Supernatural Religion Volume I Part 9

We have already casually referred to Dr. Newman's view of such a relation between Miracle and doctrine, but may here more fully quote his suggestive remarks. "Others by referring to the nature of the doctrine attested," he says, "in order to determine the author of the miracle, have exposed themselves to the plausible charge of adducing, first the miracle to attest the divinity of the doctrine, and then the doctrine to prove the divinity of the Miracle."(1) This argument he characterizes as one of the "dangerous modes" of removing a difficulty, although he does not himself point out a safer, and, in a note, he adds: "There is an appearance of doing honour to the Christian doctrines in representing them as _intrinsically_ credible, which leads many into supporting opinions which, carried to their full extent, supersede the need of Miracles altogether. It must be recollected, too, that they who are allowed to praise have the privilege of finding fault, and may reject, according to their _a priori_ notions, as well as receive. Doubtless the divinity of a clearly immoral doctrine could not be evidenced by Miracles; for our belief in the moral attributes of G.o.d is much stronger than our conviction of the negative proposition, that none but He can interfere with the system of nature.(3) But there is always

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the danger of extending this admission beyond its proper limits, of supposing ourselves adequate judges of the _tendency_ of doctrines; and, because una.s.sisted Reason informs us what is moral and immoral in our own case, of attempting to decide on the abstract morality of actions;... These remarks are in nowise inconsistent with using (as was done in a former section) our actual knowledge of G.o.d's attributes, obtained from a survey of nature and human affairs, in determining the probability of certain professed Miracles having proceeded from Him. It is one thing to infer from the experience of life, another to imagine the character of G.o.d from the gratuitous conceptions of our own minds."(1) Although Dr. Newman apparently fails to perceive that he himself thus makes reason the criterion of miracles and therefore incurs the condemnation with which our quotation opens, the very indecision of his argument ill.u.s.trates the dilemma in which divines are placed. Dr.

Mozley, however, still more directly condemns the principle which we are discussing--that the doctrine must be the criterion of the miracle--although he also, as we have purposes for which it never was intended, and is unfitted. To rationalise in matters of Revelation is to make our reason the standard and measure of the doctrines revealed; to stipulate that those doctrines should be such as to carry with them their own justification; to reject them, if they come in collision with our existing opinions or habits of thought, or are with difficulty harmonised with our existing stock of knowledge" (Essays, Crit. and Hist., 1872, vol. i. p. 31); and a little further on: "A like desire of judging for one's self is discernible in the original fall of man. Eve did not believe the Tempter any more than G.o.d's word, till she perceived the fruit was good for food '" (76., p. 33). Dr. Newman, of course, wishes to limit his principle precisely to suit his own convenience, but in permitting the rejection of a supposed Revelation in spite of miracles, on the ground of our disapproval of its morality, it is obvious that the doctrine is substantially made the final criterion of the miracle.

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seen, elsewhere substantially affirms it. He says: "The position that the revelation proves the miracles, and not the miracles the revelation, admits of a good qualified meaning; but taken literally, it is a double offence against the rule, that things are properly proved by the proper proof of them; for a supernatural fact _is_ the proper proof of a supernatural doctrine; while a supernatural doctrine, on the other hand, is certainly _not_ the proper proof of a supernatural fact"(1)

This statement is obviously true, but it is equally undeniable that, their origin being uncertain, miracles have no distinctive evidential force. How far, then, we may inquire in order thoroughly to understand the position, can doctrines prove the reality of miracles or determine the agency by which they are performed? In the case of moral truths within the limits of reason, it is evident that doctrines which are in accordance with our ideas of what is good and right do not require miraculous evidence at all. They can secure acceptance by their own merits alone. At the same time it is universally admitted that the truth or goodness of a doctrine is in itself no proof that it emanates directly from G.o.d, and consequently the most obvious wisdom and beauty in the doctrine could not attest the divine origin of a miracle. Such truths, however, have no proper connection with revelation at all.

"_These_ truths," to quote the words of Bishop Atterbury, "were of themselves sufficiently obvious and plain, and needed not a Divine Testimony to make them plainer. But the Truths which are necessary in this Manner to be attested, are those which are of Positive Inst.i.tution; those, which if G.o.d had not pleased to reveal them, Human Reason could not

