06-Chapter 5 The Assaults on the Miracles
Chapter 5 The Assaults on the Miracles
1. The Jewish A rigid monotheistic religion like the Jewish left hut one way of escape from the authority of miracles, which once were acknowledged to be indeed miracles, and not mere collusions and sleights of hand. There remained nothing to say, but that which we find in the N. T, the adversaries of the Lord continually did say, namely, that these works were works of hell: “This fellow doth not cast out devils but by Beelzebub, the prince of the devils”[1] (Mat 12:24. cf. Mark 3:22-27; Luk 11:15-22). We have our Lord’s own answer to the deep malignity of this assertion; his appeal, namely, to the whole tenor of his doctrine and his miracles—whether they were not altogether for the overturning of the kingdom of evil,—whether such a lending of power to Him on the part of Satan would not be wholly inconceivable, since it were merely and altogether suicidal. For though it would be quite intelligible that Satan should bait his hook with some good, should array himself as an angel of light, and do for a while deeds that might appear as deeds of light, that so he might the better carry through some mighty delusion—
“Win men with honest trifles, to betray them In deepest consequence,” just as Darius was willing that a small detachment of his army should perish, that so the mighty deceit which Zopyrus was practising against Babylon might succeed,[2].—yet the furthering upon his part of a lasting, unvarying, unrelaxing assault on his own kingdom is quite unintelligible. That kingdom, thus in arms against itself, could not stand, but must have an, end. He who came, as all his words and his deeds testified, to “destroy the works of the devil,” could not have come armed with his power, and helped onward by his aid. It is not of a pact with the Evil One which this tells, but of One mightier than that Evil, who has entered with power into his stronghold, and who, having bound him, is now spoiling his goods. Our Lord does in fact repel the accusation, and derive authority to his miracles, not from the power which they display, however that may be the first thing that brings them into consideration, but from the ethical ends which they serve. He appeals to every man’s conscience, whether the doctrine to which they bear witness, and which bears witness to them, be not from above, and not from beneath: and if so, then the power with which He accomplished them could not have been lent Him from beneath, since the kingdom of lies would never so contradict itself, as seriously to help forward the establishment of; the kingdom of truth.[3]
There is, indeed, at first sight a difficulty in the argument which our Saviour draws from the oneness of the kingdom of Satan—namely, that it seems the very idea of this kingdom, that it should be an anarchy, blind rage and hate not merely against God, but each part of it warring against every other part. And this is most deeply true”, that hell is as much in arms against itself as against heaven; neither does our Lord deny that in respect of itself that kingdom is infinite contradiction and division: only He asserts that in relation to the kingdom of heaven it is at one: there is one life in it and one soul in opposition to that. Just as a nation or kingdom may embrace within itself infinite parties, divisions, discords, jealousies, and heart-burnings; yet, if it is to subsist as a nation at all, it must not, as regards other nations, have lost its sense of unity; when it does so, of necessity it falls to pieces and perishes. To the Pharisees He says: “This kingdom of evil subsists; by your own confession it does so; it cannot therefore have denied the one condition of its existence, which is, that it should not lend its powers to the overthrowing of itself, that it should not side with its own foes; my words and works declare that I am its foe, it cannot therefore be siding with Me.” This accusation brought against the miracles of Christ, that they were done by the power of an evil magic, the heathen also sometimes used; but evidently having borrowed this weapon from the armoury of the Jewish adversaries of the faith.[4] And in their mouths, who had no such earnest idea of the kingdom of God upon one side and the kingdom of evil on the other, and of the fixed limits which divide the two, who had peopled the intermediate space with middle powers, some good, some evil, some mingled of both, the accusation was not at all so deeply malignant as in the mouth of a Jew. It was little more than a stone which they found conveniently at hand to fling, and with them is continually passing over into the charge that those works were wrought by trick—that they were conjuror’s arts; the line between the two charges is continually disappearing. The heathen, however, had a method more truly their own of evading the force of the Christian miracles, which is now to consider.
2. The Heathen. (Celsus, Hierocles, Porphyry.) A religion like the Jewish, which, besides God and the Angels who were in direct and immediate subordination to Him, left no spirits conceivable but those in rebellion against Him, the absolutely and entirely evil, this, as has been observed, allowed no choice, when once the miracle was adjudged not to be from God, but to attribute it to Satan. There was nothing between; it was from heaven, or, if not from heaven, from hell. But it was otherwise in the heathen world, and with the “gods many” of polytheism. So long as these lived in the minds of men, the argument from the miracles was easily evaded. For what did they prove at the uttermost with regard to their author? What but this, that a god, it might be one of the higher, or it might be one of the middle powers, the δαίμονες, the intermediate deities, was with him? What was there, men replied, in this circumstance, which justified the demand of an absolute obedience upon their parts? Wherefore should they yield exclusive allegiance to Him that wrought these works? The gods had spoken often by others also, had equipped them with powers equal to or greater than those claimed by his disciples for Jesus; yet no man therefore demanded for them that they should be recognized as absolute lords of the destinies of men. Esculapius performed wonderful cures; Apollonius went about the world healing the sick, expelling demons, raising the dead; Aristeas disappeared from the earth in as marvellous a way as the Author of the Christian faith: yet no man built upon these wonders a superstructure such as that which the Christians built upon the wonders of Christ.[5]
Thus Celsus, as we learn from more than one passage in Origen’s reply, brings forward now the mythic personages of antiquity, now the magicians, of a later date; though apparently with no very distinct purpose in his mind, but only with the feeling that somehow or other he can play them off against the divine Author of our religion, and undermine his claims to the allegiance of men. For it certainly remains a question how much credence he gave himself to the miracles which he adduced; Origen[6] charges him with not believing them; whether, sharing the almost universal scepticism of the educated classes; of his day, he did not rather mean that all should fall, than that all should stand, together. Hierocles again, governor of Bithynia, who is accused of having been a chief instigator of the cruelties under Diocletian,—and who, if the charge be just, wielded arms of unrighteousness on both hands against the Christian faith, the persecutor’s sword and the libeller’s pen,—followed in the same line. His book we know from the extracts in the answer of Eusebius, and the course of his principal arguments. From this answer it appears that, having recounted various miracles wrought, as he affirms, by Apollonius, he preceeds thus: “Yet do we not account him who has done such things for a god, only for a man beloved of the gods:. while the Christians, on the contrary, on account of a few insignificant wonder-works, proclaim their Jesus for a God.”