Our Lord came proclaiming a kingdom of God, a kingdom ordained by God
on this earth, the order and beauty of which the unruly and sinful
wills of men had deformed, so that disease, and death, and all miseries
and disorder, had grown up and destroyed the order of it, and thwarting
the perfectly loving will of God.
In asserting this kingdom and this order, our Lord claimed (as he must
have claimed if indeed he were the Son of God) dominion over disease
and death. This dominion was lower than that over the human heart and
will, but he claimed it as positively. He proved his claim to be good
in other ways, but specially for our present purpose by healing the
sick, and raising the dead. Were these works orderly or disorderly?
Every one of them seems to me to be the restoring of an order which
had been disturbed. They were witnesses for the law of life, faithful
and true manifestations of the will of a loving Father to his children.
Yes, you may say, but he did other miracles besides those of healing.
He turned water into wine, stilled the waves, multiplied loaves and
fishes. These at any rate were capricious suspensions of natural laws.
You say you believe in natural laws which have their ground in God’s
will. Such laws he suspended or set aside in these cases. Now were
these suspensions orderly?
I think they were. The natural laws which Christ suspended, such as the
law of increase, are laws of God. Being his laws, they are living and
not dead laws, but they are not the highest law; there must be a law
of God, a law of his mind, above them, or they would be dead tyrannous
rules. Christ seems to me to have been asserting the freedom of that
law of God by suspending these natural laws, and to have been claiming
here again, as part of his and our birthright, dominion over natural
laws.
All the other miracles, I believe, stand on the same ground. None have
been performed except by men who felt that they were witnessing for
God, with glimpses of his order, full of zeal for the triumph of that
order in the world, and working as Christ worked, in his spirit, and in
the name of his Father, or of him. If there are any miracles which do
not on a fair examination fulfil these conditions—which are such as a
loving Father educating sons who had strayed from or rebelled against
him would not have done—I am quite ready to give them up.