05-Chapter 4 The Evangelical, Compared with other Cycles of Miracles

Chapter 4 The Evangelical, Compared with other Cycles of Miracles 1. The Miracles of the Of the Old Testament The miracles of our Lord and those of the O. T. afford many interesting points of comparison; and this comparison is equally instructive, whether we trace the points of likeness, or of unlikeness, which exist between them. Thus, to note first a remarkable difference, we find oftentimes the holy men of the old covenant bringing, if one may venture so to speak, hardly, and with difficulty, the wonder-work to pass; it is not born without pangs; there is sometimes a momentary pause, a seeming uncertainty about the issue; while the miracles of Christ are always accomplished with the highest ease; He speaks, and it is done. Thus Moses must plead and struggle with, God, “Heal her now, O God, I beseech Thee,” ere the plague of leprosy is removed from his sister, and not even so can he instantly win the boon (Num 12:13-15); but, Christ heals a leper by his touch (Mat 8:3), or ten with even less than this, merely by the power of his will and, at a distance^[1] (Luk 17:14). Elijah must pray long, and his servant go up. seven times, before tokens, of the rain appear (1Ki 18:42-44); he stretches himself thrice on the child and cries unto the Lord, and painfully wins back its life (1Ki 17:21-22); and Elisha, with yet more of effort and only after partial failure (2Ki 4:31-35), restores the child of the Shunammite to life. Christ, on the other hand, shows Himself the Lord of the, living and the dead, raising the dead with as much ease as He performed the commonest transactions of life.—In the miracles wrought by men, glorious acts of faith as they are, for they are ever wrought in reliance on the strength and faithfulness of God, who will follow up and seal his servant’s word, it is yet possible for human impatience and human unbelief to break out. Thus Moses, God’s organ for the work of power, speaks hastily and acts unbelievingly (Num 20:11). It is needless to say of the Son, that his confidence ever remains the same, that his Father hears Him always; no admixture of even the slightest human infirmity mars the completeness of his work. Where the miracles are similar in kind, his are larger and freer and more glorious. Elisha feeds a hundred men with twenty loaves (2Ki 4:42-44), but He five thousand with five.^[2 Others have continually their instrument of power to which the wonder-working power is linked. Thus Moses has his rod, his staff of wonder, to divide the Red Sea, and to accomplish his other mighty acts, without which he is nothing (Exo 7:19; Exo 8:5; Exo 8:16; Exo 9:23; Exo 10:13; Exo 14:16, &c.); his tree to heal the bitter waters (Exo 15:25); Elijah divides the river with his mantle (2Ki 2:8); Elisha heals the spring with a cruse of salt (2Ki 2:20). But Christ accomplishes his miracles simply by the agency of his word, or by a touch (Mat 20:34); or if He takes anything as a channel of his healing power, it is from Himself He takes it (Mark 7:33; Mark 8:23^[3] or should He, as once He does, use any foreign medium in part (John 9:6), yet by other miracles of like kind, in which He has recourse to no such extraneous helps, He declares plainly that this was of free choice, and not of any necessity. And, which is but another side of the same truth, while the miracles of Moses, or of the Apostles, are ever done in the name of, and with the attribution of the glory to, another, “Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord, which He will show you” (Exo 14:13), “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk” (Acts 3:6), “Eneas, Jesus Christ maketh thee whole” (Acts 9:34. cf. Mark 16:17; Luk 10:17; John 14:10); his are ever wrought in his own name and by a power immanent and inherent in Himself: “I will, be thou clean” (Mat 8:3); “Thou deaf and dumb spirit, I charge thee come out of him” (Mark 9:25); “Young man, I say unto thee, Arise” (Luk 7:14^[4] Where He prays, being about to perform one of his mighty works, his disciples, shall learn even from his prayer itself that herein He is not asking for a power not indwelling in Him, but indeed only testifying thus to the unbroken oneness of his life with his Father’s (John 11:41-42^[5]); just as on another occasion He will not suffer his disciples to suppose that it is for any but for their sakes that the testimony from heaven is borne unto Him (John 12:30). Thus needful was it for them, thus, needful for all, that they should have great and exclusive thoughts of Him, and should not class Him with any other, even the greatest and holiest of the children of men.

These likenesses and unlikenesses are equally such as beforehand we should have naturally expected. We should have expected the mighty works of either covenant to be like, since the old and new form parts of one organic whole; and it is ever God’s law that the lower should contain the germs and prophetic intimations of the higher. We should expect them to be unlike, since the very idea of God’s kingdom is that of progress, of a gradually fuller communication and larger revelation of Himself to men, so that He who in times past spake unto the fathers by the prophets, did at length speak unto us by his Son; and it was only meet that this Son should be clothed with mightier powers than theirs, and powers which He held not from another, but such rather as were evidently his own in fee.^[6] And this, too, explains a difference in the character of the miracles of the two covenants, and how it comes to pass that those of the old wear oftentimes a far severer aspect than the new. They are miracles, indeed, of God’s grace, but yet also miracles of the Law, of that Law which worketh wrath, which will teach, at all costs, the lesson of the awful holiness of God, his hatred of the sinner’s sin,—a lesson which men had all need thoroughly to learn, lest they should mistake and abuse the new lesson which a Saviour taught, of God’s love at the same time toward the sinner himself. Miracles of the Law, they preserve a character that accords with the Law; being oftentimes fearful outbreaks of God’s anger against the ’unrighteousness of men; such for instance are the signs and wonders in Egypt, many of those in the desert (Num 16:31; Lev 10:2), and some which the later prophets wrought (2Ki 1:10-12; 2Ki 2:23-25); leprosies are inflicted (Num 12:10; 2Ch 26:19), not removed; a sound hand is withered and dried up (1Ki 13:4), not a withered hand restored. Not but that these works also are for the most part what our Lord’s are altogether and with no single exception, namely, works of evident grace and mercy. I affirm this of all our Lord’s miracles; for that single one, which seems an exception, the cursing of the barren fig-tree, has no right really to be considered such. Indeed it is difficult to see how our blessed Lord could more strikingly have shown his purpose of preserving throughout for his miracles their character of beneficence, or have witnessed for Himself that He was come not to destroy men’s lives but to save them, than in this circumstance,—that when He needed in this very love to declare, not in word only but in act, what would be the consequences of an obstinate unfruitfulness and resistance to his grace, and thus to make manifest the severer side of his ministry, He should have chosen for the showing out of this, not one among all the sinners who were about Him, but should rather have displayed his power upon a tree, which, itself incapable of feeling, might yet effectually serve as a sign and warning to men. He will not allow even a single exception to the rule of grace and love.^[7] When He blesses, it is men; but when He smites, it is an unfeeling tree.^[8] More upon this matter must be deferred till the time comes for treating that miracle in its order.