[7] He presently, it is true, shifts his arguments, and no longer allows the miracles, denying only the conclusions drawn from them; but rather denies that they have any credible attestation: in his blind hate setting them in this respect beneath the miracles of Apollonius, which this “lover of truth,” for under the name of “Philalethes” he writes, declares to be far more worthily attested. This Apollonius (of Tyana in Cappadocia), whose historical existence there seems no reason to call in question, was probably born about the time of the birth of Christ, and lived as far as into the reign of Nerva, a.d. 97. Save two or three isolated notices of an earlier date, the only record which we have of him is a Life, written by Philostratus, a rhetorician of the second century, and professing to be founded on contemporary documents, yet everywhere betraying its unhistoric character. It is in fact a philosophic romance, in which the revival and re-action of paganism in the second century is portrayed. Yet I do not believe that Life to have been written with any purpose directly hostile to the new faith, but only to prove that they of the old religion had their mighty wonderworker as well. It was composed indeed, as seems to me perfectly clear, with an eye to the life of our Lord; the parallels are too remarkable to have been the effect of chance;[8] in a certain sense also in emulation and rivalry; yet not in hostile opposition, not as implying this was the Saviour of men, and not that; nor yet, as some of Lucian’s works, in a mocking irony of the things which are written concerning the Lord.[9] This later use which has often been made of the book, must not be confounded with its original purpose, which was different. The first, I believe, who so used it, was Charles Blount,[10] one of the earlier English Deists. And passing over some other insignificant endeavours to make the book tell against revealed religion, endeavours in which the feeble hand, however inspired by hate, yet wanted strength and skill to launch the dart, we come to Wieland’s Agathodcemon, in which neither malice nor dexterity was wanting, and which, professing to explain upon natural grounds the miracles of Apollonius, yet unquestionably points throughout at one greater than the wonderworker of Tyana, with a hardly suppressed de te fabula narratur running through the whole.[11] The arguments drawn from these parallels, so far as they were adduced in good faith and in earnest, have, of course, perished with the perishing of polytheism from the minds of men. Other miracles can no longer be played off against Christ’s miracles; the choice which remains now is between these and none.
3. The Pantheistic. (Spinoza.)
These two classes of assailants of the Scripture miracles, the Jewish and the heathen, allowed the miracles themselves to stand unquestioned as facts, but either challenged their source, or denied the consequences drawn from them by the Church. Not so the pantheistic deniers of the miracles, who assailed them not as being of the devil, not as insufficient proofs of Christ’s absolute claims of lordship; but cut at their very root, denying that any miracle was possible, since it was contrary to the idea of God. For these opponents of the truth Spinoza may be said, in modern times, to bear the word; the view is so connected with his name, that it will be well to hear the objection as he has uttered” it. That objection is indeed only the necessary consequence of his philosophical system. Now the first temptation on making acquaintance with that system is to contemplate it as a mere and sheer atheism; and such has ever been the ordinary charge against it; nor, in studying his works is it always easy to persuade oneself that it is anything else, or that the various passages in which Spinoza himself assumes it as something different, are more than inconsequent statements, with which he seeks to blind the eyes of others, and to avert the odium of this charge of atheism from himself. And yet atheism it is not, nor is it even a material, however it may be a formal, pantheism. All justice, requires it to be acknowledged that he does not bring down and resolve God into nature, but rather takes up and loses nature in God. It is only man whom he submits to a blind fate, and for whom he changes, as indeed for man he does, all ethics into physics. But the idea of freedom, as regards God, is saved; since, however, he affirms Him immanent in nature and not transcending it, this is only because He has Himself chosen these laws of nature as the one unchangeable manner, of his working, and constituted them in his wisdom so elastic that they shall prove, under every circumstance and in every need, the adequate organs and servants of his will. He is not bound to nature otherwise than by that, his own will; the laws which limit Him are of his own imposing; the necessity which binds Him to them is not the necessity of any absolute fate, but of the highest fitness. Still, however, Spinoza does affirm such a necessity, and thus excludes the possibility of any revelation, whereof the very essence is that it is a new beginning, a new unfolding by God of Himself to man, and especially excludes the miracle, which is itself at once the accompaniment, and itself a constituent part, of a revelation.
It would not be profitable to say more than a few words here on the especial charges which he brings against the miracle, as lowering, and unworthy of, the idea of God. They are but an application to a particular point of the same charges which he brings against all revelation, namely, that to conceive any such is to dishonour, and cast a slight upon, God’s great original revelation of Himself in nature and in man; a charging of that with such imperfection and incompleteness, as that it needed the author of the world’s laws to interfere in aid of those laws, lest they should prove utterly inadequate to his purposes.[12] And thus, as regards the miracle in particular, he finds fault with it as a bringing in of disorder into that creation, of which the only idea worthy of God is that of an unchangeable order; it is a making of God to contradict Himself, for the law which was violated by the miracle is as much God’s law as the miracle which violated it. The answer to this objection has been already anticipated; it has been already urged that the miracle is not a discord in nature, but the coming in of a higher harmony; not disorder, but instead of the order of earth, the order of heaven; not the violation of law, but that which continually, even in this natural world, is taking place, the comprehension of a lower law in a higher; in this case the comprehension of a lower natural, in a higher spiritual law; with only such modifications of the lower as are necessarily consequent upon this.
When, further, he charges the miracle with resting on a false assumption of the position which man occupies in the universe, with flattering the notion that nature is to serve him, not he to bow to nature, it cannot be denied that it does rest on this assumption. But this were only a charge which would tell against it, supposing that true, which so far from being truth, is indeed his first great falsehood of all, namely, the substitution of a God of nature, in place of a God of men. If God be indeed only or chiefly the God of nature, and not in a paramount sense the God of grace, the God of men, if nature be indeed the highest, and man only created as furniture for this planet, it were indeed absurd and inconceivable that the higher should serve, or give place to, or fall into the order of, the lower. But if, rather, man is “the crown of things,” the end and object of all, if he be indeed the vicegerent of the Highest, the image of God, this world and all else that belongs to it being but a school for the training of men,, only having a worth and meaning when so, considered, then that the lower should serve, and, where need is, give way to the interests of the highest, were only beforehand to be expected.[13]
Here, as is so often the case, something much behind the miracle, something much earlier in men’s view of the relations between God and his creatures, has already determined whether they should accept or reject it, and this, long before they have arrived at the consideration of this specific matter.
