that they are. Is it wrong suddenly to turn the tables and ask those who would compel us to explain Pierre de Rudder's case, how they explain Charlotte Laborde's case, which is certainly far more wonderful than Pierre de Rud- der's? Charlotte Laborde was a Jansenist cripple who had no legs at all, as two surgeons duly testified ; and yet she literally had two good legs pulled out for her— as any- body may read in Montgeron's veracious narrative.151 No doubt it will be at once said that the thing never happened. Assuredly, it never did happen. But has everybody earned the right to take up that attitude toward it? We recog- nize, of course, that not all testimony to marvels can be trusted— at least not in all the details. It seems indeed rather difficult to report marvels precisely as they hap- pened, and few there be who attain to it.152 We have seen that even an Augustine cannot be implicitly trusted when he reports marvels as occurring within his own knowledge. Perhaps Doctor Rouby is right in suggesting that some slight errors of detail have crept into the report of Pierre de Rudder's case; and that this marvel too is one of the things that never happened— precisely as it is reported. Our personal interest in such adjustments, however, is at best languid. In the nature of the case they are only con- jectural. We are only beginning to learn the marvellous behavior of which living tissue is capable, and it may well be that, after a while, it may seem very natural that Pierre de Rudder's case happened just as it is said to have hap- pened. We are afraid to alter the facts as witnessed even a little, in order to make them fit in better with the igno- rance of to-day: and our guesses of to-day are sure to seem very foolish to-morrow. We do not busy ourselves, there- fore, with conjecturing how Pierre de Rudder's cure may have happened. We are willing to believe that it happened just as it is said to have happened. We are content to know that, in no case, was it a miracle. We must endeavor to make clear the grounds on which
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this assertion is adventured. To do this we need to go back a little in the discussion. We take it up again at the point where we have said that bare inexplicableness can- not be accepted as the sufficient criterion of the miraculous. There are many things which we cannot explain, and yet which nobody supposes to be miraculous.153 No doubt the appeal to "unknown laws," hidden forces of nature not yet discovered, may be made the mark of an easy ridicule. Yet we must not be stampeded into acknowledging as sheerly miraculous everything the laws of whose occurrence — the forces by which it is produced — are inscrutable to us. Even if absolute inscrutability be meant — inscrutability not to me (for my ignorance cannot be the measure of reality) but to any and every living man, or body of men, to any possible man — miracle cannot be inferred from this alone. Nature was made by God, not man, and there may be forces working in nature not only which have not yet been dreamed of in our philosophy, but which are beyond human comprehension altogether. Simple inexplicability, therefore, is not an adequate ground on which to infer mir- acle. There must be something else about an occurrence besides its inexplicableness to justify us in looking upon it as a direct act of God's.
Clearly, when we are bidden to accept an event as mirac- ulous merely on the ground of its inexplicableness, it is forgotten that no event is merely an inexplicable event. It is always something else besides; and if we are to pass upon its origin we must consider not merely its abstract inexplicableness but the whole concrete fact — not merely that it has happened inexplicably, but what it is that has happened inexplicably — that is to say, not its bare occur- rence, but its occurrence in all its circumstantials, the total thing which has occurred. The healing of Pierre de Rud- der, for example, is not merely an inexplicable happening (if it be inexplicable) of which we need know no more than just that. It is the healing of a particular individual,
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Pierre de Rudder, in a complex of particular circumstances, the whole complicated mass of which constitutes the thing that has occurred. The cause assigned to the occurrence must satisfy not only its inexplicableness, but also all these other circumstances entering into the event as an occur- rence in time and space. No event, occurring in time and space — in a complex, that is, of other occurrences — no matter how marvellous it may seem to be, how sheerly in- explicable on natural grounds — can possibly be interpreted as a divine act, if there is anything about it at all in its concrete wholeness which cannot be made consistent with that reference.