Miracles

VIEW:24 DATA:01-04-2020
MIRACLES
1. The narratives—a) In the Gospels Jesus is recorded to have cast out devils (Mat_8:28; Mat_15:28; Mat_17:18, Mar_1:25), restored paralytics (Mat_8:13; Mat_9:6, Joh_5:8), revived the withered hand (Mat_12:13), released from the spirit of infirmity (Luk_13:12), stanched an issue of blood (Mat_9:22), cured dropsy (Luk_14:2), allayed fever with a touch (Mat_8:15), given speech to the dumb, hearing to the deaf, and sight to the blind (Mat_9:33; Mat_12:22, Mar_7:35, Mat_9:29; Mat_20:34, Mar_8:25, Joh_9:7), cleansed leprosy (Mat_8:3, Luk_17:18), and even raised from the dead (Mat_9:25, Luk_7:15, Joh_11:44). Besides these miracles of healing there are ascribed to Him other extraordinary acts, such as the Stilling of the Storm (Mat_8:26), the Feeding of Five Thousand (Mat_14:19) and Four Thousand (Mat_15:35), the Walking on the Sea (Mat_14:28), the Change of Water into Wine (Joh_2:9). The blasting of the Fig Tree (Mat_21:19), and the finding of the Coin in the Fish’s Mouth (Mat_17:27), may possibly be figurative sayings misunderstood. The Two Draughts of Fishes (Luk_5:6 and Joh_21:6) may be variant traditions of one occurrence, and, like the recovery of the Nohleman’s Son of Capernaum (Joh_4:50), may be regarded as proof of superhuman wisdom, and not of supernatural power. These miracles are presented to us as the acts of a Person supernatural both in the moral character as sinless and perfect, and in the religious consciousness as alone knowing and revealing the Father. It was the universal conviction of the early Christian Church that after three days He rose from the dead (1Co_15:4), and was universally present in supreme power (Mat_28:18; Mat_28:20).
Regarding the miracles of Jesus the following general considerations should be kept in view. (a) It is impossible to remove the records of miracles from the Gospels without tearing them to pieces, as these works of Jesus are so wrought into the very texture of His ministry. (b) The character of the miracles is absolutely harmonious with the power of Jesus; with only two apparent exceptions they are beneficent. The blasting of the fig tree (Mat_21:19), even if the record is taken literally, may be explained as a symbolic prophetic act, a solemn warning to His disciples of the doom of impenitent Israel. The finding of the coin in the fish’s mouth (Mat_17:27) would be an exception to the rule of Jesus never to use His supernatural power on His own behalf, and the narrative itself allows us to explain it as a misunderstanding of figurative language. (c) The miracles were not wrought for display, or to prove His claims. Jesus rejected such use as a temptation (Mat_4:6-7), and always refused to work a sign to meet the demands of unbelief (Mat_16:4). He did not highly esteem the faith that was produced by His miracles (Joh_4:48). The cure of the paralytic, which He wrought to confirm His claim to forgive sins, was necessary to assure the sufferer of the reality of His forgiveness (Mat_9:6). The miracles are not evidential accessories, but essential constituents of Jesus’ ministry of grace. (d) While faith in the petitioner for, or recipient of, the act of healing was a condition Jesus seemingly required in all cases, while He was prevented doing His mighty works, as at Nazareth, by unbelief (Mat_13:58), while the exercise of His power was accompanied by prayer to God (Joh_11:41-42), His healing acts were never tentative; there is in the records no trace of a failure. (e) In view of one of the explanations offered, attention must be called to the variety of the diseases cured; nervous disorders and their consequences did not limit the range of His activity.
(b) In the Acts the record of miracles is continued. The promise of Jesus to His Apostles (Mat_10:8, cf. Mar_16:17-18) is represented as abundantly fulfilled. In addition to the charisms of tongues and prophecy (wh. see), there were signs and wonders wrought by the Apostles and others (Act_2:43; Act_5:12; Act_5:18; Act_6:8; Act_8:13). Miracles of which further details are given are the restoration of the lame man at the gate Beautiful (Act_3:7), and of the cripple at Lystra (Act_14:9), the cure of the palsied Æneas (Act_9:34), the expulsion of the spirit of divination at Philippi (Act_16:18), the healing of the father of Publius in Melita (Act_28:8), the restoration to life of Dorcas (Act_9:40) and Eutychus (Act_20:10, the narrative does not distinctly affirm death). This supernatural power is exercised in judgment on Ananias and Sapphira (Act_5:5; Act_5:10), and on Elymas (Act_13:11)—acts the moral justification of which must be sought in the estimate formed of the danger threatening the Church and the gospel, but which do present an undoubted difficulty. One may hesitate about accepting the statement about the miracles wrought by Peter’s shadow (Act_5:15) or Paul’s aprons (Act_19:12). What are represented as miraculous deliverances from imprisonment are reported both of Peter (Act_12:8) and of Paul (Act_16:26). Paul’s escape from the viper (Act_28:3) does not necessarily involve a miracle. These miracles, which, taken by themselves as reported in Acts, there might be some hesitation in believing, become more credible when viewed as the continuation of the supernatural power of Christ in His Church for the confirmation of the faith of those to whom the gospel was entrusted, and also those to whom its appeal was first addressed. In this matter the Epistles of Paul confirm the record of Acts (1Co_12:10; 1Co_12:28, 2Co_12:12). Paul claims this supernatural power for himself, and recognizes its presence in the Church.
(c) We cannot claim to have contemporary evidence of the miracles of the OT, as we have of those of the NT. The miracles are almost entirely connected either with the Exodus from Egypt, or with the ministry of Elijah and of Elisha. The majority of the miracles of the first group are not outside of the order of nature; what is extraordinary in them is their coincidence with the prophetic declaration, this constituting the events signs of the Divine revelation. While the miracles ascribed to Elijah and Elisha might be considered as their credentials, yet they cannot be regarded as essential to their prophetic ministry; and the variations with which they are recorded represent popular traditions which the compiler of the Books of Kings has incorporated without any substantial alteration. The record of the standing still of the sun in Gibeon is obviously a prosaic misinterpretation of a poetic phrase (Jos_10:12-14); behind the record of the bringing back of the shadow on the dial of Ahaz (2Ki_20:11) we may assume some unusual atmospheric phenomenon, refracting the rays of the sun; the speech of Balaam’s ass (Num_22:27) may be regarded as an objectifying by the seer of his own scruples, doubts, and fears; the Book of Jonah is now interpreted not literally, but figuratively; the Book of Daniel is not now generally taken as history, but rather as the embellishment of history for the purposes of edification. The revelation of Jehovah to Israel is seen in the providential guidance and guardianship of His people by God, and in the authoritative interpretation of God’s works and ways by the prophets, and in it miracle, in the strict sense of the word, has a small place. While the moral and religious worth of the OT, as the literature of the Divine revelation completed in Christ, demands a respectful treatment of the narratives of miracles, we are bound to apply two tests: the sufficiency of the evidence, and the congruity of the miracle in character with the Divine revelation.
2. The evidence.—In dealing with the evidence for the miracles the starting-point should be the Resurrection. It is admitted that the belief that Jesus had risen prevailed in the Christian Church from the very beginning of its history; that without this belief the Church would never have come into existence. Harnack seeks to distinguish the Easter message about the empty grave and the appearances of Jesus from the Easter faith that Jesus lives: but he is not successful in showing how the former could have come to be, apart from the latter. No attempt to explain the conversion of Paul without admitting the objective manifestation of Christ as risen can be regarded as satisfactory. It may not be possible absolutely to harmonize in every detail the records of the appearances, but before these narratives were written it was the common belief of the Christian Church, as Paul testifies, ‘that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he hath been raised on the third day according to the Scriptures’ (1Co_15:3-4). If the Resurrection of Christ is proved, this fact, conjoined with His absolutely unique moral character and religious consciousness, in vests the Person of Jesus with a supernaturalness which forbids our limiting the actions possible to Him by the normal human tests. His miracles are not wonders, for it is no wonder that He should so act, but signs, proofs of what He is, and works, congrnous with His character as ‘ever doing good,’ and His purpose to reveal the grace of the Father. Harnack will not ‘reject peremptorily as illusion that lame walked, blind saw, and deaf heard,’ but he will not believe that ‘a stormy sea was stilled by a word.’ The miracles of healing are not all explicable, as he supposes, by what Matthew Arnold called moral therapeutics—the influence of a strong personality over those suffering from nerve disorders, as they embrace diseases of which the cure by any such means is quite incredible; and the evidence for the cosmic miracles, as the miracles showing power over nature apart from man have been called, is quite as good as for the healing miracles. If the Synoptic Gospels can be dated between a.d. 60 and 90, as is coming to be admitted by scholars generally, the evidence for the miracles of Jesus is thoroughly satisfactory; the mythical theory of Strauss must assume a much longer interval. Harnack regards as ‘a demonstrated fact’ that ‘Luke, companion in travel and associate in evangelistic work of Paul,’ is the author of the Third Gospel and the Acts; nevertheless he does not consider Luke’s history as true; but Ramsay argues that the Lukan authorship carries with it substantial accuracy. In his various writings he has endeavoured to show how careful a historian Luke is, and if Luke’s excellence in this respect is established, then we can place greater reliance on the evidence for miracles in the early Church, as well as in the ministry of Jesus. Harnack lays great stress on the credulity of the age in which the Gospels were written; but this credulity was not universal. The educated classes were sceptical; and, to judge Luke from the preface to his Gospel, he appears as one who recognized the duty of careful inquiry, and of testing evidence. The miracles of the Gospels and the Acts are closely connected with the Person of Jesus, as the Word Incarnate and the risen Lord, and the credulity of the age does not come into consideration unless it can be shown that among either the Jews or the Gentiles there was a prejudice favourable to belief in the Incarnation and the Resurrection. The character of the miracles, so harmonious with the Person, forbids our ascribing them to the wonder-loving, and therefore wonder-making, tendency of the times.
Some indications have already been given in regard to the evidence for the miracles of the OT. The frequent references to the deliverance from Egypt made in the subsequent literature attest the historical reality of that series of events; and it cannot be said to be improbable that signs should have accompanied such a Divine intervention in human history. Some of the miracles ascribed to Elisha are not of a character congruous with the function of prophecy; but it may be that we should very cautiously apply our sense of fitness as a test of truth to these ancient narratives. In the OT history, Prophecy (wh. see) was the supernatural feature of deepest significance and highest value.
3. Explanations.—Admitting that the evidence is satisfactory, and the miracles are real, what explanations can be offered of them? (a) One suggestion has already been considered; it is favoured by Harnack and Matthew Arnold: it is that one person may exercise over another so strong an influence as to cure nervous disorders. The inadequacy of this explanation has been shown; but even were it admissible, a reason would need to be given why Jesus used a means not known in His age, and thus anticipated modern developments of medical skill. It is certain that Jesus worked His miracles relying on the Divine powers in Himself; whether in any cases this obscure psychic force was an unknown condition of His miracles is a matter of secondary importance.
(b) A second suggestion, made by the late Duke of Argyll (Reign of Law, p. 16), is that God chooses and uses laws unknown to man, or laws which, even if he knew, he could not use. He thinks that this would meet the prejudice of scientific thought against effects without causes. This explanation recognizes that miracles are not explicable by the laws of nature as known to man, and that it is of God’s free choice that for certain ends He uses means otherwise unknown. As these laws are quite hypothetical, and as this use of them only occasionally is not at all probable, this explanation does not appear to make miracles any more credible.
(c) We may now attempt to define more closely what we mean by a miracle. It does seem, on the whole, desirable to restrict the term ‘miracle’ to an external event of which there is sensible evidence. Inward changes, such as in the prophetic inspiration, or the religious conversion of an individual, however manifest the Divine presence and action may be for the person having the experience, should not be described as miracles, unless with some qualification such as spiritual or moral. The negative feature of the external event which justifies our describing it as a miracle is that it is inexplicable by the natural forces and laws as known to us. The will of man is a force in nature with which we are familiar, and therefore the movements of the body under the control of the will are not to be described as miraculous. We say more than we are justified in saying if we describe a miracle as an interference with the laws and forces of nature, or a breach in the order of nature; for just as the physical forces and laws allow the exercise of human will in the movements of the body, so the power that produces the miracle may, nay must, be conceived as so closely related to nature that its exercise results in no disturbance or disorder in nature. The miracle need not interfere with the continuity of nature at all. The modem theory of Evolution is not less, but more, favourable to the belief in miracle. It is not a finished machine, but a growing organism, that the world appears. Life transcends, and yet combines and controls physical forces (Lodge’s Life and Matter, p. 198). Mind is not explicable by the brain, and yet the will directs the movements of the body. There is a creative action of God in the stages of the evolution, which attaches itself to the conserving activity. Applying the argument from analogy, we may regard the Person of Christ and the miracles that cluster round His Person as such a creative action of God. If we adequately estimate the significance of the Exodus in the history of mankind, the providential events connected with it will assume greater credibility. But there is a final consideration. The purpose of God in Christ is not only perfective—the completion of the world’s evolution; it is also redemptive—the correction of the evil sin had brought on the human race. It was fitting that the redemption of man from sin should be accompanied by outward remedial signs, the relief of his need and removal of his sufferings. God is without variation and shadow that is cast by turning in His purpose, but His action is conditioned, and must necessarily be conditioned, by the results of man’s use of the freedom which for His wise and holy ends He bestowed. He may in His action transcend His normal activity by a more direct manifestation of Himself than the natural processes of the world afford. The consistency of character of a human personality is not disproved by an exceptional act when a crisis arises; and so, to deal effectively with sin for man’s salvation, God may use miracles as means to His ends without any break in the continuity of His wisdom, righteousness, and grace.
4. Objections.—It seemed desirable to state the facts, the proofs for them, and the reasonableness of them, before taking up the objections that are made. These objections refer to two points,—the possibility of miracle at all, and the sufficiency of the evidence for the miracles of the Bible. Each of these may be very briefly dealt with. (a) For materialism, which recognizes only physical forces; and pantheism, which so identifies God and man that the order of nature is fixed by the necessity of the nature of God; and even for deism, which confines the direct Divine activity to the beginning, and excludes it from the course of the world, miracles are impossible. Agnosticism, which regards the ultimate reality as an inscrutable mystery, is under no logical compulsion to deny the possibility of miracles; Huxley, for instance, pronounces such denial unjustifiable. Two reasons against the possibility of miracles may be advanced from a theistic standpoint. In the interests of science it may be maintained that the uniformity of nature excludes miracle; but, as has just been shown, the theory of Evolution has so modified the conception of uniformity that this argument has lost its force. Life and mind, when first appearing in the process of evolution, were breaches in the uniformity. The uniformity of nature is consistent with fresh stages of development, inexplicable by their antecedents; and only when science has resolved life and mind into matter will the argument regain any validity. In the interests of philosophy, it may be argued that miracles interrupt the continuity of thought: the world as it is is so reasonable (idealism) or so good (optimism) that any change is unthinkable. But the affirmation ignores many of the problems the world as it is presents: sin, sorrow, death are real; would not the solution of these problems give both a more reasonable and a better world? and if miracles should be necessary to such a solution, they are thinkable. Again, is it not somewhat arrogant to make man’s estimate of what is reasonable and good the measure of God’s wisdom and grace?