4. The Sceptical. (Hume.)
While Spinoza rested his objection to the miracles on the ground that the everlasting laws of the universe left no room for such, and while the form therefore which the question in debate assumed in his hands was this, Are miracles (objectively) possible? Hume, the legitimate child and pupil of the empiric philosophy of Locke, started his objection in altogether a different shape, namely, in this, Are miracles (subjectively) credible? He is, in fact, the sceptic, which,—taking the word in its more accurate sense, not as a denier of the truths of Christianity, but a doubter of the possibility of arriving at any absolute truth,—Spinoza is as far as possible from being. To this question Hume’s answer is in the negative; or rather, in the true spirit of that philosophy which leaves everything in uncertainty, ’It is always more probable that a miracle is false than true; it can therefore in no case prove anything else, since it is itself incapable of proof; ’—which thus he proceeds to show. In every case, he observes, of conflicting evidence we weigh the evidence for and against the alleged facts, and give our faith to that side upon which the evidence preponderates, with an amount of confidence proportioned, not to the whole amount of evidence in its favour, but to the balance which remains after subtracting the evidence against it. Thus, if the evidence on the side of A might be set as=20, and that on the side of B as =15, then our faith in A would remain 20—15=5; we giving our faith upon the side on which a balance of probabilities remains, and only to the extent of that balance. But every miracle, he goes on to say, is a case of conflicting evidence. In its favour is the evidence of the attesting witnesses; against it “the testimony of all experience which has gone before, and which witnesses for an unbroken order of nature. When we come to balance these against one another, the only case in which the evidence for the miracle could be admitted as prevailing would be that in which the falseness or error of the attesting witnesses would be a greater miracle than the miracle which they affirm. But no such case can occur. The evidence against a miracle having taken place is as complete as can be conceived; even were the evidence in its favour as complete, it would only be proof against proof, and absolute suspension of judgment would be the wise man’s part. But further, the evidence in favour of the miracle never makes claim to any such completeness. It is always more likely that the attesting witnesses were deceived, or were willing to’ deceive, than that the miracle took place. For, however many they may be, they are always but few compared with the multitudes who attest a fact which excludes their fact, namely, the uninterrupted succession, of a natural order in the world; and those few, moreover, submitted to divers warping influences, from which the others, nature’s witnesses, are altogether free. Therefore there is no case in which the evidence for any one miracle is able to outweigh the a priori evidence which is against all miracles. Such is the conclusion at which he arrives. The argument, it will be seen, is sceptical throughout. Hume does not, like Spinoza, absolutely deny the possibility of a miracle; all he denies is that we can ever be convinced of one. Of two propositions or assertions that may be true which has the least evidence to support it; but according to the necessary constitution of our mental being, we must give our adherence to that which presents itself to us with the largest amount of evidence in its favour.
Here again, as on a former occasion, so long as we abide in the region of nature, miraculous and improbable, miraculous and incredible, may be admitted as convertible terms. But once lift up the whole discussion into a higher region, once acknowledge something higher than nature, a kingdom of God, and men the intended denizens of it, and the whole argument loses its strength and the force of its conclusions. Against the argument from experience which tells against the miracle, is to be set, not, as Hume asserts, the evidence of the witnesses, which it is quite true can in no case itself be complete and of itself sufficient, but this, plus the anterior probability that God, calling men to live above nature and sense, would in this manner reveal Himself as the Lord paramount of nature, the breaker through and slighter of the apparitions of sense; plus also the testimony which the particular miracle by its nature, its fitness, the glory of its circumstances, its intimate coherence as a redemptive act with the personality of the doer, in Coleridge’s words, “its exact accordance with the ideal of a true miracle is the reason,” gives to the conscience that it is a divine work. The moral probabilities Hume has altogether overlooked and left out of account, and when they are admitted,—dynamic in the midst of his merely mechanic forces,—they disturb and indeed utterly overbear and destroy them. His argument is as that fabled giant, unconquerable so long as it is permitted to rest upon the earth out of which it sprung; but easily destroyed when once it is lifted into a higher world. It is not, as Hume would fain have us to believe, solely an intellectual question; but it is in fact the moral condition of men which will ultimately determine whether they will believe the Scripture miracles or not; this, and not the exact balance of argument on the one side or the other, which will compel this scale or that to kick the beam.
He who already counts it likely that God will interfere for the higher welfare of men, who believes that there is a nobler world-order than that in which we live and move, and that it would be the blessing of blessings for that nobler to intrude into and to make itself felt in the region of this lower, who has found that here in this world we are bound by heavy laws of nature, of sin, of death, which no powers that we now possess can break, yet which must be broken if we are truly to live,—he will not find it hard to believe the great miracle, the coming of the Son of God in the flesh, and his declaration as the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead; because all the deepest desires and longings of his heart have yearned after such a deliverer, however little he may have been able even to dream of so glorious a fulfilment of those longings. And as he believes that greatest miracle, so will he believe all other miracles, which, as satellites of a lesser brightness, naturally wait upon that, clustering round and drawing their lustre from the central brightness of that greatest. He, upon the other hand, to whom this world is all, who has lost all sense of a higher world with which it must once have stood connected, who is disturbed with no longings for anything nobler than it gives, to whom “the kingdom of God” is an unintelligible phrase, he will resist, by an intellectual theory if he can, or if not by that, by instinct, the miracle. Everything that is in him predisposes him to disbelieve it and the doctrines which it seals. To him who denies thus any final causes, who does not believe that humanity is being carried forward under a mightier leading than its own to a certain and that a glorious end, who looks at the history of this world and of man as the history of a bark tempest-tost, with no haven to which it is bound, to him these moral probabilities are no probabilities; and this being so, we should learn betimes how futile it is to argue with men about our faith, who are the deniers of all upon which any faith can be built.[14] 5. The Miracles only relatively miraculous, (Schleiermacher.)
