DIVINITY.

THE MIRACLES OF SCRIPTURE DEFENDED FROM THE ASSAULTS OF MODERN SCEPTICISM.*

MIRACLES have been variously defined. One thing is certain: they always imply deviation from the ordinary course of nature. Yet the mere circumstance of being unusual does not constitute a miracle; for very extraordinary events sometimes happen in rare conjunctures of natural causes. An entirely new disposition of chemical agents might evolve results never witnessed before; but there would be no miracle in this, there would only be an extension of our knowledge of what lies within the ordinary powers of nature. The real miracle is exhibited, either when something ensues contrary to what the causes operating at the time would of themselves produce, or immeasurably beyond their reach; or when something takes place, for whose production the necessary natural causes are entirely wanting. The growth of the human body, for example, and the expansion of the human mind, are slow processes, requiring the prolonged operation of many causes : let an infant, therefore, rise up on the spot a full-grown man, and discourse with all the wisdom which others reach only by experience, and you would have an undeniable miracle, nor would you for a moment imagine that some future discovery might yet explain how it happened. Or, to give another example, the body of man, when the vital principle has fled, immediately begins to decay, and there is no power in nature which can restore it to life : let a dead man, therefore, be raised from the corruption of the grave by a word, and let him return to human society with all his powers of mind and body in full vigour, and you would have an incontestable miracle, which you would be certain no investigation could ever explain. There is no room, then, for the objection sometimes made, that miracles are just an appeal to our ignorance; that what seems a miracle to-day, may wear a very different aspect to-morrow, when the circumstances are better known. That strange events are sometimes explained by subsequent investigation, is undeniable; but these are not miracles, nor even at the time would they appear so to a man of ordinary discernment. For a miracle is not merely an event which you cannot explain; but it is an event which you see to be obviously inconsistent with certain laws of nature. It is not the negative quality of want of clearness which constitutes a miracle, but it is the positive quality of contrariety to nature: it is not merely that you cannot tell how it happens, but that you can point out a law in opposition to which it happens. Real miracles, therefore, are not an appeal to our

From the Lecture delivered in the United Presbyterian Theological Hall, at the opening of one of the late Sessions, by the Rev. Dr. Lindsay, Professor of Sacred Languages and Biblical Criticism. Edinburgh: Oliphants.

VOL. X.-FOURTH SERIES.

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ignorance, but to our knowledge; and, to be distinguishable by us, they must take place within the limits of our acquaintance with nature. They pre-suppose a knowledge, accurate so far as it goes, of the laws of the material world; and their essence lies in being a manifest departure from them. Even a real miracle would be no miracle to us, it would not even seem a prodigy, if we were quite ignorant of the ordinary laws to which it stood in opposition.

We think it of importance, that the idea of suspension of natural laws or opposition to them should not be discarded from the definition of a miracle..........Mr. Trench is very keen in opposing the idea that a miracle is ever against nature. It is only, he says, above and beyond nature, but not against it. And the argument he employs to make good this distinction, as universally applicable to miracles, is, that they are never against the higher nature, never against nature viewed in a wide and comprehensive sense as including the influences and harmonies of the invisible world. "The true miracle is a higher and a purer nature coming down out of the world of untroubled harmonies into this world of ours, which so many discords have jarred and disturbed, and bringing this back again, though it be but for one prophetic moment, into harmony with that higher."* But this is a palpable fallacy. The same argument will prove that miracles are not even above and beyond nature. They are not above and beyond that higher nature, which includes the whole government of God in all its influences, visible and invisible, earthly and heavenly. They are neither against, nor yet are they above and beyond, nature as thus defined. They are only above and beyond that nature with which we are familiarly conversant in the present world; and most certainly in many cases, and those the most satisfactory ones, they are against the laws of that nature too.

