Miracles and Supernatural Religion Part 2

[16] Other writers might be mentioned, as Mme. Necker (1790), Dr. Vigne (1841). Yet on the other hand it is alleged, that "none of the numerous stories of this dreadful accident which have obtained credence from time to time seem to be authentic" (_American Cyclopedia_, art. "Burial").

Allowing a wide margin for exaggeration and credulity, there is certainly a residuum of fact. A correspondent of the (London) _Spectator_ a few years since testified to a distressing case in his own family.

[17] Kings xvii. 17-23.

[18] Kings iv. 32-36.

[19] Mark v. 35-43.

[20] Luke vii. 12-16.

[21] John xi. 11-44.

[22] Was Jesus aware that Lazarus was really not dead? It is impossible to reach a positive conclusion. In some directions his knowledge was certainly limited. That he was not aware of the reality might be inferred from his seeming to have allowed his act to pa.s.s for what, in the view of it here suggested, it was not,--the recall to life of one actually dead. This, however, a.s.sumes the completeness of a record whose silence on this point cannot be pressed as conclusive. It is, indeed, unlikely that Jesus knew all that medical men now know. But awareness of any fact may be in varying degrees from serious suspicion up to positive cert.i.tude. While far from positiveness, awareness may exist in a degree that gives courage for resolute effort resulting in clear and full verification. Jesus may have been ignorant of the objective reality of Lazarus's condition, and yet have been very hopeful of being empowered by the divine aid he prayed for (John xi. 41) to cope with it successfully.

[23] See pages 28, 29, Note.

[24] Jesus' works of healing are explicitly attributed by the Evangelists to a peculiar power that issued from him. In Mark v. 30, Luke vi. 19, and viii. 46, the original word _dunamis_, which the Authorized Version translates "virtue," is more correctly rendered "power" in the Revised Version. Especially noticeable is the peculiar phraseology of Mark v. 30: "Jesus perceiving in himself that the power proceeding from him had gone forth (R. V.)." The peculiar circ.u.mstances of the case suggest that the going forth of this power might be motived sub-consciously, as well as by conscious volition.

[25] Acts ix. 36-42.

[26] Acts xx. 9-13.

IV

IV

SYNOPSIS.--A clearer conception of miracle approached.--Works of Jesus once reputed miraculous not so reputed now, since not now transcending, as once, the existing range of knowledge and power.--This transfer of the miraculous to the natural likely to continue.--No hard and fast line between the miraculous and the non-miraculous.--Miracle a provisional word, its application narrowing in the enlarging mastery of the secrets of nature and life.

At this point it seems possible to approach a clearer understanding of the proper meaning to attach to the generally ill-defined and hazy term _miracle_.[27] Matthew Arnold's fantastic ill.u.s.tration of the idea of miracle by supposing a pen changed to a pen-wiper may fit some miracles, especially those of the Catholic hagiology, but, if applied to those of Jesus, would be a caricature. In the New Testament a reputed miracle is not any sort of wonderful work upon any sort of occasion, but an act of benevolent will exerted for an immediate benefit,[28] and transcending the then existing range of human intelligence to explain and power to achieve. The historic reality of at least some such acts performed by Jesus is acknowledged by critics as free from the faintest trace of orthodox bias as Keim: "The picture of Jesus, the worker of miracles, belongs to the first believers in Christ, and is no invention."

It has already been noted that a considerable number of the then reputed miracles of Jesus, particularly his works of healing, do not now, as then, transcend the existing range of knowledge and power, and accordingly are no longer reputed miraculous. And one cannot reasonably believe that a limit to the understanding and control of forces in Nature and mind that now are more or less occult has been already reached. It is, therefore, not incredible that some of the mighty works of Jesus, which still transcend the existing limits of knowledge and power, and so are still reputed miraculous, and are suspected by many as unhistorical, may in some yet remote and riper stage of humanity be transferred, as some have already been, to the cla.s.s of the non-miraculous and natural.

