DR. COX ON MIRACLES.*
Tars admirable little book is a republication of three articles in the Expositor for 1882 and 1883, in which the relation of miracle to the Bible is carefully studied and described, and in which probably the best rationale of miracles known to us, as studied by the light of modern science and philosophy, is given. Dr. Cox's view is a view of miracles which we have often enforced in these columns; though we must add, that while we entirely agree in that view, we have never concealed from ourselves that the more this view is studied and enforced, the less shall we be able to consider the marvellous acts commonly called miraculous, as of a nature to prove incontestably the direct divine agency, and the more shall we be compelled to fall back on the moral and spiritual. manifestations of God as alone suited to produce that final conviction which miracles, viewed as they probably ought to be viewed, will fail to produce. Miracles understood—and, we think, rightly understood— as Dr. Cox understands them,—namely, not as suspensions of the order of nature, but as modifications of natural laws produced under circumstances over which man, with his present knowledge, has no command,—are indeed striking signals of new power and influence which will attract, and ought to attract, human attention, but are not proofs that such power and influence are due to divine purpose, and to divine pur- pose alone. And, oddly enough, Dr. Cox fails to notice that this insufficiency in a miracle to attest the direct agency of God,—an insufficiency which naturally results from the view of it as not necessarily involving more than the use of other more or less unknown agencies in combination with those which are already known to man,—is itself anticipated and enforced on us in the Bible.• We are told, both in the Old Testament and in the New, that there shall be those who can give signs and wonders, and whose signs and wonders are to be rejected as evidences of divine authority, because given on behalf of beliefs which we have ample means of knowing to be untrustworthy, whereas we cannot possibly have the means of knowing any mere sign or wonder to be, as such, divine. Not only does the Denteronomist explicitly contemplate signs and wonders brought about by one who has idolatrous purposes at heart (Deuteronomy, xiii.), but our Lord himself predicts false Christs and false prophets, who shall do signs and wonders to seduce even the elect ; so that Dr. Cox might have added this to his exposition, that miracles are regarded in the Bible itself as anything but certain evidences of divine pOwer. They proceed from the use of powers of nature which are not usually at the command of man, but which are sometimes at least wielded by persons who will use them for ends which are the opposite of divine. Surely this fact alone ought to have warned the scientific antagonists of miracle, that miracle is not regarded by the great divine teachers as the unique and altogether supernatural power which it has so often been supposed to be ;—but rather as a signal deserving of attention, which attention, however, when it is given, may either decide the signal to be deceptive and one that beguiles us from the true objects of human pursuit, or as a timely call to a sphere of genuinely divine revelation. Yet the scientific critics of miracle have always insisted on assuming that in the eyes of -believers miracle must be something much more than this—
something which necessarily implies divine power, as the warrant of divine truth,—which is just what the great teachers of the Bible deny it to be.
Dr. Cox reminds us that the earliest traditions of the divine history—the story of Creation itself excepted—are free from the records of miracle ; that the epochs of miracles when they do occur are epochs which hardly ever add to the grandeur of the great historic figures of the Hebrew people— passing over Samuel, and David, and Solomon, for example, without touching them with the glory of the supernatural, though Greek legends add to the grandeur of the Greek heroes, and Roman legends to that of the Roman heroes
* Miracles an Argument and a Challenge. By Samuel Cox, D.D. London : Eagan Paul, Troneb, and Co. '
—nay, that such miracles as are related very often seem to humiliate more than they magnify, the heroic figures of the Hebrew leaders ; again, that long intervals occur in which miracles are altogether absent ; and that the greatest miracles of all are recorded in a perfectly historic period, and are recorded, not of the austere favourite of the Hebrew nation,— John the Baptist,—but of one who was accused, and truly accused, by his contemporaries, of repressing the vehement national feelings of the Hebrews. Now, all this is very important, and it is all in perfect keeping with the Hebrew teaching that spiracle does not necessarily attest truth, and may be sometimes found, by the admission of the Hebrew teachers themselves, lending a certain false brilliance to the teach- ing of those whose hearts were not loyal to the God of truth. And why should it not be so, if miracle only implies the use of powers beyond any which man, in his present stage, thoroughly understands, to produce effects which startle us into attention, but which, if divorced from the higher moral teaching, have no claim to subdue us into humility ? Our own belief is that those visionary powers, which are now generally regarded as of the mesmeric type, have oftener been used for evil than for good purposes, and that in such uses of them we have very good illus- trations of the signs and wonders which may lead astray, instead of leading into all truth.