Another scheme for getting rid of the miraculous element in the miracle, and one often united with Spinoza’s a priori argument against it,[15] being brought forward to explain the phenomenon of an apparent miracle, after that has shown that a real one was impossible, has been the following. These works, it has been said, were relative miracles,—miracles, in other words, for those in regard of whom they were first done,—as when a savage believes that a telescope has the power of bringing the far instantaneously near,—but no miracles in themselves, being but in truth the anticipation of discoveries in the kingdom of nature, the works of one who having penetrated deeper into her mysteries than the men of his own age, could therefore wield powers which were unknown, and bring about results which were inexplicable, to them.[16] It must be evident to the least thoughtful, that, however it may be sought to disguise the fact, the miracle does thus become no miracle,[17] and the doer of it can no longer be recognized as one commanding nature in a way specifically different from other men, but only as one who has a clearer or earlier insight than others into her laws and the springs of her power. It is strange that any should ever have been satisfied with this statement, which is indeed only a decently veiled denial of the miracle altogether.[18] For thus it has no longer an eternal significance; it is no longer a halo which is to surround the head of its worker for ever; with each enlargement of men’s knowledge of nature a star in his crown of glory is extinguished, till at length it fades altogether into the light of common day, nay, rather declares that it was not any more than a deceitful and meteor fire at the best. For it implies a serious moral charge against the doer of these works, if he vents them as wonders, as acts of a higher power than nature’s, or allows others so to receive them, when indeed he entirely knows that they are wrought but according to her ordinary laws. It was well enough, according to the spirit in which he was working, for one of the conquerors of the New World to make the Indians, whom he wished to terrify, believe that in his displeasure with them he would at a certain hour darken the moon, when indeed he did but foreknow an eclipse of her orb:[19] but in the kingdom of truth to use artifices like these were nothing else but by lies to seek to overturn the kingdom of lies.
Schleiermacher[20] endeavours so to guard this view as that it shall not appear an entire denial of the miracles, to dress it. out and prevent its nakedness from being seen; but he does not, in fact, lift himself above it. Christ, he says, had not merely this deeper acquaintance with nature than any other that ever lived, but stands in a more inward connexion with nature. He is able to evoke, as from her hidden recesses and her most inward sanctuary, powers which none other could; although still powers which lay in her already. These facts, which seem exceptional, were deeply laid in the first constitution of the law; and now, at this turning-point of the world’s history, by the providence of God, who had arranged all things from the beginning of the world for the glory of his Son, did at his bidding emerge. Yet single and without analogy as these “wonders of preformation” (for so one has called them) were, they belonged to the law as truly as, when the aloe puts forth its flower, or is said to put it forth, once in its hundred years, it yet does this according to its own innermost nature. For ninety and nine years it would have seemed to men not to be the nature of the plant to flower, yet the flowering of the hundredth year is only the coming out of its truest nature.
We see in this scheme that attempt to reconcile and atone between revelation and science, which was the main purpose of all Schleiermacher’s writings. Yet is it impossible to accept the reconciliation which he offers; as it is really made, however the sacrifice may be concealed, altogether at the expense of the miracle—which, in fact, is no miracle, if it lay in nature already, if it was not a new thing, if it was only the evoking of old and latent forces in nature, 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.
Augustine has been sometimes quoted, but altogether unjustly, as maintaining this scheme of the relatively miraculous. It is quite true that, when arguing with the heathen, he does demand why they refuse to give credence to the Scripture miracles, when they believe so much that can in no way be explained by any laws which their experience supplied; and adduces some curious but actual, and some also entirely fabulous, phenomena of the natural world, such as, fountains cold by night and hot by day,—others which extinguished a lighted torch, but set on fire an extinguished one,—stones which, once kindled, could not be quenched,—magnets which attracted iron, and other wonders, to which he and they gave credence alike.[21] But it is not herein his meaning to draw down the miracles to a level with natural appearances, hitherto unexplained, but capable of and waiting their explanation. Rather in these natural appearances he sees direct interpositions of the Divine Power; he does not reckon that any added knowledge will bring them under laws of human experience, and therefore he lifts them up to a level with the miracles. He did not merge the miracles in nature, but drew up a portion of nature into the region of the miraculous. However greatly as a natural philosopher he may have been here at fault, yet all extenuating of the miracle was far from him; indeed lie ever refers it to the omnipotence of God as to its ultimate ground.[22] When he affirms that much seems to be against nature, but nothing truly is, this may sound at first like the same statement of the miraculous being what it is merely in relation to certain persons and certain stages of our knowledge of this outward world. But it is only in sound that it is similar. He has quite a different thought of nature from any that will allow such to be his meaning. Nature is for him but the outward expression of the will of God; and all which he affirms is, that God never can be contrary to God; that there can be no collision of his wills; that whatever comes in is as true an order, the result of as real a law, as that which gives place to it; which must needs be, since it has come in according to the will of God, which will is itself the highest order, and law, and harmony.[23] 6. The Rationalistic. (Paulus.) The rise of rationalism,—which term I use for convenience sake, and without at all consenting to its fitness, for it is as absurd a misnomer as when in the last century that was called free-thinking, which was assuredly to end in the slavery of all thought,—seems to have been in this manner. It may be looked at as an escape from the conclusions of mere Deists concerning Christ’s Person and his Word, upon the part of some, who had indeed abandoned the true faith of the Church concerning its Head, yet were not prepared to give up the last lingering vestiges of their respect for Holy Scripture and for Him of whom Scripture testified. They with whom this system grew up could no longer believe the miracles, they could no longer believe the great miracle, in which all other are easily included, a Son of God, in the Church’s sense of the term. They, too, were obliged to fall in with the first principles of the infidel adversary, that any who professed to accomplish miracles was either self-deceived or a deceiver, even as those who recorded such as having happened must be regarded as standing in the same dilemma. But what if it could be shown that Christ never professed to do any miracles, nor the sacred historians to record any? if it could be shown that the sacred narratives, rightly read, gave no countenance to any such assumption, and that it was only the lovers of, and cravers after, the marvellous, who had found any miracles there;—the books themselves having been intended to record merely natural events? Were not this an escape from the whole difficulty? The divine, it is true, in these narratives would disappear; that, however, they did not desire to save; that they had already given up: but the human would be vindicated; the good faith, the honesty, the entire credibility of the Scripture historians, would remain unimpeached. And in Christ Himself there would be still that to which they could