Dr. Robbins, Dean of the General Theological Seminary, New York, after remarking that "the word _miracle_ has done more to introduce confusion into Christian Evidences than any other," goes on to say: "To animals certain events to them inexplicable are signs of the presence of human intelligence and power. To men these miracles of Christ are signs of divine intelligence and power. But how is miracle to be differentiated from other providential dealings of G.o.d? Not by removing him further from common events. Abstruse speculations concerning the relation of miracles to other physical phenomena may be safely left to the adjustment of an age which shall have advanced to a more perfect synthesis of knowledge than the present can boast."[29]

The truth to which such considerations conduct is, that no hard and fast line can be drawn between the miraculous and the non-miraculous. To the untutored mind, like that of the savage who thought it miraculous that a chip with a message written on it had talked to the recipient, the simplest thing that he cannot explain is miraculous: "_omne ignotum pro mirifico_," said Tacitus. As the range of knowledge and power widens, the range of the miraculous narrows correspondingly. Some twenty years since, the International Sunday-school Lessons employed as a proof of the divinity of Christ the reputedly miraculous knowledge which he evinced in his first interview with Nathanael of a solitary hour in Nathanael's experience.[30] Since then it has been demonstrated[31] by psychical research that the natural order of the world includes telepathy, and the range of the miraculous has been correspondingly reduced without detriment to the argument for the divinity of Christ, now rested on less precarious ground.

Under such conditions as we have reviewed a miracle cannot always be one and the same thing. Miracle must therefore be defined as being what our whole course of thought has suggested that it is: in general, an elastic word; in particular, a provisional word,--a word whose application narrows with the enlarging range of human knowledge[32] and power which for the time it transcends; a word whose history, in its record of ranges already transcended, prompts expectation that ranges still beyond may be transcended in the illimitable progress of mankind. Professor Le Conte says that miracle is "an occurrence or a phenomenon according to a law higher than any yet known." Thus it is a case of human ignorance, not of divine interference.

On the other hand, we must believe that the goal of progress is a flying goal; that human attainment can never reach finality unless men cease to be. And so all widening of human knowledge and power must ever disclose further limitations to be transcended. There will always be a _Beyond_, in which dwells the secret of laws still undiscovered, that underlie mysteries unrevealed and marvels unexplained. This will have to be admitted, especially, by those to whom the marvellous is synonymous with the incredible. We have not been able to eviscerate even these prosaic and matter-of-fact modern times of marvels whose secret lies in the yet uncatalogued or indefinable powers of the mysterious agent that we name _life_: witness many well verified facts recorded by the Society for Psychical Research.[33] How, then, is it consistent to affirm that no such marvels in ancient records are historical realities? Nay, may it not be true that the ancient days of seers and prophets, the days of Jesus, days of the sublime strivings of great and lonely souls for closer converse with the Infinite Spirit behind his mask of Nature, offered better conditions for marvellous experiences and deeds than these days of scientific laboratories and factories, and world-markets and world-politics?

FOOTNOTES:

[27] "Early and mediaeval theologians agree in conceiving the miraculous as being above, not contrary to, nature. The question entered on a new phase when Hume defined a miracle as a violation of nature, and a.s.serted the impossibility of substantiating its actual occurrence. The modern discussion has proceeded largely in view of Hume's destructive criticism. a.s.suming the possibility of a miracle, the questions of fact and of definition remain."--_Dictionary of Psychology._

"When we find the definition for which we are searching, the miraculous will no longer be a problem."--PROFESSOR W. SANDAY, at the Anglican Church Congress, 1902.

[28] For exceptions see Matthew xxi. 19; Acts xiii. 10, 11.

[29] _A Christian Apologetic_, p. 97.

[30] John i. 47-50.

[31] In the opinion of such psychologists as Professor William James, of Harvard, the late Professor Henry Sidgwick, of Cambridge, England, and others of like eminence.

[32] A hint of this was given by Augustine: "Portentum non fit contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura."--_De Civitate Dei._

[33] Consult the late F. W. H. Myers's remarkable volumes on _Human Personality and Survival after Death_ (Longmans, Green & Co.).

V

V

SYNOPSIS.--Biblical miracles the effluence of extraordinary lives.--Life the world's magician and miracle worker; its miracles now termed _prodigies_.--Miracle the natural product of an extraordinary endowment of life.--Life the ultimate reality.--What any man can achieve is conditioned by the psychical quality of his life.--Nothing more natural, more supernatural, than life.--The derived life of the world filial to the self-existent life of G.o.d, "begotten, not made."--Miracle, as the product of life, the work of G.o.d.