It is also noticeable that the region in which the miracles of the O. T. chiefly move, is that of external nature; they are the cleaving of the sea (Exo 14:21), or of a river (Jos 3:14; 2Ki 2:8; 2Ki 2:14), yawnings of the earth (Num 16:31), fire falling down from heaven (1Ki 18:38; 2Ki 1:10; 2Ki 1:12), furnaces which have lost their power to consume (Daniel 3), wild-beasts which have laid aside their inborn fierceness in whole (Dan 6:18; Dan 6:22), or in part (1Ki 13:24; 1Ki 13:28), and the like. Not of course that they are exclusively these; but this nature is the haunt and main region of the miracle in the O. T., as in the New it is mainly the sphere of man’s life in which it is at home. And consistently with this, the earlier miracles, done as the greater number of them were, in the presence of the giant powers of heathendom, have oftentimes a colossal character: those powers of the world are strong, but the God of Israel will show Himself to be stronger yet. Thus it is with the miracles of Egypt, the miracles of Babylon: they are miracles eminently of strength;^[9] for under the influence of the great nature-worships of those lands, all religion had assumed a colossal grandeur. Compared with pur Lord’s works wrought in the days of his flesh, those were the whirlwind and the fire, and his as the. still small voice which followed. In that old time God was teaching his people, He was teaching also the nations with whom his people were brought wonderfully into contact, that He who had entered into covenant with one among all the nations, was not one God among many, the God of the hills, or the God of the plains (1Ki 20:23), but that the God of Israel was the Lord of the whole earth. But Israel at the time of the Incarnation had thoroughly learned that lesson, much else as it had still to learn: and the whole civilized world had practically outgrown polytheism, however as the popular superstition it may have lingered still. And thus the works of our Lord, though they bear not on their front the imposing character which did those of old, yet contain higher and deeper truths. They are eminently miracles of the Incarnation, of the Son of God who had taken our flesh, and who, taking, would heal it. They have predominantly a relation to man’s body and his spirit. Miracles of nature assume now altogether a subordinate place: they still survive, even as we could have ill afforded wholly to have lost them; for this region of nature must still be claimed as part of Christ’s dominion, though not its chiefest or its noblest province. But man, and not nature, is now the main subject of these mighty powers; and thus it comes to pass that, with less of outward pomp, less to startle and amaze, the new have a yet deeper inward significance than the old.^[10] 2. The Miracles of the Apocryphal Gospels The apocryphal gospels, abject productions as, whether contemplated in a literary or moral point of view, they must be allowed to be, are yet instructive in this respect, that they show us what manner of gospels were the result, when men drew from their own fancy, and devised Christs of their own, instead of resting upon the basis of historic truth, and delivering to the world faithful records of Him who indeed had lived and died among them. Here, as ever, the glory of the true comes out into strongest light by its comparison with the falsa But in nothing, perhaps, are these apocryphal gospels more worthy of note, than in the difference between the main features of their miracles and those of the canonical Gospels. Thus in the canonical, the miracle is indeed essential, yet, at the same time, ever subordinated to the doctrine which it confirms,—a link in the great chain of God’s manifestation of Himself to men; its ethical significance never falls into the background, but the wonder-work of grace and power has, in every case where this can find room, nearer or remoter reference to the moral condition of the person or persons in whose behalf it is wrought. The miracles ever lead us off from themselves to their Author; they appear as emanations from the glory of the Son of God; but it is in Him we rest, and not in them; they are but the halo round Him, and have their worth from Him, not contrariwise, He from them. They are held, too, together by his strong and central personality, which does not leave them a conglomerate of marvellous anecdotes accidentally heaped together, but parts of a great organic whole, of which every part is in vital coherence with all other. But it is altogether otherwise in these apocryphal narratives. To say that the miracles occupy in them the foremost place would very inadequately express the facts of the case. They are everything. Some of these so-called histories are nothing else but a string. of these; which yet (and this too is singularly characteristic) stand wholly disconnected from the ministry of Christ. Not one of them belongs to the period after his Baptism, but they are all miracles of the Infancy,—in other words, of that time whereof the canonical history relates no miracle, and not merely does not relate any, but is remarkably at pains to tell us that during it no miracle was wrought, the miracle in Cana of Galilee being his first (John 2:21).

It follows of necessity that they are never seals of a word and doctrine which has gone before; they are never “signs,” but at the best wonders and portents. Any high purpose and aim is clearly altogether absent from them. It is never felt that the writer is writing out of any higher motive than to excite and feed a childish love of the marvellous, never that he could say, “These are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life through his name” (John 20:31). Indeed, so far from having a religious, they are often wanting in a moral element. The Lord Jesus appears in them as a wayward, capricious, passionate child; to be feared indeed, seeing that He is furnished with such formidable powers of avenging every wrong or accidental injury which He meets; and so bearing Himself, that the request which the parents of some other children are represented as making, that He may be kept within the house, for He brings harm and mischief wherever He comes, is perfectly justified by the facts.

