PUBLIC-DOMAIN CHRISTIAN BOOK
Counterfeit Miracles
B. B. Warfield, 1851–1921 · 119,298 words · 159 reading sections
140 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES
seems to have been a young woman "possessed of gifts of mind and temperament scarcely inferior to genius, " "with all the personal fascination of beauty," and endowed with a "young, fervid and impressionable imagination." 22 On her the subtlest arguments of one of the acutest men of the day were poured. Irving himself …
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The only remaining step was to convey the gifts to liv- ing's church. Of course, he was at once informed of the extraordinary events which had taken place in Scotland. He seems to have caught the contagion of excitement at once. John Bate Cardale, a lawyer of living's circle, who afterward became the first Irvingite "A…
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his exclusion from the church; of the founding of the first Irvingite Congregation in Newman Street in a deserted studio which had been erected for the use of the painter West. The new "prophets" as a matter of course soon began to exercise the authority which they found in their hands as inspired servants of God. They…
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So strong was the delusion to which Irving was now de- livered— that Irving who had been hitherto plastic wax in the hands of everybody. He was soon established in his new church in Newman Street. In that church an elab- orate order was set up, and an ornate ritual instituted ac- cording to the pattern of which Baxter …
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and scramble in the dark." 46 In this article occurs a pungent paragraph which ought itself to have awakened Erskine to the true nature of his procedure. The subject in hand is the criterion employed to discriminate between true and false manifestations of the Spirit. True to his spiritual individualism, his "enthusias…
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Church.54 We cannot quote them at large; here are some examples. In the course of his exposition of the first chapter of I Samuel, Irving mentions the church as bar- ren ... on which the ecstatic voice interposes: "Oh but she shall be fruitful: oh! oh! oh! she shall replenish the earth and subdue it — and subdue it!" A…
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"power." You will bear in mind that the hour is six in the morning, which in the winter was before dawn. "The church appeared to me," writes our observer,62 "to be pitch dark; only the lights from the gas lamps shining into the windows enabled us to grope our way forward. It seemed to be entirely full, but my friend ac…
770 wordsSECTION 68FAITH-HEALING
tion, and no attempt at it. Had there been now and then something like a word, it was mixed up in such a jargon of sound, it was uttered with such rapidity, and in such a long continued and prolonged yell that, led up to it as I had been by the adjuncts of the scene, by the weirdness and obscurity of the building, I wa…
731 wordsSECTION 69GORDON'S METHOD 159
I have called your attention to the discrediting which befell the Irvingite gifts. This discrediting was wrought not only by the course of history which confounded all the expectations based on them, but also by the confession which was made by one and another of the " gifted" per- sons that they had suffered from delu…
635 wordsSECTION 70CONFUSING THE ISSUE 161
the whole, at once the most readable and the most rational presentation of the views of the Faith-Healers, is Doctor A. J. Gordon's The Ministry of Healing, or Miracles of Cure in All Ages. The copy of this book at my disposal belongs to the second, revised edition, issued in 1883. Gordon writes in a straightforward, b…
840 wordsSECTION 71OBLITERATING THE MIRACULOUS 163
Now, this confusion of the issue is a very serious matter. It has first of all the effect of permitting long lists of un- sifted cases to be pleaded as proofs of the proposition de- fended, although a large number of these cases would be at once excluded from consideration on a closer definition of exactly what is to b…
625 wordsSECTION 72164 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES
The deeper danger to the reasoner himself which comes from thus obscuring the lines which divide miracles, specifi- cally so called, from the general supernatural, although al- ready incidentally suggested, seems to require at this point more explicit notice. When once the distinguishing mark ofjmiracles is obliterated…
677 wordsSECTION 73MARK 16 : 17, 18 SPURIOUS 167
exhortation, on a higher plane, Work and pray. No man prays God for a good harvest and then neglects to plan and plant and cultivate. If he did he knows perfectly well he would neither deserve nor receive the harvest. Similarly God requires effort on the part of those who receive His supernatural salvation — even thoug…
890 wordsSECTION 74JAMES 5 : 14, 15 IRRELEVANT 169
We begin with the second of them, Mark 16 : 17, 18, because we may rule it out of court at once as spurious. Of course its spuriousness may be disputed, and some very learned men have disputed it. The late Dean Burgon published a lengthy treatise in its defense, and the Abbe Martin wrote an even more lengthy one. Never…
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The passage does not stand off by itself in isolation: it has a context. And the context throws fight upon the simplicity of the meaning. " Is any among you suffering ? " asks James, and advises, "let him pray. Is any cheerful? let him sing praises. Is any among you sick? let him call for the elders of the church; and …