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have discovered; and those, which, even now they are revealed, Human Reason cannot fully account for, and perfectly comprehend."(1) How is it possible then that Reason or "the moral nature in man" can approve as good, or appreciate the fitness of, doctrines which in their very nature are beyond the criterion of reason?(2) What reply, for instance, can reason give to any appeal to it regarding the doctrine of the Trinity or of the Incarnation? If doctrines the truth and goodness of which are apparent do not afford any evidence of Divine Revelation, how can doctrines which Reason can neither discover nor comprehend attest the Divine origin of miracles? Dr. Mozley clearly recognizes that they cannot do so. "The proof of a revelation," he says, and we may add, "the proof of a miracle--itself a species of revelation--which is contained in the substance of a revelation has this inherent check or limit in it: viz. that it cannot reach to what is undiscoverable by reason. Internal evidence is itself an appeal to reason, because at every step the test is our own appreciation of such and such an idea or doctrine, our own perception of its fitness; but human reason cannot in the nature of the case prove that which, by the very hypothesis, lies beyond human reason."(3) It naturally follows that no doctrine which lies beyond reason, and therefore requires the attestation of miracles, can possibly afford that indication of the source and reality of miracles which is necessary to endow them with evidential value, and the supernatural doctrine must, therefore, be rejected in the absence of miraculous evidence of a decisive character.

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Canon Mozley labours earnestly, but unsuccessfully, to restore to Miracles as evidence some part of that potentiality of which these unfortunate limitations have deprived them. Whilst on the one hand he says: "We must admit, indeed, an inherent modification in the function of a miracle as an instrument of proof,"(1) he argues that this is only a limitation, and no disproof of it, and he contends that: "The evidence of miracles is not negatived because it has conditions."(2) His reasoning, however, is purely apologetic, and attempts by the unreal a.n.a.logy of supposed limitations of natural principles and evidence to excuse the disqualifying limitation of the supernatural. He is quite conscious of the serious difficulty of the position: "The question," he says, "may at first sight create a dilemma--If a miracle is nugatory on the side of one doctrine, what cogency has it on the side of another? Is it legitimate to accept its evidence when we please, and reject it when we please?" The only reply he seems able to give to these very pertinent questions is the remark which immediately follows them: "But in truth a miracle is never without an argumentative force, although that force may be counterbalanced."(3) In other words a miracle is always an argument although it is often a bad one. It is scarcely necessary to go to the supernatural for bad arguments.

It might naturally be expected that the miraculous evidence selected to accredit a Divine Revelation should possess certain unique and marked characteristics. It must, at least, be clearly distinctive of Divine power, and exclusively a.s.sociated with Divine truth. It is inconceivable that the Deity, deigning thus to attest

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the reality of a communication from himself of truths beyond the criterion of reason, should not make the evidence simple and complete, because, the doctrines proper to such a revelation not being appreciable from internal evidence, it is obvious that the external testimony for them--if it is to be of any use--must be unmistakable and decisive. The evidence which is actually produced, however, so far from satisfying these legitimate antic.i.p.ations, lacks every one of the qualifications which reason antecedently declares to be necessary. Miracles are not distinctive of Divine power but are common to Satan, and they are admitted to be performed in support of falsehood as well as in the service of truth. They bear, indeed, so little upon them the impress of their origin and true character, that they arc dependent for their recognition upon our judgment of the very doctrines to attest which they are said to have been designed.

Even taking the representation of miracles, therefore, which divines themselves give, they are utterly incompetent to perform their contemplated functions. If they are superhuman they are not super-satanic, and there is no sense in which they can be considered miraculously evidential of anything. To argue, as theologians do, that the ambiguity of their testimony is deliberately intended as a trial of our faith is absurd, for Reason being unable to judge of the nature either of supernatural fact or supernatural doctrine, it would be mere folly and injustice to subject to such a test beings avowedly incapable of sustaining it. Whilst it is absolutely necessary, then, that a Divine Revelation should be attested by miraculous evidence to justify our believing it the testimony so called seems in all respects

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unworthy of the name, and presents anomalies much more suggestive of human invention than Divine originality. We are, in fact, prepared even by the Scriptural account of miracles to expect that further examination will supply an explanation of such phenomena which will wholly remove them from the region of the supernatural.

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CHAPTER II. MIRACLES IN RELATION TO THE ORDER OF NATURE

Without at present touching the question as to their reality, it may be well to ascertain what miracles are considered to be, and how far, and in what sense it is a.s.serted that they are supernatural We have, hitherto, almost entirely confined our attention to the arguments of English divines, and we must for the present continue chiefly to deal with them, for it may broadly be said, that they alone, at the present day, maintain the reality and supernatural character of such phenomena.