It may be well to cite a few examples in proof, however harshly some of them may jar on the Christian ear. Thus some children refuse to play with Him, hiding themselves from Him; He pursues and turns them into kids.^[11] Another child by accident runs against Him and throws Him down; whereupon He, being exasperated,^[12] exclaims, “As thou hast made me to fall, so shalt thou fall and not rise;” at the same hour the child fell down and expired.^[13] He has a dispute with the master who is teaching Him letters, concerning the order in which He shall go through the Hebrew alphabet, and his master strikes Him; whereupon Jesus curses him, and straightway his arm is withered, and he falls on his face and dies.^[14] This goes on, till at length Joseph says to Mary, “Henceforward let us keep Him within doors, for whosoever sets himself against Him, perishes.” His passionate readiness to “avenge Himself shows itself at the very earliest age. At five years old He has made a pool of water, and is moulding sparrows from the clay. Another child, the son of a scribe, displeased that He should do this on the Sabbath, opens the sluices of his pool and lets out the water. On this Jesus is indignant, gives him many injurious names, and causes him to wither and wholly dry up with his curse.^[15]

Such is the image which the authors of these books give us of the holy child Jesus;—and no wonder; for man is not only unable to realize the perfect, he is unable to conceive it. The idea is as much a gift, as the power to realize that idea. Even the miracles which are not of this revolting character are childish tricks, like the tricks of a conjuror, never solemn acts of power and love. Jesus enters the shop of a dyer, who has received various cloths from various persons to be dyed of divers colours. In the absence of the master, He throws them all into the dying vat together, and when the dyer returns and remonstrates, draws them out of the vat, each dyed according to the colour which was enjoined.^[16] He and some other children make birds and animals of clay; while each is boasting the superiority of his work, Jesus says, “I will cause those which I have made to go;”— which they do, the animals leaping and the birds flying, and at his bidding returning, and eating and drinking from his hand.^[17] While yet an infant at his mother’s breast, He bids a palm-tree to stoop that she may pluck the fruits; it obeys, and only returns to its position at his command.^[18] Another time his mother sends Him to the well for water; the pitcher breaks, and He brings the water in his cloak.^[19] And as the miracles which He does, so those that are done in regard of Him, are idle or monstrous; the ox and ass worshipping Him, a new-born infant in the crib, may serve for an example.^[20] In all these, as will be observed, the idea of redemptive acts altogether falls out of sight; they are none of them the outward clothing of the inward facts of man’s redemption. Of course it is not meant to be affirmed that miracles of healing and of grace are altogether wanting in these books;^[21] that would evidently have been incompatible with any idea of a Redeemer; but only that they do not present to us any clear and consistent image of a Saviour full of grace and power, but an image rather, continually distorted and defaced by lines of passion and caprice, of peevishness and anger. The most striking, perhaps, of the miracles related in regard of the child Jesus, is that of the falling down of the idols of Egypt at his presence in the land; for it has in it something of a deeper significance, as a symbol and prophecy of the overthrow of the idol worship of the world by Him who was now coming into the world.^[22] The lions and the leopards gathering harmlessly round Him as He passed through the desert on the way to Egypt, is again not alien to the true spirit of the Gospel, and has its analogy in the words of St. Mark, that He “was with the wild-beasts” (i. 13); words which certainly are not introduced merely to enhance the savageness of the wilderness where He spent those forty days of temptation, but are meant as a hint to us that in Him, the new head of the race, the second Adam, the Paradisaical state was once more given back (Gen 1:28). But with a very few such partial exceptions as these, the apocryphal gospels are a Darren and dreary waste, of wonders without object or aim; and only instructive as making us strongly to feel, more strongly than but for these examples we might have felt, how needful are other factors besides power for the producing of a true miracle; that wisdom and love must be there also; that where men conceive of power as its chiefest element, they give us only a hateful mockery of the divine. Had a Christ such as these gospels portray actually lived upon the earth, he had been no more than a potent and wayward magician, from whom all men would have shrunk with a natural instinct of distrust and fear.

3. The Later, or Ecclesiastical, Miracles

It would plainly lead much too far from the subject in hand to enter into any detailed examination of the authority upon which the later, or, as they may be conveniently termed, the ecclesiastical, miracles come to us. Yet a few words must of necessity find place concerning the permanent miraculous gifts which have been claimed for the Church as her rightful heritage, equally by some who have gloried in their presumed presence, and by others who have lamented their absence—by those alike who have seen in their presence the evidences of her sanctity, or in their absence, of her degeneracy and fall. It is not my belief that she has this gift of working miracles, nor yet that she was intended to have, and only through her own unfaithfulness has lost, it; nor that her Lord has abridged her of aught that, would have made her strong and glorious in not endowing her with powers such as these, With reasons enough for humbling herself, yet I do not believe that among those reasons is to be accounted her inability to perform these works that should transcend nature. So many in our own day have arrived at. a directly opposite conclusion, that it will be needful shortly to justify the opinion here exprest. And first, as a strong presumption against the intended continuance of these powers in the Church, may be taken the analogies derived from the earlier history of God’s dealings with his people. We do not find the miracles sown broadcast over the whole O. T. history, but they all cluster round a very few eminent persons, and have reference to certain great epochs and crises of the kingdom of God. Abraham, the father of the faithful,—David, the theocratic king,—Daniel, the “man greatly beloved,” are alike entirely without them; that is, they do no miracles; such may be accomplished in behalf of them, but they themselves accomplish none. In fact there are but two great outbursts of these; the first, at the establishing of the kingdom under Moses and Joshua, on which occasion it is at once evident that they could not have been wanting; the second in the time of Elijah and Elisha; and then also there was utmost need, when it was a question whether the court religion which the apostate kings of Israel had set up, should not quite overbear the true worship of Jehovah, when the Levitical priesthood was abolished, and the faithful were hut a scattered few among the ten tribes. Then, in that decisive epoch of the kingdom’s history, the two great prophets, they too in a subordinate sense the beginners of a new period, arose, equipped with powers which should witness that He whose servants they were, was the God of Israel, however Israel might refuse to acknowledge Him. There is in all this an entire absence of prodigality in the use of miracles; they are ultimate resources, reserved for the great needs of God’s kingdom, not its daily incidents; they are not cheap off-hand expedients, which may always be appealed to, but come only into play when nothing else would have supplied their room. How unlike this moderation to the wasteful expenditure of miracles in the legends of the middle ages! There no perplexity can occur so trifling that a miracle will not be brought in to solve it; there is almost no saint, certainly no distinguished one, without his nimbus of miracles around his head; they are adorned with these in rivalry with one another, in rivalry with Christ Himself; no acknowledgment like this, “John did no miracle” (John 10:41), in any of the records of their lives finding place.