(b) The more usual objection is the insufficiency of the evidence. Hume laid down this criterion: ‘No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish. Or briefly, it is contrary to experience that a miracle should be true, but not contrary to experience that testimony should be false.’ But to this statement it may properly be objected, that it assumes what is to be proved; for, while it may be contrary to ordinary experience that miracles happen, what the defenders of miracles maintain is that there have been exceptional experiences of miracles. If miracles were common, they would cease to be so described; their uncommonness does not prove their incredibility. Although the test is one that has no warrant, yet it may be argued that Christ’s character and resurrection would stand it. It is less credible that the portrait of Jesus given in the Gospels was invented, than that Jesus lived as there depicted. It is less credible that the Apostolic faith in the risen Lord, and all it accomplished, should have its origin in illusion, than that He rose from the dead. The improbability of miracle is usually the tacit assumption when the sufficiency of the evidence is denied. If the relation of God to the world is conceived as a constant, immanent, progressive, perfective, redemptive activity, the probability of miracles will be so great that the evidence sufficient to prove an ordinary event will be regarded as satisfactory, provided always that this test is met, that the miracle is connected with the fulfilment of the Divine purpose, and is congruous in its character with the wisdom, righteousness, and grace of God.
5. Value.—A few words may in conclusion be added regarding the value of the miracles. The old apologetic view of miracles as the credentials of the doctrines of Christianity is altogether discredited. It is the truth of the doctrines that makes the fact of the miracles credible. It is Christ’s moral character and religious consciousness that help us to believe that He wrought wonderful works. The NT recognizes that a miracle proves only superhuman power (2Th_2:9); only if its character is good, is it proved Divine. In the OT prophecy is declared false, not only when unfulfilled (Deu_18:22), but also when it leads to idolatry (Deu_13:3). The moral test, which can be applied to the miracles of the Gospels, shows the irrelevancy, not to say the flippancy, of Matthew Arnold’s sneer about the turning of a pen into a pen-wiper as the proof of a doctrine. The miracles of the Gospels are constituent elements of Christ’s moral perfection, His grace towards men. While the miracles are represented in the Gospels as not in themselves sufficient to generate faith (Joh_11:46; Joh_12:37), yet it is affirmed that they arrested attention and strengthened faith (Mat_8:27, Luk_5:8; Luk_7:18, Joh_2:11; Joh_6:14). Christ Himself is reported as appealing to them as witness (Joh_5:36), but the appeal seems deprecatory, as elsewhere He rates low the faith that rests on seeing miracles (Joh_4:48; Joh_14:11), while condemning the unbelief that resists even this evidence (Mat_11:20). At the beginning of the Christian Church the miracles had some value as evidence. Today the change Christ has wrought in human history is the most convincing proof of His claim; but we must not ignore the value the miracles had when they occurred, and their value to us still as works of Christ, showing as signs His grace.
Alfred E. Garvie.
Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible
Edited by James Hastings, D.D. Published in 1909


Three distinct New Testament Greek words represent miracles: seemeion, "a sign"; teras, "a prodigy"; dunamis, "a mighty work." Septuagint uses seemeion and teras for Hebrew 'owt and mopheth (Exo_7:9). Seemeion, "sign," views the miracle as evidence of a divine commission: Joh_3:2, "no man can do these signs (Greek) which Thou doest except God be with him" (Joh_9:30; Joh_9:33; Joh_15:24; Luk_7:19-22); teras, "prodigy" or "wonder," expresses the effect on the spectator; dunamis, "mighty work," marks its performance by a superhuman power (Act_2:22; 2Co_12:12; 2Th_2:9). The "sign" is God's seal, attestation, or proof of a revelation being genuine. Jesus' miracles were not merely wonders but signs; signs not merely of His power, but of the nature of His ministry and of His divine person.
A grand distinction peculiar to Christianity is, it won the world to it in an age of high civilization, through a few preachers of humble position, on the evidence of miracles. Basing its claim on miracles the creed of the slave became eventually the faith of the Caesars. Muhammed on the contrary, even in a half-enlightened age and country, pretended no miracle. Christ and His apostles still less than Mahomet among friends would have dared to allege miracles, in the midst of hostile Jews and skeptical Romans, unless they were true. This claim is the more striking, since John the Baptist, though coming "in the spirit and power of Elias," the great miracle worker of the Old Testament, never claimed miraculous power; so far is Scripture from indiscriminately gratifying men's love of the marvelous at the cost of truth.
Similarly, Abraham, David, and other Old Testament heroes never appear as miracle workers. Early Christian writers, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Origen, occasionally appeal to miracles in proof of Christianity; but state that their pagan opponents, admitting the facts, attributed them to magic; which accounts for the fewness of their references to miracles. The Jewish writings, as the Sepher Toldoth Jeshu, also the extant fragments of Celsus, Porphyry, and Julian, admit the fact of the miracles, though ascribing them to magic and evil spirits. In the case of the resurrection (Mat_28:11-15) and the cure of the blind man (John 9) the Jews made a self confuted charge of fraud. The early Christian apologists allege in support of Christianity:
(1) the greatness, number, completeness, and publicity of the miracles;
(2) the beneficial tendency of the doctrine;
(3) the connection of the miracles with prophecy and the whole scheme of redemption from Adam to Christ. The miracles must have been altogether different from the wonders of exorcists, magicians, etc.; else they would not have gained for the gospel so wide and permanent an acceptance. The effect of Philip's ministry on the Samaritans, in opposition to Simon Magus (Acts 8), proves this. The holy character of Christ and His apostles, and the tendency of Christianity to promote truth and virtue, are against the origination of the miracles from evil spirits or jugglery. In the fourth century miracles had ceased (Chrysostom on 1 Corinthians 11-13); in the third, miracles are alleged, but are suspicious, as wrought among those already believing and predisposed to accept prodigies credulously. The ecclesiastical miracles are not attested by inspired writers. The apostles alone could transmit the power of working miracles to others. Cornelius was an exception, being the firstfruit of the Gentiles.
But Philip could not impart it; Peter and John must come to confer on his Samaritan converts miraculous gifts, by laying on of hands (Act_8:15-20; Act_10:44-46; Act_19:6; Mar_16:17-18). Christianity being once proved and attested to us, the analogy of God's dealings leads us to expect He would leave it to make its way by ordinary means; the edifice being erected, the scaffolding is taken down; perpetual miracle is contrary to His ways. The ecclesiastical miracles alleged are ambiguous, or tentative, or legendary, i.e. resembling known products of human credulity and imposture. Many are childish, and palpably framed for superstitious believers, rather than as evidences capable of bearing critical scrutiny. Most of them are not told until long after their presumed occurrence. Herein the New Testament miracles wholly differ from them. The Christian miracles are:
(1) Recorded by contemporaries.
(2) In the same country.
(3) Not based on transient rumor, but confirmed by subsequent investigation, and recorded in independent accounts.
(4) Not naked history, but the history combined with the institution and with the religion of our day, as also with the time and place of the miracle recorded and of Christianity's origin.
(5) With particular specification of names, places, dates, and circumstances.
(6) Not requiring merely otiose assent, as the popular superstitions on which nothing depends, but claiming to regulate the opinions and acts of people.
(7) Not like popish miracles in Roman Catholic countries, in affirmation of opinions already formed, but performed amidst enemies, converting men from their most cherished prejudices; there was no anterior persuasion to lay hold of, Jesus' miracles gave birth to the sect; frauds might mix with the progress, but could not have place in the commencement of the religion.
(8) Not an imaginary perception, as Socrates' demon; the giving sight to the blind leaves a lasting effect; in those of a mixed nature the principal miracle is momentary, but some circumstance combined with it is permanent; Peter's vision might be a dream, but the message of Cornelius could not have been; the concurrence could only be supernatural.
(9) Not tentative, where out of many trials some succeed, as the ancient oracles, cures wrought by relics, etc.
(10) Not doubtful miracles, as the liquefaction of Januarius' blood, cures of nervous ailments.
(11) Not stories which can be resolved into exaggerations.
(12) Not gradual, but instantaneous for the most part (Luk_18:43); not incomplete; not merely temporary, but complete and lasting.
(13) Witnessed to at the cost of suffering and death. (Paley, Evidences of Christianity.)
A miracle is not a "violation of the laws of nature" (Hume), but the introduction of a new agent. Such introduction accords with human experience, for we see an intelligent agent often modifying the otherwise uniform laws of nature. "Experience" informs us of human free will counteracting the lower law of gravitation. Infinitely more can the divine will introduce a new element, counteracting, without destroying, lower physical law; the higher law for a time controls and suspends the action of the lower. Or, "law" being simply the expression of God's will, in miracles God's will intervenes, for certain moral ends, to suspend His ordinary mode of working. The wise men following the star, and then receiving further guidance from the Scripture word, illustrate the twofold revelation, God's works, and God's word, the highest guide. Both meet in the Incarnate Word (Matthew 2; 2Pe_1:19-21). As disturbance has entered the world by sin, as nature visibly attests, God must needs miraculously interfere to nullify that disturbance.
Hume alleged against miracles their contrariety to "experience," and that experience shows testimony to be often false. But "experience" is not to be limited to our time and knowledge. The "experience" of the witnesses for Christianity attests the truth of miracles. However improbable miracles are under ordinary circumstances, they are probable, nay necessary, to attest a religious revelation and a divine commission. "In whatever degree it is probable that a revelation should be communicated to mankind at all, in the same degree is it probable that miracles should be wrought" (Paley, Evidences of Christianity). That they are out of the ordinary course of nature, so far from being an objection, is just what they need to be in order to be fit signs to attest a revelation. It is as easy to God to continue the ordinary course of the rest of nature, with the change of one part, as of all the phenomena without any change. It is objected, miracles "interrupt the course of nature."
But as that course really comprises the whole series of God's government of the universe, moral as well as physical, miracles are doubtless included in it. In this point of view Butler remarks, nothing less than another world, placed in circumstances similar to our own, can furnish an argument from analogy against the credibility of miracles. They have some known general laws, e.g. they are infrequent, they are signs attesting a revelation; and probably have other laws as yet unknown. The testimony to Christian miracles is that of concurrent and contemporaneous witnesses. The religion so attested specifically differs from the false religions which false miracles have been alleged to support. To draw from the latter a reason against the former is utterly illogical. The argument is the other way, namely, since palpably false religions were propped up by false miracles a pure religion like Christianity is not likely to rest on false miracles.
In estimating the value of the testimony to Christ's miracles it is to be remembered there is no counter testimony. The unbelieving Jews admitted them, but attributed them to Satan. Jesus replied, Satan would never help to overthrow his own kingdom. Besides the evidential value of miracles, they are intimately and internally connected with Christianity as a new creation springing from God manifest in the flesh. That the new creating powers brought into the world in Christ should manifest themselves in miraculous agencies was a necessary consequence of His own manifestation or epiphany. The redemption of mankind from sin was typified, and its earnest given, in the redemption of individuals from the ailments which are sin's consequences. Christ's "bearing our griefs and carrying our sorrows" in His own assumed manhood guaranteed His healing human sicknesses and infirmities.
The miracle of active compassion necessarily flowed from His divine power and human sympathy combined in His incarnation, of which the atonement is the crown (Mat_8:17; Isa_53:4). The history and separate existence of the Israelite church (the sole instance of a pure theism in the ancient world) it is impossible to explain without accepting the miracles which the same Scripture records; so Christianity and Christendom can only be explained by accepting the miracles which introduced them. Both dispensations were inaugurated by miracles, and then mainly left to ordinary providence; only that the Old Testament church, at times when surrounding paganism, as in Elijah's times, threatened to swamp it, was vindicated by miracles. Its miracles are miracles of power, to impress a rude age; the New Testament miracles were miracles of love.
The Old Testament miracles were for the foe's destruction; Christ's were miracles of mercy, except the withering of the fig tree and the sending the demons into the swine to perish, both symbolical lessons of warning to man. Many miracles were typical; as the "tongues" manifested the universality of the Christian dispensation designed for every tongue, so counterworking the division of man from man through the confusion of tongues at Babel; the casting out of demons symbolizes Christ's coming "to destroy the works of the devil." Miracles thus were manifestations of the Holy Spirit's presence and operation in the church. The Old Testament miracles attested God's presence as King of the theocracy; though this involved a continual series of miracles, yet as the theocracy was temporary and local those miracles did not violate God's ordinary government of the world by the laws of nature. The Christian miracles on the contrary, as attesting a permanent and universal dispensation, were properly limited to its commencement.
Christ performed His miracles more for others' preservation than His own. Christ's mission, doctrine, and life, and Christ's miracles mutually depend on one another. Those were worthy objects for which to suspend the so-called (lower) laws of nature, and they illustrate the new spiritual and material creation which He introduces into our fallen world. Therefore that His miracles were false would be far harder to believe than that the testimony which supports them is true. Pritchard observes, Christ's miracles, as His parables, go on the principle of the law of continuity of the human with the divine. So the ten Egyptian plagues have a demonstrable connection with Egyptian phenomena, in most cases not reversing, but developing, nature's forces for a foretold particular end and at a defined time. (See EGYPT; EXODUS.)
Thus the first plague turning the Nile to blood answers to the natural phenomenon of the water becoming, before the rise, first green, then clear yellow about the 25th of June, and gradually ochre red through microscopic cryptogams and infusoria, at times smelling offensively (Exo_7:17-21). The supernatural element was the sudden change at Moses' word and act, killing the fish and making the water unfit for use, results not following the ordinary discoloration. So the frogs, accordant with natural phenomena usual in September, but miraculous in extent, intensity, and connection with Moses' word and act. So the dust, or black fertile soil of the Nile basin, called "chemi," from whence Egypt's ancient name was derived, producing "lice" or tick.
So the dogflies or else beetles; and the murrain, an epidemic often in December succeeding the inundation; and the boils, hail, locusts, and "darkness which might be felt," arising from masses of fine sand filling the atmosphere, the S.W. wind blowing it from the desert. That miracles harmonize with nature in some degree is what we might expect, since the God of revelation is the God of nature. The style of the same author in a new book will resemble his style in former books, only with such changes as the subject requires. The book of nature and the book of redemption are from the same God, written in different characters, but mutually analogous. Leslie (Short Method with the Deists) observes four notes of truth in the Mosaic miracles:
1. They were such as men's senses can clearly judge of.
2. Publicly wrought; two nations, Israel and Egypt, were affected by them, and above two million Israelites for 40 years witnessed them.
3. Public monuments and, what is more convincing, outward observances continually were retained in commemoration of the facts.
4. These monuments and observances were set up at the time the events took place, and continued without interruption afterward. (Compare Deu_8:4; Exo_20:18; Exo_40:38; Exo_8:10; Exo_8:23; Exo_8:22; Exo_9:5; Exo_9:18; Exo_9:25-26; Exo_10:4-5; Exo_10:14; Exo_10:22-23; Exo_12:29; Exo_16:17, etc.; Exo_19:10, etc.; Jos_3:16; Numbers 16; Deu_5:22-23; Numbers 21; 2 Kings 18).
Graves (Pentat. 6) observes we have two histories of Moses and his miracles, one in his book, the other in Israel's laws and ceremonies which are a living witness, not only of the Pentateuch history in general, but also of the miracles it records (Exo_13:1; compare Num_3:11; Num_3:46); its facts are inseparably connected with the miraculous. However indifferent nations become as to religion, they never are so as to property; now miracles were the foundation of the Hebrew polity and of the tenure and regulations of property, e.g. the Jubilee restoration. And the religion and government were so closely connected as to presuppose a peculiar providence rewarding or punishing temporally obedience or disobedience. The effect of the miracles under Joshua kept all his generation faithful to Jehovah, so real and convincing were they (Jos_24:31; Jdg_2:7).
