2 narrators not meant to remove the miraculous character of the events; they prove, on the contrary, that even where a natural explanation offered itself, and was suggested by tradition, it was rejected by miracle-loving generations, and set aside in favour of the assumption of extraordinary agencies. Yet, what natural basis can be discovered for the legends that Miriam became suddenly "leprous like snow" because she had spoken slightingly of Moses,' that a corpse which touched the bones. of Elisha, became alive and rose from the grave, or that diseases were cured, physical defects removed, and evil spirits expelled by touching the hand or the garment of Christ, or "an handkorchiof or apron" of the apostle Paul? that a large number of fiery horses and chariots appeared to rescue Elisha from his pursuers? that fire came out of a rock by striking it with a staff, and consumed the meat and the cakes placed thereon by Gideon as an offering? that the sea raged because it bore the guilty Jonah, and became tranquil as soon as the latter was removed from the ship?" 7 9 And yet the Bible itself lowers considerably the force and effect of miracles by attributing the power of performing them not only to Hobrews worshipping foreign gods, and to heathens controlled by the might of Jehovah, as in the instance of Balaam, but to idolators who work in opposition to Jehovah himself, as the magicians of Egypt.s The New Testament goes even farther; it supposes miracles to be performed by "false Christs and false prophets" to such a degree "that if it were possible they might deceive the very elect"; 10 the enemy of the Church, represented under the form of a beast rising out of the carth, "did groat wonders, made fire come down from heaven, and thereby deceived many men"; 11 and "the spirits of the devils", which betray the kings of the earth and of the whole world, work miracles. 12 Wonders, therefore, neither testify to the greatness of God, nor to the purity or truth of doctrines. It is, moreover, oxtremely difficult to distinguish between a true and a false miraclo; all critoria that have been fixed, are either indefinite or fallacious. The inference to be drawn from these facts is as decisive as it is significant. Can a gift that an idol is able to bestow, have any value or 1 Num. XII. 10. 2 2 Ki. XIII. 21. 3 Matth. VIII. 13, 15; IX. 20-22; Mark VI. 55, 56; VII. 32–35; Aels XIX. 12. 4 2 Ki. VI. 17; comp. II. 11. 5 Judg. VI. 20, 21. Jon. I. 12-15. 7 Deut. XII. 2-6. 8 Exod. VII. 9—12, 22; VIII. 3; see, however, ver. 14. 9 Matth. XXIV. 24; comp. 2 Thess. 11. 9. 10 Comp. Revel. XIX. 20. 11 Revel. XIII. 13, 14. 12 Revel. XVI. 14; comp., however, John III. 2 (no man can do these miracles except God be with him). reality? Can those powers be supernatural which a Hebrew prophet shares with a priest of Baal? Miracles are both impossible and incredible impossible because against the established laws of the universe, and incredible because those set forth by tradition, are palpable inventions of unhistoric ages. The belief in miracles may, in certain periods, not be without advantage and importance; it emanates from a spiritual elevation, perhaps from a moral impulse; it may serve to strengthen the religion of the heart and to sanction those doctrines which the mind recognises as true and eternal; it may thus prove a material aid to a genuine faith; but it can, at best, only be a means to that end; it loses its usefulness, when it loses the connection with the mind; it becomes injurious and dangerous and leads to mechanical ritualism or fanatic vehemence when it is isolated from the moral faculties; and engenders hypocrisy and falsehood when it ceases to be conceived in simplicity and childlike ingenuousness. According to the current and traditional view, miracles were wrought exclusively in the early times of deficient education and imperfect knowledge; they are no longer reported in the more enlightened epochs of progress and research. Why should they have so suddenly and so completely coased? It is futile to reply that they were performed only as long as they were necessary for the training of the human raco; for miraclos, by confounding and often insulting reason, and hence fostering superstition, especially magic, witchcraft and sorcery, to which they aro akin, far from promoting, tend to retard the education of mankind. They are valueless for our advancement, whether in religion or philosophy; for neither the one nor the other can be improved by phenomena which the human mind is unable to understand; those facts and ideas only can influence us