look up with reverence and love; they could still believe in Him as the truthful founder of a religion which they shrunk from the thought of renouncing altogether. No longer being, as the Church declared Him, the worker of wonders, clothed with power from on high, nor professing to be that which He was not, as the blasphemers affirmed, He would still abide for them, the highest pattern of goodness which the world had yet seen, as He went up and down the world, healing and blessing, though with only the same means at his command as were possessed by other men. Their attempt was certainly a bold one. To suffer the sacred text to stand, and yet to find no miracles in it, did appear a hopeless task. For this, it must be always remembered, altogether distinguishes this system from later mythic theories, that it does accept the N. T. as entirely historic; it does appeal to the word of Scripture as the ground and proof of its assertions; its great assertion being that the Evangelists did not intend to relate miracles, but ordinary facts of everyday experience, works done by Jesus, now of friendship and humanity, now of medical skill, now, it might be, of chance and good fortune, or other actions which from one cause or other seemed to them of sufficient significance to be worth recording. Thus Christ, they say, did not heal an impotent man at Bethesda, but only detected an impostor; He did not change water into wine at Cana, but brought in a new supply of wine when that of the house was exhausted; He did not multiply the loaves, but, distributing his own and his disciples’ little store, set an example of liberality, which was quickly followed by others who had like stores, and in this way there was sufficient for all; He did not cure blindness otherwise than any skilful oculist might do it;—which indeed, they observe, is clear; for with his own lips He declared that He needed light for so delicate an operation—” I must work the works of Him that sent Me, while it is day; the night cometh, when no man can work” (John 9:4); He did not walk on the sea, but on the shore; He did not tell Peter to find a stater in the fish’s mouth, but to catch as many fish as would sell for that money; He did not raise Lazarus from the dead, but guessed from the description of his disease that he was only in a swoon, and happily found it as He had guessed. This scheme, which many had already tried here and there, but which first appeared full blown and consistently carried through in the Commentary of Dr. Paulus, published in 1800, did not long survive in its first vigour. It perished under blows received from many and opposite quarters; for, not to speak of a reviving faith in the hearts of many, that God could do more than man could understand, even the children of this world directed against it the keenest shafts of their ridicule. Every philologist, nay, every man who believed that language had any laws, was its natural enemy, for it stood only by the violation of all these laws. Even the very advance of unbelief was fatal to it, for in it there was a slight lingering respect to the Word of God; moved by which respect it sought forcibly to bring that Word into harmony with its theory, as a better alternative than the renouncing of the authority of that Word altogether. But when men arose, who did not shrink from the other alternative, who had no desire to hold by that Word at all, then there was nothing to hinder them from at once coming back to the common-sense view of the subject, one which no art could long succeed in concealing, namely that the Evangelists did at any rate intend to record supernatural events. Those to whom the Scriptures were no authority were, thus far at least, more likely to interpret them aright, that they were not under the temptation to twist and pervert them, so to bring them into apparent accordance with their own systems. This scheme of interpretation, thus assailed from so many sides, and itself merely artificial, quickly succumbed. And now, even in the land of its birth, it has entirely perished; on the one side a deeper faith, on the other a more rampant unbelief, have encroached on, and wholly swallowed up, the territory which it occupied for a while. It is indeed so little the form in which an assault on Revelation will ever again clothe itself, and may be so entirely regarded as one of the cast-off garments of unbelief, now despised and trodden under foot even of those who once glorified themselves in it, that I have not alluded, save very slightly and passingly, to it in the body of my book. Once or twice I have noticed its curiosities of interpretation, its substitutions, as they have been happily termed, of philological for historical wonders. The reader who is curious to see how Dr. Paulus and his compeers arrived at the desired result of exhausting the narrative of its miraculous element, will find specimens in the notes upon The feeding, of the five thousand, and The stater in the fish’s mouth.
7. The Historico-Critical. (Woolston, Strauss.) The last assault upon the miracles is that which may be not unfitly termed the historico-critical. It affirms that they are so full of contradictions, psychological and other improbabilities, discrepancies between the accounts of one Evangelist and another, that upon close handling they crumble to pieces, and are unable to maintain their ground as history. Among the English deists of the last century, Woolston especially addressed himself in this way to the undermining the historic credit of these narratives. He was brought to this evil work in a singular way, and abides a mournful example of the extremes to which spite and mortified vanity may carry a weak man, though, as all testimonies concur in acknowledging, at one time of estimable conversation, and favourably known for his temperate life, his charity to the poor, and other evidences of an inward piety. Born in 1669, and educated at Cambridge, where he became a fellow of Sidney, he first attracted unfavourable notice by a certain crack-brained enthusiasm for the allegorical interpretation of Scripture, which he carried to all lengths. Whether he owed this to the works of Philo and Origen, or whether he only strengthened and nourished an already existing predilection by the study of their writings, is not exactly clear; but it had become a sort of “fixed idea” in his mind. At first, although just offence was taken at more than one publication of his, in which his allegorical system was carried out at the expense apparently of the historic truth of the Scripture, yet, as it was not considered that he meant any mischief, as it was not likely that, he would exert any very wide influence, he was suffered to follow his own way, unvisited by any serious censures from the higher authorities of the Church. Meeting, however, with opposition in many quarters, and unable to carry the clergy with him, he broke out at last in unmeasured invectives against them, and in a virulent pamphlet[24] styled them “slaves of the letter,” “Baal-priests,” “blind leaders of the blind,” and was on account of this pamphlet deprived of his fellowship (1721). From this time it seemed as if an absolute fury possessed him. Not merely the Church, but Christianity itself, was the object of his attack. Whether his allegorical system of interpretation had indeed ended, as it was very likely to do, in depriving him of all faith in God’s Word, and he retained his professed veneration for its spiritual meaning only that he might, under shelter of that, more securely advance to the assault of its historical foundations, or whether he did still retain this in truth, it was now at any rate only subordinate and subservient to his purpose of revenge. To these he was ready to offer up every other consideration. When, then, in that great controversy which was raging in the early part of the last century, the defenders of revealed religion entrenched themselves behind the miracles, as defences from which they could never be driven, as irrefragable proofs of the divine origin of Christianity, Woolston undertook, by the engines of his allegorical interpretation, to dislodge them from these also, and with this aim published his notorious Letters on the Miracles.