As an illustration of the admirable force and lucidity of Dr. Cox's little book, let us extract some portion of his refutation of the assertion that the miracles of Christ may fairly be ascribed to the myth-making tendencies of the age in which our Lord appeared :-
" If any man objects : But we are speaking of Jews, not of Greeks and Romans ; and surely the Jews of that time were credn- bons and prone to see miracles where no miracles were ?' we need not insist, in reply, on a fact for which there is nevertheless much evidence, viz., that even the Jews were deeply infected in the time of Christ, and for two or three centuries before that time, with the sceptical philosophy of Greece and Rome. There is an answer to it so conclusive that, though it has often been adduced, it has never been met, nor am I aware of any attempt even to refute it. For at this very age there lived a man who answered much more closely to the popular, and even to the Jewish, idea of a hero than Christ Jesus; a man, moreover, who made a far deeper impression on the imagina- tion and memory of his fellows ; and yet no miracle was ever attri- buted to him, whether in the Bible or out of it. John the Baptist was a Jew. The Jewish people recognised in him a prophet and more than a prophet. They would gladly have accepted him as the Christ. So profound was the impression he made that all Jerusalem and all Judea went out after him ;' so profound that Josephus, who dismisses Jesus with a single dubious sentence, has mach to say of the character and mission of the stern unbending seer and moralist, who struck his contemporaries rather as an embodied and inspired voice than as a man of like passions with themselves. And yet no legend has gathered round this strange impressive figure, no halo gleams on his brow. Neither his own disciples nor the Jewish people, nor Josephus or any other writer of his time, credits him with the supernatural power so freely ascribed to Jesus, and even to the meanest of his followers. So marked was the contrast between John and Jesus, that even the outlandish folk of Ferree were struck with it, and exclaimed, John did no miracle, but all that John said of this man is true.' It is, therefore, to beg the whole question, it is to evade rather than meet the point in dispute, when certain critics ascribe the miracles of Jesus to the credulous and myth making tendencies of the age in which He appeared, although the most prominent and popular Jewish prophet of that age stands before us untouched by any ray of miraculous glory. Till this fact has been explained, this problem solved, we are hardly called upon to adduce any other argument against those who would reduce the wonders attributed to Christ to the level,of worn-out and incredible myths."