Again, Mr. Trench says, that a miracle "may be against one particular law, viewed in its isolation, and rent away from the complex of laws of which it forms a part. But no law does stand thus alone; and it is not against, but rather in entire harmony with, the system of laws; for the law of those laws is, that, where powers come into conflict, the weaker shall give place to the stronger, the lower to the higher. In the miracle, this world of ours is drawn into, and within, a higher order of things: laws are then at work in the world, which are not the laws of its fallen condition, for they are laws of mightier range and higher perfection. And as such they claim to make themselves felt, and to have the pre-eminence which is rightly their own." But this is as great a fallacy as the former, and it does not furnish one hair's-breadth of ground for the author's conclusion. No Christian will maintain, that a miracle is against the whole system of God's laws, natural and moral, of narrower and of wider range. But as little, certainly, can any Christian maintain, that a miracle is above and beyond God's laws, in all their amplitude of reach. It is only above and beyond, and so we allow it is only against, those laws +Ibid., p. 17.

• Notes on the Miracles of our Lord, p. 15.

which are statedly in operation in the world where we dwell. If miracles take place at all, they must take place in conformity with God's laws, considered in their whole extent and compass. They cannot be unknown to the statute-book of the universe. To allow their reality, and yet to say that they are either against, or above and beyond, the whole principles of the Divine government, would be to ascribe them to another power than God's, and a power able to control God's. The fallacy of the distinction we are considering lies in this, that the word nature is employed in two totally different senses, according as it is connected with the favourite expressions "above" and "beyond," or with the proscribed one "against ;" and, in fact, the very opposite of what is affirmed might be affirmed with equal truth, by simply inverting the application of the two significations. You might say, a miracle is frequently against the natural laws we behold in daily operation around us; but it is never above and beyond those laws of mightier range and higher perfection, which constitute the whole system of God's government.

The opponents of revelation have found the historical testimony in favour of miracles so difficult to deal with, that they have generally shifted the battle against them to a different field, and tried to show that there are antecedent reasons which render it unnecessary to look to their evidence. The various attacks of this kind may be reduced to two classes. The possibility of miracles has been denied: the possibility of proving them, even supposing them wrought, has also been denied.

The possibility of miracles is denied by those who have imbibed the Pantheistic notions. There is but one Substance in the universe, and that substance, under all its variety of forms, is God. There is no personal Deity, distinct from the universe, who administers its laws, guides its motions, rewards and punishes. The smiling fields are God. The lofty mountain, the boundless ocean, the arid wilderness, are not works of God, but different aspects of Himself. It is God's countenance you behold, when you look on the sun shining in his mid-day strength. It is a different phase of the same countenance you sec, when the softened light of moon and stars spreads over the sky. The storm-carried cloud darkens the face of God. The howling tempest, the bellowing thunder, the roaring cataract, are the louder utterances of His voice; the gentle breeze, the insect's hum, the streamlet's murmur, are His whisper. God is in everything, and everything is God. Mind and matter are but modifications of the one existing Being. Heaven and earth, the inward and the outward, are all God. We ourselves are God. In Him we live, and move, and have our being, not as supported by His power, but as a portion of His essence; and we are so, as really as aught else in the universe. The manifestations of the one only existing Substance take place in accordance with His own unchangeable character, and the laws of nature are just the exhibition of what that character is. These laws, therefore, cannot be suspended; and miracles, which would be independent of them, or opposed to them, are impossible. Such

events would suppose a power above God, and capable of controlling God; another being, besides the one only existing Being. They would be treason against the established order of the universe. On the principles of Pantheism, there can be no miracles. But then the want of them is no loss. We need them not. We need not what they are alleged to prove. We are manifestations of God ourselves. We are a law to ourselves, and our own impulses are our best rule. We cannot sin. Moral evil, as a ground of charge, has no existence. Responsibility is a dream. True, we cease not to be when we die; but we go back into the general substance of God, and no more appear the same individuals. What we were is forgotten and gone for ever, excepting in so far as it may have stamped an impression on something following.

