The Life Of Jesus Christ In Its Historical Connexion

In the miracles nature is shown to be related, like history, to the one highest aim of God's holy love, namely, the redemption of the human race to the communion of the Divine life, or, what is the same thing, the establishment of His kingdom among men. Nature was destined to reveal and glorify God; but it can only do this in connexion with rational beings, together with whom it forms the world as a whole. Now the communion of rational beings, working together with conscious freedom to reveal and glorify God, is nothing else but the kingdom of God; and as the unity which is to exhibit the world as a whole can only be complete when nature has been fully appropriated for the revelation of that kingdom, it follows that the realization of the latter is the aim of the whole creation -- of both nature and history.

The manifestation of Christ, the founder of the kingdom of God, the bestower upon mankind of that Divine life which constitutes the essence of the kingdom, was the highest miracle, the central-point of all miracles, and required other and analogous phenomena to precede and follow it. But as the re-establishment of the original harmony between the natural and the Divine (which coincides with the completion of the Divine kingdom) was the final aim of redemption, so, when the Divine life, the essential principle of the miracle itself, which is purely and in its essence supernatural, was incorporated with the natural progress of humanity by the manifestation of Christ, it followed that thenceforward, in all ages, it should operate within the forms and laws of human nature.