which lie within the sphere of our common nature; "from an effect which surpasses the capacity of man, he cannot deduce intelligible truths, and those are silly who, if unable to understand a thing, have recourse to God; forsooth, a ridiculous mode of displaying ignorance.” The notion of "rational wonders" which has been proposed, is preposterous; for all wonders are irrational; they realise their character the more completely, the more irrational they are; for reason penetratos into the depth and essence of things, while the miracles play lightly on their surface. The love of the miraculous, innate in human nature, and strongost in imaginative or enthusiastic minds and in the early stages of development, is the parent of miracles; they germinate not in the quality of things but in the propensity of men; "believe you that I am able to do this?" Jesus asked the blind men who came to him to be cured, and "they said to him, Yea, Lord"; a leper appealed to him saying, "Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean", and Jesus said, "I will", and the leprosy was immediately removed; 2 miracles are desired and demanded when they are believed in; their origin lies neither in the sphere of metaphysics nor of theology; they can be truly explained only as psychological phenomena. Mohammed was pressed on all sides to perform miracles in vindication of his alleged mission; the incessant requests of both friends and foes, justified by the precedents of the Old and New Testament, almost brought him to despair, and in vain he insisted, that the greatest miracles are the creation, the animal and vogotable kingdom, or heaven and sea. The untutored or youthful mind delights in uncommon and astounding mysteries, the manly intellect endeavours to reduce all uncommon and astounding mysteries to ordinary and intelligible laws. The one is, therefore, prepared to witness miracles before an occasion arises, the other refuses to acknowledge them oven after they are supposed to have happened. The childlike believer feels his yearnings unsatisfied by the severo, impartial, and uniform rule of ever-balancing and all-embracing reason; the thoughtful philosopher disdains the insinuating flatteries of aspiring enthusiasm, of exceptional or providential protection, because he divines eternal harmony and order in the stern sameness of nature's working. The former, therefore, requires extraordinary marvels to be awed, since "the miracle is the dearest child of faith", while the latter is impressed with a sense of sublimity by examining the common and daily operations of nature. Confiding apathy beholds in the affairs of life the inscrutable and desultory play of preternatural influences; onergetic reason is restless to discover the connecting thread of cause and effect. Hence the former either disregards or roads to no purpose the book of the past, while the latter derives from it the most fruitful lessons for his guidance and training. The feeble-minded, conscious of his own helplessness, constantly tries to support it by some unexpected and unaccountable aid; the resolute man of action glories in his ability of maintaining his due place in the system of creation by his own energy and the legitimate exercise of his strength. And while the one is eager to be lifted, on the wings of fancy and of faith, immeasurably beyond his natural sphere, the other prefers laboriously to conquer, by the sword of thought and science, his proper domain as a rational being, and to desire no more, convinced that he is great only in the same degree as he is independent, and that his conquests are sure and inalienable when he obtains them by his own 1 Matth. IX. 28. 2 Matth. VIII. 2, 3; comp. IX. 22. efforts and the unrestrained power of his nature. The contrast, therefore, between the miracle-loving Scriptures and the productions of pragmatic history, is nothing less than the contrast between poetry and truth, between the hazy beauty of the morning-dawn and the clearness of the midday-sun, between the first creditable offorts of reflecting infancy and the safe conclusions of experienced manhood. History rests on proofs and the internal evidence of facts; the Biblical narrative introduces elements lying beyond the test of ordinary examination, and often directly opposed to all experience, reason, and possibility. Whilo, therefore, the one possesses objective truth, the other may be accepted or rejected according to the general principles adopted by individual readers. 