We must add to this the declarations of Scripture, which I have already entered on at large, concerning the object of miracles, that they are for the confirming the word by signs following, for authenticating a message as being from heaven—that signs are for the unbelieving (1Co 14:22). What do they then in a Christendom? It may indeed be answered, that in it are unbelievers still; yet not in the sense in which St. Paul uses the word, for he would designate not the positively unbelieving, not those that in heart and will are estranged from the truth, but the negatively, and that, because the truth has never yet sufficiently accredited itself to them; the ἄπιστοι, not the ἀπειθεῖς. Signs are not for these last, the positively unbelieving, since, as we have seen, they will exercise no power over those who harden themselves against the truth;—such will resist or evade them as surely as they will resist or evade every other witness of God’s presence -in the world;—but for the unbelieving who are such by no fault of their own, for them to whom the truth is now coming for the first time. And if not even for. them now,—as they exist, for instance, in a heathen land,—we may sufficiently account for this by the fact, that the Church of Christ, with its immense and evident superiorities of all kinds over everything with which it is brought in contact, and some portions of which superiority every man must recognize, is itself now the great witness and proof of the. truth which it delivers. That truth, therefore, has no longer need to vindicate itself by an appeal to something else; but the position which it has won in the very forefront of the world is itself its vindication now, and suffices to give it a first claim on every man’s attention. And then further, all that we might ourselves beforehand presume from the analogy of external things leads us to the. same conclusions. We find all beginning to be wonderful;—to be under laws different from, and higher than, those, which regulate ulterior progress. Thus the powers evermore at work for the upholding the natural world, would have been manifestly insufficient, for its first creation; there were other which must have presided at its birth, but which now, having done their work, have fallen back, and left it. to its ordinary development. The multitudinous races of animals which people the earth, and of plants which clothe it, needed infinitely more for their first production than suffices for their present upholding. It is only according to the analogies of that which thus everywhere surrounds, us, to presume that it was even. so with the beginnings of the spiritual creation—the Christian Church. It is unquestionably so in the beginning of that new creation in any single heart. Then, in the regeneration, the strongest tendencies of the old nature are overborne; the impossible has become possible, in some measure easy; by a mighty wonder-stroke of grace, the polarity in the. man is shifted; the flesh, that was the positive pole, has become the negative, and the spirit, which was before the negative, is henceforth the positive. Shall we count it strange, then, that the coming in of a new order, not into a single heart, but into the entire world—a new order bursting forcibly through the bonds and hindrances of the old, should have been wonderful? It had been inexplicable if it had been otherwise. The son of Joseph might have lived and died, and done no miracles: but the Virgin-born, the Son of the Most Highest, Himself the middle point of all wonder,—for Him to have done none, herein, indeed, had been the most marvellous thing of all. But this new order, having not only declared but constituted itself, having asserted that it is not of any inevitable necessity bound by the heavy laws of the old, henceforth submits itself in outward things, and for the present time, to those laws. All its true glory, which is its inward glory, it retains; but these powers, which are not the gift—for Christ Himself is the gift—but the signs of the gift, it foregoes. “Miracles,” says Fuller, “are the swaddling clothes of the infant Churches;” and, we may add, not the garments of the full grown. They were as the proclamation that the king was mounting his throne; who, however, is not proclaimed every day, but only at his accession; when he sits acknowledged on his throne, the proclamation ceases. They were as the bright clouds which gather round, and announce the sun at his first appearing: his mid-day splendour, though as full, and indeed fuller, of light and heat, knows not those bright heralds and harbingers of his rising. Or they may be likened to the temporary framework on which the arch is, rounded, which framework is taken down so soon as that is completed. That the Church has had these wonders,—that its first birth was, like that of its wondrous Founder, wonderful,—of this it preserves a record and attestation in its Scriptures of truth. The miracles recorded there live for the Church; they are as much present witnesses for Christ to us now as to them who actually saw them with their eyes. For they were done once, that they might be believed always; that we, having in the Gospels the lively representation of our Lord portrayed for us, might as surely believe that He was the ruler of nature, the healer of the body, the Lord of life and of death, as though we had actually ourselves seen Him allay a storm, or heal a leper, or raise one dead.

Moreover, a very large proportion of the later miracles presented to our belief bear inward marks of spuriousness. The miracles of Scripture,—and among these, not so much the miracles of the Old Covenant as the miracles of Christ and his Apostles, being the miracles of that highest and latest dispensation under which we live,—we have a right to consider as normal, in their chief features at least, for all future miracles, if such were to continue in the Church. The details, the local colouring, might be different, and there would be no need to be perplexed at such a difference appearing; yet the later must not, in their inner spirit, be totally unlike the earlier, or they will carry the sentence of condemnation on their front. They must not, for instance, lead us back under the bondage of the senses, while those other were ever framed to release from that bondage. They must not be aimless and objectless, fantastic freaks of power, while those had every one of them a meaning and distinct ethical aim,—were bridges by which Christ found access from men’s bodies to their souls,—manifestations of his glory, that men might be drawn to the glory itself. They must not be ludicrous and grotesque, saintly jests, while those were evermore reverend and solemn and awful. And lastly, they must not be seals and witnesses to aught which the conscience, enlightened by the Word and Spirit of God,—whereunto is the ultimate appeal, and which stands above the miracle, and not beneath it,—protests against as untrue (the innumerable Romish miracles which attest transubstantiation), or as error largely mingling with the truth (the miracles which go to uphold the whole Romish system), those other having set their seal only to the absolutely true. Miracles with these marks upon them, we are bound, by all which we hold most sacred, by all which the Word of God has taught us, to reject and to refuse. It is for the reader, tolerably acquainted with the Church-history of the Middle Ages, to judge how many of its miracles will, if these tests be acknowledged and applied, at once fall away, and, failing to fulfil these primary conditions, will have no right even to be considered any more.^[23]