Messiah's miracles were foretold (Isa_35:5-6; Isa_42:7), and so were asked for by John Baptist (Mat_11:2-4), and made the ground by the people of calling Him "Son of David" (Mat_12:23; Joh_7:31). Their aim was not merely to astonish, for many were wrought in behalf of and before obscure persons. When asked for a startling "sign from heaven" He refused (Luk_11:16). The 40 miracles of Christ recorded are but samples out of a greater number (Joh_2:23; Joh_20:30-31; Mat_4:23; Mat_8:16; Mat_9:35; Mat_12:15; Mat_14:14; Mat_14:35-36; Mat_15:30; Mat_19:2; Mat_21:14). Three He restored to life in an ascending gradation: Jairus' daughter just dead, the Nain widow's son being carried to burial, Lazarus four days dead and decomposing (Mat_9:18; Luk_7:11-12; John 11).
Six demons He cast out, two of which witnessed He is "the Holy One ... the Son of the Most High God" (Mar_1:24; Mar_5:2; Mat_9:32; Mat_15:22; Mat_17:15; Luk_11:15). Seventeen He cured of sicknesses, fever, leprosy, palsy, infirmity, withered hand, issue of blood, dropsy, blindness, deafness, muteness (Joh_4:47; Joh_5:5; Joh_9:1; Mat_8:2; Mat_8:5; Mat_8:14; Mat_9:2; Mat_9:20; Mat_9:27; Mat_12:10; Mar_8:22; Luk_13:11; Luk_17:12; Luk_18:35; Luk_22:51); this class is that of miracles bringing in love relief to suffering man. Another class shows His control over nature: creating wine out of water (John 2); feeding 5,000 and 4,000 with bread multiplied manifold (Mat_14:16; Mat_15:36); passing unseen through a crowd, setting aside natural laws (Luk_4:30); giving draughts of fish when the fishermen had caught none (Luk_5:4; Joh_21:6); stilling the storm (Mat_8:26); walking on the sea (Mat_14:25), God's attribute, Job_9:8; transfiguring His countenance (Mat_17:1); directing the fish with the tribute shekel to Peter, and Peter to the fish (Mat_17:27).
Another class is: His overawing men; twice turning out of the temple the sellers and moneychangers (Mat_21:12; Joh_2:13); alone dud unarmed striking fear into the officers sent to take Him twice (Joh_7:45-46; Joh_18:6). He justified His healing on the Sabbath on the same ground as God is above the Sabbath law, working on it as on other days for the sustenance of all life and being (Joh_5:17), "My Father worketh hereto and I work," thus as the Jews truly alleged calling "God His own (in an exclusive sense, idion) Father," and "making Himself equal with God." Love to man, unweariedly active, is as conspicuous in His miracles as power. The connection of His miracles with His redeeming work is the reason why faith was the needed preliminary on the part of the recipients of healing (Mar_6:5-6; Mar_7:29; Mat_9:28-29). If miracles were mere wonders anyone would have been a fit witness of their performance.
But the miracles were designed to attract the witnesses to His kingdom. They were symbolical of spiritual needs met by the Redeemer; vehicles of instruction as well as signs of His divine commission. Performed in His own name and in the first person, "I say unto thee" (Luk_7:14); but the apostles' miracles were in His name (Act_3:6; Act_4:10-12). Faith in His power to heal the body prepared the way for faith in His power to heal the soul. Disbelief disqualified for appreciating miracles. To work miracles before hardened unbelievers would only aggravate their opposition, sin, and condemnation (Joh_15:24; Joh_9:39-41). They crowned their enmity by attributing His casting out of demons to Beelzebub. The "sign" of Jonah in his virtual burial and resurrection, and the sign of their destroying the temple of His body and His raising it in three days (Joh_2:18-21; Mat_16:4), were the only sign which remained to convince them.
His resurrection is the central miracle toward which all the rest converge. He would give them no such sign as they craved, a startling phenomenon in the sky visible and indisputable to all. He would still give such signs of unobtrusive mercy as hereto; if they not only still reject them but also His resurrection, there only remains the last condemning sign, the Son of man coming with the clouds of heaven (Rev_1:7; Dan_7:9-13). His name is "Wonderful" or "miracle" (Isa_9:6; Jdg_13:18-19). He is an embodied miracle, the Miracle of miracles. His incarnation and His resurrection include all between, and involve the wonders of Pentecost. Christ's charge that the eye witnesses should not report His miracles (Mat_9:30; Mar_5:43; Mar_7:36) was in order that men should not dissociate the wonder from His redeeming work.
To John the Baptist on the contrary He sent a report of His miracles, because John was not likely to dissever His miracles from His person and His work. His gestures, laying hands on the patient, anointing the blind eyes with clay, putting His finger into the deaf ear and touching the dumb tongue, creating much bread out of little not out of nothing, condescending to use means though in themselves wholly inadequate, all are tokens of His identifying Himself with us men, signs of His person at once human and divine and of His redeeming and sympathizing work for us. If the incarnation be denied, Christianity's existence is an effect without an adequate cause; grant the incarnation, and miracles are its necessary concomitant and natural consequence. To deny testimony because of the improbability of the facts attested would involve the denial of the Napoleonic history and other facts notoriously true.
The truth of the miracles is confirmed incidentally by the fact that in no nation but Israel have the knowledge and worship of the one true God, the Creator, been maintained by the mere light of nature, and Israel was far from overtopping other nations in mental power and civilization. A divine power alone could have so elevated Israel by an extraordinary call, confirmed by miracles. The prophecies, the morality, the structure of the Bible, and Christianity's conquest of the Roman world and its public establishment about 300 years after the execution of its Founder as a malefactor, similarly confirm the miracles which attest to its divinity. The improbability of the Christian religion being established WITH miracles is not nearly so great as the improbability of its being established WITHOUT miracles. Strauss' mythic theory, namely, that the story of Jesus embodies the nation's cherished idea of what the Messiah was expected to do, and therefore was believed to have done, is counter to the fact that the Jews expected a reigning Messiah, who should not die but deliver them from their Roman masters.
The gravity, simplicity, and historical consistency of the New Testament incidents with the otherwise known circumstances of the times, and the internal marks of the date of writing being soon after the occurrence of the facts, are all against the mythic theory, especially in a non-legendary but historical age. How unlike they are to the really mythic apocryphal Gospels, e.g. that of Nicodemus, the Ebionites, etc. No miracles of Jesus' youth are mentioned; there is no description of His personal appearance, nor of His doings in the world of spirits; no miracles of the Virgin Mary: omissions sure to be supplied in a legendary story. The hostility of the Jewish nation to Christianity confirms the gospel miracles. Had the Jews been generally converted by them, the septic might argue with plausibility that the facts had been invented or exaggerated to gratify the national propensity, credited without examination or proof, and all inquiry checked at the only period when inquiry could have detected imposition.
But now we are certain that the gospel miracles were wrought in the presence of enemies, and so subjected to the severest scrutiny. Joel (Joe 2:28-29-31) apparently foretells a fuller outpouring of the Spirit accompanied with "prophesying," "dreams," and "wonders," in connection with and before "the great and terrible day of the Lord" (compare Zec_12:10). Also Mat_24:24; Mat_24:29, "false Christs and prophets shall show great signs and wonders, inasmuch that if it were possible they shall deceive the very elect ... immediately after ... the sun shall be darkened." So 2Th_2:9, "the coining of that wicked one, the man of sin, shall be after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders."
The same three terms occur for Jesus' miracles (Act_2:22; Heb_2:4); for as the Egyptian magicians imitated Moses (2Ti_3:1-8), so antichrist imitates Christ's works as a "sign" of divinity, real but demoniac. The test of miracles is their being wrought, or not, in support of doctrine in accordance with God's known word and revelation; for God cannot by subsequent revelation contradict Himself (Deu_13:1-5; Gal_1:8-9; Rev_13:11-15; Rev_19:20; 1Ki_13:11-26).
Fausset's Bible Dictionary
By Andrew Robert Fausset, co-Author of Jamieson, Fausset and Brown's 1888.


Miracles. A miracle may be defined to be a plain and manifest exercise by a man, or by God at the call of a man, of those powers which belong only to the Creator and Lord of nature; and this for the declared object of attesting that a divine mission is given to that man. It is not, therefore, the wonder, the exception to common experience, that constitutes the miracle, as is assumed both in the popular use of the word and by most objectors against miracles.
No phenomenon in nature, however unusual, no event in the course of God's providence, however unexpected, is a miracle unless it can be traced to the agency of man, (including prayer, under the term agency), and unless it be put forth as a proof of divine mission. Prodigies and special providences are not miracles.
(A miracle is not a violation of the laws of nature. It is God's acting upon nature in a degree far beyond our powers, but the same kind of act as our wills are continually exerting upon nature. We do not, in lifting a stone, interfere with any law of nature, but exert a higher force among the laws. Prof. Tyndall says that "science does assert that, without a disturbance of natural law quite as serious as the stoppage of an eclipse, or the rolling of the St. Lawrence up the falls of Niagara, no act of humiliation, individual or nation, could call one shower from heaven."
And yet men, by firing a cannon during a battle, can cause a shower: does that cause such a commotion among the laws of nature? The exertion of a will upon the laws does not make a disturbance of natural law; and a miracle is simply the exertion of God's will upon nature. ? Editor).
Again, the term "nature" suggests, to many persons, the idea of a great system of things, endowed with powers and forces of its own ? a sort of machine, set a-going originally by a first cause, but continuing its motions of itself. Hence, we are apt to imagine that a change in the motion or operation of any part of it, by God, would produce the same disturbance of the other parts as such a change would be likely to produce in them, if made by us or by any other natural agent.
But if the motions and operations of material things be produced really by the divine will, then his choosing to change, for a special purpose, the ordinary motion of one part does not necessarily, or probably, imply his choosing to change the ordinary motions of other parts in a way, not at all requisite, for the accomplishment of that special purpose.
It is as easy for him to continue the ordinary course of the rest, with the change of one part, as of all the phenomena without any change at all. Thus, though the stoppage of the motion of the earth, in the ordinary course of nature, would be attended with terrible convulsions, the stoppage of the earth miraculously, for a special purpose to be served by that only, would not, of itself , be followed by any such consequences. (Indeed, by the action of gravitation, it could be stopped, as a stone thrown up is stopped, in less than two minutes, and yet, so gently as not to stir the smallest feather or mote on its surface. ? Editor).
From the same conception of nature as a machine, we are apt to think of interferences, with the ordinary course of nature, as implying some imperfection in it. But it is manifest that this is a false analogy; for the reason why machines are made is to save us trouble; and, therefore, they are more perfect in proportion as they answer this purpose.
But no one can seriously imagine that the universe is a machine, for the purpose of saving trouble to the Almighty. Again, when miracles are described as "interferences with the law of nature," this description makes them appear improbable to many minds, from their not sufficiently considering that the laws of nature interfere with one another, and that we cannot get rid of "interferences" upon any hypothesis consistent with experience.
The circumstances of the Christian miracles are utterly unlike those of any pretended instances of magical wonders. This difference consists in ?
(1) The greatness, number, completeness and publicity of the miracles.
(2) In the character of the miracles. They were all beneficial, helpful, instructive, and worthy of God as their author.
(3) The natural beneficial tendency of the doctrine they attested.
(4) The connection of them, with a whole scheme of revelation, extending from the origin of the human race to the time of Christ.
Smith's Bible Dictionary
By Dr. William Smith.Published in 1863


A miracle, in the popular sense, is a prodigy, or an extraordinary event, which surprises us by its novelty. In a more accurate and philosophic sense, a miracle is an effect which does not follow from any of the regular laws of nature, or which is inconsistent with some known law of it, or contrary to the settled constitution and course of things. Accordingly, all miracles presuppose an established system of nature, within the limits of which they operate, and with the order of which they disagree. Of a miracle in the theological sense many definitions have been given. That of Dr. Samuel Clarke is: “A miracle is a work effected in a manner unusual, or different from the common and regular method of providence, by the interposition of God himself, or of some intelligent agent superior to man, for the proof or evidence of some particular doctrine, or in attestation of the authority of some particular person.” Mr. Hume has insidiously or erroneously maintained that a miracle is contrary to experience; but in reality it is only different from experience. Experience informs us that one event has happened often; testimony informs us that another event has happened once or more. That diseases should be generally cured by the application of external causes, and sometimes at the mere word of a prophet, and without the visible application of causes, are facts not inconsistent with each other in the nature of things themselves, nor irreconcilable according to our ideas. Each fact may arise from its own proper cause; each may exist independently of the other; and each is known by its own proper proof, whether of sense or testimony. As secret causes often produce events contrary to those we do expect from experience, it is equally conceivable that events should sometimes be produced which we do not expect. To pronounce, therefore, a miracle to be false, because it is different from experience, is only to conclude against its general existence from the very circumstance which constitutes its particular nature; for if it were not different from experience, where would be its singularity? or what particular proof could be drawn from it, if it happened according to the ordinary train of human events, or was included in the operation of the general laws of nature? We grant that it does differ from experience; but we do not presume to make our experience the standard of the divine conduct. He that acknowledges a God must, at least, admit the possibility of a miracle. The atheist, that makes him inseparable from what is called nature, and binds him to its laws by an insurmountable necessity; that deprives him of will, and wisdom, and power, as a distinct and independent Being; may deny even the very possibility of a miraculous interposition, which can in any instance suspend or counteract those general laws by which the world is governed. But he who allows of a First Cause in itself perfect and intelligent, abstractedly from those effects which his wisdom and power have produced, must at the same time allow that this cause can be under no such restraints as to be debarred the liberty of controlling its laws as often as it sees fit. Surely, the Being that made the world can govern it, or any part of it, in such a manner as he pleases; and he that constituted the very laws by which it is in general conducted, may suspend the operation of those laws in any given instance, or impress new powers on matter, in order to produce new and extraordinary effects.
In judging of miracles there are certain criteria, peculiar to the subject, sufficient to conduct our inquiries, and warrant our determination. Assuredly they do not appeal to our ignorance, for they presuppose not only the existence of a general order of things, but our actual knowledge of the appearance which that order exhibits, and of the secondary material causes from which it, in most cases, proceeds. If a miraculous event were effected by the immediate hand of God, and yet bore no mark of distinction from the ordinary effects of his agency, it would impress no conviction, and probably awaken no attention. Our knowledge of the ordinary course of things, though limited, is real; and therefore it is essential to a miracle, both that it differ from that course, and be accompanied with peculiar and unequivocal signs of such difference. We have been told that the course of nature is fixed and unalterable, and therefore it is not consistent with the immutability of God to perform miracles. But, surely, they who reason in this manner beg the point in question. We have no right to assume that the Deity has ordained such general laws as will exclude his interposition; and we cannot suppose that he would forbear to interfere where any important end could be answered. This interposition, though it controls, in particular cases, the energy, does not diminish the utility, of those laws. It leaves them to fulfil their own proper purposes, and affects only a distinct purpose, for which they were not calculated. If the course of nature implies the general laws of matter and motion, into which the most opposite phenomena may be resolved, it is certain that we do not yet know them in their full extent; and, therefore, that events, which are related by judicious and disinterested persons, and at the same time imply no gross contradiction, are possible in themselves, and capable of a certain degree of proof. If the course of nature implies the whole order of events which God has ordained for the government of the world, it includes both his ordinary and extraordinary dispensations, and among them miracles may have their place, as a part of the universal plan. It is, indeed, consistent with sound philosophy, and not inconsistent with pure religion, to acknowledge that they might be disposed by the supreme Being at the same time with the more ordinary effects of his power; that their causes and occasions might be arranged with the same regularity; and that, in reference chiefly to their concomitant circumstances of persons and times, to the specific ends for which they were employed, and to our idea of the immediate necessity there is for a divine agent, miracles would differ from common events, in which the hand of God acts as efficaciously, though less visibly. On this consideration of the subject, miracles, instead of contradicting nature, might form a part of it. But what our limited reason and scanty experience may comprehend should never be represented as a full and exact view of the possible or actual varieties which exist in the works of God.
