the divine character and purpose; but they are signs and not merely seals of truth. Some of the theories regarding miracles which have been formulated may be mentioned. Bonnet, Euler, Haller, Schmid and others “suppose miracles to be already implanted in nature. The miraculous germs always exist alongside other germs in a sort of sheath, like hidden springs in a machine, and emerge into the light when their time comes.” Similar is the view of Paracelsus and Jerome Cardan, who “suppose a twofold world, existing one in the other; beside or behind the visible is an inner, ideal world, which breaks through in particular spots” (Dorner’s System of Christian Doctrine, ii. 155, 156). The 8th duke of Argyll (Reign of Law) maintains that “miracles may be wrought by the selection and use of laws of which man knows and can know nothing, and which, if he did know, he could not employ.” These theories endeavour to discover the means by which the exceptional occurrence is brought about; but the explanation is merely hypothetical, and we are not helped in conceiving the mode of the divine activity in the working of miracles. The important consideration from the religious standpoint is that God’s activity should be fully recognized.
An attempt has been made to discover a natural law which will explain some at least of the miracles of Jesus. “In one respect alone,” says Matthew Arnold, “have the miracles recorded by the evangelists a more real ground than the mass of miracles of which we have the relation. Medical science has never gauged, perhaps never enough set itself to gauge the intimate connexion between moral fault and disease. To what extent or in how many cases what is called illness is due to moral springs having been used amiss, whether by being over-used, or by not being used sufficiently, we hardly at all know, and we too little inquire. Certainly it is due to this very much more than we commonly think, and the more it is due to this the more do moral therapeutics rise in possibility and importance” (Literature and Dogma, pp. 143–144). The moral therapeutics consists in the influence of a powerful will over others. Harnack accepts this view. “We see that a firm will and a convinced faith act even on the bodily life and cause appearances which appeal to us as miracles. Who has hitherto here with certainty measured the realm of the possible and the real? Nobody. Who can say how far the influences of one soul on another soul and of the soul on the body reach? Nobody. Who can still affirm that all which in this realm appears as striking rests only on deception and error? Certainly no miracles occur, but there is enough of the wonderful and the inexplicable” (Das Wesen des Christentums, p. 18). As regards the theory, it may be pointed out: (1) that the nature or cosmical miracles—feeding of the five thousand, stilling of the storm, withering of the fig-tree—are as well-attested as the miracles of healing; (2) that many of the diseases, the cure of which is reported, are of a kind with which moral therapeutics could not effect anything;[1] (3) that Christ’s own insight regarding the power by which He wrought His works is directly challenged by this explanation, for He never failed to ascribe His power to the Father dwelling in Him.
The divine agency is recognized as combining and controlling, but not as producing, in the teleological notion of miracles. “In miracle no new powers, instituted or stimulated by God’s creative action, are at work, but merely the general order of nature”; but “the manifold physical and spiritual powers in actual existence so blend together as to produce a startling result” (Dorner’s System of Christian Doctrine, ii. 157). While we cannot deny, we have no ground for affirming the truth of this theory. Whether God’s action is creative, or only selective and directive in miracles, is beyond our knowledge; we at least do not know the powers exercised, whether new or old.
An attempt is made to get rid of the distinctive nature of miracle when the exceptionalness of the events so regarded is reduced to a new subjective mode of regarding natural phenomena. H. E. G. Paulus dismisses the miracles as “exaggerations or misapprehensions of quite ordinary events.” A. Ritschl has been unjustly charged with this treatment of miracles. But what he emphasizes is on the one hand the close connexion between the conception of miracles and the belief in divine providence, and on the other the compatibility between miracles and the order of nature. He declines to regard miracles as divine action contrary to the laws of nature. So for Schleiermacher “miracle is neither explicable from nature alone, nor entirely alien to it.” What both Ritschl and Schleiermacher insist on is that the belief in miracles is inseparable from the belief in God, and in God as immanent in nature, not only directing and controlling its existent forces, but also as initiating new stages consistent with the old in its progressive development.