Dr. Cox's rationale of the miracle seems to us:and has long seemed, a far truer one than the old rationale of it as a " sus- pension " of any law of nature whatever. It is not a suspen- sion of any law, but a more comprehensive use of existing laws, such a use, for an instance, as an electrician makes who cures a paralysed limb by passing an electric current through it ; or such as a mesmerist makes who soothes an excitable nervous system to rest by a pass or two of his hands:— "We throw no doubt on the steadfast and unchangeable action of the forces and laws of nature. We do not assert that in working his miracles our Lord either violated, suspended, or abrogated them. All we affirm is that God may, and that Christ did, use them in ways too subtle and profound for us to grasp, yet in ways not wholly unlike to those in which we ourselves bend them to our service—using them to heal the sick, and give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, feet to the lame, and life to the dying, or even to the dead. In short, we affirm that He did perfectly and in fall what even man may do imperfectly and in part. And we affirm it, we argue for it from premisses which science herself has laid down, not only that the Bible miracles may be credible and reasonable to reasonable men—miracles which, as we have seen, are distributed through its pages with a singular economy, and are prompted by a motive so worthy, so divine ; but also in order that we ourselves may believe that God, by secret ways past finding
out—but which probably would be no whit more wonderful to us, if we could find them out, than our own control over the world and men— can still help, and heal, and save us ; that He is not deaf to any of our prayers, or unable to answer them, but can still bestow wisdom and health, righteousness and love, on all who sincerely seek them at
his hands But if God holds all the forces and laws of nature in the hollow of his hand, and can use them for our good in ways un- known and perhaps undiscoverable by us, not only do the miracles of the Bible grow credible to us so soon as we have evidence for them on which we can depend ; but we also condemn ourselves as unreason- able if we any longer doubt the efficacy of Prayer. And of all the implications of the Centurion's argument, this, to my mind, is the most valuable and delightful, as it is also the most obvious and direct. For what we need most of all, as we stand hesitating and bewildered among the perplexities of life and conduct, is the conviction that we have a living God who is still active, still working in and for us, to whom we can appeal, in whom we can trust, who will listen to us and answer us when we call on Him for teaching, guidance, strength ; and who can work miracles of grace for us, even though signs and wonders be no longer vouch- safed us. This is the conviction which sustained the Centurion when he brought his prayer to Christ, and which Christ Himself sanctioned and confirmed by his admiration and approval of the Centurion's faith. He might have had a sign, a portent, if he would, bat, strong in faith, he preferred a simple word, and no more doubted that that word would be obeyed than that his own word of command would be obeyed by those who served under him. Obviously he believed that the forces and laws of nature, animate and inanimate, were always doing the will of God, and that the Servant and Son of God, without any signal or exceptional exertion of his power, could heal his boy,' and would heal him if He felt that it was for the good of both servant and master that the boy' should be healed. And this is the very conviction which we require in order to give depth and devotion, courage and hope, alike to our supplications and our lives. Why should we not cherish it and lean upon it ? If God knows the natural forces and laws as we cannot know them, if He can and does use and control them for our good and for the general good ; if, as we see, He does feed and heal, teach, guide, and sustain men by his wise use and administration of them, and that in ways past finding out ; why should not we ask of Him whatsoever things we need, or think the world needs, in the full assurance that He will listen to us, and either grant what it is really for our good to have, or teach us that his will is wiser and kinder than our own ? On this hypothesis, urged in this spirit, Prayer is not unreasonable, but most reasonable ; and we may, we ought to lay the unflattering but most cordial and invigorat- ing unction to our souls, that, if we commit our way unto the Lord, He will give us the desire of our hearts."
It seems to us that it would not be easy to explain better the true nature of miracles, nor the relation between miracles and the answer to prayer. But as we have insisted all through, the whole rationale here given implies,—what the Bible itself implies,—that men are no judges of what may be called absolute miracle ; that is, of what it is in the power of God alone to effect, and what he allows finite beings to do for him. In other words, the signs and wonders which seem to us to be clearly superhuman may not be so, and, even if superhuman, are not necessarily divine. Any savage seeing us communicate with a place three thousand miles off, within a couple of minutes, would, on verifying the fact of our communication, accept our feat as a miracle, and relatively to him a miracle it would be. He would be right, not wrong, in attaching great importance to the belief of one who could give such a sign of his superior power. But he would be wrong, not right, in deeming such a belief infallible. So we should say of signi absolutely beyond the reach of all human beings. If such signs there be,—and such signs there have been,—we should deem them entitled to great respect, but to absolute confidence and belief only when combined with the highest spiritual and moral wonders. Such signs might be given by superhuman powers which fell far short of being divine powers. Nor is this our view alone. It is, beyond all question, the teaching of the sacred books in which we find, at one and the same time, the records of the most wonderful signs, and the records of the most spiritual teaching, that the world has ever received. In conclusion, we cannot too highly recommend this terse and lucid little book to the notice of our readers.
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