Be it noted, now, that the marvellous phenomena of the Biblical record, whatever else be thought of them, are, even to a superficial view, the extraordinary effluence of extraordinary lives. Here at length we gain a clearer conception of miracle. _Life_ is the world's great magician,--life, so familiar, yet so mysterious; so commonplace, yet so transcendent. No miracle is more marvellous than its doings witnessed in the biological laboratory, or more inexplicable than its transformation of dead matter into living flesh, its development of a Shakespeare from a microscopic bit of protoplasm. But its mysterious processes are too common for general marvel; we marvel only at the uncommon. The boy Zerah Colburn in half a minute solved the problem, "How many seconds since the beginning of the Christian era?" We prefer to call this a prodigy rather than a miracle,--a distinction more verbal than real; and we fancy we have explained it when we say that such arithmetical power was a peculiar endowment of his mental life. Now all of the inexplicable, inimitable reality that at any time has to be left by the baffled intellect as an unsolved wonder under the name of miracle is just that,--_the natural product of an extraordinary endowment of life_. More of its marvellous capability is latent in common men, in the subconscious depths of being, than has ever yet flashed forth in the career of uncommon men. Some scientists say that it depends on chemical and physical forces. It indeed uses these to build the various bodies it inhabits, but again it leaves these to destroy those bodies when it quits them. The most constant and ubiquitous phenomenon in the world, the ultimate reality in the universe, is _life_, revealing its presence in innumerable modes of activity, from the dance of atoms in the rock to the philosophizing of the sage and the aspirations of the saint,--the creator of Nature, the administrator of the regular processes we call the laws of Nature, the author of the wonders men call miraculous because they are uncommon and ill understood.

The works of which any man is naturally capable are conditioned by the psychical quality of his life, and its power to use the forces of Nature. Through differences of vital endowment some can use color, as wonderful painters, and others employ sound, as wonderful musicians, in ways impossible to those otherwise endowed. So "a poet is born, not made." So persons of feeble frame, stimulated by disease or frenzied by pa.s.sion, have put forth preternatural and prodigious muscular strength.

By what we call "clairvoyant" power life calls up in intelligent perception things going on far beyond ocular vision. By what we call "telepathic" power life communicates intelligence with life separated by miles of s.p.a.ce. Such are some of the powers that have been discovered, and fully attested, but not explained, as belonging to the world's master magician, _Life_. And when the poet asks,--

"Ah, what will our children be, The men of a hundred thousand, a million summers away?"

we can only answer with the Apostle: "It doth not yet appear what we shall be." But we cannot deem it likely that the powers of life,

"Deep seated in our mystic frame,"

and giving forth such flashes of their inherent virtue, have already reached their ultimate development.

We look with wonder and awe into the secret shrine of life, where two scarcely visible cells unite to form the human being whose thought shall arrange the starry heavens in majestic order, and harness the t.i.tanic energies of Nature for the world's work. There we behold the real supernatural. Nothing is more natural than life, and nothing also more supernatural. Biology studies all the various forms that the world shows of it, and affirms that life, though multiform, is one. This embryology attests, showing that the whole ascent of life through diverse forms from the lowest to the highest, during the millions of years since life first manifested its presence on this globe, is recapitulated in the stages of growth through which the human being pa.s.ses in the few months before its birth. And philosophy, which does not seek the living among the dead, affirms, _omne vivum ex vivo_. The varied but unitary life of the world is the stream of an exhaustless spring. It is filial to the life of G.o.d, the Father Almighty. What the ancient creed affirmed of the Christ as the Son of G.o.d--whom his beloved disciple recognized as "the eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested unto us[34]"--may be truly affirmed of the mysterious reality that is known as life: "Begotten not made; being of one substance with the Father; through whom [or which] all things were made." Looking from the derived and finite life of the world, visible only in the signs of its presence, but in its reality no more visible than him "whom no man hath seen, nor can see," up to the life underived, aboriginal, infinite, we recognize _G.o.d_ and _Life_ as terms of identical significance. How superficial the notion of miracles as "the personal intervention of G.o.d into the chain of cause and effect," in which he is the constant vital element. If an event deemed miraculous is ever ascribed, as of old, to "the finger of G.o.d," the reality behind the phenomenon is simply a higher or a stronger power of life than is recognized in an event of a common type--life that is one with the infinite and universal Life,

"Life that in me has rest, As I, undying Life, have power in Thee."

FOOTNOTES: