BISHOP DCPANLOUP ON MIRACLES IN FRANCE.
THE Bishop of Orleans has written one of the best pastorals on that craving for miracles, prodigies, and prophecies, of which the disasters of France have produced so frightful a crop there, which any religious teacher could well have produced. Protestants, amazed and annoyed, as they have a good right to be, with the sudden impulse given to the sensational and prodigy-loving side of faith,—partly by the Vatican Council, and the decline of moral influence which the more moderate and reasonable of the Catholic Episcopate incurred through the defeat which they suffered in that Council, and partly by the stimulus given to Catholic visions and pilgrimages generally through the misfortunes of the Papacy and of the great Continental main-stay of the Papacy, France,—have almost forgotten that in no part of the history of Roman Catholicism have there been wanting teachers and bishops who discouraged religious sensationalism gene- rally, as dangerous to the humility and sobriety of true religion ; and that even the Roman See itself, mainly, no doubt, for another reason,—the very excellent worldly reason that heady fanatics of this kind are hard to govern, and very little used to obey dis- cipline,—has generally dealt with them in a cold and disapproving spirit. Bishop Dupauloup, for instance, quotes not only Fiuielon and many other high Roman-Catholic authorities who have coun- selled strongly the distrust of this sort of miracle-mongering, but adduces Pio Nono's own discouraging words on the subject:—" I do not give much credit to prophecies," said the Pope, on the 9th April, 1872, " because those in particular which have been re- cently produced do not deserve the honour of being read." And again :—" There are a great many prophecies in circulation, but I believe them to be the offspring of imagination. True prophecy consists in resigning oneself merely to the will of God, and in doing as much good as possible." If Mr. Knight had made use of the last phrase instead of Pio Nono, we suspect that the Free Presbytery vof Dundee would have had him up for rationalism almost as quickly as they bad for the Con- temporary article on " Prayer." However, nobody could pos- sibly have put the case better against the prodigy-mongers than Monseigneur Dupanloup. He makes his people see that the very reason why they are all craving for signs and wonders, is that thfy
have not made the use they might and ought to have made of their natural powers and knowledge. It is like the men in the gospel
for whom an appeal was urged that some one should be sent from the dead to convert them, not because they had, but because they had not made the use they might of " Moses and the Prophets."
" God, who made us reasonable and free," says Bishop Dupan- loup, " cannot command us to conduct ourselves as if we possessed
neither reason nor liberty. If the supernatural is still possible ; if the source of it, as was so happily said by Fendlon, is not ex- hausted ; if God pours out his spirit on his servants when it seemeth
good to him, it is not the less true, as St. Ambrose said, that God does not govern us habitually by revelations and miracles. But one meets now-a-days with numbers of persons who, in the
evil days we are traversing, seem to reckon upon that alone.
God,' it was lately said to me with full reliance, God will work a miracle ; God will strike a great blow.' And when I asked, ' How do you know that?' the reply was, You will see ; I have no proofs to give, but I am sure of it.' Assuredly, gentlemen, that is not the language of true piety, nor of an enlightened faith." The truth is that the passionate despair of Fienchmen at the collapse of their country, and the dismay of true Catholics at the misfortune, as they think, suffered by their Church in the col- lapse of the temporal power, have produced a feeling of impatient incredulity on the part of a people and a Church, which, for dif- ferent reasons, have too long been accustomed to lay down the law to others. Such calamities, they think, can only be permitted for the sake of the greater glory which is to follow their sudden and complete reversal. France may be conquered in order to enhance the grandeur of her final triumph ; the Church may be humiliated in order to make her victory more marvellous and splendid ; but to find the explanation of the recent calamities in the calamities themselves and their immediate causes,—that is intolerable, is an utter contradiction of the natural assumptions in which French- men and Catholics have been educated, and without which they would hardly have been Frenchmen and Catholics at all.
Such, we take it, is the state of mind which has favoured so extraordinarily the crop of prodigies in France,—of miracle- workers who say, " Lo here ! and lo there ! " and of prophets who fix the coming of Antichrist, or the second advent of Christ, as the case may be, for some arbitrary date, which finds them hosts of credulous readers till the fated day arrives, when, of course, the latter transfer their credulity to some other equally false prophet, who has happened to be more tardy or more cau- tious about his dates. Monseigneur Dupanloup quotes a book written to illustrate some spurious prophecy which put the great advent on the 17th of February last, and which obtained 50,000 buyers before that date, and of course none after it,—the people who buy to verify the failure of their dreams not being an im- portant class. Nor is this an isolated case. It is evident that both the genius of the French people and (of late, at least,) of the Catholic Church have fostered elements of feeling which have rendered a patient acquiescence in humiliations, as part of God's will to which the mind should be heartily and steadily conformed. an incredible and intolerable effort to French Catholics. Yet the mind which does not take home the humiliations and study their lessons will hardly overcome them. The temper which calls out "Exoriare aliquis " is not the temper which extracts the uses from adversity.