Very interesting is it to observe how the men who in some sort fell in with the prevailing tendencies of their age (for, indeed, who escapes them?), yet did ever, in their higher moods, with truest Christian insight, witness against those very tendencies by which they, with the rest of their contemporaries, were more or less borne away. Thus was it with regard to the over-valuing of miracles, the counting them the only evidences of an exalted sanctity. Against this what a continual testimony in all ages of the Church was borne; not, indeed, sufficient to arrest the progress of an error, into which the sense-bound generations of men only too naturally fall, yet showing that the Church herself was ever conscious that the holy life was in the sight of God of higher price than the wonderful works—that love is the greatest miracle of all—that to overcome the world, this is the greatest manifestation of the power of Christ in his servants.^[24] Upon this subject one passage from Chrysostom, in place of the many that might be quoted, and even that greatly abridged, must suffice.^[25] He is rebuking the faithful, that now, when their numbers were so large, they did so little to leaven the world, and this, when the Apostles, who were but twelve, effected so much; and he puts aside the excuse, “But they had miracles at command,” not with the answer, “So have we;” but in this language: “How long shall we use their miracles as a pretext for our sloth? ’And what was it then,’ you say, ’which made the Apostles so great?’ I answer, This, that they contemned money; that they trampled on vain-glory; that they renounced the world. If they had not done thus, but had been slaves of their passions, though they had raised a thousand dead, they would not merely have profited nothing, but would have been counted as impostors. What miracle did John, who reformed so many cities, of whom yet it is expressly said, that he did no sign? And thou, if thou hadst thy choice, to raise the dead in the name of Christ, or thyself to die for his name, which wouldst thou choose? Would it not be plainly the latter? And yet that were a miracle, and this is but a work. And if one gave thee the choice of turning all grass into gold, or being able to despise all gold as grass, wouldst thou not choose the last? And rightly; for by this last wouldst thou most effectually draw men to the truth. This is not my doctrine, but the blessed Paul’s: for when he had said, ’Covet earnestly the best gifts.’ and then added, ’yet show I unto you a more excellent way,’ he did not adduce miracles, but love, as the root of all good things.”^[26]

Few points present greater difficulties than, the attempt to fix accurately the moment when these miraculous powers were withdrawn from the Church, and it entered into its permanent state, with only its present miracles of grace and the record of its past miracles of power; instead of having actually going i forward in the midst of it those miracles of power as well, with which it first asserted itself in the world. This is difficult, because it is difficult to say at what precise moment the Church was no longer in the act of becoming, but contemplated in the mind of God as now actually being; when to the wisdom of God it appeared that He had adequately confirmed the word with signs following, and that this framework might be withdrawn from the completed arch, these props and strengthenings of the infant plant might safely be removed from the hardier tree.^[27] That their retrocession was gradual, that this mighty tide of power should have ebbed only by degrees,^[28] this was what was to be looked for in that spiritual world which, like God’s natural world, is free from all harsh and abrupt transitions, in which each line melts imperceptibly into the next. We can conceive the order of retrocession to have been in this way; that divine power which dwelt in all its fulness and intensity in Christ, was first divided among his Apostles, who, therefore, individually brought forth fewer and smaller works than their Lord. It was again from them further subdivided among the ever-multiplying numbers of the Church, who, consequently, possessed not these gifts in the same intensity and plenitude as did the twelve. Yet must it always be remembered that these receding gifts were ever helping to form that which should be their own substitute; that if they were waning, that which was to supply their room was ever waxing,—that they only waned as that other waxed; the flower dropped off only as the fruit was being formed. If those wonders of a first creation have left us, yet this was not so, till they could bequeath in their stead the standing wonder of a Church,^[29] itself a wonder, and embracing manifold wonders in its bosom.^[30] For are not the laws of the spiritual worlds as they are ever working in the midst of us, a continual wonder? What is the new birth in Baptism, and the communion of Christ’s body and blood in the Holy Eucharist, and the life of God in the soul, and a kingdom of heaven in the world, what are these but every one of them wonders?^[31] wonders in this like the wonders of ordinary nature, as distinguished from those which accompany a new incoming of power, that they are under a law which we can anticipate; that they conform to an absolute order, and one the course of which we can understand;—but not therefore the less divine.”^[32] How meanly do we esteem of a Church, of its marvellous gifts, of the powers of the coming world which are working within it, of its “Word, of its Sacraments, when it seems to us a small thing that in it men are new born, raised from the death of sin to the life of righteousness, the eyes of their understanding enlightened, and their ears opened, unless we can tell of more visible and sensuous wonders as well. It is as though the heavens should not declare, to us the glory of God, nor the firmament show us his handiwork, except at some single moment such as that when the sun was standing still upon Gibeon, and the moon in Ajalon.

While then it does not greatly concern us to know when this power was withdrawn, what does vitally concern us is, that we suffer not these carnal desires after miracles, as though they were necessarily saints who had them, and they but imperfect Christians who were without them, as though the Church were incomplete and spiritually impoverished which could not show them, to rise up in our hearts; being, as they are, ever ready to rise up in the natural heart of man, to which power is so much dearer than holiness. There is no surer proof than the utterance of feelings such as these, that the true glory of the Church is hidden from our eyes—no sadder sign that some of its outward trappings and ornaments have caught our fancy; and not the fact that it is all-glorious within, taken possession of our hearts and minds. It is, indeed, an ominous token as regards our own spiritual estate, for it argues the little which we ourselves have known of the miracles of grace, when they seem to us poor and pale, and only the miracles of power have any attraction in our eyes.

Footnotes [1] Cyril of Alexandria. (Cramer’s Cat., in Luc. v. 12) has observed and drawn out the contrast.

[2] Tertullian (Adv. Marc. iv. 35): Aliter Dominus per semet ipsum operatur, sive per Filium; aliter per prophetas famulos suos; maxime documenta virtutis et potestatis; quae ut clariora et validiora, qua propria, distare a vicariis fas est.