[25] It is his manner in these to take certain miracles which Christ did, or which were wrought in relation of Him, two or three in a letter; he then seeks to show that, understood in their literal sense, they contain such extravagances, contradictions, and the like, that none can suppose Christ actually to have done them; while neither could the Evangelists, as honest men, men who had the credit of their Lord at heart, have intended to record them as having been actually wrought, or desired us to receive them otherwise than as allegories, spiritual truths clothed in the garb of historic events. The enormous difference between himself and those early Church writers, to whom he appeals, and whose views he professes to be only reasserting,—a difference of which it is impossible that he could have been ignorant,—is this: they said, This history, being real, has also a deeper ideal sense; he upon the contrary, Since it is impossible that this history can be real, therefore it must have a spiritual significance. They build upon the establishment of the historic sense, he upon its ruins.[26] When he would fain utter grosser blasphemies than in his own person he dares, or than would befit the position which he has assumed from whence to assault Revelation, he introduces a Jewish Rabbi, and suffers him to speak without restraint, himself only observing, “This is what an adversary might say; to these accusations we Christians expose ourselves, so long as we cleave to the historic letter; we only can evade their force by forsaking that, and holding fast the allegorical meaning alone.” I shall not (as it is not needful) offend the Christian reader by the reproduction of any of his coarser ribaldry, which has sufficient cleverness to have made it mischievous enough; but will endeavour to show by a single example the manner in which he seeks to make weak points in the Scripture narratives. He is dealing with the miracle of the man sick of the palsy, who was let through the broken roof of the house where Jesus was, and thereupon healed (Mark 2:1-12). But how, he demands, should there have been such a crowd to hear Jesus preach at Capernaum, where He was so well known, and so little admired? And then, if there was that crowd, what need of such urgent haste? it was but waiting an hour or two, and the multitude would have dispersed; “I should have thought their faith might have worked patience.” Why did not Jesus tell “the people to make way? would they not have done so readily, since to see a miracle was the very thing they wanted? How should the pulleys, ropes, and ladder have been at hand to haul the sick man up? How strange that they should have had hatchets and other tools ready at hand, to break through the spars and rafters of the roof; and stranger still, that the good man of the house should have endured, without a remonstrance, his property to be so injured! How did those below escape without hurt from the falling tiles and plaster? And if there were a door in the roof, as some, to mitigate the difficulty, tell us, why did not Jesus go up to the roof, and there speak the healing word, and so spare all this trouble and damage and danger? But enough;—it is evident that this style of objection could be infinitely multiplied in regard of any history. There is always something else that might have been done besides the thing that was done. It is after this taking to pieces of the narrative, this triumphant showing, as he affirms, that it cannot stand in the letter, that he proceeds, as a sort of salvo, to say it may very well stand in its spirit, as an allegory and symbol of something else; and that so, and so only, it was intended. This is what he offers by way of this higher meaning in the present case: By the palsy of this man is signified “a dissoluteness of morals and unsteadiness of faith and principles, which is the condition of mankind at present, who want Jesus’ help for the cure of it.” The four bearers are the four Evangelists, “on whose faith and doctrine mankind is to be carried unto Christ.” The house to the top of which he is to be carried is “the intellectual edifice of the world, otherwise called Wisdom’s house.” But “to the sublime sense of the Scriptures, called the top of the house, is man to be taken; he is not to abide in the low and literal sense of them.” Then if he dare to “open the house of wisdom, he will presently be admitted to the presence and knowledge of Jesus.”[27] Not very different is Strauss’s own method of proceeding. He wields the same weapons of destructive criticism, thinking to show how each history will crumble at his touch, will resolve into a heap of improbabilities, which no one can any longer maintain. It needs not to say that he is a more accomplished adversary than Woolston, with far ampler resources at command,—more, if not of his own, yet of other men’s learning; inheriting as he does all the negative criticism of the last hundred years, of an epoch, that is, which has been sufficiently fruitful in this kind. Here indeed is in great part the secret of the vast sensation which his work for a season caused: all that was scattered up and down in many books he has brought together and gathered into a single focus; all which other men had spoken faintly and with reserve, he with a greater boldness has spoken out; he has dared to give utterance to all which was trembling upon the lips of numbers, but which, from one cause or another, they had shrunk from openly avowing. Yet as regards the treatment of the miracles,—for with that only we have now to do,—there are differences between him and Woolston. He unites in his own person the philosophical and the critical assailant of these; for he starts from the philosophic ground of Spinoza, that the miracle is impossible, since the laws of nature are the only and the necessary laws of God and of his manifestation; and he then proceeds to the critical examination of the Gospel miracles in detail; but of course in each case to the trial of that which is already implicitly tried and condemned. Thus, if he is ever at a loss, if any of them give him trouble, if they oppose a too stubborn resistance to the powerful solvents which he applies, threatening to stand in despite of all, he immediately falls back on his philosophic ground, and exclaims, “But if we admit it was thus, then we should have here a miracle, and we have started from the first principle, that such is inconceivable.” This mockery in every case he repeats, trying them one by one, which have all been condemned by him beforehand in the gross.
There is, too, this further difference, that while Woolston professed to consider the miracles as the conscious clothing of spiritual truth, allegories devised artificially, and, so to speak, in cold blood, for the setting forth of the truths of the kingdom, Strauss gives them a freer birth and a somewhat nobler origin. They are the halo of glory with which the Infant Church gradually and without any purposes of deceit clothed its Founder and its Head. His mighty personality, of which it was livingly conscious, caused it ever to surround Him with new attributes of glory. All that men had ever craved and longed for—deliverance from physical evil, dominion over the crushing powers of nature, victory over death itself,—all that had ever in a lesser measure been attributed to any,—they lent in larger abundance, in unrestrained fulness, to Him whom they felt greater than all. The Church in fact made its Christ, and not Christ his Church.[28] With one only observation I will pass on, not detaining the reader any longer from more pleasant and more profitable portions of the subject. It is this,—that here, as so often, we find the longings and cravings of men after a redemption, in the widest sense of that word, made to throw suspicion upon Him in whom these longings and cravings are affirmed to have been satisfied. But if we believe a divine life stirring at the root of our humanity, the depth and universality of such longings is a proof rather that they were meant some day to find their satisfaction, and not always to be mere hopes and dreams; and if so, in whom, but in Him whom we preach and believe—in whom, but in Christ? What other beside Him could, with the slightest show of reason, be put forward as the fulfiller of the world’s hopes, the realizer of the world’s dreams? If we do not believe in this divine life, nor in a divine leading of our race, if we hold a mere brutal theory about man, it were then better altogether to leave discussing miracles and Gospels, which indeed have no meaning for, as they can stand in no relation to, us.