2. If we be asked whether miracles are credible, we reply, that, abstractedly considered, they are not incredible; that they are capable of indirect proof from analogy, and of direct, from testimony; that in the common and daily course of worldly affairs, events, the improbability of which, antecedently to all testimony, was very great, are proved to have happened, by the authority of competent and honest witnesses; that the Christian miracles were objects of real and proper experience to those who saw them; and that whatsoever the senses of mankind can perceive, their report may substantiate. Should it be asked whether miracles were necessary, and whether the end proposed to be effected by them could warrant so immediate and extraordinary an interference of the Almighty, as such extraordinary operations suppose; to this we might answer, that, if the fact be established, all reasonings a priori concerning their necessity must be frivolous, and may be false. We are not capable of deciding on a question which, however simple in appearance, is yet too complex in its parts, and too extensive in its object, to be fully comprehended by the human understanding. Whether God could or could not have effected all the ends designed to be promoted by the Gospel, without deviating from the common course of his providence, and interfering with its general laws, is a speculation that a modest inquirer would carefully avoid; for it carries on the very face of it a degree of presumption totally unbecoming the state of a mortal being. Infinitely safer is it for us to acquiesce in what the Almighty has done, than to embarrass our minds with speculations about what he might have done. Inquiries of this kind are generally inconclusive, and always useless. They rest on no solid principles, are conducted by no fixed rules, and lead to no clear conviction. They begin from curiosity or vanity, they are prosecuted amidst ignorance and error, and they frequently terminate in impious presumption or universal skepticism. God is the best and indeed the only judge how far miracles are proper to promote any particular design of his providence, and how far that design would have been left unaccomplished, if common and ordinary methods only had been pursued. So, from the absence of miracles, we may conclude, in any supposed case, that they were not necessary; from their existence, supported by fair testimony, in any given case, we may refer with confidence that they are proper. A view of the state of the world in general, and of the Jewish nation in particular, and an examination of the nature and tendency of the Christian religion, will point out very clearly the great expediency of a miraculous interposition; and when we reflect on the gracious and important ends that were to be effected by it, we shall be convinced that it was not an idle and useless display of divine power; but that while the means effected and confirmed the end, the end fully justified and illustrated the means. If we reflect on the almost irresistible force of prejudice, and the strong opposition it universally made to the establishment of a new religion on the demolition of rites and ceremonies, which authority had made sacred, and custom had familiarized; if we reflect on the extent and importance, as well as the singularity, of the Christian plan; what was its avowed purpose to effect, and what difficulties it was necessarily called to struggle with before that purpose could be effected; how much it was opposed by the opinions and the practice of the generality of mankind, by philosophy, by superstition, by corrupt passions and inveterate habits, by pride and sensuality, in short, by every engine of human influence, whether formed by craft, or aided by power;—if we seriously reflect on these things, and give them their due force, (and experience shows us that we can scarcely give them too much,) we shall be induced to admit even the necessity of a miraculous interposition, at a time when common means must inevitably, in our apprehensions, have failed of success.
The revelation of the divine will by inspired persons is, as such, miraculous; and therefore, before the adversaries of the Gospel can employ with propriety their objections to the particular miracles on which its credibility is based, they should show the impossibility of any revelation. In whatever age the revelation is given, succeeding ages can know it only from testimony; and, if they admit, on the report of their fellow creatures, that God had inspired any being with the preternatural knowledge of his will, why should they deny that he had enabled the same being to heal the sick, or to cleanse the leprous? How, may it be asked, should the divine Teacher give a more direct and consistent proof of his preternatural commission, than by displaying those signs and wonders which mark the finger of God? That the Apostles could not be deceived, and that they had no temptation to deceive, has been repeatedly demonstrated. So powerful, indeed, is the proof adduced in support of their testimony, that the infidels of these later days have been obliged to abandon the ground on which their predecessors stood; to disclaim all moral evidences arising from the character and relation of eye-witnesses; and to maintain, upon metaphysical, rather than historical, principles, that miracles are utterly incapable, in their own nature, of existing in any circumstances, or of being supported by any evidence.
Miracles may be classed under two heads: those which consist in a train or combination of events, which distinguish themselves from the ordinary arrangements of Providence; and those particular operations which are performed by instruments and agents incompetent to effect them without a preternatural power. In the conduct of Providence respecting the Jewish people, from the earliest periods of their existence, as a distinct class of society, to the present time, we behold a singularity of circumstance and procedure which we cannot account for on common principles. Comparing their condition and situation with that of other nations, we can meet with nothing similar to it in the history of mankind. So remarkable a difference, conspicuous in every revolution of their history, could not have subsisted through mere accident. There must have been a cause adequate to so extraordinary an effect. Now, what should this cause be, but an interposition of Providence in a manner different from the course of its general government? For the phenomenon cannot be explained by an application of those general causes and effects that operate in other cases. The original propagation of Christianity was likewise an event which clearly discovered a miraculous interposition. The circumstances which attended it were such as cannot rationally be accounted for on any other postulatum. (See Christianity.) It may now be observed, that the institutions of the law and the Gospel may not only appeal for their confirmation to a train of events which, taken in a general and combined view, point out an extraordinary designation, and vindicate their claim to a divine authority; but also to a number of particular operations which, considered distinctly, or in a separate and detached light, evidently display a supernatural power, immediately exerted on the occasion.
Since Christ himself constantly appealed to these works as the evidences of his divine mission and character, we may briefly examine how far they justified and confirmed his pretensions. That our Lord laid the greatest stress on the evidence they afforded, nay, that he considered that evidence as sufficient to authenticate his claims to the office of the Messiah with all reasonable and well disposed inquirers, is manifest not only from his own words, Joh_10:25, but also from a great variety of other passages in the evangelists. Thus, when the disciples of John were sent to Christ, to receive from his own lips the most satisfactory proofs of his divine mission, he referred them to his miracles. “Go,” said he, “and show to John again those things which ye hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up,”
Mat_11:4-5. Again: “If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not: but if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works,” Joh_10:37. This appeal to miracles was founded on the following just and obvious grounds:—
First: That they are visible proofs of divine approbation, as well as of divine power; for it would have been quite inconclusive to rest an appeal on the testimony of the latter, if it had not at the same time included an evidence of the former; and it was, indeed, a natural inference, that working of miracles, in defence of a particular cause, was the seal of Heaven to the truth of that cause. To suppose the contrary, would be to suppose that God not only permitted his creatures to be deceived, but that he deviated from the ordinary course of his providence, purposely with a view to deceive them. The conclusion which the man whom our Saviour restored to sight drew from this miracle was exceedingly just, and founded on the common sentiments and impressions of the human heart. “We know,” says he, “that God heareth not sinners: but if any man be a worshipper of God, and doeth his will, him he heareth. Since the world began was it not heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was born blind. If this man were not of God, he could do nothing,” Joh_9:31-33. If the cause which our Saviour was engaged in had not been approved of by God, it would not have been honoured with the seal of miracles: for the divine power can never be supposed to counteract the divine will. This would be to set his nature at variance with itself; and, by destroying his simplicity, would destroy his happiness, and terminate in confusion and misery. Hence we may justly reject, as incredible, those miracles which have been ascribed to the interposition of wicked spirits. The possibility of their interference is a mere hypothesis, depending upon gratuitous assumption, and leading to very dangerous consequences; and the particular instances in which credulous superstition, or perverted philosophy, has supposed them to interfere, are, as facts, destitute of any clear and solid evidence; or, as effects, often resolvable into natural causes.
Secondly: When our Lord appealed to his miracles, as proofs of his divine mission, it presupposed that those miracles were of such a nature as would bear the strictest examination; that they had all those criteria which could possibly distinguish them from the delusions of enthusiasm, and the artifices of imposture; else the appeal would have been fallacious and equivocal. He appealed to them with all the confidence of an upright mind totally possessed with a consciousness of their truth and reality. This appeal was not drawn out into any laboured argument, nor adorned by any of the embellishments of language. It was short, simple, and decisive. He neither reasoned nor declaimed on their nature or their design: he barely pointed to them as plain and indubitable facts, such as spoke their own meaning, and carried with them their own authority. The miracles which our Lord performed were too public to be suspected of imposture; and, being objects of sense, they were secured against the charge of enthusiasm. An impostor would not have acted so absurdly as to have risked his credit on the performance of what, he must have known, it was not in his power to effect; and though an enthusiast, from the warmth of imagination, might have flattered himself with a full persuasion of his being able to perform some miraculous work; yet, when the trial was referred to an object of sense, the event must soon have exposed the delusion. The impostor would not have dared to say to the blind, Receive thy sight; to the deaf, Hear; to the dumb, Speak; to the dead, Arise; to the raging of the sea, Be still; lest he should injure the credit of his cause, by undertaking more than he could perform; and though the enthusiast, under the delusion of his passions, might have confidently commanded disease to fly, and the powers of nature to be subject to his control; yet their obedience would not have followed his command.
The miracles of Christ then were such as an impostor would not have attempted, and such as an enthusiast could not have effected. They had no disguise; and were in a variety of instances of such a nature as to preclude the very possibility of collusion. They were performed in the midst of his bitterest enemies; and were so palpable and certain, as to extort the following acknowledgment even from persons who were most eager to oppose his doctrines, and to discredit his pretensions: “This man doeth many miracles. If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him,”
Joh_11:47-48. The miracles Christ performed were indeed sufficient to alarm the fears of those whose downfall was involved in his success.
And it was impossible for them to deny the facts, which so many thousands were ready to attest on evidence too certain to admit even the possibility of mistake, delusion, or imposture. But his enemies, who admitted their reality and yet resisted their design, by not acknowledging the person who wrought them to be the Messiah, had recourse to the most impious and most absurd suppositions, in order to evade their evidence. The Heathen imputed them to some occult power of magic: and thus applied what has no existence in nature, in order to account for a phenomenon that existed out of its common course. The stories of the Jews, who confessed the miracles, but denied what they were intended to establish, are too ridiculous to be mentioned. We must not, however, omit to take notice of the wicked and blasphemous cavil of the Pharisees, and the noble reply which our Lord made to it. They could not deny the fact, but they imputed it to the agency of an infernal spirit: “This fellow,” said they, “doth not cast out devils, but by Beelzebub, the prince of the devils. And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand: and if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand?” Mat_12:24-26. The purity of the doctrine which was taught by our blessed Lord was totally adverse to the kingdom of darkness. It tended to overthrow it, by the introduction of principles far different from those which Satan would inspire, and by prosecuting objects totally opposite to those which that wicked and malignant spirit would tempt us to pursue: so that in proportion to the prevalence of the kingdom of Christ, the kingdom of Satan would of course be diminished. Now, supposing miracles to be in the power of an infernal spirit, can it be imagined that he would communicate an ability of performing them to persons who were counteracting his designs? Would he by them give credit to a cause that tended to bring his own into disgrace? Thus, as our Saviour appealed to miracles as proofs of his power; so he appealed to the inherent worth and purity of the doctrines they were intended to bear witness to, as a proof that the power was of God. In this manner do the external and internal evidences give and receive mutual confirmation and mutual lustre.
The truth of the Christian religion does not, however, depend wholly on the miracles wrought by its divine Founder, though sufficient in themselves to establish his claims: but, in order to give the evidence of miracles the strongest force they could possibly acquire, that evidence was extended still farther; and the same power that our Lord possessed was communicated to his disciples, and their more immediate successors. While yet on earth he imparted to them this extraordinary gift, as the seal of their commission, when he sent them to preach the Gospel: and after his glorious resurrection and ascension into heaven, they were endowed with powers yet more stupendous. Sensible of the validity of this kind of evidence, the Apostles of our Lord, with the same artless simplicity, and the same boldness of conscious integrity, which distinguished their great Master, constantly insisted upon the miracles they wrought, as strong and undeniable proofs of the truth of their doctrines. Thus the miracles of our blessed Lord may be justly considered as the evidence of his divine mission and character. If we consider their nature, their greatness, and their number; and if to this consideration we add that which respects their end and design, we must acknowledge that no one could have performed them, unless God was with him. They were too public to be the artifices of imposture; too substantial and too numerous to afford the slightest suspicion of undesigned and fortuitous coincidence. In a word, supposing that the Most High should in any instance so far counteract the common laws of nature, as to produce a miracle; and should design that miracle as a monument to future times of the truth of any peculiar doctrine, we cannot conceive any mode of communicating it more effectual than that which he has chosen. Stronger proofs could not be afforded, consistently with the design of the Gospel, which is not to overpower our understandings by an irresistible and compulsory light, but to afford us such rational evidence as is sufficient to satisfy moral inquirers, who are endowed with faculties to perceive the truth; but at the same time who also have power totally to resist it, and finally to forfeit all its blessings. These miracles were of a nature too palpable to be mistaken. They were the objects of sense, and not the precarious speculations of reason concerning what God might do; or the chimerical suggestions of fancy concerning what he did. The facts were recorded by those who must have known whether they were true or false. The persons who recorded them were under no possible temptations to deceive the world. We can only account for their conduct on the supposition of their most perfect conviction and disinterested zeal. That they should assert what they knew to be false; that they should publish it with so much ardour; that they should risk every thing dear to humanity, in order to maintain it; and at last submit to death, in order to attest their persuasion of its truth in those moments when imposture usually drops its mask, and enthusiasm loses its confidence; that they should act thus in opposition to every dictate of common sense, and every principle of common honesty, every restraint of shame, and every impulse of selfishness, is a phenomenon not less irreconcilable to the moral state of things than miracles are to the natural constitution of the world. Falsehood naturally entangles men in contradiction, and confounds them with dismay: but the love of truth invigorates the mind; the consciousness of integrity anticipates the approbation of God; and conscience creates a fortitude, to which mere unsupported nature is often a stranger.
3. How long miracles were continued in the church, has been a matter of keen dispute, and has been investigated with as much anxiety as if the truth of the Gospel depended upon the manner in which it was decided. Assuming, as we are here warranted to do, that real miraculous power was conveyed in the way detailed by the inspired writers, it is plain, that it may have been exercised in different countries, and may have remained, without any new communication of it, throughout the first, and a considerable part of the second century. The Apostles, wherever they went to execute their commission, would avail themselves of the stupendous gift which had been imparted to them; and it is clear, not only that they were permitted and enabled to convey it to others, but that spiritual gifts, including the power of working miracles, were actually conferred on many of the primitive disciples. Allusions to this we find in the epistles of St. Paul; such allusions, too, as it is utterly inconceivable that any man of a sound judgment could have made, had he not known that he was referring to an obvious fact, about which there could be no hesitation. Of the time at which several of the Apostles died, we have no certain knowledge. St. Peter and St. Paul suffered at Rome about A.D. 66, or 67; and it is fully established, that the life of John was much longer protracted, he having died a natural death, A.D. 100, or 101. Supposing that the two former of these Apostles imparted spiritual gifts till the time of their suffering martyrdom, the persons to whom they were imparted might, in the course of nature, have lived through the earlier part of the second century; and if John did the same till the end of his life, such gifts as were derived from him might have remained till more than the half of that century had elapsed. That such was the fact, is asserted by ancient ecclesiastical writers. Whether, after the generation immediately succeeding the Apostles had passed away, the power of working miracles was anew communicated, is a question, the solution of which cannot be nearly so satisfactory. The probability is, that there was no such renewal; and this opinion rests upon the ground that natural causes were now sufficient to accomplish the end for which miracles were originally designed; and it does not appear to have been any part of the scheme of the blessed Author of our religion, that, solely for the purpose of hastening that conversion of the nations which might gradually be accomplished, miracles should be wrought, when these could be of no use in establishing after ages in the faith.
Biblical and Theological Dictionary by Richard Watson
PRINTER 1849.


