THE "CHURCH QUARTERLY REVIEW" ON MIRACLES.
A article, to which a good deal of attention has been very properly drawn in the April number of the Church Quarterly Review, on the "Rationale of Miracles," cer- tainly pats in a. far less assailable form than has been at all common among divines the relation in which miracles stand to revelation as a whole, and their evidential value as prophesied events. We have long held the author's view of miracles as events of which the chief purpose was not intellectual instruction, but modifications of national or individual destiny of a kind to secure some great moral end,—hike the training-up of a nation in hatred of idolatry and in the habit of serving an invisible and righteous God,—or like the manifestation of divine love for all sorts of insignifibant persons, such as the blind beggar, Bartimmus, for example, or the Syro-Phcenician woman. That is really the only view of the Jewish and Christian miracles which will hold water for a moment. No one can say, of nine at least out of every ten miracles recorded in the Bible, of what dogmatic truth they were even supposed to be the guarantee. And even where such a truth can be surmised, no one could show that the miracles worked, as is supposed, in connection with it, really do guarantee it. The Gospels indeed assume that something like preternatural powers may be wielded by evil men, and also by good men who are not chosen messengers of God, but who are with Him only so far as they are not against Him. All that a miracle, assumed to be true, shows concerning the person who predicts or is instrumental in bringing it about, is that he has either some very unusual know- ledge, or some very unusual power. Whether that knowledge or power is of the kind which we call divine can only be decided by the consideration of a great number of other circumstances, of which the moral and spiritual drift of the events of which it formed a part, and the historical origin and historical effect of that series of events, are probably quite the most important. For instance, supposing it should ultimately be proved that some of the inexplicable phenomena asserted by " Spiritista" (as they are best called, to distinguish them from Spiritualists) really happen, no one could reasonably ascribe them to direct divine agency,—in the first place, because they are mixed. up with so much folly and so much fraud, and
in the next place, because they are not in any sense links in a grand historic series adapted to bring home the power of divine righteousness as the true object of human worship, but are rather penetrated everywhere with all those indications of confusion and caprice which earmark, as it were, the phenomena left to man to clear up and unravel for himself as he best can, and which ab- lutely exclude the idea of divine teaching.
But the second point made by the Church Quarterly Reviewer is even more important than his first. It is that miracles must not be regarded as a suspension or infraction of the laws or principles of nature, but simply as the introduction of such new conditions, by the exercise of a supernatural Will, as will impress an articulate purpose and significance on those natural causes, which, when left to 'themselves, could only be understood as parts of a system, not as embodying any individual lesson. Thus our Lord warned his disciples against supposing that the persons killed by the fall of the tower of Siloam were in any sense punished by what we now call a divine " judgment." All that could properly be inferred from the circumstance itself was that all the eighteen suffered the natural consequence of some negligence on the part of the builders or conservators of the tower,—not that God had any common moral purpose—the same for all—in their death. But supposing the story in the Acts as to the death of Ananias and Sapphire to be authentic, no one could say the same of that. There undoubtedly was a special purpose impressed on Peter's prophecy and the immediate fulfilment of it in their death, and that purpose was, to say the least, a divine warning against false professions of Christian zeal, and an intimation that to protect from corruption the divine purity of the infant Church, it needed purging from the insin- cerities of false men. While the death of the eighteen killed by the fall of the tower of Siloam was merely a natural fact, fulfilling, no doubt, many divine purposes, but not making clear to any man what the divine purposes were which were thus ful- filled, the miraculous prediction of Ananias and Sapphire's death was an event the purpose of which was plain enough,—a solemn, divine protest against the mingling of false with true, at that early and critical stage in the Church's life. If we understand the Church Quarterly Reviewer rightly, he would question whether the physical causes put in operation by a miracle were ever in any sense supernatural, though they would always be super- naturally controlled. For instance, he would think that Ananias and Sapphire's death might be ascribed as reasonably to apoplexy, as regards the physical antecedent, as to any other cause ; and even in the case of the raising of the dead, he would assume that some natural physical causes,—of course, only available to divine knowledge,—must have been set at work to arrest the dis- integration of the body, and to render it once more a fit organ for the mind ; and what he would earnestly con- tend for would be, that in any case, the new physical causes set in motion by a miracle are so far from suspending those already at work, that they presuppose and require them. For instance, the Reviewer points out that the walking of Christ on the water so far from implying any suspension of the law of gravitation, must have presupposed that law, as all walking presupposes it,—though it must have involved other physical conditions, not present in ordinary cases of human walking, which modified the results. As the Reviewer remarks, all laws operating in the lower regions of matter are at work also in the higher, but their effects are vitally altered by the laws of the higher ; chemical laws assume the mechanical, but add new and important principles which wholly alter their effect ; vital laws assume chemical laws, but add new principles which transform them ; the action of the human will assumes physiological laws, but adds a new directing principle ; and so, too, supernatural events assume the laws of all that we call natural phe- nomena as their basis, and involve only new controlling principles which greatly modify the issue. Such is the Re- viewer's rationale of miracle, and there can be no doubt that it is far the most reasonable view of the connection between miracle and the existing order of nature which can be suggested, though it seems to us that the author puts far too much confidence in his own rationale of a class of events which, by the very nature of the ease, are beyond our analysis. When he says, "We maintain that if the process by which such a miracle as the resurrection of Lazarus was brought about, could be laid before a man of science, he would be able to analyse it into precisely the same laws as he analyses any ordinary event," he obviously maintains what at best he can only be led, by reasonable and natural analogies, to conjecture. He may assume, not unreasonably, that the divine Will acts like the human, solely by controlling and manipulating the natural
forces and principles through which it acts ; but at best this as- sumption can only be a reasonable conjecture, and we are not at all sure that the very strong inclination which the Reviewer dis- plays to assume that Force is something quite distinct from Will, and not even of the same origin, is not akin to a philosophy which would raise a more dangerous barrier between science and spiritual faith than even the theory of " suspended laws " which he attacks.