No thoughtful mind can fail to see that, considering the function of miracles, this is the only logical and consistent course.(1) The insuperable difficulties in the way of admitting the reality of miracles, however, have driven the great majority of continental, as well as very many English, theologians who still pretend to a certain orthodoxy, either to explain the miracles of the Gospel naturally, or to suppress them altogether. Since Schleiermacher denounced the idea of Divine interruptions of the order of nature, and explained away the supernatural character

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of miracles, by defining them as merely relative: miracles to us, but in reality mere antic.i.p.ations of human knowledge and power, his example has been more or less followed throughout Germany, and almost every expedient has been adopted, by would-be orthodox writers, to reduce or altogether eliminate the miraculous elements. The attempts which have been made to do this, and yet to maintain the semblance of unshaken belief in the main points of ecclesiastical Christianity, have lamentably failed, from the hopeless nature of the task and the fundamental error of the conception. The endeavour of Paulus and his school to get rid of the supernatural by a bold naturalistic interpretation of the language of the Gospel narratives, whilst the credibility of the record was represented as intact, was too glaring an outrage upon common sense to be successful, but it was scarcely more illogical than subsequent efforts to suppress the miraculous, yet retain the creed. The great majority of modern German critics, however, reject the miraculous altogether, and consider the question as no longer worthy of discussion, and most of those who have not distinctly expressed this view either resort to every linguistic device to evade the difficulty, or betray, by their hesitation, the feebleness of their belief.(1) In dealing with the

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question of miracles, therefore, it is not to Germany we must turn, but to England, where their reality is still maintained.

Archbishop Trench rejects with disdain the attempts of Schleiermacher and others to get rid of the miraculous elements of miracles, by making them relative, which he rightly considers to be merely "a decently veiled denial of the miracle altogether;"(1) and he will not accept any reconciliation which sacrifices the miracle, "which," he logically affirms, "is, in fact, no miracle, if it lay in nature already, if it was only the evoking of forces latent therein, not a new thing, not the bringing in of the novel powers of a higher world; if the mysterious processes and powers by which those works were brought about had been only undiscovered hitherto, and not undiscoverable, by the efforts of human inquiry."(2) When Dr. Trench tries to define what he considers the real character of miracles, however, he becomes, as might be expected,

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voluminous and obscure. He says: "An extraordinary Divine casualty, and not that ordinary which we acknowledge everywhere, and in everything, belongs, then, to the essence of the miracle; powers of G.o.d other than those which have always been working; such, indeed, as most seldom or never have been working before. The unresting activity of G.o.d, which at other times hides and conceals itself behind the veil of what we term natural laws, does in the miracle unveil itself; it steps out from its concealment, and the hand which works is laid bare. Beside and beyond the ordinary operation of nature, higher powers (higher, not as coming from a higher source, but as bearing upon higher ends) intrude and make themselves felt even at the very springs and sources of her power."(1) "Not, as we shall see the greatest theologians have always earnestly contended, _contra_ naturam, but _praeter_ naturam, and _supra_ naturam."(2) Further on he adds: "_Beyond_ nature, _beyond_ and _above_ the nature which we know, they are, but not _contrary_ to it."(3) Dr.

Newman, in a similar strain, though with greater directness, says: "The miracles of Scripture are undeniably beyond nature;" and he explains them as "wrought by persons consciously exercising, under Divine guidance, a power committed to them for definite ends, professing to be immediate messengers from heaven, and to be evidencing their mission by their miracles."(4)

Miracles are here described as "beside," and "beyond," and "above"

nature, but a moment's consideration must

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show that, in so far as these terms have any meaning at all, they are simply evasions, not solutions, of a difficulty. Dr. Trench is quite sensible of the danger in which the definition of miracles places them, and how fatal to his argument is would be to admit that they are contrary to the order of nature. "The miracle," he protests, "is not thus _unnatural_; nor could it be such, since the unnatural, the contrary to order, is of itself the unG.o.dly, and can in no way, therefore, be affirmed of a Divine work, such as that with which we have to do."(1) The archbishop in this; however, is clearly arguing from nature to miracles, and not from miracles to nature. He does not, of course, know what miracles really are, but as he recognizes that the order of nature must be maintained, he is forced to a.s.sert that miracles are not contrary to nature. He repudiates the idea of their being natural phenomena; and yet attempts to deny that they are unnatural.