God is shown in the Bible to be a God of miracles. But miracles do not feature consistently throughout the biblical record. Rather they are grouped largely around three main periods.
The first of these periods was the time of the Israelites’ bondage in Egypt, which challenged God’s purposes to establish his people as an independent nation. By mighty acts God saved his people and brought them into the land he had promised them (Deu_4:34-35; Jos_4:23-24). The second period was that of Elijah and Elisha, when Israel’s religion was threatened with destruction. By some unusual miracles God preserved the minority who remained faithful to him, and acted in judgment against those who tried to wipe out the worship of Yahweh from Israel (1Ki_19:15-18). The third period was that of the coming of the kingdom of God through Jesus Christ and the establishment of his church through those to whom he had given his special power (Act_2:22; Act_3:6; Act_4:10; 1Co_12:10; 1Co_12:28-29; 2Co_12:12).
Of all the miracles, the greatest are those that concern the birth and resurrection of Jesus. God’s act in becoming a human being is itself a miracle so great that it overshadows the means by which it happened, namely, the miraculous conception in the womb of a virgin (Mat_1:18-23; Joh_1:14; see VIRGIN). The resurrection is a miracle so basic to the Christian faith that without it there can be no Christian faith (1Co_15:12-14; see RESURRECTION).
Miracles and nature
If we believe in a personal God who created and controls the world (Gen_1:1; Col_1:16-17), we should have no trouble in believing the biblical record of the miracles he performed. The physical creation is not something self-sufficient or mechanical, as if it were like a huge clock that, once wound up, runs on automatically till finally God stops it. The God of creation is a living God who is active in his creation (Joh_5:17).
God deals with people as responsible beings whom he has placed in a world where everything is in a state of constant change. Being sensitive to the needs of his creatures, he may work in his creation in an extraordinary, even miraculous, way for their benefit (Exo_17:6; Jos_10:11-14; 2Ki_4:42-44; Mar_6:47-51).
On the other hand, God does not work miracles every time someone wants him to. If he did there would be chaos. God’s control of the universe is designed to produce order (Job_38:4-41; Job 39; Psa_147:8-9; Psa_147:16-18; Mat_5:45).
Since God is the controller of nature, he may have performed many of his miraculous works not by doing something ‘contrary to nature’, but by using the normal workings of nature in a special way. The miracle was in the timing, extent or intensity of the event.
Such divine activity may help to explain events such as the plagues of Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea, the crossing of the Jordan River, the collapse of Jericho’s walls and some of the healings performed by Jesus. But even if these can be explained as having natural causes, they were still miracles to those who saw them. They happened as predicted, even though the chances of their so happening appeared to be almost nil (Exo_7:17; Exo_8:2; Jos_3:8-13).
This still leaves unexplained the large number of miracles for which there seem to be no natural causes. Such supernatural interventions by God are not attacks on the so-called laws of nature. What we call the laws of nature are not forces that make things happen, but statements of what people have discovered concerning how nature works. It is God who makes things happens; the ‘laws of nature’ merely summarize the processes by which such things happen. When God acts supernaturally, his actions may be contrary to the way people has usually seen nature work, but his actions do not break any laws of nature. They merely provide new circumstances through which nature works.
God is always the creator of life, the healer of diseases, the calmer of storms and the provider of food, whether he does so through the normal processes of nature or through some miraculous intervention. Through the ages God has sent the rain to water the grapes to produce the wine, but he may choose to hasten the process by turning water into wine immediately (Joh_2:1-11). God has also at times withheld the rain and so caused trees gradually to dry up, but again he may choose to intervene and hasten the process (Mat_21:18-19).
The purpose of miracles
Miracles were usually ‘signs’, that is, works of God that revealed his power and purposes (Exo_7:3; Deu_4:34; Isa_7:11; Mat_16:1; Joh_2:11; Joh_6:14; Joh_20:30; Act_2:43; see SIGNS). However, messengers of God never used miracles just to impress people or to persuade people to believe them (Mat_12:38-39; Luk_23:8). It was the false prophet who used apparent miracles to gain a following (Deu_13:1-3; Mat_24:24; 2Th_2:9-11; Rev_13:13-14). God’s miracles were usually linked with faith (2Ki_3:1-7; Dan_3:16-18; Dan_6:22; Heb_11:29-30).
This was clearly seen in the miracles of Jesus Christ. Jesus used miracles not to try to force people to believe in him, but to help those who already believed. He performed miracles in response to faith, not to try to create faith (Mat_9:27-29; Mar_2:3-5; Mar_5:34; Mar_5:36; Mar_6:5-6). Frequently, Jesus told those whom he had healed not to spread the news of his miraculous work. He did not want to be bothered by people who wanted to see a wonder-worker but who felt no spiritual need themselves (Mat_9:30; Mar_5:43; Mar_8:26).
Nevertheless, it is clear that many of those who saw Jesus’ miracles were filled with awe and glorified God (Mat_9:8; Luk_5:26; Luk_7:16; Luk_9:43). To those who believed in Jesus as the Son of God and the Messiah, the miracles confirmed the truth of their beliefs and revealed to them something of God’s glory (Joh_2:11; Joh_11:40; Act_14:3; Heb_2:3-4; see MESSIAH). There was a connection between the miracles of Jesus and the era of the Messiah. This may explain why miracles were common in the early church but almost died out once the original order of apostles died out (Mat_10:5-8; Luk_9:1; Luk_10:9; Act_4:16; Act_4:29-30; Act_5:12; Rom_15:19; 1Co_12:9-10; 2Co_12:12).
In the record of some of Jesus’ miracles, faith is not mentioned. On those occasions Jesus acted, it seems, purely out of compassion (Mat_8:14-15; Mat_14:13-14; Mat_15:32; Luk_4:40; Luk_7:11-17; Joh_6:1-13); though, as always, he refused to satisfy people who wanted him to perform miracles for their own selfish purposes (Joh_6:14-15).
Jesus’ miracles demonstrated clearly that he was the Messiah, the Son of God (Joh_20:30-31), and that the power of the Spirit of God worked through him in a special way (Mat_12:28; Luk_4:18). Being both divine and human, he had on the one hand authority and power to work miracles, but on the other he always acted in dependence upon his Father (Joh_5:19; Joh_14:10-11). His miracles were always in keeping with his mission as the Saviour of the world. They were never of the senseless or unbelievable kind such as we find in fairy stories. Jesus did not perform miracles as if they were acts of magic, and he never performed them for his own benefit (cf. Mat_4:2-10).
Jesus’ miracles and the kingdom of God
In Jesus the kingdom of God had come into the world. The rule of God was seen in the miracles by which Jesus the Messiah delivered from the power of Satan people who were diseased and oppressed by evil spirits (Mat_4:23-24; Mat_11:2-6; Mat_12:28; see KINGDOM OF GOD). This victory over Satan was a guarantee of the final conquest of Satan when the kingdom of God will reach its triumphant climax at the end of the world’s history (Rev_20:10).
To Christians, Jesus’ miracles foreshadow the age to come. His raising of the dead prefigures the final conquest of death (Mat_11:5; Joh_11:24-27; Joh_11:44; 1Co_15:24-26; Rev_21:4). His healing miracles give hope for a day when there will be no more suffering (Mat_9:27-29; Mar_1:40-42; Rev_21:4). His calming of the storm foreshadows the final perfection of the natural creation (Mat_8:24-27; Rom_8:19-21). His provisions of food and wine give a foretaste of the great banquet of God in the day of the kingdom’s triumph (Joh_2:1-11; Mat_14:15-21; Mat_15:32-38; Mat_26:29; Rev_19:9).
Bridgeway Bible Dictionary by Don Fleming
PRINTER 1990.


God sees fit to carry on his common operations on established and uniform principles. These principles, whether relating to the physical or moral world, are called the laws of nature. And by the laws of nature the most enlightened philosophers and divines have understood the uniform plan according to which, or the uniform manner in which, God exercises His power throughout the created universe.
This uniform method of divine operation is evidently conducive to the most important ends. It manifests the immutable wisdom and goodness of God, and, in ways too many to be here specified, promotes the welfare of His creatures. Without the influence of this uniformity, rational beings would have no effectual motive to effort, and the affairs of the universe, intelligent and unintelligent, would be in a state of total confusion. And this general fact may be considered as a sufficient reason why God, in the common course of His providence, has adopted a uniform method of operation in preference to any other.
But if, in conducting the affairs of his great empire, God sees, in any particular case, as good a reason for a deviation from this uniform order, as there is generally for uniformity, that is, if the glory of his attributes and the good of His creatures require it?and no one can say that such a case may not occur?then, unquestionably, the unchangeable God will cause such a deviation; in other words, will work miracles.
It is admitted that no man, apart from the knowledge of facts, could ever, by, mere reasoning, have arrived at a confident belief, that the conjuncture supposed would certainly occur. But to us who know that mankind are so depraved and wretched, and that the efforts of human wisdom to obtain relief have been in vain, the importance of a special divine interposition is very apparent. And being informed what the plan is, which a merciful God has adopted for our recovery to holiness and happiness, and being satisfied that this plan, so perfectly suited to the end in view, could never have been discovered by man, and never executed, except by a divine dispensation involving miracles, we conclude, that the introduction of a new and miraculous dispensation was in the highest degree an honor to God and a blessing to the world. The mode which God has chosen to impart the knowledge of this dispensation to man, is that of making a revelation to a number of individuals, who are to write and publish it for the benefit of the world. This revelation to individuals is made in such a manner as renders it certain to their minds, that the revelation is from God. But how can that revelation be made available to others? It will not answer the purpose for those who receive it merely to declare that God has made such a revelation to them, and authorized them to proclaim it to their fellow-creatures. For how shall we know that they are not deceivers? Or, if their character is such as to repel any suspicion of this kind, how shall we know that they are not themselves deceived? Have we not a right, nay, are we not bound in duty, to ask for evidence of the divine authority of what they reveal? But what evidence will suffice? The reply is obvious. The revelation, in order to be of use to us, as it is to those who receive it directly from God, must not only be declared by them to us, but must have a divine attestation. In other words, those who declare it to us must show, by some incontestable proof, that it is from God. Such proof is found in a miracle. If an event takes place which we know to be contrary to the laws of nature, we at once recognize it as the special act of him who is the God of nature, and who alone can suspend its laws, and produce effects in another way. The evidence of a direct interposition of God given in this way is irresistible. No man, no infidel, could witness an obvious miracle, without being struck with awe, and recognizing the finger of God.
It is clear that no event, which can be accounted for on natural principles, can prove a supernatural interposition, or contain a divine attestation to the truth of a prophet's claim. But when we look at an event which cannot be traced to the laws of nature, and is clearly above them, such as the burning of the wood upon the altar in the case of Elijah's controversy with the false prophets, or the resurrection of Lazarus, we cannot avoid the conviction, that the Lord of heaven and earth does, by such a miracle, give his testimony, that Elijah is his prophet, and that Jesus is the Messiah. The evidence arising from miracles is so striking and conclusive, that there is no way for an infidel to evade it, but to deny the existence of miracles, and to hold that all the events called miraculous may be accounted for according to the laws of nature.
Hume arrays uniformsexperience against the credibility of miracles. But the shallow sophistry of his argument has been fully exposed by Campbell, Paley, and many others. We inquire what and how much he means by uniform experience. Does he mean his own experience? But because he has never witnessed a miracle, does it follow that others have not? Does he mean the uniform experience of the greater part of mankind? But how does he know that the experience of a smaller, part has not been different from that of the greater part? Does he mean, then, the uniform experience of all mankind in all ages? How then does his argument stand? He undertakes to prove that no man has ever witnessed or experienced a miracle, and his real argument is, that no one has ever witnessed or experienced it. In other words, to prove that there has never been a miracle, he asserts that there never has been a miracle. This is the nature of his argument?an example of begging the question, which a man of Hume's logical powers would never have resorted to, had it not been for his enmity to religion.
The miraculous events recorded in the Scriptures, particularly those which took place in the times of Moses and Christ, have all the marks which are necessary to prove them to have been matters of fact, and worthy of full credit, and to distinguish them from the feats of jugglers and impostors. This has been shown very satisfactorily by Leslie, Paley, Douglas, and many others. These miracles took place in the most public manner, and in the presence of many witnesses; so that there was opportunity to subject them to the most searching scrutiny. Good men and bad men were able and disposed to examine them thoroughly, and to prove them to have been impostures, if they had been so.
A large number of men, of unquestionable honesty and intelligence, constantly affirmed that the miracles took place before their eyes. And some of these original witnesses wrote and published histories of the facts, in the places where they were alleged to have occurred, and near the time of their occurrence. In these histories it was openly asserted that the miracles, as described, were publicly known and acknowledged to have taken place; and this no one took upon him to contradict, or to question. Moreover, many persons who stood forth as witnesses of these miracles passed their lives in labors, dangers, and sufferings, in attestation of the accounts they delivered, and solely in consequence of their belief of the truth of those accounts; and, from the same motive, they voluntarily submitted to new rules of conduct; while nothing like this is true respecting any other pretended miracles.
It has been a long agitated question, whether miracles have ever been wrought, or can be consistently supposed to be wrought, by apostate spirits.
It is sufficient to say here, that it would be evidently inconsistent with the character of God to empower or to suffer wicked beings to work miracles in support of falsehood. And if wicked spirits in the time of Christ had power to produce preternatural effects upon the minds or bodies of men, and if those effects are to be ranked among real miracles (which, however, we do not affirm), still the end of miracles is not contravened. For those very operations of evil spirits were under the control of divine providence, and were made in two ways to subserve the cause of Christ. First; they furnished an occasion, as doubtless they were designed to do, for Christ to show His power over evil spirits, and, by His superior miracles, to give a new proof of His Messiahship. Secondly; the evil spirits themselves were constrained to give their testimony, that Jesus was the Christ, the Holy One of Israel.
As to the time when the miraculous dispensation ceased, we can only remark, that the power of working miracles, which belonged pre-eminently to Christ and His apostles, and, in inferior degrees, to many other Christians in the apostolic age, subsided gradually. After the great object of supernatural works was accomplished in the establishment of the Christian religion, with all its sacred truths, and its divinely appointed institutions, during the life of Christ and His apostles, there appears to have been no further occasion for miracles, and no satisfactory evidence that they actually occurred.




The Popular Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature
by John Kitto.


Miracles
In every age there are certain great movements of human thought, which more or less influence the convictions of men in the mass, and carry them on to conclusions which, but a few years before, would have seemed altogether improbable. Sometimes it is very difficult to account for these movements. There has often been no master-mind leading the way whatever works have been written have rather been the result of the wave of thought passing over that small portion of the world which thinks than the cause of the wave. As far as cause can be traced, the new movement is a reaction, a recoil of the mind, from that which has gone before, whether in the way of dissatisfaction at the sloth and inactivity of the previous age, and at its being ignobly content to have no high aspiration, no high sense of the nobleness of man's mission, or a rebound from overstrained dogmatism and principles urged on to an extent which made them practically a burden and wearisomeness too great for men to endure.
The latter is perhaps the more common origin of new developments of thought, and is a power larger and more constantly at work than men are apt to imagine. But the explanation of the movements of the mind in our own time is rather to be sought in the meanness of the last century. Upon the whole, it was not a time of high purposes, though the War of Independence on the one side of the Atlantic, and the resistance to the despotism of Napoleon on the other, show that it was not wanting in great practical results. But as the present century advanced, the old lethargy which had enwrapped the minds of the English-speaking race gave way. Some men became intensely active in working for practical reforms; others set new modes of thought in motion, and everywhere there was On eager desire for thoroughness, and for probing: the principles of things to the very bottom. The old argument of “continuance” — that a thing should still exist because it had existed — gave way to an intense realism, which would let nothing exist unless it could prove its right to existence. Utilitarianism became the order of the day, and that poetry which often gilds a sleepy age, and makes it dwell at peace in a dreamland of repose, vanished before the energy of men keenly alive to the necessities and imperfections of the present.