Let us explain more exactly what we mean. The Reviewer denies that the will of man is an " efficient cause," on the ground that it cannot "create energy," by which he does not mean to deny the will's freedom,—which he evidently believes,—but only, we imagine, to deny that the human will can produce physical energy. " Formerly," he says, " it was supposed that the will had a power of efficiency,—that is, that it really could create the force which it expended in the bodily actions,—but modern science rejects the supposition. It tells us that energy can neither be created nor destroyed by us, and that the energy which constitutes the substance of our bodily actions must pre- viously exist in the tissues of the body. But if the will cannot create energy, it is clear that it must have control over it, for in no other way can we account for the undoubted fact that man is able to impress his purpose upon nature." Now, in the first place, this sense of the word' energy ' is a little peculiar. Admit that the will cannot act at all without some physical medium, which, if the Reviewer likes, we may call energy,' as distinct from ' will.' Still, are we to admit that that which diverts and alters the whole application of energy is in no sense energy itself ? Is not the mere nisus of the will the only true interpreter to us of the word ' energy ?' Should we attach any real meaning to the word ' energy '—except, perhaps, an imaginary antecedent of motion— if we did not read into the forces which we direct and control, the kind of effort which it costs us to direct and control them? Let the Reviewer go as far as he will with modern science in its somewhat conjectural, and certainly quite undemonstrated, prin- ciple of the Conservation of energy, still he is treading on very dangerous ground indeed when he seems to admit that " Will" and " Energy " are not even of like origin, and that that which controls energy, is in no sense able to create it. We should have said, that whatever alters the direction of force is poten- tially a creator of force. Admit that an infinitely small force `acting at right angles to any moving thing will alter its direction of motion, still we should say that, infinitesimal as it may be, and in a mathematical sense absolutely nothing, anything must include in itself force,' which alters the dis- position of force.
This, however, might not be worth contending for, but for its bearing on religious philosophy. As far as we understand, the Reviewer presses his analogy right into the heart of religion, and says that all the eneregies of the physical world are as constant a quantity, even in relation to God, as they are in relation to man, and that God works miracles only by altering the disposition of the forces which He himself provides, and never by creating a new force. Now, we have no objection at all to this assumption, as a mere conjecture, except that in relation to the Being who sustains and informs the whole system of nature, the dis- tinction seems to us either completely evanescent, or of a tendency to encourage that pantheistic notion of nature, which separates widely the creative will from the life which it creates. Is it not the comparative easiness of be- lieving in a natura rnaturans, rather than in God, which alone justifies this fine distinction between the Will which created and sustains, and the Will which controls and disposes ? If the two are really identical at bottom, why keep up this parade of distinction? But if this parade of distinction between the constant forces of nature and the disposing Will of God has anything really substan- tial and important in it, then may not the men of science be inclined to give in their adherence to the former, and to withhold their belief from the latter? The only fault we have to find with the Church Quarterly Reviewer's admirable paper is that he seems to us to insist upon, and even emphasize a distinction between the controlling Will of God, and the completely mapped-out and mort- gaged divine power which he treats as furnishing our natural world with its laws, which is not really justified by our own experience of the relation between human will and natural energy, and which tends towards a pantheistic rather than a Theistic view of Nature. It is clear enough that he does not hold any such view. But his language about the natural forces disposed of by the divine Will, as if they were in any real sense distinguishable from the divine Will itself, points in that direction.
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