They must either be the one or the other. The archbishop, besides; forgets that he ascribes miracles to Satan as well as to G.o.d. Indeed, that his distinction is purely imaginary, and inconsistent with the alleged facts of Scriptural miracles, is apparent from Dr. Trench's own ill.u.s.trations; The whole argument is a mere quibble of words to evade a palpable dilemma. Dr. Newman does not fall into this error, and more boldly faces the difficulty. He admits that the Scripture miracles "innovate upon the impressions which are made upon us by the order and the laws of the natural world;"(2) and that "walking on the sea, or the resurrection of the dead, is a plain reversal of its laws."(3)

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Take, for instance, the multiplication of loaves and fishes. Five thousand people are fed upon five barley loaves and two small fishes: "and they took up of the fragments which remained twelve baskets full."(1) Dr. Trench is forced to renounce all help in explaining this miracle from natural a.n.a.logies, and he admits: "We must simply behold in the multiplying of the bread" (and fishes?)" an act of Divine omnipotence on His part who was the Word of G.o.d,--not, indeed, now as at the first, of absolute creation out of nothing, since there was a substratum to work on in the original loaves and fishes, but an act of creative accretion."(2) It will scarcely be argued by any one that such an "act of Divine omnipotence" and "creative accretion" as this multiplication of five baked loaves and two small fishes is not contrary to the order of nature.(3) For Dr. Trench has himself pointed out that there must be interposition of man's art here, and that "a grain of wheat could never by itself, and according to the laws of natural development, issue in a loaf of bread.(4)

Undaunted by, or rather unconscious of, such contradictions, the archbishop proceeds with his argument, and with new definitions of the miraculous. So far from being disorder of nature, he continues with audacious precision: "the true miracle is a higher and a purer

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nature coming down out of the world of untroubled harmonies into this world of ours, which so many discords have jarred and disturbed, and bringing this back again, though it be but for one mysterious prophetic moment, into harmony with that higher."(1) In that "higher and purer nature" can a grain of wheat issue in a loaf of bread? We have only to apply this theory to the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes to perceive how completely it is the creation of Dr. Trench's poetical fancy.

These pa.s.sages fairly ill.u.s.trate the purely imaginary and arbitrary nature of the definitions which those who maintain the reality and supernatural character of miracles give of them. That explanation is generally adopted which seems most convenient at the moment, and none ever pa.s.ses, or, indeed, ever can pa.s.s, beyond the limits of a.s.sumption.

The favourite hypothesis is that which ascribes miracles to the action of unknown law. Archbishop Trench naturally adopts it: "We should see in the miracle," he says, "not the infraction of a law, but the neutralizing of a lower law, the suspension of it for a time by a higher;" and he asks with indignation, whence we dare conclude that, because we know of no powers sufficient to produce miracles, none exist.

"They exceed the laws of _our_ nature; but it does not therefore follow that they exceed the laws of _all_ nature."(2) It is not easy

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to follow the distinction here between "_our_ nature" and "_all nature_," since the order of nature, by which miracles are judged, is, so far as knowledge goes, universal, and we have no grounds for a.s.suming that there is any other.

The same hypothesis is elaborated by Dr. Mozley. a.s.suming the facts of miracles, he proceeds to discuss the question of their "referribleness to unknown law," in which expression he includes both "_unknown law_, or unknown connexion with _known_ law."(1)

Taking first the supposition of (unknown) connection with known law, Dr.

Mozley argues that, as a law of nature, in the scientific sense, cannot possibly produce single or isolated facts, it follows that no isolated or exceptional event can come under a law of nature _by direct observation_, but, if it comes under it at all, it can only do so by some _explanation_, which takes it out of its isolation and joins it to a cla.s.s of facts, whose recurrence indeed const.i.tutes the law. Now Dr.

Mozley admits that no explanation can be given by which miracles can have an unknown connexion with known law. Taking the largest cla.s.s of miracles, bodily cures, the correspondence between a simple command or prophetic notification and the cure is the chief characteristic of miracles, and distinguishes them from mere marvels.

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No violation of any law of nature takes place in either the cure or the prophetic announcement taken separately, but the two, taken together, are the proof of superhuman agency. Dr. Mozley concludes that no physical hypothesis can be framed accounting for the superhuman knowledge and power involved in this cla.s.s of miracles, supposing the miracles to stand as they are recorded in Scripture.(1)

Dr. Mozley then shifts the inquiry to the other and different question, whether miracles may not be instances of laws which are as yet wholly unknown.(2) This is generally called a question of "higher law," --that is to say, a law which comprehends under itself two or more lower or less wide laws. And the principle would be applicable to miracles by supposing the existence of an unknown law, hereafter to be discovered, under which miracles would come, and then considering whether this new law of miracles, and the old law of common facts, might not both be reducible to a still more general law which comprehended them both. Now a law of nature, in the scientific sense, cannot exist without a cla.s.s of facts which comes under it, and in reality const.i.tutes the law; but Dr. Mozley of course recognizes that the discovery of such a law of miracles would necessarily involve the discovery of fresh miracles, for to talk of a law of miracles without miracles would be an absurdity.(3) The supposition of the discovery of such a law of miracles, however, would be tantamount to the supposition of a future new order of nature, from which it immediately follows that the whole supposition is irrelevant and futile as regards the present question.(4)

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