It is this intense realism that has made men restless and ill at ease athaving to believe in miracles. A miracle stands on entirely different grounds from the whole present order of things, and is out of harmony with the main current of our thoughts. There have been ages when men lived for the future, when the present was neglected, and things unseen were the realities which engrossed their thoughts. When we read the accounts of the trials for witchcraft in New England a century or two ago, we find not the accusers only, but the accused full of ideas of the preternatural. What they saw had but slight influence upon them; what they imagined had alone power over their minds. We, on the contrary, live in the present. The turn of our minds is to verify everything. We call for proof, and whatever cannot be proved we reject. It is not merely miracles which we treat thus, but most of what the last century regarded as historical realities. The intense historical activity of the present day, which has rewritten for us the annals of Greece and Rome, of the Church and of England, of the great eras of Spain and the Netherlands, besides special studies of great value, has its origin in that same spirit for searching and proving which leads so many to reject miracles.
It is altogether unfair to lay the rejection of miracles to the charge of physical science. The leaders of science are as thoroughly realistic as our historians and men of letters, but not more so. They are themselves phenomena of an age which perpetually asks What is? They inquire into the conformation of the earth and its constituents; into the motions of the heavenly bodies, and the laws which govern them, with the same eagerness to find out present facts, and the explanation of them, as animates the historian and the practical reformer. Old beliefs in our day can no more stand their ground than old laws and old customs, unless they can prove their right to stand by an appeal to present usefulness. It is of no use to appeal to anything else. In the present state of men's minds, if a thing does not fit in to the present, it seems to have no right to exist at all.
But if the progress of physical science has little to do with the dislike to miracles and the supernatural, the rapid increase of material wealth, and the advance made in everything which tends to present comfort and enjoyment, have much to do with it. We are living in an age when the present is full of enjoyment. By our large ascendency over the powers of nature, the earth yields us its treasures with a bountifulness never known before. Our homes are replete with comforts and luxuries little dreamed of by those who went before; and the secret forces of nature are pressed into our service, and do our bidding. Side by side with this subjection of nature there has grown up a greatness of material enterprise unknown before. Vast projects are undertaken and persevered in, before which the greatest merchant princes of antiquity would have quailed. There is a grandeur of conception, a nobleness of purpose, an unflinching courage in many of the commercial undertakings of the present day, which, though gain may be their final object, yet give them a dignity and a poetry that make them for the time enough to conceal the deep cravings which are man's peculiar endowment, and which mark him out as a being destined for no common purposes.
Yet this present greatness of material things dwarfs many of man's higher gifts. Its influence begins early. Even in education it makes men aim chiefly at utilitarian objects, and at too early results. Parents do not care for anything which does not lead directly and at once to profit and pay. Whatever develops man's thinking powers, and aims simply at making him better and nobler in himself, is thrust aside. It would take too much time; defer too long the quick harvest of gains; might make men even indifferent to worldly prosperity, and unwilling to sacrifice everything to material wealth. Or, at all events it lies out of the circle of men's every day thoughts. Life is an eager race, with boundless prizes for all who press onwards and upwards. In so active a contest, with every energy on the stretch, and every exertion richly rewarded, it is no wonder if the present is enough; and in its enjoyment men thrust from them indignantly everything that would interfere with and render them less fit for the keen struggle after earthly success.
It is this spirit which makes it so difficult for men to believe in miracles. The purpose of miracles, and their whole use and intention hold so entirely distinct a place from that which is now the main purpose of the mass of men, that they will hear no evidence for them, nor stop calmly to consider whether they may not after all hold a necessary place in the order of things, and be as indispensable for man's perfectness as is this present activity. What too many do is to put aside the consideration of them entirely. They have a sort of notion that miracles contradict the laws of nature, and are therefore impossible. Without perhaps denying the historical accuracy of the Gospels in the main, they yet suppose that they were written by credulous men in a credulous age, and that if cool observers had been present, they could have explained on natural grounds all that took place. Probably they do not think much about the supernatural at all. They have plenty to occupy them; have no spare time; find their lives full of interest; they rise early to their labor and late take rest; and so are content with a general feeling that, whatever may be the explanation of man being what he is, and of the world being what it is, time will reveal it, and that no obligation lies upon a busy man to inquire into abstruse questions, with no present profit. When business is over and old age has come, then it will be his duty to make his peace with God. And he will do so in the ordinary way. as other men do. Religion is a thing relegated to the background for the present; in due time he will attend to it as a practical matter, in the same way in which he will attend to the making of his will.
This thorough realism of the 19th century, intensified by the vast facilities of combined action and, mutual intercourse, which make us live constantly in one another's company, would banish all care and thought of the future from our minds, if it were not that the belief in the existence of a God and of a future life is an undying conviction of our nature. It is a necessary part of ourselves to look forward. No present gains or successes can content us. We turn always to the future, and that with an eagerness which would make life unendurable if we were forced to believe that life were all. The doctrine of annihilation may be professed, but call never really be believed; for it violates the deepest instincts of our hearts. And thus compelled by the very constitution of our natures to believe that there is a God, and that we exist after death, religion itself becomes a very real thing, and supplies a real need. The existence of a God and the immortality of man are not doctrines which need proving. They are intuitions, innate ideas, which may and do gain form and shape from advancing knowledge, but which grew out of the soul itself. Over the savage they have little influence, but civilized and thinking man can never be complete and entire unless these deep instincts of his inner being have their needs fully met and satisfied. In a mail who stands perfect and complete, the necessities of the future must be as fully and entirely recognised and supplied as the requirements of the present. He must have a religion.
Now religion is either natural or revealed. Not that these two are opposed. The revealed religion which we Christians profess contains and gives new authority to all the truths of natural religion, while extending itself far beyond them. Natural religion is a dim feeling and groping after God as manifested in his works, and a distinguishing of right from wrong, as far as the indications of a righteous government existing now, and the laws of our own nature, and the marvellous gift of conscience, enable us to do so. In revealed religion we have fuller knowledge: knowledge of God's attributes, not merely as far as we can trace them in his works, but still more as they are manifested in his dealings with man as made known to us in revelation itself; knowledge of man, both as regards his present state and his future hopes; more exact knowledge, too, of right and wrong, the appeal now lying not to the varying codes of human morality, nor even to the inner conscience, which, as a faculty capable of education and development, is no rigid rule, but one which bends to every state of things, and adapts itself to every stage and degree of human progress and decay. Under a revealed religion the appeal is to an unchanging law of God. Morality has at last a settled basis, and man a fixed standard by which to judge his actions.
Now it seems almost supererogatory to show that natural religion was not suffice for man's wants. We know of no one who has definitely asserted that it does. Even Kant, though he appears to think that Christianity might now be dispensed with, yet distinctly holds that natural religion, without the teaching of Christianity, would not even now have been enlightened enough, or pure enough, or certain enough, to guide man's life.* But the whole state of the heathen world before Christ came, and now wherever Christianity is unknown, is proof sufficient of the utter powerlessness of natural religion. The Greek world, with its marvellous taste in art and appreciation of the beautiful, was yet intensely wicked. The state of things at Rome under the empire was so foul that modern pens would blush to describe it. What natural religion is where civilization does not exist, the condition now of savage tribes proves clearly enough. We will touch therefore only upon one point, that of progress. Apart from Christianity, there are at most in the world the very faintest indications of progress; usually none at all. In no form of natural religion, in no heathen religion, was there anything to lead man onward, or to make him better. At best, as under Mohammedanism, or the religion of Confucius, there was stagnation. And when, as in the case of so many of the older civilizations of the world, decay set in, there was no recuperative force. Man sank steadily and hopelessly. In the Old Testament alone do we find the thought of progress. A nation is there formed for a high and unique purpose; and to shape it for its end it is placed in a special and immediate relation to God, and is taught by messengers sent directly by him. Under this special dispensation, its one business was to grow fit for the work prepared for it; its one motto, progress. In the New Testament, progress is the central thought everywhere present; but no longer now for one nation — it is progress for all mankind. It is a new kingdom that is proclaimed, and all who enter it are required to put away old things, and become new. It belongs to men who have left their previous condition far behind, and who, forgetting what is past, “reach forth unto those things which are before.” And special stress is laid everywhere upon the duty of bringing all men into this new kingdom, and of Christians being the purifying salt which is to preserve the whole world.
The means by which Christianity thus renovates mankind, and becomes the moving force of all modern and real progress, is partly that it alone proposes to us principles so perfect that at the utmost our approach to their realization is a very distant one. The complete abnegation of self, the treatment of others with that justice, liberality, and love with which we would wish ourselves to be treated, and a holiness as absolute and entire as that of God himself such principles, while practically aiding us in our upward course, yet set us a standard which as a matter of fact, is unattainable. How often this is misunderstood! Men contrast our Christianity with what is set before us in the Gospels, and, either in mockery or in grief at the disparity, assert that our state is practically a mere heathenism. But while there is ample room for lamentation that we Christians are content to remain so very much below the standard set us, yet, so far as there is progress towards it — so far as it can be truly said that this generation is in a higher stage than the last was, and is training the youth to attain in the next to a still nearer approximation to Christian perfectness, so far Christianity is doing its work; not merely its work on individuals these constantly, even where the general state of things is bad and low, it raises to a high degree of virtue and holiness — but its work on the mass. If nationally we are making no progress, then our Christianity is not having its proper work, and, in an age which judges by results, is not proving its right still to exist. But even at the worst no Christian nation is hopeless: heathen nations sank without hope. Christian nations have again and again risen from the lowest degradation.
* “We may well concede that if the Gospel had not previously taught the universal moral laws, reason would not yet have attained so perfect an insight into them. Letter of Kant to Jacobi, in Jacobi's Werke, 3:523. But Christianity tends to progress not merely by the high ideal it sets before us, but by its power over men's sympathies. This power resides mainly in the human nature of Christ, but only when viewed in its relation to his Godhead. As the great proof of the Father's love to man, it does arrest our feelings, dwell upon our imagination, and inspire our conduct with motives such as no other supposed manifestation of the Deity to man has ever produced. Christ incarnate in the flesh is not merely the realization of the high standard of Christianity, and the model for our imitation, but acts also as a motive power, by which men are aroused and encouraged to the attempt to put into practice the principles of the religion which Christ taught.
If there be a God — and the man who denies it contradicts the intuitions of his own nature — it is religion, and revealed religion only, that gives us adequate knowledge of his nature and attributes, If there be a future — and the very instincts of our nature testify that there is — again it is revealed religion only that tells us what the future life is, and how we may attain to it. Yet necessary parts as both these beliefs are of oar nature, men may bring themselves to deny them. For a time they can put away from them both the future and a God. But if there be a present — and this is just the one thing in which the 19th century does thoroughly believe — even then, granting only this, if this present is to have any progress, and is to move onwards to anything better; if there is to be in it anything of healthful and vigorous life, this, too, is bound up with the one religion, which has satisfactory proof to give that it is revealed; proof that it did come really from God; and proof that it is the one motive power of human progress. If the light of nature hitherto has been insufficient to secure virtue or raise men towards it, that light will not suffice now, even though it has been fed and strengthened by centuries of Christian teaching. In asserting this, Kant asserted too much. Neither Christians nor Christian communities have as yet risen to anything like a high general standard of morality, to say nothing about holiness; remove the high ideal and the strong motives supplied by the religion of Christ, and there would result, first stagnation, and then decay. An “enlightened self-love” never yet successfully resisted any carnal or earthly passion. Christianity has effected much; the contrast between heathen and Christian communities is immense: but it has tot raised men yet to its own standard, nor even to a reasonably fair standard of moral excellence. Now, grant but the possibility of there being a God; grant but the possibility of there being a future, as there must necessarily be a connection between man's future and his present, and as our idea of God forbids our excluding any existent thing from connection with him, then at least a revelation would be useful, and as God must be good, there is no antecedent improbability in his bestowing upon man what would be of use and benefit to him. You must get rid of God — must resolve him into a sort of nebulous all-pervading ether, with no attributes or personal force or knowledge (the Pantheists do this beautifully, and call God cosmic force) — you must get rid of a future life, and account yourselves simple phenomena, like the monkey, and ascidian jellybags, from which you are supposed to be descended, with no connection with the past, no reason for your present existence, mere shooting-stars in the realms of space, coming from nowhere, and going nowhither, and so only, by the extirpation of these two ideas from your nature, can you make a revelation improbable. Even then your position is open to grave doubt. We can understand the law of evolution; and if the law be proved, though as yet it is unproved, it would involve me in .no religious difficulties, provided that evolution really worked towards a solid end. Accustomed everywhere else in nature to see things fitted to their place, and all things so ordered that there is a use for everything, I could understand the meanest thing in creation rising upwards in the scale through multitudinous forms and infinite periods of time, if finally there were some purpose for all this rising. The plan is vast and marvellous. It can be justified only by some useful end. And such an end there would be if, after vast ages of development, the tiny atom ended in becoming a reasonable and responsible creature, with some purpose for all this vast preparation, because capable of still rising upwards, and of “becoming partaker of the divine nature.” But if the law of evolution stops at man without a future, then its product is not worthy of it, and so purposeless a law, ending in so mean a result — for what is there meaner than man without Christ? — falls to the ground as too grand in its design for so bare and worthless a result.
Yet even this is but part of the argument; the evidences in favor of Christianity have a collective force, and it is upon them as to whole that one fain rests secure. But we may well contend that if Christianity is necessary for our present well-being; if the advance of society; if the removal of the bad, the vile, and the sorrowful in our existing arrangements; if the maintenance and strengthening of the noble, the earnest, the generous, and the pure, is bound up with Christianity, as being the only sure basis and motive towards progress, then, at all events, religion can show cause enough for existence to make it the duty of men to examine the evidence which it offers in its proof. Nineteenth century men may decline to listen to arguments which concern only things so remote as God and the future. Have they not built railways, laid the Atlantic telegraph, found out the constituent elements of the sun through the spectrum, and gained fortunes by gambling on the stock exchange? What can men want more?' Well, they want something to bind society together: even the worst want something to control in others those passions to which they give free play in themselves. No man wants society to grow worse, however much he may do himself to corrupt it. But the one salt of society, the one thing that does purify and hold it together, is religion.
Now antecedently there is no reason why God might not have made natural religion much more mighty and availing. As it is, nothing is more powerless in itself, though useful as an ally to revelation. Religion or no religion means revelation or no revelation. Reject revelation, and the only reason for not rejecting natural religion is that it is not worth the trouble. If religion, then, is a necessity of our present state, this means that revelation is a necessity. We are quite aware that even revealed religion does not explain all the difficulties of our present state. There is very much of doubt suggested by our philosophy to which Christianity gives only this answer, Believe and wait. It is, in fact, rigidly careful in refusing to give any and every explanation of things present except a practical one: in the most marked way it is silent as to the cause of our being what we are, and as to the nature of the world to come. It tells us that we do not now see the realities themselves, but only reflections of them in a mirror, and even that only in a riddling way (1Co_13:12). Hereafter it promises that we shall see the things themselves, and understand the true nature and exposition of the enigmas of life. Meanwhile it gives us every practical help and necessary guidance for the present. Judged thus by practical results and by its working powers, it is a thing indispensable. Without it man is imperfect, and society has nothing to arrest its dissolution, or arouse it to a struggle after amendment. Reformation is essentially a Christian idea. That a state should throw off its ignoble past and start on a new quest after excellence and right is possible only where there is a religion strong enough to move men, and noble enough to offer them a high ideal. Reform movements have therefore been confined to Christian states; and for the individual, his one road to perfection has been a moving forwards towards God.