It seems to us a somewhat remarkable thing that, in the Christian Church at least, the hope of miracle and prodigy should ever have become the habitual intellectual resource of a people suffering from great calamity. No doubt the story of the deliverance from Egypt and of the history of Israel under some of the Judges, has been the main authority for this class of superstitions. But in the New Testa- ment all is of the exactly opposite character. Not only is the craving for revolutionary signs and wonders strongly condemned as of the very essence of impatient distrust, but the key-note of the Gospels, the key-note of feeling in the early Church, is, " Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake." Nor is there a sign or a miracle of what we may call the vindicatory character,—the character which brings triumph to the true believers, and stretches the foe at their feet,—in the whole of the New Testa- ment. So far from it, that when, in the gospel which is supposed by certain modern critics to be written especially for the purpose of magnifying the divine nature of our Lord, the Son of God himself confesses, " Now is my soul troubled, and what shall I say ? Father, save me from this hour,' "—that prayer is promptly rejected, and the great lesson for suffering of all kinds and all ages of the world is substituted,—" But for this cause came I to this hour. Father, glorify thy name." It does seem wonderful indeed that when this is the language used by the divine Son himself in the hour of humiliation, any Christian should regard periods of similar trial as not intended to be embraced for their own sakes, but only endured as preliminary to some great display of God's triumphant and victorious interference in his favour. In the New Testament, as Mr. Maurice so frequently and so power- fully taught, the miracles and signs are few or none of them of the type which the false prophets of France are now proclaiming. Instead of averting calamity and humiliation from the Christian, the great signs of the New Testament were adapted only to teach the true meaning of the laws under which men permanently live. The "Life of the world" restores life to the dead to show that life is God's gift to man. The "Light of the world" restores
sight to the blind to show that sight is God's gift both to the eyes and to the mind of man. The great physician heals the sickness both of the body and the mind to show that health as well as life is of God. The Prince of Peace stills the storm to show that the power of God is more manifested in calm than in tempest. The signs of Christ are all done to reveal the principles of God's ordinary government, not to avert from those who are his truest children the opportunity of serving him in trouble as well as in joy. No miracle is wrought to save Christ and his Apostles from hunger, or persecution, or death. When these things come upon them, they are to feel that for this cause came they to this hour,'—not that it is their privilege to be free of the troubles which belong to the human lot. The mighty signs and wonders of the Christian revelation are signs and wonders which explain the divine purposes of our ordinary life to those least capable of understanding them, not of the kind which throw over true Christians a shield from which the unbelievers are exempt. On the contrary, it is the privilege of the Christian not to need this protection, to be able to draw from calamity its deepest teaching, and to count suffering gain for the sake of him who sent it. It is the weak and the despised of this world who are to overcome the mighty and the influential, and that not by merely seeming weak, and then being suddenly raised by divine miracle into a position of grandeur and import- ance, but by exhausting all the significance of a weak and con- temptible position in life, by learning all its bitterness and all its lessons, and gradually gaining the power which faith, and humi- lity, and sympathy with the lowest of all lots, give. As it seems to us, no doctrine less like a Christian doctrine than that God will interfere to save from humiliation either his truest children, or that ecclesiastical institution which is to train his children, was ever announced. On the contrary, the Christian teaching is that this sort of humiliation should be the very ground and sub- stance of their hopes, that for this cause' (namely, to pass through all its bitterness,) men fall into trouble, and that 'signs and wonders' come, not to extricate Christians from their calami- ties, but to teach those who are not Christians to understand the divine love which inspires the apparently inexorable order of nature and the bewildering procession of phenomena in which it is so difficult to find the traces of any personal love or care. Certainly Monseigneur Dupanloup might go far beyond his modest assertion that God's ordinary government is not a government by miracle. Not only is that not so, but so far as we can understand the Christian teaching at all, signs and wonders are meant mainly to keep the meaning of God's ordinary government living and fresh, not to supersede it. Nature is not for the sake of miracle, but miracle for the sake of nature. People who are sick of God's ordinary government of the universe, are sure to find in their craving for the extraordinary, nothing but a new impulse on the down-hill road they are already running.
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