THEBISHOP OF LONDON'S EASTER SERMON.
THE Bishop of London preached a sermon in St. Paul's on Easter Sunday on the doctrine of which there has since been some interesting controversy. A corre- spondent of the Times, writing to that journal on the following Friday (March 30th), appeared to consider that the drift of the sermon was contained in the following sentences :—" All this man has done, all this he promises to go on doing. What is the ordinary scientific operation of the present day, would assuredly have been the miracles of the days gone by, if then, perchance, any man had been able to do what is now constantly done. It goes on still, and we seem perpetually to approach the time when miracles will appear to be nothing more than the exercise of the highest scientific knowledge." The sermon, however, was published in full in the Family Churchman on the very day on which "(1" confided to the Times his alarm at this doctrine, and those who have read it there will discover that the main object of the Bishop's sermon is rather to confute than to support the impression which these sentences would convey. We do not think that the sentences themselves are particularly well worded. It may be true that some feats of modern science, such as the working of the tele- phone, for instance (more especially when the telephone is set working, as it now sometimes is, by an induced galvanic current separated by half-a-mile of sea from the galvanic current which induces it) would look as supernatural as any miracle could look to an ill-informed observer. And again, the effect of chloroform in sending a man into a state of profound unconsciousness, in which it is possible to perform the most tremendous operations without leaving any trace of pain on the memory of the person operated on, might seem essentially supernatural to all uninstructed spectators. As a matter of fact, however, there is this characteristic difference between the wonders of science and any miracle properly so called,—that the wonders of science are the results of a very elaborate subordination of means to ends, while a miracle is the mere fiat of a supernaturally endowed will. The electrician has to set up his galvanic current somewhere in the neighbourhood at least of the conductor in which he hopes to induce the secondary current that shall convey his message from the sea to the shore. The operator has to procure his chloroform from the druggist, to get his patient to inhale it, to use a highly elaborate set of surgical instruments which have been the slow product of years, or even centuries, of skilled labour, and even when he has done all this, he only produces a very half-and-half sort of result. The patient awakes to relief, indeed, but still very imperfect relief; he has a slow and perhaps or partial recovery; he is never, it may be, quite the same man again. The miracles of science are miracles of adaptation of means to ends, and it was the very object of the Bishop's sermon to show that in the great Easter miracle at least there was no such elaborate adaptation of means to ends, but "that it is only by virtue of the spiritual and the moral that it is possible in the last resort to set aside all the laws of Nature, if it be so, and Nature itself, and do what no other power is capable of doing." That sentence represents far more truly the exact drift of the Bishop's sermon than the not very happily constructed sentences to which "G." called attention. Bishop Temple's point, indeed, was that science, far from teaching us how to give life to what is not living, or to restore to life what is really dead, is more and more tending to the doctrine that that feat is scientifically impossible, that what scientific men term "abiogenesis" is absolutely beyond the resources of science. Indeed, the Bishop is careful to point out that our Lord's human nature exhibits no sign at all of that elaborate adaptation of physical means to physical ends which is the great stock-in-trade of scientific manipulation. "It would be irreverent for us to talk of His [our Lord's] knowledge of mathe- matics or of physics; it would be altogether beside the mark to speak of Him as working His miracles of healing by virtue of His knowledge of the science of medicine; it would be altogether a mistake for us, and one that we should feel to be inconsistent with our faith in Him, and our worship of His unique character, if we were to think of Him as a great linguist. He gave to His infant Church the gift of tongues, no doubt for the use of those who preached His Gospel in those days ; but we never hear of His possessing such a gift Himself, or of His making use of such a gift in order to
establish the truth of His Gospel. No; He stands apart from all this. He rises above it all." In a word, the great miracle of Easter, the miracle of the resurrection, is the miracle of showing that the moral and the spiritual is at the core of even physical power; that only that human nature is one with God, which is in the closest possible communion with God's purity and love.
We imagine that what startled those who only read the account of the Bishop's sermon in the Times was the half- inclination which it seemed to express to explain miracle away. In reality, however, to those who read the whole sermon, the only sense in which there is the least disposi- tion to explain miracle away, is a sense which establishes it more firmly than ever, as a direct sign from God. There is, perhaps, a sense in which we might find something like a positive law for miracle,—in which miracle would be no longer an anomaly,—a breach of law as we know it, but rather a manifestation of a higher law. Supposing it could be shown, as perhaps some day it may be shown, that those who have the most devout and spiritual natures, in other words, the most Christlike natures, have also a certain notable though imperfect command over the physical processes of life,—not a scientific command, not a command due to the physical adaptation of means to ends, but what we should call a mystical command over them, a power of signally arresting the hand of hasty and arrogant evil, a power analogous in some degree to that power in our Lord which made the announcement to his captors, "I am he," so paralyse them, that they "went backward and fell to the ground,"—then there would be a kind of explanation of miracle which, so far as it went, would be supernatural in the strictest sense, and yet rational, without being rationalistic. A rationalistic explanation of miracle is an explanation which professes to find the ground of the higher nature of man in the lower. A rational explanation is one which actually does find the ground of the lower in the higher. If it could be shown that all supernaturally good men, are more or less endowed with a certain mystical though imperfect power of controlling physical nature, then the lesson of the Bishop's sermon, that the source of our Lord's control over nature was his divine spirit, would, pro tante, be true even of the highest human beings. In other words, it would be their closeness to God, their life in God, which would dominate to some imperfect extent the physical powers of nature. Whether this may ever appear to be in any sense a law of miracle, we do not know. But if it be true that in all ages those who have been found most saintly, have also been found most capable of those signs and wonders which the Apostles performed, we should have a partial explanation of miracle which, instead of destroying its significance as an index of the divine will, would, in fact, establish that significance. It would establish miracle as the finger of God, instead of explaining it away, and teach us the great lesson of the Bishop's sermon, that after all the essential root of what is divine is not mere power but holiness, not might but right. Hitherto the philosophy of miracle has seemed to rest on the notion that power is more divine than goodness. But the Bishop of London's doctrine tends quite in the opposite direction. You may acquire scientific power, he says, by mastering scientific processes; but when you have done this, you have not even approached the sort of power by which Christ manifested his unity with the Father. The secret of that was not science, was not the command due to the knowledge of natural laws, but that command over the energy which creates and renews the very springs of life, which comes only from intimate com- munion with the Holy Spirit,—which controls nature because it is essentially above nature, not because it has threaded all the labyrinths of physical, chemical, and biological laws. .
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