of science, he had more power than they with
all created things from his earliest youth. Nor could it be otherwise
with the hearts and wills of men. Over these we know that, from
that time to this, he has exercised a supreme sway, infinitely more
wonderful than that over birds and beasts, because of man’s power of
resistance to the will Christ came to teach and to do, which exists, so
far as we can see, in no other part of creation.
I think, then, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that he must
have had all these powers from his childhood, that they must have
been growing stronger from day to day, and he, at the same time, more
and more conscious of possessing them, not to use on any impulse
of curiosity or self-will, but only as the voice within prompted.
And it seems the most convincing testimony to his perfect sonship,
manifested in perfect obedience, that he should never have tested his
powers during those thirty years as he did at once and with perfect
confidence as soon as the call came. Had he done so his ministry must
have commenced sooner; that is to say, before the method was matured by
which he was to reconstruct, and lift into a new atmosphere and on to
a higher plane, the faith and life of his own nation and of the whole
world. For it is impossible to suppose that the works which he did, and
the words he spoke, at thirty—which at once threw all Galilee and Judea
into a ferment of hope and joy and doubt and anger—should have passed
unnoticed had they been wrought and spoken when he was twenty. Here, as
in all else, he waited for God’s mind: and so, when the time for action
came, worked with the power of God. And this waiting and preparation
must have been the supreme trial of his faith. The holding this
position must have been, in those early years, the holding of the very
centre of the citadel in man’s soul, (as Bunyan so quaintly terms it),
against which the assaults of the tempter must have been delivered
again and again while the garrison was in training for the victorious
march out into the open field of the great world, carrying forth the
standard which shall never go back.
And while it may be readily admitted that Christ wielded a dominion
over all created things, as well as over man, which no other human
being has ever approached, it seems to me to be going quite beyond what
can be proved, or even fairly assumed, to speak of his miracles as
supernatural, in the sense that no man has ever done, or can ever do,
the like. The evidence is surely all the other way, and seems rather
to indicate that if we could only have lived up to the standard which
we acknowledge in our inmost hearts to be the true one—could only have
obeyed every motion and warning of the voice of God speaking in our
hearts from the day when we first became conscious of and could hear
it—if, in other words, our wills had from the first been disciplined,
like the will of Christ, so as to be in perfect accord with the will of
God—I see no reason to doubt that we, too, should have gained the power
and the courage to show signs, or, if you please, to work miracles, as
Christ and his Apostles worked them.