WHAT IS A MIRACLE ?
AWELL KNOWN lay correspondent, from whom we often differ widely, but whose letters never fail to indicate the fife of thought and study which he has devoted to theology and theological criticism, contends in another column that the true answer to the question, What is a miracle ?' is, " An effect sup- posed to be produced without the use of means." And he goes so far as to say, as to the raising of Lazarus, " Assume a means
for its production, say an influence emanating from the body of Christ, controllable by His will, like other bodily influences, capable of restoring to life a corpse not advanced beyond a cer- tain stage of decay, but yet a true means, i.e., a force limited by and acting under certain definable conditions,—the restoration of Lazurus to life by such a force may remain as wonderful as the production of life in any case, but the notion of miracle is gone. To preserve this notion we must suppose that Christ has only to will, ' Lazarus come forth,' and that the effect followed without the use of any means, by the so-called Omnipotence of God." Now, miracle is a subject on the inner nature of which we do not feel disposed in any way to dogmatize. It seems to us that judging, by mere history, the Resurrection of our Lord from the dead, one of the greatest of so-called miracles, is a fact which, quite apart from its nature and cause, it is on the whole irrational to disbelieve, though many rational-minded men and all the so-called Rational- ists do reject it. Now, if taking this as the central fact of the history of miracle, which, once accepted, creates at least a certain presumption for other miracles, both before and after this event, in connection with the same series of moral and spiritual causes, we examine the characteristic phenomena usually called miraculous, to ascertain as far as is possible, —no dogmatic conclusion seems to as warrantable or desirable,—what the nature of a miracle is, our inference is and has always been in quite the opposite direc- tion from "E. V. N.'s." A sufficient practical definition of a miracle seems to be a wonderful phenomenon of some kind transcending ordinary experience, the purpose of which is to manifest directly the Spirit and moral will of God. Thus the Resurrection of our Lord was such a wonderful phenomenon, the express purpose of which was to reveal Him as " the resur- rection and the life" to man, as the fountain of that living water which is not dried up in us by death, but flows on more freely throughout eternity. In other words, the Resur- rection of Christ is the manifestation of a power stronger than death, in which we all have our share. We have given, of course, a mere practical definition of a miracle that does not touch the question raised by our correspondent. The essence of the practical aspect of a miracle seems to be that it shall be ac- companied by the strongest belief on the part of those through whom it is worked, that it is due to a power specially conferred by God for the purpose of strengthening faith, or illuminating the policy of His government and the mystery of His love. A mere marvel worked by any one who either gave himself out for a magician, or who, repudiating all sense of divine revelation, discovered in him- self some rare and strange faculty unknown to the race at large,— like Heinrich Zschokke's faculty, for instance, for seeing, on his first encounter with some few individuals previously quite unknown to him, a vision pass before his eyes of important events in their past lives, which vision always turned out to be true,—would not be a miracle. Miracle seems to us to be limited to acts of extra- ordinary power bound up in the belief of the agent, or rather of the channel of that power, with a divine revelation, which in some mysterious way, not clearly necessarily apprehended, is strengthened and made clearer by these wonderful acts. Thus, when Peter and John said to the lame man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, " Look on us ; in the name of jest's Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk," what they believed and meant to teach was that the sudden restoration of strength which they announced was due to their Lord and a direct manifestation of His healing and life- giving influence. In other words, they believed that but for their conscious spiritual relation to Christ, and apart from their desire to manifest Him to the world, they should not have been the
channel of any such divine healing influence. But they did not either believe or assert anything as to the absence of all " means" to the end attained. And all cases of asserted miracle, not only in Scripture, but in later times,—the great. Jansenist miracle at Port Royal, for instance, one of the most curious, as regards the historical evidence in its favour, in the later history of Christianity,—are distinguished by the same moral features of bringing fresh witness to the divine light shining through some profound individual faith. The feeling of the human channel of the miracle always is, " This ability to announce, if not to transmit, the exercise of divine power, comes to me in consequence of the faith I preach. If I had not the faith, I should not have this power. The power is a sign, which accompanies the faith, of its having its root in the author of all power, God." And we deny that any marvel can be properly called a miracle which is not thus closely associated with the consciousness of a reveal- ing function.