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are sick, to seek unto the Lord as well as to their physician — nay, to seek unto the Lord rather than to their physician — with a promise that the Lord will attend to their cry. If any is sick among you, we read, let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray for him, rubbing him with his oil in the name …
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I have reserved to the last the passage which Gordon appeals to first, because its application to the present matter raises a question of doctrine which it seemed more convenient to discuss at the end, rather than at the begin- ning of a scrutiny of proof texts. When speaking of our Lord's abounding miracles of healing…
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It will doubtless be more profitable, however, to seek to lay our finger on the source of error in the statement of the doctrine, and to correct it, than to track out all its confusions. This error does not lie in the supposition that redemption is for the body as well as the soul, and that the saved man shall be renew…
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work of cleansing and renewal effected for the soul?"36 Assuredly. The good man will not fail to be the better for his goodness even in his bodily life. Of course we may make an absurd application of even so obvious a maxim. That devout physician whom we had occasion to quote a while ago, warns us against such an absur…
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We have examined all the scriptural passages formally appealed to by Gordon. The considerations which he places under the heading of "the testimony of reason," however, are closely related to the scriptural argument, and no doubt require a passing word. They are these: (i) that, "if miracles should cease, they would fo…
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testimony of the alleged miraculous facts, have already- been enumerated. He calls in turn upon the witness of the church, of theologians, of missions, of the adversary, of experience, and of the healed. There is an almost too great completeness in this accumulation of sources of testi- mony. There is nevertheless obse…
808 wordsSECTION 82186 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES
It is observable, further, that the cases which are suc- cessfully treated in the Faith-Houses have their natural limits. Not every one is cured. The brother of Samuel Zeller, who succeeded Dorothea Triidel in her House in Switzerland, sought cure there for years in vain. Doro- thea TriidePs own health remained through…
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Stanton rests his case for Faith-Healing on a half-dozen wisely chosen instances. The first one which he gives is that of a young woman with "a withered hand which was bent in upon her wrist as no well hand by any act of the will can be, and presented nothing but a mass of skin and bones, with not a vein visible upon i…
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Finally it must be added with great firmness that sifting is needed by the cases reported by the Faith-Healers to isolate the instances the details of which can be trusted. Of certain obvious facts any honestly disposed person is a competent witness; of certain others few persons are com- petent witnesses. Among these …
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would have to go as he was six or seven weeks, and must be very patient; and when the little fellow told him that Jesus had made him well, he said, ' Pooh ! pooh ! nonsense ! ' and sent him away. The next morning the poor boy came to me and pleaded with so much sincerity and confidence, that I more than half believed, …
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After the statement of the evidence from facts Gordon has nothing further to do but to draw his conclusion. This he does in a chapter called "The Verdict of Candor," while he gives a warning to his brethren not to press be- yond limits in another chapter entitled "The Verdict of Caution." In both of these chapters some…
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to those to whom the Apostles had conveyed them — whence a presumption arises against their continuance after the Apostolic age. Then, again, that there are instances of sickness in the New Testament which were not removed by the prayer of faith. There is, for example, Paul's leaving of Trophimus at Miletum sick, and h…
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fame of others has been, if more splendid, at the same time less pure and less lasting. The name of a certain A. Schrader, for example, was in everybody's mouth twenty years ago. Then there was the romantic figure of Franz Schlatter, with his meteoric career in Denver and elsewhere in the West, as Messiah and divine he…
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It might conduce to clearness if writers would agree to classify all such cures, the natural products of faith itself, under some such caption as mind-cures — or, if we prefer a big name, under the general designation of psychotherapy — reserving the term " faith-healing " for those cures which are ascribed not to fait…
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The variety of forms in which mind-healing is practised to-day is very great. They differ from one another less in the results obtained, or even in the means employed to obtain these results, than in the theoretical basis by which they severally attempt to explain their production. Wil- liam F. Cobb, the writer of the …