Footnotes
[1] They regarded Him as planum in signis (Tertullian, Adv. Marc. iii. 6; cf. Apolog. xxi.). This charge is drest out with infinite blasphemous additions in the later Jewish books (see Eisemnenger, Entdeckt. Judenth. vol. i. p. 148, seq.).
[2] Herodotus, iii. 155 [3] Eusebius (Dem. Evang. iii. 6) makes much of this argument,
[4] See a curious passage, Origen, Con. Gels. i. 68. cf. also i. 6; 2:49; viii. 9; Augustine, Be Cons. Evang. i. 9-11; Jerome, Brev. in Psal. lxxxi. in fine; Arnobius, Adv. Gen. i. 43, who brings in this as one of the calumnies of the heathen against the Lord: Magus fuit, clandestinis artibus omnia ilia perfecit: AEgyptiorum ex adytis angelorum potentium nomina et remotas furatus est disciplinas; cf. also 53. This charge of fetching his magical skill from Egypt, which Celsus in like manner takes up (Origen, Con. Gels. i. 28, 38; see also Eusebius, Dem. Evang. iii. 6), betrays at once the Jewish origin of the accusation. It is evermore repeated in Jewish books. Egypt, say they, was the natural home of magic, so that if the magic of the world were divided into ten parts, Egypt would possess nine; and there, even as the Christian histories confess, Jesus resided two years (Eisenmenger, Entdeckt. Judenth. vol. i. pp. 149, 166).
[5] The existence of false cycles of miracles should no more cast a suspicion upon all, or cause to doubt those which present themselves with marks of the true, than the appearance of a parhelion forerunning the sun cause us to deny that he was travelling up from beneath the horizon, for which rather it is an evidence. The false money passes, not because there is nothing better, and therefore all have consented to receive it, but because there is. a good money, under colour of which the false is accepted. Thus is it with the longing which has existed “at all times and in all ages after some power which is not circumscribed by the rules of ordinary visible experience, but which is superior to these rules and can transgress them.” The mythic narrations in which such longings find an apparently historic clothing and utterance, so far from being eyed with, suspicion, should be most welcome to the Christian inquirer. The enemies of the faith will of course parade these shadows, in the hopes of making us believe that our substance is a shadow also; but they are worse than simple who are cozened by so palpable a fraud.
[6] Con. Cels. iii. 22.
[7] In the same way Arnobius (Adv. Gen. i. 48) brings in the heathen adversary saying it is idle to make these claims (frustra tantum arrogas Christo) on the score of the miracles, when so many others have done the like..
[8] See, for instance, upon the raising of the widow’s son, the parallel miracle which I have adduced from the life of Apollonius. The above is Baur’s conclusion in his instructive little treatise, Apollonius von Tyana und Christus, Tübingen, 1832.
[9] His Philopseudes, for instance, and his Vera Historia. Thus only the latter half of this judgment of Huet’s (Dem. Evang. prop. ix. 147) seems to me to be true: Id spectâsse imprimis videtur Philostratus, ut invalescentem jam Christi fidem ac doctrinam deprimeret, opposito hoc omnis doctrinae, sanctitatis, ac mirincae virtutis foeneo simulacro. Itaque ad Christi exemplar hanc expressit effigiem, et pleraque ex Christi Jesu historia Apollonio accommodavit, lie quid ethnici Christianis invidere possent.
[10] In his now scarce translation, with notes, of The two first hooks of Philostratus, London, 1680, with this significant motto from Seneca, Cum omnia in incerto sint, fave tibi, et crede quod mavis.
[11] The work of Philostratus has been used with exactly an opposite aim by Christian apologists, namely, to bring out, by comparison with the best which heathenism could offer, the surpassing glory of Christ. Cudworth, in his Intellectual System, iv. 15, occupies himself at a considerable length with Apollonius. Here may probably have been the motive to Blount’s book, which followed only two years after the publication of Cudworth’s great work. Henry More, too, in his Mystery of Godliness, iv. 9-12, compares at large the miracles of Christ with those of Apollonius.
[12] Tract. Theol. Pol. vi.: Nam cum virtus et potentia naturae sit ipsa Dei virtus et potentia, leges autem et regulae naturae ipsa Dei decreta, omnino credendum est, potentiam naturae infinitam esse, ejusque leges adeo latas, ut ad omnia quae et ab ipso divino intellectu concipiuntur, se extendant; alias enim quid aliud statuitur, quam quod Deus naturam adeo impotentem creaverit, ejusque leges et regulas adeo steriles statuerit, ut saepe de novo ei subvenire cogatur, si earn conservatam vult, et ut res ex voto succedant, quod sane a ratione alienissimum esse existimo?
[13] They are the truly wise, lie says (Tract. Theol. Pol. vi.), who aim not at this, ut natura iis, sed contra ut ipsi naturae pareant, utpote qui certe sciunt, Deum naturam dirigere prout ejus leges universales, non autem prout humanae naturae particulares leges exigunt, adeoque Deum non solius humani generis, sed totius naturas rationem habere.
[14] Augustine (Be Util. Cred. xvi.): Si enim Dei providentia non praesidet rebus humanis, nihil est de religione satagendum. See some valuable remarks on Hume and on his position in Mill’s Logic, vol. ii. p. 187, 2d edit.
[15] As by Spinoza himself, Ep. xxiii.: Rogare mihi liceat an nos homunciones tantam naturae cognitionem habeamus, ut determinare possimus, quousque ejus vis et potentia se extendit, et quid ejus vim superat?
[16] Thus Hase (Leben Jesu, p. 108): Sie sind zwar nothwendig begriffen im Naturzusammenhange, daher nach diesem überall zu forschen ist, aber sie überschritten weit die Kenntniss und Kraft der Zeitgenossen.
[17] Mirabile, but not miraculum. Augustine’s definition in one place (De Util. Gred. xvi.), Miraculum voco quicquid arduum aut insolitum supra spem vel facultatem mirantis apparet,. is plainly faulty; it is the definition of the mirabile, not of the miraculum. Aquinas is more distinct (Summ. Theol. 1, qu. 110, art. 4): Non sufficit ad rationem miraculi, si aliquid fiat praeter ordinem alicujus naturae particularis, sic enim aliquis miraculum faceret lapidem sursum projiciendo; ex hoc autem aliquid dicitur miraculum, quod fit praeter ordinem totius natures creatae, quo sensu solus Deus facit miracula. Nobis enim non omnis virtus naturae creatae nota; cum ergo fit aliquid praeter ordinem naturae creatae nobis notae per virtutem creatam nobis ignotam, est quidem miraculum quoad nos, sed non simpliciter.