[3] In the East the Mahometans had probably a sense of the fitness of this, namely, that Christ should find all in Himself, when they made his healing virtue to have resided in his breath (Tholuck, Bliithensamml. aus d. Morgenl. Myst. p. 62), to which also they were led as being the purest and least material effluence of the body (cf. John 20:22), So Abgarus, in the apocryphal letter which bears his name, magnifies Christ’s healings, in that they were done ἄνευ φαρμάκων καὶ βοτανῶν. Arnobius too (Adv. Gent. i. 43, 44, 48, 52) lays great stress upon the point, that all which He did was done sine ullis adminiculis, reruin; he. is comparing, it is true, our Lord’s miracles with the lying wonders of the γόητες, not with the only relatively inferior of the O.T.) [4] See on all this subject Pearson, On the Creed, Art. 2; and Gerhard’s Loc. Theoll. loc. iv. 5, 59.).

[5] Cf. Ambrose, Be Fide, iii. 4.

[6] Tertullian (Adv. Marc. iii. passim) brings this out in a very interesting manner; and Eusebius (Dem. Evang. iii. 2) traces in the same way the parallelisms between the life of Moses and of Christ. They supposed that in so doing they were, if anything, confirming the truth of either, though now the assailants of Revelation will have it that these coincidences are only calculated to cast suspicion upon both.

[7] Compare Lord Bacon’s excellent remarks, in his Meditationes Sacrae, where on the words, Bene omnia fecit (Mark 7:37), in which he sees rightly an allusion to Gen 1:31, he says: Verus plausus: Deus cum universa crearet, vidit quod singula et omnia erant bona himis. Deus Verbum in miraculis quae edidit (omne autem miraculum est nova creatio, et non ex lege primae creationis) nil facere voluit, quod non gratiam et beneficentiam omnino spiraret. Moses edidit miracula, et profligavit AEgyptios pestibus multis: Elias edidit, et occlusit coelum ne plueret super terram; et rursus eduxit de coelo ignem Dei super duces et cohortes: Elizaeus edidit, et evocavit ursas e deserto, quae laniarent impuberes; Petrus Ananiam sacrilegum hypocritam morte, Paulus Elymam magum caecitate, percussit: sed nihil hujusmodi fecit Jesus. Descendit super eum Spiritus in formâ columbae; de quo dixit, Nescitis cujus Spiritus sitis. Spiritus Jesu, spiritus columbinus: fuerunt illi servi Dei tanquam boves Dei triturantes granum, et conculcantes paleam; sed Jesus agnus Dei sine irâ et judiciis. Omnia ejus miracula circa corpus humanum, et doctrina ejus circa animam humanam. Indiget corpus hominis alimento, defensione ab externis, et curâ Ille multitudinem piscium in retibus congregavit, ut uberiorem victum honrinibus praeberet: ille alimenturn aquae in dignius alimentum vini ad exhilarandum cor hominis convertit; ille ficum quod officio suo ad quod destinatum fuit, ad cibum hominis videlicet, non fungeretur, arefieri jussit: ille penuriam panum et piscium ad alendum exercitum populi dilatavit: ille ventos, quod navigantibus minarentur, corripuit......Nullum miraculum judicii, omnia beneficentiae, et circa corpus humanum.

[8] It is from this point of view that we should explain our Saviour’s rebuke to the sons of Zebedee, when they wanted to call down fire from heaven on a village of the Samaritans, “as Elias did” (Luk 9:54); to repeat, that is, an O. T. miracle. Christ’s answer, “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of,” is not, as it is often explained, “Ye are mistaking a spirit of bitter zeal for a spirit of love to Me; “—but the rebuke is gentler, “Ye are mistaking and confounding the different standing-points of the old and new covenant, taking your stand upon the old, that of an avenging righteousness, when you should rejoice to take it upon the new, that of a forgiving love.”

[9] We find the false Christs, who were so plentiful about the time of our Lord’s coming, professing and promising to do exactly the same works as those wrought of yore,—to repeat even on a larger scale these O. -T. miracles. Thus “that Egyptian” whom the Roman tribune supposed that he saw in Paul (Acts 21:38), and of whom Josephus gives us a fuller account (Antt. xx. 8, 6), led a tumultuous crowd to the Mount of Olives, promising to show them from thence how, as a second and a greater Joshua, he would cause the walls, not of Jericho, but of Jerusalem, to fall to the ground at his bidding (see Vitringa’s interesting Essay, De Signis a Messid edendis, in his Obss. Sac. vol. i. p. 482.

[10] Julian the Apostate had indeed so little an eye for the glory of such works as these, that in one place he says (Cyril, Adv. Jul. vi.), Jesus did nothing wonderful, “unless any should esteem that to have healed some lame and blind, and exorcised some demoniacs in villages like Bethsaida and Bethany, were very wonderful works.”

[11] Evang. Infant. 40, in Thilo’s Cod. Apocr. p. 115; to whose admirable edition of the apocryphal gospels the references in this section are made throughout.

[12] Πικρανθείς

[13] Evang. Infant. 47, p. 123; cf. Evang. Thorn. 4, p. 284.

[14] Evang. Infant. 49, p. 125. In the Evang. Thorn. 14, p. 307, he only-falls into a swoon, and something afterwards pleasing Jesus (15), he raises him up again.

[15] Evang. Thorn. 3, p. 282. This appears with variations in the Evang. Infant. 46, p. 122.

[16] Evang. Infant. 37, p. 111.

[17] Evang. Infant. 36 [18] Evang. Infant. 37, p. 395 [19] Evang. Infant. 37, p. 121.

[20] Evang. Infant. 37, p. 382.

[21] For instance, Simon the Canaanite (Evang. Infant. 37, p. 117) is healed, while yet a child, of the bite of a serpent. Yet even in miracles such as this there is always something that will not let us forget that we are moving in another world from that in which the sacred Evangelists place us.

[22] Evang. Infant. 10-12, pp. 75-77; cf. l. Sam. 5:3, 4.

