The main interest centres in the explanations of the miracles, though the author, it must be admitted, endeavoured to guard against this. "It is my chief desire," he writes in his preface, "that my views regarding the miracle stories should not be taken as by any means the principal thing. How empty would devotion or religion be if one's spiritual well-being depended on whether one believed in miracles or no!" "The truly miraculous thing about Jesus is Himself, the purity and serene holiness of His character, which is, notwithstanding, genuinely human, and adapted to the imitation and emulation of mankind."
The question of miracle is therefore a subsidiary question. Two points of primary importance are certain from the outset: (1) that unexplained alterations of the course of nature can neither overthrow nor attest a spiritual truth, (2) that everything which happens in nature emanates from the omnipotence of God.
The Evangelists intended to relate miracles; of that there can be no doubt. Nor can any one deny that in their time miracles entered into the plan of God, in the sense that the minds of men were to be astounded and subdued by inexplicable facts. This effect, however, is past. In periods to which the miraculous makes less appeal, in view of the advance in intellectual culture of the nations which have been led to accept Christianity, the understanding must be satisfied if the success of the cause is to be maintained.
Since that which is produced by the laws of nature is really produced by God, the Biblical miracles consist merely in the fact that eye-witnesses report events of which they did not know the secondary causes. Their knowledge of the laws of nature was insufficient to enable them to understand what actually happened. For one who has discovered the secondary causes, the fact remains, as such, but not the miracle.
The question of miracle, therefore, does not really exist, or exists only for those "who are under the influence of the sceptical delusion that it is possible really to think any kind of natural powers as existing apart from God, or to thiink the Being of God apart from the primal potentialities which unfold themselves in the never-ceasing process of Becoming." The difficulty arises from the "original sin" of dissolving the inner unity of God and nature, of denying the equivalence implied by Spinoza in his "Deus sive Natura."
For the normal intelligence the only problem is to discover the secondary causes of the "miracles" of Jesus. It is true there is one miracle which Paulus retains — the miracle of the birth, or at least the possibility of it; in the sense that it is through holy