Upon this, then, we base our argument for miracles. The universal instincts of men prove the necessity of the existence of religion. Without it the promptings of our hearts, compelling us to believe in a God and to hope for a future, would be empty and meaningless; and this no human instincts are. There is no instinct whatsoever which has not in external nature that which exactly corresponds to it, and is its proper field of exercise. And, in the next place, natural religion, though in entire agreement with revealed, is, as we have shown, insufficient for the purposes for which religion is required. And, finally, there is the phenomenon that the revealed religion which we profess does act as a motive to progress. Christian nations — in morals, in freedom in literature, in science, in the arts, and in all that adorns or beautifies society and human life — hold undoubtedly the foremost place, and are still moving forward. And in proportion as a Christian nation holds its faith purely and firmly, so surely does it advance onwards. It is content with nothing to which it has attained, but sees before it the ideal of a higher perfection (Php_3:13-14).
Now a revealed religion can be proved only by that which involves the supernatural. What our Lord says to the Jews, that “they would not have sinned in rejecting him but for his works” (Joh_9:41), commends itself at once to our reason. No proof can rise higher than the order of things to which it belongs. And thus all that can be proved by the elaborate examination of all created things, and the diligent inquiry into their conformation and uses and instincts, and the purposes for which each organ or faculty was given them; yea, even the search into man's own mind, and all the psychologic problems which suggest so very much to us as to the purposes of our existence — all this can rise no higher than natural religion. They are at best but guesses and vague conjectures, and a feeling and groping after truth. Nothing of this sort could prove to us a revealed religion. For how are we to know that it is revealed? In order to its being revealed, God must be the giver of it. And how are we to know that it is he who speaks? Its strength, its value, its authority, all depend upon its being the voice of God. No subjective authority can prove this. The nature of the truths revealed, their adaptability to our wants, their usefulness, their probability nothing of this would prove that they had not been thought out by some highly-gifted man. We must have direct evidence something pledging God himself before we can accept a religion as revealed.
We shall see this more clearly if we reflect upon the nature of the obedience which we are required to render to a revealed religion. Its authority is summary, and knows no appeal. It is God who speaks, and there is no higher tribunal than his throne. Take, for instance, the Ten Commandments. Essentially they are a republication of the laws of natural religion, excepting perhaps the fourth commandment. But upon how different a footing do they stand! The duty of not killing is in natural religion counteracted by the law of selfpreservation, and in heathen communities has been generally very powerless, and human life but little valued. Even in fairly-civilized communities murder was not a crime to be punished by the state, but to be avenged by the relatives of the murdered man. This even was the state of things among the Jews when the Ten Commandments were promulgated, and Moses, by special enactments, modified and softened the customs which he found prevalent, and which did not distinguish between wilful murder and accidental homicide. Natural religion, therefore, gave no special sanctity to human life, but regarded only the injury done to the family of the sufferer. The divine commandment has gone home straight to the conscience. It has made the shedding of blood a sin, and not merely all injury. Accordingly, Christian states have recognised the divine nature of the law by punishing murder as a public offence, instead of leaving it to be dealt with as a private wrong. A revealed religion therefore claims absolute power over the conscience as being the direct will of God. No question of utility or public or private expediency may stand in its way. It must be obeyed, and disobedience is sin. But plainly we ought not to yield such absolute obedience to anything that we do not know to be the law of God. Man stands too high in the scale of existence for this to be right. Were it only that he is endowed with a conscience, and thereby made responsible for his actions, it is impossible for him to give up the control over his own actions to any being of less authority than that One to whom he is responsible. But a revelation claims to be the express will of that very Being, and therefore a sufficient justification of our actions before his tribunal. Surely, before we trust ourselves to it, we may fairly claim adequate proof that it is his will. The issues are too serious for less than this to suffice.
But, besides this, when we look at Christianity, the nature of its doctrines brings the necessity of supernatural proof before us with intense force. It teaches us that God took our nature upon him, and in our nature died in our stead; and, as we have pointed out before, the strength of Christianity, and that which makes it a religion of progress, is this union of the divine and human natures in Christ. He is not merely the “man of sorrows,” the ideal of suffering humanity — and a religion that glorifies a sinless sufferer may do much to alleviate sorrow and sweeten the bitter cup of woe — but he is much more than this. It is only when that sinless sufferer is worshipped as our Lord and our God that we reach the mainspring which has given Christianity its power to regenerate the world.
But how could such a doctrine be believed on any less evidence than that which directly pledged the divine authority on its behalf? The unique and perfect character of the Jesus of the evangelists; the pure and spotless nature of the morality he taught; the influence for good which Christian doctrines have exercised; the position attained by Christian nations, and the contrast between the ideals of heathenism and of Christianity all this and more is valuable as subsidiary evidence. Some of it is absolutely necessary to sustain our belief. Even miracles would not convince us of the truth of a revelation which taught us a morality contrary to our consciences. For nothing could make us believe that the voice of God in nature could be opposed to his voice in revelation. It is a very axiom that, however it reaches us, the voice of God must be ever the same. But these subsidiary proofs are but by-works. They are not the citadel, and can never form the main defence. A doctrine such as that of God becoming man must have evidence cognate to and in pari materie with the. doctrine itself. Thus, by a plain and self-evident necessity, revelation offers us supernatural proof of its reality. This supernatural proof is twofold, prophecy and miracle.
Now these two not merely support one another, but ,are essentially connected. They are not independent, but correlative proofs. It was the office of the prophet gradually to prepare the way for the manifestation of the Immanuel upon earth. In order to do so effectually he often came armed with supernatural authority. But a vast majority of the prophets had no other business than to impress on the consciences of the people truths already divinely vouched for and implicitly accepted; and such no more needed miracles than the preachers of Christianity do at the present day. But among the prophets were here and there men of higher powers, whose office was to advance onwards towards the ultimate goal of the preparatory dispensation. Such men offered prediction and miracle as the seals which ratified their mission. In general men could be prepared to receive so great a miracle as that set forth in the opening verses of John's Gospel only by a previous dispensation which had brought the supernatural very near to man. If the Old Testament had offered no miracles, and had not taught the constant presence of God in the disposal of all human things, the doctrines of the New Testament would have been an impossibility.
But we shall understand their connection better when we have a clearer idea of the true scriptural doctrine of miracles. The current idea of a miracle is that it is a violation of the laws of nature, and as the laws of nature are the laws of God, a miracle would thus signify the violation by God. of his own laws. This is not the teaching of the Bible itself, but an idea that has grown out of the Latin word which as supplanted the more thoughtful terms used in the Hebrew and in the Greek Scriptures. A “miracle,” miraculum, is something wonderful — marvellous. Now no doubt all God's works are wonderful; but when the word is applied to his doings in the Bible, it is his works in nature that are generally so described. In the Hebrew, especially in poetry, God is often described as doing “wonders,” that is, miracles. But the term is not merely applicable to works such as those wrought by him for his people in Egypt and the wilderness (Exo_15:11; Psa_78:12), but to a thunder-storm (Psa_77:14), and to his ordinary dealings with men in providence (Psa_9:1; Psa_26:7; Psa_40:5), and in the government of the world. But this term wonder is not the word in the Hebrew properly applicable to what ‘we mean by miracles, and in the New Testament our Lord's works are never called “miracles” (θαύματα) at all. The people are often said to have “wondered” (Mat_9:33; Mat_15:31) at Christ's acts, but those acts themselves were not intended simply to produce wonder; they had a specific purpose, indicated by the term properly applicable to them, and that term is sign.
This is the sole Hebrew term for what we mean by miracle; but there are other words applied to our Lord's doings in the New Testament which we will previously consider. And, first, there is a term which approaches very nearly to our word miracle, namely, τέρας, portent, defined by Liddell and Scott, in their Greek Lexicon, as a “sign, wonder, marvel, used of any appearance or event in which men believed that they could see the. finger of God.” But, with that marvellous accuracy which distinguishes the language of the Greek Testament, our Lord's works are never called τέρατα in the Gospels. The word is used of the false Christs and false prophets, who by great signs and portents shall almost deceive the very elect (Mat_24:24; Mar_13:22). The populace, however, expected a prophet to display these portents (Joh_4:48), and Joel had predicted that such signs of God's presence would accompany the coming of the great and notable day of Jehovah (Act_2:19).
In the Acts of the Apostles our Lord is said to have been approved of God by portents as well as by powers and signs, the words literally being “Jesus of Nazareth, a man displayed of God unto you by powers, and portents, and signs” but the portents refer to such things as the star which appeared to the magi, and the darkness and earthquake at the crucifixion. Exactly parallel to this place are the words in Heb_2:4, where God is said to have borne witness to the truth of the apostles' testimony “by signs and portents, and manifold powers, and diversified gifts of the Holy Ghost,” the description being evidently intended to include every manifestation of God's presence with the first preachers of the Gospel, ordinary and extraordinary, in providence and in grace, and not merely the one fact that from time to time they wrought miracles.
But the term portents is freely applied to the miracles wrought by the apostles, being. used of them no less than eight times in the Acts, and also in Rom_15:19, and 2Co_12:12. In every case it is used in connection with the word signs, the Greek in Act_6:8; Act_15:12, being exactly the same as that in Act_2:43; Act_4:30; Act_5:12; Act_14:3, though differently rendered. The two words, however, express very different sides of the apostles' working, the term sign, as we shall see hereafter, having reference to the long-previous preparation for the Messiah's advent, while portents were indications of the presence with them of the finger of God.
In the Synoptic Gospels, the most common term for our Lord's miracles is δυνάμεις, powers. Full of meaning as is the word, it nevertheless is not one easy to adapt to the idiom of our language, and thus in the Gospels it is usually translated “mighty works” (Mat_11:20-21; Mat_11:23, etc.), but miracles in Act_2:22; Act_8:13; Act_19:11; 1Co_12:10; 1Co_12:28, etc. Really it signifies the very opposite of miracles. A δύναμις is a faculty, or capacity for doing anything. We all have our faculties some physical, some mental and moral-and these are all strictly natural endowments. We have also spiritual faculties, and these also primarily are natural endowments of our inner being, though heightened and intensified in believers by the operation of the Holy Ghost. Yet even this is, by the ordinary operation of the Spirit, in accordance with spiritual laws, and not in violation of them. The teaching therefore of this word δυνάμεις, powers or faculties, is that our Lord's works were perfectly natural and ordinary to him. They were his capacities, just as sight and speech are ours. Now in a brute animal articulate speech would be a miracle, because it does not lie within the range of its capacities, and therefore would be a violation of the law of its nature; it does lie within the compass of our faculties, and so in us is no miracle. Similarly, the healing of the sick, the giving sight to the blind, the raising of the dead-things entirely beyond the range of our powers, yet lay entirely within the compass of our Lord's capacities, and were in accordance with the laws of his nature. It was no more a “miracle” in him to turn water into wine than it is with God, who works this change every year. Nor does John call it so, though his word is rendered miracle in our version (Joh_2:11).
His language, as becomes the most thoughtful and philosophic of the Gospels, is deeply significant. He does not use the term δύναμις, faculty, at all, but has two words, one especially his own, namely, ἔργον, a work (yet used once by Mat_11:2, who has so much in common with John); the other, the one proper term for miracle throughout the whole Bible, σημεῖον, a sign.
Our Lord's miracles are called ἔργα, works, by John some fifteen or more times, besides places where they are spoken of as “the works of God” (Joh_9:3; Joh_5:20; Joh_5:36). Now this term stands in a very close relation to the preceding word, δύναμις, a faculty. A faculty, when exerted, produces an ἔργον, or work. Whatever powers or capacities we have, whenever we use them, bring forth a corresponding result. We have capacities of thought, of speech, of action, common to the species, though varying in the individual; and what is not at all remarkable in one man may be very much so in another, simply because it is beyond his usual range. But outside the species it may be not only remarkable but miraculous, because it lies altogether beyond the range of the capacities with which the agent is endowed. And so, on the contrary, what would be miraculous in one class of agents is simply natural in another class, because: it is in accordance with their powers.
Now had our Lord been merely man, any and every work beyond the compass of man's powers would have been a miracle. It would have transcended the limits of his nature; but whether it would necessarily have violated the laws of that nature is a question of some difficulty. Supposing that man is an imperfect being, but capable of progress, the limits of his powers may be indefinitely enlarged. Those who hold theory of evolution concede this, and therefore concede that there is nothing miraculous in a remarkable individual being prematurely endowed with capacities which finally and in due time will be the heritage of the whole species. It is the doctrine of the Bible that the spiritual man has a great future before him, and the prophets of old, and the apostles and early Christians, endowed with their great charismata, or gifts, may be but an anticipation of what the spiritual man may finally become. Still, among the “works” of our Lord and his apostles, there is one which seems distinctly divine, namely, the raising of the dead. Gifts of healing, of exciting dormant powers, such as speech in the dumb, of reading the thoughts of others' hearts, may be so heightened in man as he develops under the operations of the Spirit that much may cease to be astonishing which now is highly so. But the raising of the dead travels into another sphere; nor can we imagine any human progress evolving such a power as this. We cannot imagine man possessed of any latent capacity which may in time be so developed as naturally to produce such a result. So, too, the multiplying of food seems to involve powers reserved to the Creator alone.
But the Gospel of John does not regard our. Lord as a man prematurely endowed with gifts which finally will become the heritage of the whole species; it is penetrated everywhere with the conviction that a higher nature was united in him to his human nature. It shows itself not merely in formal statements like the opening words of the Gospel, but in the language usual with him everywhere. And so here. Our Lord's miracles to him are simply and absolutely ἔργα, works only. But, as we have seen before, they are also divine works, “works of God.” Still in Christ, according to John's view, they were perfectly natural. They were the necessary and direct result of that divine nature which in him was indissolubly united with his human nature. The last thing which the apostle would have thought about them was that they were miraculous, wonderful. That God should give his only- begotten Son to save the world was wonderful. That such a being should: ordinarily do works entirely beyond the limits of man's powers did not seem to John wonderful, and hence the simple yet deeply significant term by which he characterizes them.
Yet such works were not wrought without a purpose; nor did such a being come without having a definite object to justify his manifestation. If wisdom has to be justified of all her children, of all that she produces, there must be some end or purpose effected by each of them, and especially in one like Christ, confessedly the very highest manifestation of human nature, and, as we Christians believe, reaching high above its bounds. Now John points this out in calling our Lord's works σημεῖα, signs. It is devoutly to be hoped that in the revised translation of the New Testament this term will be restored to its place, instead of being mistranslated miracle, as in our present version. Really, in employing it, John was only following in the steps of the older Scriptures, and the unity of thought in the Bible is destroyed when the same word is translated differently in one book from its rendering in another. However wonderful may be God's works, they are not wrought simply to fill men with astonishment, and least of all are those so wrought which lie outside the ordinary course of God's natural laws.
The word σημεῖον, sign, tells us in the plainest language that these works were tokens calling the attention of men to what was then happening; and especially is it used in the Old Testament of some mark or signal confirming a promise or covenant. Such a sign (or mark) God gave to Cain in proof that his life was safe (Gen_4:15). Such a sign (or token) was the rainbow to Noah, certifying him and mankind throughout all time that the world should not be again destroyed by water (Gen_9:13). And here learn we incidentally that God's signs need not be miraculous. The laws of refraction probably were the same before as after the flood, and the fact of the rainbow being produced by the operation of natural laws does not make it a less fit symbol of a covenant between God and man relative to a great natural convulsion. So, again, circumcision was a sign (or token) of the covenant between God and the family of Abraham (Gen_17:11). It was to recall the minds of the Israelites to the thought not merely that they stood in a covenant relation to God, but that that covenant implied personal purity and holiness. In the same way the Sabbath was a sign (Exo_31:13; Eze_20:12) of a peculiar relation between the Jew and his God.