[18] J. Müller (Be Mime. J. G. Nat. et Necess. par. ii. p. 1) well characterizes this scheme: Quid vero? num de miraculorum necessitate ordiamur a notione miraculi tollendâ? Si enim ex eâ, sententia mirabilia Christi opera e propriis naturae viribus secundum hujus legem, at absconditam, orta sunt, certum et constans discrimen haec inter et ilia, quae quotidie in naturâ fieri videmus, remanet nullum; omnia fluunt et miscentur; quae reruni natura heri gremio suo operuit, aperit hodie; quae etiam nunc abscondita sunt, posthac patebunt. Si vero, quod hodie miraculum, eras non erit, et hodie non est, sed esse tantum videtur.
[19] Plutarch (De Def. Orac. xii.) mentions exactly the” same trick of a Thessalian sorceress. A late writer upon the rule of the Jesuits in Paraguay accuses them of using artifices of the like kind for acquiring and maintaining an influence over their converts.
[20] Der christi Glaube, vol. ii. p. 100; vol. ii. p. 135.
[21] Be Civ. Dei, xxi. 5.
[22] Be Civ. Dei, xxi. 7.
[23] See the quotation from Augustine, p. 16. That he had clearly in his eye the essential property of a miracle, that it should be the coming in of a new power of God into nature, and distinguished this broadly from the relatively miraculous, is plain from innumerable passages such as this (De Civ. Dei, x. 16): Miracula,... non ea dico quae intervallis temporum occultis ipsius mundi caussis, verumtamen sub divina providentia constitutis et ordinatis monstrosa contingunt, quales sunt inusitati partus animalium, et coelo ten-ague rerum. insolita facies.
[24] In his Letter to the Rev. Dr. Bennett upon this question, Whether the Quakers do not the nearest of any other sect resemble the primitive Christians in principle and practices. By Aristobulus. London, 1720.
[25] These six Letters, first published as separate pamphlets between 1727-29, had an immense circulation, and were read with the greatest avidity. Voltaire, who was in England just at the time of their publication, says that thirty thousand copies of them were sold, and that large packets of them were forwarded to the American colonies. In the copy I am using, the different letters range from the third to the sixth edition, and this almost immediately after their first publication. Indeed, Swift, in his lines on his own death, written 1731, speaks of something much more than this, and quite consents with Voltaire’s account of the immense popularity which they enjoyed. He makes Lintot, the bookseller, say,—
“Here’s Woolston’s tracts, the twelfth edition,
’Tis read by every politician:
The country members when in town
To all their boroughs send them down:
You never met a thing so smart;
The courtiers have them all by heart;” &c. Their circulation was so great, and their mischief so wide, that above sixty answers were published within a very short period. Gibson, then Bishop of London, addressed five pastoral letters to his diocese against them; and other chief divines of England, as Sherlock, Pearce, Smallbrooke, found it needful to answer them. Of the replies which I have seen, Smallbrooke’s (Bishop of St. David’s) Vindication of our Saviour’s Miracles, 1729, is the most learned and the best. But one cannot help being painfully struck upon this and other occasions with the exceeding poverty and feebleness of the anti-deistical literature of England in that day of need; the low grounds which it occupies; the little enthusiasm which the cause awakened in its defenders. With regard to Woolston himself, the paltry shifts with which he sought to evade the consequences, of his blasphemy,—and there is an infinite meanness in the way in which he professes, while blaspheming against the works of Christ, to be only assailing them in the letter that he may vindicate them in the spirit,—this and other such poor” evasions failed to protect him from the pains and penalties of the law. He was fined twenty-five pounds for each of his Letters, sentenced to be imprisoned for a year, and was not to be released till he could find sureties for his good behaviour. These he was not able to procure, and he died in prison in 1731.
[26] Their canon was ever this of Gregory the Great (Horn. xl. in Evang.): Tune namque allegorise fructus suaviter carpitur, cum prius per historiam in veritatis radice solidatur; and they abound in such earnest warnings as this of Augustine’s: Ante omnia tamen, fratres, hoc in nomine Dei admonemus,... ut quando auditis exponi Sacras Scripturas narrantes quae gesta sunt, prius illud quod lectum est credatis sic gestum quomodo lectum est, ne subtracto fundamento rei gestae, quasi in aëre quaeretis aedificare. Compare what he says on ’the history of Jonah, Ep. cii. qu. vi. 33.
[27] Fourth Discourse on the Miracles, pp. 51-67. Strauss’s own judgment of his predecessor in this line very much agrees with that given above. He says, “Woolston’s whole presentation of the case veers between these alternatives. If we are determined to hold fast the miracles as actual history, then they forfeit all divine character, and sink down into unworthy tricks and common frauds. Do we refuse, on the other hand, to let go the divine in these narrations, then must we, with the sacrifice of their historic character, understand them only as the setting forth, in historic guise, of certain spiritual truths; for which, indeed, the authority of the chiefest allegorists in the Church, as Origen and Augustine and others, may be adduced;—yet so, that Woolston imputes falsely to them the intention of thrusting out, as he would do, the literal interpretation by the allegorical altogether; when indeed they, a few instances on Origen’s part being excepted, are inclined to let both explanations stand, the one by the other. Woolston’s statement of the case may leave a doubt to which of the two alternatives that he sets over against one another, he with his own judgment inclines. If one calls to mind, that before he came forward as an opponent of Christianity as received in his day, he occupied himself with allegorical interpretations of the Scripture, one might regard this as the opinion which was most truly his own. But on the other hand, all that he can adduce of incongruities in the literal sense of the miracle histories is brought forward with such one-sided zeal, and so colours the whole with its mocking tone, that one must rather conjecture that the Deist seeks only, by urging the allegorical sense, to secure his own rear, that so he may the more boldly let himself loose on the literal meaning” (Leben Jesu, 3d edit, vol. i. p. 14). There is a very accurate and carefully written account of Woolston, and his life and writings, in Lechler, Ceschichte des Englischea Drismus, pp. 289-311.
[28] See the very remarkable chapter, anticipating so much of modern speculation on this subject, in Augustine, De Civ. Dei, xxii. 6.