3 The Scriptures habitually represent drought and famine, postilonce and earthquake, floods and every disaster of the elements, as the results of idolatry and wickedness; they make tho cessation of these inflictions. dependent on the people's return to God and virtue, and hence speak, for instance, of "the ignominy of famine":1 but the scourges of nature result from physical laws which, though they should never be explored entirely, certainly repudiate the notion of a direct influence of the moral upon the physical world. And with respect to the living creation, the conception of the Bible is so childlike, that it assumes the possibility of moral degeneracy in animals, generally supposes a simultaneous corruption of mon and boasts, and includos both in tho same exercises of ponitonce, fasting, and humiliation; nay oven tho earth, the abode of man, and tho matorial from which his body was framed, may share in the general depravity; and honce the destruction of man, as was the case in the deluge, includes the destruction of the beasts, and at least the temporary devastation of the earth, if not, as in the visitation of Sodom and Gomorrah, its utter annihilation" all which notions are to us like strange and fanciful echoes of a remote past. The veil which once covered and hid nature, has in a great measure been withdrawn. The awe which man felt at her grandeur, has thereby not been diminished; on the contrary, it has gained in intensity and reality. But the enquirer has become conscious that he must renounce the hope of fathoming a power that rules her working; that she does not enable him to understand the distinction between "a primary cause" and "secondary causes", since, throughout her dominion, she reveals Comp. Exod. XXIII. 25; Lev. XXVI. 6, 7, 10, 19, 20, 26; Deut. XXVIII. 3—5, comp. XXXIV. 26—29. 5 Jon. III. 7, 8; comp. IV. 11; Jer. XII. 4; Hos. II. 20; IV. 3; Zeph. I. 3; and other passages. Comp. Gen. VI. 12, 13, 17; Comm. on Gen. pp. 119, 121. T causes that he must consider as primary, and beyond which he cannot pass if he desires to penetrate into the genesis of things; and that, therefore, man's dignity and his happiness depend on the earnestness with which he explores nature's laws and obeys her suggestions and behests. 1 2. PRAYER AND OTHER DEVOTIONS. From the principles laid down with regard to miracles, it will not be difficult to estimate the value of several other fundamental notions which porvade the Bible. If every effect produced in the material world is the consequence of a commensurate physical cause to which it is intrinsically related, human supplication, sacrifices, fasting, or any other form of devotion or asceticism, cannot possibly exercise an influence on the course of events or on the destiny of men. There exists no conceivable connection between the one and the other. The spiritual aspiration of prayer lies in a sphere totally different from that which causes the changes or the progress of the external world. If we read that Elijah's prayer suddenly called down from heaven a fire to consume his sacrifice, we are startled by a complete overthrow of all the truths to which we are accustomed with regard to the permanent order of things, and we find it impossible to abandon the undisputed results of science in favour of a doubtful tradition, even if the latter did not form part of a narrative coloured throughout by fanciful legends. If the entreaty of Abraham at once removed the barrenness which had afflicted tho women in Abimelech's household, 2 if prayers are supposed to effect or to accelerate the recovery of the sick, and oven to restore the dead to life, or to cause sudden blindness, we fail to see, how words, however fervent, can affect a physiological process resulting from the complicated operation of the human organism. And yet the New Testament plainly teaches, "Is anyone sick among you? let him call for the elders of the Church, and let them pray over him. . . and the prayer of faith shall save the sick"; nay it contends, "If you shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea, it shall be done; and all things whatever you shall ask in prayer, believing, you 4 1 1 Ki. XVIII. 36-38. 2 Gen. XX. 17, 18; comp. XXV. 21; 1 Sam. I. 10 sqq. 3 Comp. Num. XII. 13, 14; 2 Chr. XXX. 18-20; 2 Ki. XX. 3, 5, 6; 1 Ki. XIII. 6. 4 1 Ki. XVII. 17-22 (on the son of the widow of Zarephath); Acts IX. 40 (on Tabitha or Dorcas); comp, also 1 Ki. 5 IV. 33 (on the son of the Shunamite woman). 52 Ki. VI. 18; comp. vers. 17-20. James V. 14-16; comp. 2 Ki, XX. 1-6; Wisd. XVI. 12; the Chronist remarks even, with censure, that king Asa in his illness "did not consult God but the physicians" (2 Chr. XVI. 12). |