But there are places where it distinctively means what we call a miracle. Thus Ahaz is told to ask a sign, and a choice is given him either of some meteor in the heavens, or of some appearance in the nether world: “Make it deep unto Hades, or high in the vault of heaven above” (Isa_7:11). And when the unbelieving king will ask, no sign, the prophet gives him that of the Immanuel, the virgin's son. So the sign unto Hezekiah of his recovery was the supernatural retrogression of the shadow upon the sundial of Ahaz, however significant it might also be of the hand of time having gone back as regards Hezekiah's own life (Isa_38:7). Elsewhere the divine foreknowledge is the sign (Exo_3:12; Isa_37:30), and generally signs of God's more immediate presence with his people would either be prophecy (Psa_74:9) or miracle (Psa_105:27; Jer_32:20; Dan_4:2).
Very much more might be learned by a filler consideration of the manner in which the word sign is used in the Old Testament, but what is said above is enough to explain the reason why John so constantly used the term to express our Lord's miracles. The water changed into wine at Cana he calls “the beginning of signs” (Joh_2:11), and the healing of the centurion's son is “the second sign” (Joh_4:54), as being the first and second indications of Christ's wielding those powers which belong to God as the Creator and Author of nature, and which therefore pledged the God of nature, as the sole possessor of these powers, to the truth of any one's teaching who came armed with them (Joh_3:2, where again the Greek is signs). So he tells us that the people assembled at Jerusalem for the Passover believed Jesus “when they. saw the signs which he did” (Joh_2:23). It was, in fact, the very thing they had asked (Mat_12:38; Mat_16:1; Joh_2:18; Joh_6:30), and candid minds confessed that they were a sufficient ground for belief (Joh_6:14; Joh_7:31; Joh_9:16; Joh_12:18); in fact, they were wrought for that purpose (Joh_20:30-31), though men might and did refuse to accept them as proof conclusive of the Saviour's mission (Joh_11:47; Joh_12:37), and vulgar minds, saw in them nothing more than reason for astonishment (Joh_6:2; Joh_6:26). To them they were simply miracles-wonders.
A sign is more and means more than a miracle, for it does not stand alone, but is a token and indication of something else. Thus John's word shows that our Lord's works had a definite purpose. They were not wrought at random, but were intended for a special object. What this was is easy to tell. The Old Testament had always represented the Jews as holding a peculiar position towards the Godhead. They were a chosen people endowed with high privileges and blessings, but so endowed because they were also intended for a unique purpose. They were the depositaries of revelation, and in due time their Torah, their revealed law, was to go forth out of Zion (Isa_2:3) to lighten the whole Gentile world (Isa_42:6). This promise of a revelation extending to the whole world was further connected with the coming of a special descendant of Abraham (Gen_22:18; Deu_18:15), and prophecy had gradually so filled up the outline that a complete sketch had been given of the person, the offices, the work, and the preaching of the great Son of David, to whose line the promise had subsequently been confined (Isa_11:1; Jer_23:5; Hosea 3:8; Mic_5:2, etc.).
But how were people to know when he had come? The prophets had indeed given some indications of the time, especially Daniel (Dan_9:24-27), and so clear were their words that all the world was expecting the arrival of some mighty being, in whom magnus ab integro sceclorrum nascitur ordo, and an entire transformation of the world should take place. But how, among many claimants, was he to be known? He might come, perhaps, as a conqueror, and by force of arms compel men to submit to his authority. But no! Prophecy had described him as the Prince of Peace; nor was his kingdom to be of this world, but a spiritual empire. Now, if we reflect for a little, we shall see that there is no obligation incumbent upon men to accept, or even examine, the claims of any and every one professing to be the bearer of a revelation from God. Before this duty arises, there must at least be something to call our attention to his claims. Mere self- assertion imposes no obligation upon others, unless it have something substantial to back it up. Life is a practical thing, with very onerous duties, and few, like the Athenians of old, have the taste or the leisure to listen to and examine everything new. The herald of a divine dispensation must have proof to offer that he does come from God, and such proof as pledges the divine attributes to the truth of his teaching. This is the reason why the Old-Testament dispensation was one of signs. On special occasions justifying the divine interference, and in the persons of its great teachers, the prophets, supernatural proof was given in two ways of God's presence with his messengers in a manner superior to and beyond his ordinary and providential presence in the affairs of life. The divine omniscience was pledged to the truth of their words by the prediction of future events and his omnipotence by their working things beyond the ordinary range of nature. The two Old Testament proofs of a revelation were prophecy and miracle. We can think of no others, and nothing less would suffice.
As we have said, the whole of the Old Testament looked forward to the manifestation of a divine person, in whom revelation would become, in the first place, perfect; in the second, universal; and, thirdly, final. As being a final revelation, prophecy, which was the distinctive element of the preparatory dispensation, holds in it no longer an essential place, though it is present in the New Testament in a subordinate degree. But miracle must, in the bearer of such a revelation, rise to its highest level; first because of the superiority of his office to that of the prophets. For he was himself the end of prophecy, the person for whose coming prophecy had prepared, and in whom all God's purposes of love towards mankind were to be fulfilled. The office of Christ as the bearer to mankind of God's final and complete message involves too much for us lightly to ascribe it to him. And no merely natural proof would suffice. We could not possibly believe what we believe of him had he wrought no miracles. We could not believe that he was the appointed Savior, to whom “all honor was given in heaven and earth” (Mat_28:18), for man's redemption, if he had given no proof during the period of his manifestation on earth of being invested with extraordinary powers. But we go further than this. Perhaps no one would deny that the sole sufficient proof of such a religion as Christianity must be supernatural. We assert that no revealed religion whatsoever can be content with a less decided proof. The sole basis upon which a revelation can rest is the possession by the bearer of it of prophetic and miraculous powers.
For a revealed religion claims authority over us. If it be God's voice speaking to us, we have no choice but to obey. Our reason might not approve; our hearts and wills might detest what we were told; yet if we knew that it was God's voice, we must sadly and reluctantly submit to it. But it would be wrong in the highest degree to yield up ourselves to anything requiring such complete obedience unless we had satisfactory. proof that God really was its author. And no subjective proof could be satisfactory. The purity of the doctrines of Christianity, their agreement with the truths of natural religion, their ennobling effects upon our characters, and the way in which they enlighten the conscience — all this and more shows that there is no impossibility in Christianity being a divine revelation: the perfectness of our Lord's character, the thoroughness with which. Christ's atonement answers to the deepest needs of the soul, the way in which Christianity rises above all religions of man's devising — all this and more makes it probable that it is God's gift. But at most these considerations only prepare the mind to listen without prejudice to the direct and external proofs that Christianity is a revelation from God. The final proof must pledge God himself to its truth. But what are the divine attributes which would bear the most decisive witness? Surely those which most entirely transcend all human counterfeits — omniscience and omnipotence. Now these are pledged to Christianity by prophecy and miracle.
The first had performed its office when Christ came. All men were musing in their hearts upon the expected coming of some Great One. His miracles, his works, the products of his powers, were the signs that prophecy was in course of fulfilment, The two must not be separated. Our Lord expressly declares that but for his works the Jews would have been right in rejecting him (Joh_15:24), His claims were too high for any less proof to have sufficed. But the nature of his works did put men under a moral obligation to inquire into his claims; and then he sent them to the Scriptures (Joh_5:39). The miracles were thus not the final proof of Christ's mission. Had they been such, we might have expected that they would still be from time to time vouchsafed, as occasion required, even to the end of the world. The agreement of Christ's life and death and teaching with what had been foretold of the Messiah is the leading proof of his mission, and, having this, we need miracles no more. Christ's works called men's attention to this proof, and made it a duty to examine it. They also exalt his person, and give him the authority of a messenger accredited from heaven; but the Old Testament remains for all ages the proper proof of the truth of the New. Miracles were signs for the times; prophecy is for all time, and as Christianity no longer requires anything especially to call men's attention to its claims, prophecy is proof enough that it is a message from God.
The more clearly to set this before our readers, we repeat that prediction was the distinctive sign of God's presence under the Old-Testament dispensation, and miracles subordinate. Revelation was then a growing light, and was ever advancing onward; and thus the prophets were ever preparing for the future. It was only on special occasions that miracle was needed. ‘But when revelation became perfect and final in the person of One who, according to the terms of prophecy, transcended the bounds of human nature, it was necessary that miracle should rise in him to its highest level, both because of the dignity of his person, as one invested with all power, human and divine, and also as the proper proof at the time of his being the Son, the last and greatest therefore whom the Father could send; and, finally, to call the attention of men to his claims, and compel them to examine them. For this reason they were called signs. But as soon as the dispensation thus given could force. its claims on men's attention by other means, and its divine bounder had with drawn, miracles necessarily ceased, as being inconsistent with man's probation. Look over the. list of Scripture names for miracles, and ask what one would be appropriate now? Of what would they now be signs? Of what person would they be the proper faculties? For whom now would they be suitable works? The whole scriptural theory of miracles is contravened by the supposition of miracles being continued after Christianity had once been established. What history teaches us, namely, that they were rapidly withdrawn, is alone consistent with what we gather from Scripture concerning them.
They were an essential part of the proof at the time, and have an essential use now. For we could not believe what is taught us of Christ if he had not been accredited by miracles. But the proper evidence for the truth of Christianity now is that of prophecy, not as existing any longer in living force, but as manifested in the agreement of the long list of books forming the Old Testament with one another; and still more in the fulfilment of the Old Testament in the New. It is a proof in everybody's hands, and open to every one to examine. The proof of miracles requires, of course, large historical evidence, and not every one possesses bishop Stillingfleet's Origines Cause, or even Paley; but every Christian has his Bible, and in it will find the proper proof now of its truth.
Agreeably with this, dean Lyall, in his Propaedia Prophetica, has well remarked that the apostles “scarcely allude to Christ's miracles at all, and never in the way of proof (page 4). Miracles, he shows, now hold a disproportionate place in the argument from that assigned to them in the New Testament; and, in fact, it is very remarkable that Peter but twice refers in his speeches to Christ's miracles, and never but once to those wrought by himself. Paul, in his thirteen epistles, only thrice appeals to his own miraculous powers, and never mentions Christ's miracles, or even directly alludes to them. The key of this we have in the names applied to them by the apostles, and especially by John. They were the natural works of one such as was Christ, but also signs that in him the long preparation of the Old-Testament dispensation had reached its final purpose, and that the new and lasting dispensation had begun.
In their proper place and degree, however, they were and still remain essential to the proof of a divine revelation. We could not accept a revelation, or give it the authority over our conscience due to the direct voice of God, unless we had indubitable proof that it was God's voice. The supernatural can only be proved by the Supernatural. If, then, a revelation was necessary as well for the present progress of mankind as for their future perfectness, miracle was also necessary, and the believer in revelation cannot possibly discard it from its place among the evidences.
Necessarily, therefore, from first to last, the Bible is a book of miracle. Miracle is present not as an accident, separable from the main thread, but is itself the very essence of the narrative. The facts of the Old Testament were the basis of the faith of the Jew. They were so as being miracles, and because, as such, they involved certain dogmatic propositions concerning the divine Being and his relations to themselves. So as regards ourselves. When we repeat the Apostles' Creed, we acknowledge our belief first in the existence of a God — an instinct, as we have shown, of our nature — but upon this follow certain historical facts recorded in the New Testament, which are either directly miraculous, or become dogmatic because of being based upon miracle. Without miracle Christianity is absolutely nothing. All that distinguishes it from simple Theism is miraculous.
Miracles in the present day are at a discount. Our men of science have so well studied the laws of the material universe, and shown us so clearly the existence there of a calm, unbroken, unvarying order, that our minds, enamored of so grand a truth, are impatient of any truth or theory rising above these material laws. Thus the controversy whether Christianity is true or not really turns upon miracle. The close and exact examination of all the facts of holy Scripture which has marked our days has served only to confirm men's belief in the authenticity of the sacred writings. Our increased knowledge, especially that obtained from the cuneiform inscriptions corroborative of the Old-Testament history, and from similar unquestionable authorities contemporaneous with the New-Testament records has well-nigh swept away every so-called historical difficulty; while subjective criticism has not merely failed in substantiating any case against the several books of the Bible, but has done very much: to place them upon a surer basis. At no time was the external evidence in favor of Christianity, or the argument drawn from prophecy, so clear and so little liable to objection as at the present day. And this is no slight matter. A host of eager and competent critics have examined with unfavorable intentions the whole line of our defences, and the result of their operations has been to show how thoroughly tenable it is in every part.
Thus the whole attack is now thrown upon miracle. Miracle is roundly asserted to be contrary to the whole course of nature, and to be a violation of that grand law of invariable order which we find everywhere else throughout the universe. In this way a sort of induction is drawn against miracle. Wherever we can examine into the causes of phenomena, we always find them the products of forces acting according to unchanging laws. Whole regions of phenomena,: which were once supposed to be under the sway of chance, have now been reduced to order, and the causes of them made manifest. Men of science have entered one field after another, and have added it to their domains, by showing what laws govern it, and how those laws work. With some show of reason therefore they affirm that law prevails everywhere, and that where at present it cannot be shown to prevail, we may yet be sure of its presence, and convinced that the patient investigations of science will in due time demonstrate its sway. And therefore miracle as being a violation of these universal laws, is not merely, they say, contrary to that experience of men of which Mr. Hume spoke, and upon which he founded an .argument repeatedly shown to be untenable, but of an induction drawn from a vast field of observation and scientific inquiry. In miracle, and miracle alone, science finds something which contradicts its experience. The examination of this most important objection will complete our inquiry.
The proposition contained in this objection, when we consider it, seems a most true conclusion as regards the material universe. All material things apparently are governed by general laws, and it is probable that scientific men are quite right in endeavoring to show that even in creation all things were produced by law. For our own part, we cannot imagine a perfect Being like the Deity working except by law, and therefore we read all theories about evolution and selection, and the formation of the solar system by slow degrees out of a vast nebula, and the like, with no prejudice regarding them, however intended, simply as attempted answers to the question, In what way — by what secondary processes — did God create and shape the world? If, — after reading the arguments, we conclude by thinking them often ingenious rather than true, and put the book down with the Scotch verdict, “Not proven,” we do not therefore think that science is on the wrong track, nor doubt that all these inquiries do in the main give us juster views of God's method of working. But miracle seems to us to belong to another field, of thought, and to be outside the domains of science. For we venture to ask, Is the material universe everything? Is there nothing but matter? nothing but dull, inert particles, acted upon by material forces — attraction, repulsion, affinity, and the like. What is force? What is law? If there be a God — a perfect, omnipotent, omnipresent Being — then law has to us a meaning. It is his will, working permanently and unchangeably because he is a perfect and omnipotent worker. We can understand force. It is his presence, acting upon and controlling all things, but always in the same way, because he changes not. To believe in universal order without a universal will to order all things, to believe in universal laws without a universal lawgiver, is to us an absurdity. Ex nihilo nihil fit. In a world where every effect has a cause, who and what is the cause of all? Who but God? And who sustains the world now but he who first made it?
But it is not the office of science to inquire into the being and attributes and nature of this First Great Cause. Science is solely occupied with the secondary processes. When it has reached the law, it has done its work. It is not the business of science to examine into the law as such, but only into the mode of its operations. Whose is the law, what power sustains it, how it came into being — all this lies outside the domain of science. Thus science never rises above material things; and by remembering this by remember
CYCLOPEDIA OF BIBLICAL, THEOLOGICAL AND ECCLESIASTICAL
press 1895.





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