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as instruments for moving man.10 It is unfortunate, more- over, that the form of Christianity which is professed by the leaders of the Emmanuel Movement, and the inculca- tion of which they rely upon to soothe troubled minds and to inspire to effort, is rather that taught by Renan and Harnack and Theodor Keim (the coll…
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The leaders of the Emmanuel Movement are theists. Therefore, instead of saying of an act of healing, "The forces of nature do it," they prefer to say, " God does it in and through the forces of nature." In accordance with their theistic presuppositions this is the proper account to give of any natural act of healing. N…
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The late Doctor St. John Roosa once described mind- cure as faith-cure run to seed.21 The characterization is true as a general proposition in the history of thought. Man is a religious animal, and the religious explanation of phenomena antedates, in this department of thought also, the naturalistic. It is also, in the…
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It was out of a very different soil, in point of fact, that Christian Science actually grew. According to Mrs. Eddy's own account her previous experience had been in other forms of distinctively mind-cure. She had dabbled in homoeopathy (her then husband sometimes practised this art), and had found that she could dilut…
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"The Bible and the Christian Science text-book," writes Irving C. Tomlinson, in the Christian Science Bible Quar- terly Lessons, "are our only preachers. As the discourses are made up wholly of passages from the Bible and the Christian Science text-book, they contain nothing of human opinion ; they are devoid of man-ma…
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Mrs. Eddy's pantheism deprived her, of course, of a personal God, and she insisted on the impersonality of God with the utmost vigor.41 But she rightly found what she calls "the leading factor in Mind-Science," in the con- sequent proposition that "Mind" (with a capital "M") "is all, and matter is naught"; or as she ot…
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If we survey the system of Christian Science as a whole, with an active desire to discover in it elements of value, it is quite possible to fix upon characteristics which, viewed in the abstract, may seem admirable. There is its un- compromising idealism, for example ; the emphasis which it places on spirit as distingu…
788 wordsSECTION 98INCONSISTENCIES 221
Similarly, when we are tempted to praise Christian Science for the honor which it does to Truth, we are bound to stop and ask, not only materially, what this Truth is to which it gives honor, but also, formally, whether it can be commended for the functions which it assigns to Truth in its system. What it calls " Truth…
841 wordsSECTION 99TYPE OF PIETY 223
It puzzles us greatly, therefore, to learn that healing can apparently be had nevertheless without the reading of Mrs. Eddy's book, and indeed without the understanding which we are instructed to look upon as itself the healing. Mrs. Eddy tells this story:60 "A case of dropsy, given up by the faculty, fell into my hand…
682 wordsSECTION 100ASCETIC TENDENCIES 225
as a part of that great whole which is God, and, being in your place, you have your wholeness. This is as much of a religion as a pantheist can have. It was this that the Stoic meant when he said: "Get into the stream of nature, and if you do not like the way it is flowing, at least you need not squeal." 62 And this is…
838 wordsSECTION 101A GOOD TIME COMING 227
It is with respect to marriage, however, that the asceti- cism intrinsic to Mrs. Eddy's philosophy pushes nearest to the surface. She discourages marriage and prefers celibacy. "Is marriage more right than celibacy?" she asks, and answers,70 "Human knowledge indicates that it is, but Science indicates that it is not." …
612 wordsSECTION 102LIMITATIONS IN PRACTICE 229
not really live by eating, and this mere knowledge — with- out any effort to do without food, or lessen it, or indeed interfere with our ordinary simple habits at all — has the effect of making us less dependent on our meals both as to what and when to eat. 9. And in the same way we grow less dependent upon clothing, w…
738 wordsSECTION 103234 NOTES TO LECTURE I
self from suffering in the process.84 The explanation she gives runs as follows: " Bishop Berkeley and I agree that all is Mind. Then, consistently with this premise, the con- clusion is that if I employ a dental surgeon, and he believes that the extraction of a tooth is made easier by some ap- plication of means which…
818 wordsSECTION 104CESSATION OF THE CHARISMATA 235
5. J. H. Bernard, in an essay on "The Miraculous in Early Christian Literature," published in the volume called The Literature of the Second Century, by F. R. Wynne, J. H. Bernard, and S. Hemphill (New York, James Pott & Co., 1892), p. 145, gives a use- ful but incomplete exhibit of the references to the exercise of th…
837 wordsSECTION 105CESSATION OF THE CHARISMATA 237
It has always been the characteristic mark of a Christian that he is "led by the Spirit of God": "if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ he is none of His." It has never been the mark of a Chris- tian that because he is "led by the Spirit of God" he is a law to himself and free from the ordinances of God's house. It …
857 wordsSECTION 106CESSATION OF THE CHARISMATA 239