[23] The results are singularly curious, which sometimes are come to through the following up to their first sources the biographies of eminent Romish saints. Tholuck has done this in regard of Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier; and to him (Verm. Schrift. pp. 50-57) I am mainly indebted for the materials of the following note. There are few, perhaps, who have been surrounded with such a halo of wonders as the two great pillars of the order of the Jesuits, Loyola and Xavier. Upwards of two hundred miracles of Loyola were laid before the Pope, when his canonization was in question,—miracles beside which, those of our Lord shrink into insignificance. If Christ by his word and look rebuked and expelled demons, Ignatius did the same by a letter. If Christ walked once upon the sea, Ignatius many times in the air. If Christ, by his shining countenance and glistening garments, once amazed his disciples, Ignatius did it frequently, and, entering into dark chambers, could, by his presence, light them up as with candles. If the sacred history tells of three persons whom Christ raised from the dead, the number which Xavier raised exceeds all count. In like manner the miracles of his great namesake of Assisi rivalled, when they did not leave behind, those of Christ. The author of the Liber Conformitatum, writing of him less than a century after his death, brings out these conformities of the Master and the servant: Hie sicut Jesus aquam in vinum convertit, panes multiplicavit, et de naviculâ in medio fluctuum maris miraculose immotâ, per se a terrâ abductâ, docuit turbas audientes in littore. Huic omnis creatura quasi ad nutum videbatur parere, ac si in ipso esset status innocentise restitutus. Et ut caetera taceam: caecos illuminavit; surdos, claudos, paralyticos, omnium infirmitatum generibus laborantes curavit, leprosos mundavit; daemones effugavit; captivos eripuit; naufragis succurrit, et quam plures mortuos suscitavit (Gieseler, Lehrbuch der Kirchengesehichte, vol. ii. part II. p. 355). But to return to Ignatius, and the historic evidence of his miracles. Ribadeneira, from early youth his scholar and companion, published, fifteen years after his death, that is in 1572, a life of his departed master and friend; which book appeared again in 1587, augmented with many additional circumstances communicated by persons who had lived in familiar intercourse with Ignatius while living, and who had most intimate opportunities of being acquainted with all the facts of his life (gravissimi viri et Ignatio valde familiares). Now it is sufficiently remarkable that neither in the first, nor yet in the second so greatly enlarged and corrected edition, does the slightest trace of a miracle appear. On the contrary, the biographer enters into a lengthened discussion of the reasons why it did not please God that any signal miracles should be wrought by this eminent servant of his:—Sed dicat aliquis, si haec vera sunt, ut profecto sunt, quid causae est, quam ob rem illius sanctitas minus est testata miraculis, et, ut multorum Sanctorum vita, signis declarata, virtutumque operationibus insignita? Cui ego; Quis cognovit sensum Domini, aut quis conciliarius ejus fuit? Ille enim est qui facit mirabilia magna solus, propterea illius tantummodo infinitâ virtute fieri possunt, quaecumque aut naturae vim aut modum excedunt. Et ut solus ille haec potest efficere, ita ille solus novit, quo loco, quo tempore miracula et quorum precibus facienda sint. Sed tamen neque. omnes sancti viri miraculis excelluerunt; neque qui illorum aut magnitudine praestiterunt, aut copiâ, idcirco reliquos sanctitate superarunt. Non enim sanctitas cujusque signis, sed caritate aestimanda est. Two years before the appearance of the second edition of this work, that is, in 1585, Maffei, styled the Jesuit Livy, published at Rome his work, De Vita et Moribus S. Ignatii Loyola Libri tres; and neither in this is aught related of the great founder of the Order, which deserves the name of a miracle, however there may be here some” nearer approach to such than in the earlier biography—remarkable intimations, as of the death or recovery of friends, glimpses of their beatified state, ecstatic visions in which Christ appeared to him; and even of these, the list is introduced in a half-apologetic tone, which shows that he has by no means thoroughly convinced himself of the historic accuracy of those things which he is about to relate: Non pauca de eodem admirabilia praedicantur, quorum aliqua nobis hoc loco exponere visum est.
But with miracles infinitely more astounding and more numerous the Romish church has surrounded his great scholar, Francis Xavier. Miracles were as his daily food; to raise the dead was as common as to heal the sick. Even the very boys who served him as catechists received and exercised a similar power of working wonders. Now there are, I believe, no historic documents whatever, laying claim to an ordinary measure of credibility, which profess to vouch for these. And in addition to this, we have a series of letters written by this great apostle to the heathen, out of the midst of his work in the far East (S. Francisci Xaverii Epistolarum Libri tres; Pragae, 1750); letters which prove him indeed to have been one of the discreetest, as he was one of the most fervent, preachers of Christ that ever lived, and which are full of admirable hints for the missionary; but of miracles wrought by himself, of miracles which the missionary may expect in aid of his work, there occurs not a single word.

[24] See for instance, Augustine’s admirable treatment of the subject, Enarr. in Ps. cxxx., beginning with the words: Ergo sunt homines, quos delectat miraculum facere, et ab eis qui profecerunt in Ecclesia miraculum exigunt, et ipsi qui quasi profecisse sibi videntur, talia volunt facere, et putant se ad Deum non pertinere, si non fecerint.

[25] Horn. xlvi. in Matth.

[26] Neander (Kirch. Gesch. vol. iv. pp. 255-257) quotes many like utterances coming from the chief teachers of the Church; even in the midst of the darkness of the ninth century.. Thus Odo of Clugny relates of a pious layman, whom some grudged should be set so high, seeing that he wrought no miracles, how that once detecting a thief in the act of robbing him, he not merely dismissed him, but gave him all that which he would wrongfully have taken away, and adds, Certe mihi videtur, quod id magis admiratione dignum sit, quam si furem rigere in saxi duritiem fecisset. Aud Neander (vol. v. pp. 477, 606) gives ample testimonies to the same effect from writers of lives of saints, and from others, in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. One of these confesses indeed that it is a long line of miracles which is chiefly looked for from them (quod maxime nunc exigitur ab iis qui sanctorum vitas describere volunt). There is a beautiful passage on the superior worth of charity in St. Bernard, Serm.. xlvi.. 8, in Cant.... .. ....