But when we come to ask how far, taking this broad and obvious practical definition of a miracle, it reduces itself to the definition given by our correspondent of "an effect supposed to be produced without the use of means," we must answer that there is no ground whatever for such a generalization. On the contrary, the little that experience shows of these wonderful phenomena,—if we suppose,—as seems to us the truest view to take of ecclesiastical history, — that in some fainter degree they have recurred at intervals in all eras of heightened spiritual feeling, not the least curious of which, perhaps, occurred in Scotland within the lifetime of living men,--is, that they are more or less effluences of an intense spiritual inspira- tion, giving a new stimulus and vital impulse to germs of power which lie latent perhaps in all men, and show themselves only when they are thus closely and consciously folded as it were in the embrace of God. When our Lord himself stated that He could not do many mighty works in certain places because of their unbelief, He spoke as if some condition of this divine effluence were missing wherever the hearts of man did not leap up to meet His power. It is reported that He explained the failure of His disciples with the epileptic boy by saying, "This kind goeth not out except by prayer and fasting," as if the spirit of the healer, in the presence of so formidable a malady, needed the strength gained by long periods spent in the closest communion with God. And certainly there is no hint throughout the Bible that the " signs " of Christ and His Apostles were breaches of law in the sense of our correspondent,—the production of an effect with- out means by an unconditioned act of will. On the contrary, all we read tends to indicate the existence of conditions without which they would not have been performed. Little as was said,—little as was known,—of any physical conditions essential to them, the existence of spiritual conditions is constantly asserted, and they are always regarded as manifestations of a higher life, not as mere acts of volition, launched like thunderbolts to disturb the order of nature.
It will be said, perhaps, that if miracles were ever reducible to any sort of law, however spiritual, they would lose all their value as evidences. How so ? Of what are they supposed to be evidences? That power is rooted in the Spirit of God, that the essence behind power is righteousness and love, that the forces of the universe are not independent of this righteousness and love. What can prove this more efficiently, more con- spicuously, than the capacity of vivid spiritual life to modify the laws of physical life? If the spirit at its highest can control the body and the earthly side of nature so much more completely than at its average level, what inference is more legitimate than that the Divine Spirit is Lord of all? It seems to us that miracle con- ceived as suspense of law is a mere proof of divine control ; but miracle conceived as indicating what might be a permanent modi- fication of physical laws, if man's life were in as close communion with God's as it has been now and then for short periods in history, is a proof of much more than mere divine control,—of the tendency and drift of the divine purpose of our spiritual nature in relation to our physical. •
But further, it is possible, conceivable, even not improbable, that -4 all volition itself radiates some physical force, apart from the nervous
apparatus through which in man it usually acts. Whatever truth there may be,—and we do not know how much, but there is no doubt some,—in the phenomena of what is called electro-biology, when by force of will, whether exerted over the imagination or in some other way, the power of one person is made to paralyze the power of another to move,—is made to glue him to a chair, for ex- ample, and to persuade him of his own imbecility,—there can be no doubt of the power of a strong will over a weak one without any 440
sort of attempt at coercion, and still less of the same sort of power exerted over the lower animals. When our correspondent says, "Of free conscious will we have no knowledge whatever, except from our own consciousness, and this consciousness instead of supporting the assumption [that it can act without using means] directly contradicts it ;—we know from our own experience that the freedom of will is inseparably linked with the use of means to execute our wills,"—we do not perhaps exactly understand him, but as far as we do we entirely differ from him. When a man governs his own thoughts, pushes back an evil suggestion, turns towards a purer one, here at least there is no use of means, —you cannot possibly distinguish between the act of will and the 4, means used to execute the will." On the contrary, the two are absolutely one. The act of will is self-caused, and generates a completely new series of moral consequences, which need not have come into being at all. This is a case of pure will causing a different order of life within the mind. But is it not at least possible, if not probable, that even our little, puny acts of will may radiate some little physical force, even when they do not act through the nerves and the muscles, but the body remains in per- fect repose ? There are persons who say that, by an act of will and without a change of a single muscle, they can always make a person who does not see them turn towards them, and little as we imow upon the subject, it is certainly very hasty to assert that all will, in order to produce physical effects, requires to be exercised through the ordinary chain of physical antecedents and conse- eguents. It seems to us quite conceivable that a vivid spiritual reve- lation always tends to produce a modification of physical laws, and that in Christ, as the Incarnation of the Divine Son, the perfect union of spiritual love and obedient will produced one of the greatest of all such modifications of spiritual laws. We do not pretend to offer this crude theory as an answer to the question,
What is a miracle ?" but only as an answer to what seems to us cruder theory about it. For ourselves, we are content to be- lieve that a miracle is a wonderful event accompanying eras of intense spiritual life, the tendency of which is to prove that close communion with God, especially in organized societies, exercises a very remarkable effect on our physical nature. We pretend to have -no theory of miracle. Were it not that we hold the Resurrection -ef our Lord to be, on the whole, historically incontestable, the deep scepticism of the age concerning the marvellous would probably have its natural influence over us. But starting from this as .ground of solid fact, and looking to the curiously repeated pheno- mena of this kind which are reported from age to age, we believe that the best inference on the subject is, that miracles do take place, and that they are very rare phenomena, due to the ultimate control exerted by the spiritual elements of divine and human nature over the physical elements of the universe, —a con- trol that was .most complete and startling in the life of our Lord. But little as we feel disposed to dogmatize about miracle, the one definition we should feel most inclined to reject at once is that of our correspondent
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