We may accept Dorner’s definition as adequate and satisfactory. “Miracles are sensuously cognizable events, not comprehensible on the ground of the causality of nature as such, but essentially on the ground of God’s free action alone. Such facts find their possibility in the constitution of nature and God’s living relation to it, their necessity in the aim of revelation, which they subserve” (p. 161). By the first clause, inward moral and religious changes due to the operation of the Spirit of God in man are excluded, and rightly so (see Inspiration). The negative aspect is presented in the second clause. This is prominent in J. S. Mill’s definition of miracles: “to constitute a miracle, a phenomenon must take place without having been preceded by any antecedent phenomenal conditions sufficient again to reproduce it. . . . The test of a miracle is, were there present in the case such external conditions, such second causes we may call them, that wherever these conditions or causes reappear the event will be reproduced. If there were, it is not a miracle; if there were not, it is” (Essays, p. 224). The positive aspect is presented in the third clause. When the existence of God is denied (atheism), or His nature is declared unknowable (agnosticism), or He is identified with nature itself (pantheism), or He is so distinguished from the world that His free action is excluded from the course of nature (deism), miracle is necessarily denied. Thus Spinoza, identifying God and nature, declares “nothing happens in nature which is in contradiction with its universal laws.” The deists, compelled by their view of the relation of God to nature to regard miracles as interventions, disposed of the miracles of the Bible either as “mistaken allegory” or even as conscious fraud on the part of the narrators. It is only the theistic view of God as personal power—that is as free-will ever present and ever active in the world, which leaves room for miracles.
The possibility of miracles is often confidently denied. “We are of the unalterable conviction,” says Harnack, “that what happens in time and space is subject to the universal laws of movement; that accordingly there cannot be any miracles in this sense, i.e. as interruptions of the continuity of nature” (Das Wesen des Christentums, p. 17). Huxley expresses himself much more cautiously, as he recognizes that we do not know the continuity of nature so thoroughly as to be able to declare that this or that event is necessarily an interruption of it. “If a dead man did come to life, the fact would be evidence, not that any law of nature had been violated, but that these laws, even when they express the results of a very long and uniform experience, are necessarily based on incomplete knowledge, and are to be held only on grounds of more or less justifiable expectation” (Hume, p. 135).
Lotze has shown how the possibility of miracle can be conceived.
“The whole course of nature becomes intelligible only by supposing the co-working of God, who alone carries forward the reciprocal action of the different parts of the world. But that view which admits a life of God that is not benumbed in an unchangeable sameness will be able to understand his eternal co-working as a variable quantity, the transforming influence of which comes forth at particular moments and attests that the course of nature is not shut up within itself. And this being the case, the complete conditioning causes of the miracle will be found in God and nature together, and in that eternal action and reaction between them which perhaps, although not ordered simply according to general laws, is not void of regulative principles. This vital, as opposed to a mechanical, constitution of nature, together with the conceptions of nature as not complete in itself—as if it were dissevered from the divine energy—shows how a miracle may take place without any disturbance elsewhere of the constancy of nature, all whose forces are affected sympathetically, with the consequence that its orderly movement goes on unhindered” (Mikrokosmos, iii. 364.
The mode of the divine working in nature is in another passage more clearly defined.
“The closed and hard circle of mechanical necessity is not immediately accessible to the miracle-working fiat, nor does it need to be; but the inner nature of that which obeys its laws is not determined by it but by the meaning of the world. This is the open place on which a power that commands in the name of this meaning can exert its influence; and if under this command the inner condition of the elements, the magnitudes of their relation and their opposition to each other, become altered, the necessity of the mechanical cause of the world must unfold this new state into a miraculous appearance, not through suspension but through strict maintenance of its general laws” (op. cit. ii. 54).
If we conceive God as personal, and His will as related to the course of nature analogously to the relation of the human will to the human body, then the laws of nature may be regarded as habits of the divine activity, and miracles as unusual acts which, while consistent with the divine character, mark a new stage in the fulfilment of the purpose of God.
The doctrine of Evolution, instead of increasing the difficulty of conceiving the possibility of miracle, decreases it; for it presents to us the universe as an uncompleted process, and one in which there is no absolute continuity on the phenomenal side; for life and mind are inexplicable by their physical antecedents, and there is not only room for, but need of, the divine initiative, a creative as well as conservative co-operation of God with nature. Such an absolute continuity is sometimes assumed without warrant; but Descartes already recognized that the world was no continuous process, “Tria mirabilia fecit Dominus; res ex nihilo, liberum arbitrium et hominem Deum.” That life cannot be explained by force is recognized by Sir Oliver Lodge. “Life may be something not only ultra-terrestrial, but even immaterial, something outside our
present categories of matter and energy; as real as they are, but- ↑ See also R. J. Ryle, “The Neurotic Theory of the Miracles of Healing,” Hibbert Journal, v. 586.