[27] This image is Chrysostom’s, who draws it out at length (Horn. xlii. in Inscript. Act. Apostt.): “As therefore a husbandman, having lately committed a young tree to the bosom of the earth, counts it worthy, being yet tender, of much attention, on every side fencing it round, protecting it with stones and thorns, so that neither it may be torn up by the winds, nor harmed by the cattle, nor injured by any other injury; but when he sees that it is fast rooted and has sprung up on high, he takes away the defences, since now the tree can defend itself from any such wrong; thus has it been in the matter of our faith. When it was newly planted, while it was yet tender, great attention was bestowed on it on every side. But after it was fixed and rooted and sprung up on high, after it had filled all the world, Christ both took away the defences, and for the time to come removed the other strengthenings. Wherefore at the beginning He gave gifts even to the unworthy, for the early time had need of these helps to faith. But now He gives them not even to the worthy, for the strength of faith no longer needs this assistance.” Gregory the Great (Horn. xxix. in Evany.) has very nearly the same image: Haec [signa] necessaria in exordio. Ecclesiae fuerunt. Ut enim fides cresceret, miraculis fuerat nutrienda: quia et nos cum arbusta plantamus, tamdiu eis aquam infundimus, quousque ea in terra jam convaluisse videamus; et si semel radicem fixerint, in rigando cessamus.

[28] Thus Origen (Con. Gels. ii. 46) calls the surviving gifts in the Church vestiges ἴχνη of former powers; and again, 2:8, he speaks of them as ἴχνη καὶ τινά γε μείζονα. There is a curious passage in Abelard (Sermo de Joan. Bapt. p. 967), directed against the claimants to the power of working miracles in his day. Though he does not mention St. Bernard, it is difficult to think that he has not him in his eye.

[29] Augustine (De Civ. Dei, ’xxii, 8): Quisquis adhuc prodigia, uti credat, inquirit, magnum est ipse prodigium, qui mundo credente, non credat.

[30] Coleridge, in his Literary Remains, vol. iv. p. 260, on this matter expresses himself thus: “The result of my own meditations is, that the evidence of the Gospel, taken as a total, is as great for the Christians of the nineteenth century as for those of the apostolic age. I should not be startled if I were told it were greater. But it does not follow that this equally holds good of each component part. An evidence of the most cogent clearness, unknown to the primitive Christians, may compensate for the evanescence of some evidence which they enjoyed. Evidences comparatively dim have waxed into noonday splendour, and the comparative wane of others once effulgent is more than indemnified by the synopsis τοῦ παντός which we enjoy, and by the standing miracle of a Christendom commensurate and almost synonymous with the civilised world.”

[31] The wonder of the existence and subsistence of a Church in the world is itself so great, that Augustine says strikingly and with a deep truth, that to believe, or not to believe, the miracles is only choosing an alternative of wonders. If you do not believe the miracles, you must at least believe this miracle, that the world was converted without miracles (si miraculis non creditis, saltern huic miraculo credendum est, munduni sine miraculis fuisse conversum). Cf. De Civ. Dei, xxii. 8, 1. And on the relation of the helps to faith, the witnesses of God’s presence in the midst of his Church, which severally we have, and which the early Christians had, he says (Serm. ccxliv. 8): Apostoli Christum praesentem videbant: sed toto orbe terrarum diffusam Ecclesiam nonvidebant: videbant caput, et de corpore credebant. Habemus vices nostras: habemus gratiam dispensations et distributions nostrae: ad credendum certissimis documentis tempora nobis in una fide sunt distributa. Illi videbant caput, et credebant de corpore: nos videmus corpus, et credamus de capite. Let me here observe that Augustine’s own judgment in respect of the continuance of miracles in the Church appears to have varied at different times of his life. In an early work of his, De Verd Meligione, xxv. 47, he certainly denies their continuance: Cum enim Ecclesia Catholica per toturn orbem diffusa atque fundata sit, nec miracula ilia in nostrum tempus dura re permissa sunt, ne animus semper visibilia quaereret. In his Retractations, however (i. 13, 25), he expressly withdraws this statement, or limits it to such miracles as those which at the first accompanied the baptism of the faithful; and De Civ. Dei, xxii. 8, he enumerates at great length miracles, chiefly or exclusively miracles of healing, which he believed to have been wrought in his own time, and coming more or less within his own knowledge.

[32] Gregory the Great (Hom. xxix. in Evang.): Sancta quippe Ecclesia quotidie spiritaliter facit quod tune per Apostolos corporaliter faciebat. Nam sacerdotes ejus cum per exorcismi gratiam manum credentibus imponunt, et habitare malignos spiritus in eorum mente contradicunt, quid aliud faciunt, nisi daemonia ejiciunt? Et fideles quique qui jam vitae veteris secularia verba derelinquunt, sancta autem mysteria insonant, Conditoris sui laudes et potentiam, quantum prevalent, narrant, quid aliud faciunt, nisi novis linguis loquuntur? Qui dum bonis suis exhortationibus malitiam de alienis cordibus auferunt, serpentes tollunt. Et dum pestiferas suasiones audiunt, sed tamen ad operationem pravam minime pertrahuntur, mortiferum quidem est quod bibunt, sed non eis nocebit. Qui quoties proximos suos in opere bono infirmari conspiciunt, dum eis tota virtute concurrunt, et exemplo suae operationis illorum vitam roborant qui in propria actione titubant, quid aliud faciunt, nisi super aegros manus imponunt, ut bene habeant? Quae nimirum miracula tanto majora sunt, quanto spiritalia, tanto majora sunt, quanto per haec non corpora sed animae suscitantur.... Corporalia ilia miracula ostendunt aliquando sanctitatem, non autem faciunt: haec vero spiritalia, quae aguntur in mente, virtutem vitae non ostendunt, sed faciunt. Ilia habere et mali possunt; istis autem perfrui nisi boni non possunt.... Nolite ergo, fratres carissimi, amare signa quae possunt cum reprobis haberi communia, sed haec quae modo diximus, caritatis atque pietatis miracula amate; quae tanto securiora sunt, quanto et occulta; et de quibus apud Dominum eo major fit retributio, quo apud homines minor est gloria. See too on these greater wonders of the Church, Augustine, Serm. lxxxviii. 3; and Origen (Con. Cels. ii. 48) finds in them, in these wonders of grace which are ever going forward, the fulfilment of the promise that those who believed should do greater things than Christ Himself (John 14:12). Bernard too, In Ascen. Bom. Serm. i., has some beautiful remarks on the better miracles, which are now evermore finding place in Christ’s Church.