15. J. B. Lightfoot discusses these miraculous features of the letter in The Apostolic Fathers, Part II, S. Ignatius, S. Poly carp, vol. I, pp. 598 ff.; cf. Bernard's exhibition of their natural charac- ter op. cit., p. 168. H. Giinter, Legenden-Studien, 1906, pp. 10 ff., remarks: "thus, out of the entire series of aut…
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which dominated the whole life of the people, it is not to be won- dered at that the Christians of the second and subsequent cen- turies, who were men of their time, were not always able to hold the poise which Paul gave them in the great words: "We know that no idol is anything in the world, and that there is no God b…
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27. Cf. Bernard, as cited: "If they were frequent, if he had ever seen one himself, he would have told us of it, or to speak more accurately, Eusebius would not have selected for quotation a second-hand story, if the direct evidence of an eye-witness was on record." How did Eusebius, then, understand Irenaeus? As tes- …
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32. As cited, p. 164. Cf. Douglas, as cited in note 24. 33. Th. Trede, W under glaube im Heidentum und in der alten Kirche, 1901, pp. 83-88, brings together the instances from the literature. No doubt the heathen did not really believe in these resuscitations, at least when they were instructed men. It did not require…
647 wordsSECTION 110CESSATION OF THE CHARISMATA 245
46. The use to which this opinion, become traditional, is put, may be illustrated by its employment by Charles Herman Lea, A Plea . . . for Christian Science, 191 5, p. 58, and its similar em- ployment by Samuel McComb, Religion and Medicine, 1908, pp. 295 ff. The former writes: "In the early years of the Christian Chu…
772 wordsSECTION 111PATRISTIC AND MEDIAEVAL MARVELS
52. Bernard, as cited, p. 130, gives his acceptance to Kaye's view, speaking of "that power which in the days of the Apostles was confined to them and those on whom they had laid their hands." B. F. Manire, in an article on the "Work of the Holy Spirit," in The New Christian Quarterly, IV, 2, p. 38 (April, 1895), gives…
777 wordsSECTION 1128. I, 14, 5- 9- I, 13, 7-
2. Gregory's Panegyric on Gregory Thaumaturgus is described and characterized, and its true character shown, by Th. Trede, W under glaube im Heidentum und in der alien Kirche, 1900, pp. 144 ff. : "Our declaimer attains the climax of rhetorical fire- works in his Christian Panegyric on Gregory Thaumaturgus." In this con…
872 wordsSECTION 113PATRISTIC AND MEDIEVAL MARVELS 251
13. City of God, 22, 10, at the end. 14. On Augustine's doctrine of miracles, see especially, Friedrich Nitzsch, Augustinus' Lehre vom Wunder, 1865; especially pp. 32-35 on the "Continuance of Miracles in the Church," and pp. 35-37, "Miracles outside the limits of the Revelation-history and the Church." 15. City of G…
830 wordsSECTION 114PATRISTIC AND MEDLEVAL MARVELS 253
S3. Among the many anomalies of the legends of the saints, the question asks itself why the saints, many of whom had severe sufferings to undergo, many of whom were lifelong invalids, never rescued or healed themselves by the exercise of their miraculous powers? Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, when in extremities, n…
885 wordsSECTION 115PATRISTIC AND MEDIEVAL MARVELS 255
PATRISTIC AND MEDLEVAL MARVELS 253 very especially Yrjo Hirn, The Sacred Shrine, 1912, pp. 120 ff., with the literature given on pp. 502 ff. 38. Newman, as cited, p. 134. 39. Middleton, as cited, vol. I, p. li. 40. Smith and Cheatham, as cited. 41. Diet, des Proprieties et des Miracles (Migne), vol. I, p. 370. For…
874 wordsSECTION 116256 NOTES TO LECTURE II
PATRISTIC AND MEDIEVAL MARVELS 255 Thaumaturgus. . . ." When Gregory of Nazianzus describes Athanasius as setting forth in this book "lv ir\i,afiari of a narrative, the laws of the monastic life" {Oration XXI, 5, Post-Nicene Fathers, p. 270), does he not really suggest that it is fiction, in part at least? Trede discu…
794 wordsSECTION 117ROMAN CATHOLIC MIRACLES
69. The first of the ten miracles which Montgeron discusses at large was wrought on a young Spaniard, who was stone blind in one eye and saw but dimly with the other. Only the better eye was healed, and the famous oculist Gendron told him that he ought to be content with that, since the restoration of the other eye, in…
857 wordsSECTION 118260 NOTES TO LECTURE III
4. The same general point of view finds expression sometimes in non-Romanist quarters. For example, J. Arthur Hill, The Hibbcrt Journal, October, 1906, vol. V, p. 118, writes as follows: "Christ's miracles and resurrection were objective phenomena, and Christianity was based upon them. . . . But belief in Chris- tianit…
637 wordsSECTION 11927. P. 117.
(Epistle 475) which J. A. Froude (Life and Letters of Erasmus, 1894, p. 301) reproduces in a condensed form thus: "This Dialogue [Lucian's Philopseudes\ teaches us the folly of superstition, which creeps in under the name of religion. When lies are told us Lucian bids us not disturb ourselves, however complete the auth…
793 wordsSECTION 120ROMAN CATHOLIC MIRACLES 263
3a, Consult, however, A. M. Koniger, in Schiele and Zschar- nack's Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. V, 1913, col. 924: "In the absolute sense in which it has been until recently thought to be such, Francis of Assisi does not begin the long list. It is, on the contrary, possible to show that at the least t…
846 wordsSource & rights
Public-domain historical work by B. B. Warfield, 1851–1921. OCR from an original historical scan hosted by Internet Archive; OCR may contain recognition errors.
Project Gutenberg source record →
Historical Christian writing; not Scripture.