This assault on miracles can only be met by an assault on Pantheism itself, that huge imposture, that compound of cant and hypocrisy. It is arrant Atheism, but it does not like the name. A personal God, governing all things, it cannot bear; but to have no God would be so unpoetical, so alien to the instincts of the human breast, that it must make one. And forthwith the hills, and streams, and woods, and sun, and moon, and stars, and birds, and beasts, and men, are elevated to the throne, not as separate divinities, but as one undivided God. And the prime recommendation of this multiform Divinity is, that He exacts from us no special submission. We are part of Him ourselves; our impulses and feelings are Divine; our own views are our proper rule. Compared with this, Atheism is an honest system. It is a thousand-fold better to have the throne vacant, than to have it filled with all the beasts and reptiles of the world. Caligula raised his horse to the consulship. This has been stigmatised as the act of a madman; but where was the madness of it, if that horse was qualified to take part in the government of the universe? The Romans doubtless would have preferred no Consul to the one appointed by the Emperor; and with none, matters would have moved on just as well as with such an occupant of the consular sella curulis. So we say it is better to have no God, than to have the Pantheist's God; and, with no God, the affairs of the universe will be conducted just as wisely as under Pantheistic rule. The Atheist's universe will do every whit as well as the Pantheist's. They are the same universe, and they are just both left to manage themselves.

Bishop Berkeley was led, by the difficulty of logically deducing the existence of the object of perception from the perception itself, to deny the existence of the external world altogether, and to resolve everything into mind.* The Pantheists, on the other hand, so far as

With

*Berkeley's aim was, doubtless, to cut up the scheme of Materialism. the sentence in the text above, it may be well to collate the view maintained by Sir James Mackintosh in his celebrated Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy, Encycl. Brit.; which is, in brief, that the courageous Bishop's theory is not to be regarded as implying any real distrust of the senses, but as going to fix our thoughts on mind

Now, if

they are so on speculative grounds, employ the same premisses to carry them to a totally different conclusion. They identify the perceiving mind with the object perceived, making neither of them more or less real than the other, but affirming that they are both modifications of the same thing; and this conclusion, generalised, reduces the whole universe of being, from the highest to the lowest, to one all-embracing substance. Perceiver and perceived are always the same. we were bound to reason out the connexion between the act of perception and the object, and found the task too hard for us, then not Pantheism, but the Idealism of Berkeley, would be the proper landing-place. We have no knowledge of the external world but from perception. But, by the supposition, we fail to trace the connexion between perception and anything outward. We are conscious, however, of the act of perceiving. Surely, then, we should be bound to hold fast by the perception, and to let the external world go. But it is a fallacy to suppose we are bound to trace out and explain the connexion between perception and its object, or else to distrust every principle that may involve that connexion. There are ultimate facts which it is impossible to prove. You cannot prove that consciousness is to be relied upon. You cannot prove that the senses are not deceptive. You cannot prove your own existence. The famous argument, Ego cogito, ergo sum, takes the fact for granted. For who is ego, thus unceremoniously placed in the very fore-front of the argument, if it is the fact of my own existence I am to prove? Ego comes too soon upon the stage. Surely it were time enough for him to show face nearer the conclusion. The great facts of our constitution must be assumed as ultimate principles, from which all inquiry is to set out; and, if they deceive us, inquiry is vain, and knowledge impossible. The highest authority has generally been conceded by metaphysicians to consciousness; but there is really no more reason why we should place implicit confidence in the testimony of consciousness, than in the conviction, universally forced upon us by our senses, of the separate existence of an external world. Belief in the existence of something without us, is as universal and irresistible as belief in the trust-worthiness of consciousness; and the one seems as fundamental to our constitution as the other. Condillac's explanation of the manner in which the idea of externality springs up in the mind, may be the right one. It is very ingenious. A man's own hand impinges upon his body. A stone impinges upon it also. At the part touched, the sensation may be the same in both cases. But still there is a striking difference between them; for in the one case there is a double sensation. There is a sensation in the hand, as well as in the part touched by it. Toucher and touched are thus both felt to belong to the individual himself. But it is different with the stone, which would therefore be

-paramount mind. If this noblest of created things be denied, may not the disciple of incredulity be brought also to dispute the presence of an external world? appears to be the scope of Berkeley's "immaterialism."-EDITORS.

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