If, for instance, to take an example so extreme that it could not occur, but one that may serve all the better as our illustration on that account, there were buried some- where in the concrete wholeness of the occurrence the im- plication that twice two are five. It would be more in- explicable that God should not know His multiplication table than that any occurrence whatever, however inexplica- ble it may seem to us, should nevertheless be due to natural causation. God is not bare omnipotence; He is absolute omniscience as well. He cannot possibly be the immediate agent in an act in which a gross failure of "wisdom" is apparent, no matter how difficult it may be for us to ex- plain that act without calling in omnipotence as its pro- ducing cause. Still less can He be supposed to be the im- mediate actor in occurrences in which immoralities are implicated; or, in which, in their wholeness, as concrete facts, there are embodied implications of, say, irreligion or of superstition. Whether we can see how such occurrences are wrought, or not, we know from the outset that God did not work them. It would be more inexplicable that God should be directly active in them than that they should be the product of natural causation, though to suppose this to be the fact would be to confound all our previous conceptions of natural causation. Charles Hodge speaks
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not a whit too strongly when he asserts154 that "we are not only authorized but required to pronounce anathema an apostle or angel from heaven who should call upon us to receive as a revelation from God anything absurd or wicked."
God, indeed, has Himself forewarned us here. He has said:155 "If there arise in the midst of thee a prophet or a dreamer of dreams, and he give thee a sign and a wonder, and the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other Gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet or unto that dreamer of dreams." Conformity in their implications to what God has already revealed of Himself, He Himself makes the test of all alleged miracles. It would be more inexplicable that God by His action should confuse the revelation which He has made of His Being, of men's rela- tion to Him, and of the duty of service which they owe to Him and to Him alone, than that inexplicable things should yet be produced by natural causation. It is a primary principle, therefore, that no event can be really miraculous which has implications inconsistent with funda- mental religious truth. Even though we should stand dumb before the wonders of Lourdes, and should be ut- terly incapable of suggesting a natural causation for them, we know right well they are not of God. The whole complex of circumstances of which they are a part; their origin in occurrences, the best that can be said of which is that they are silly; their intimate connection with a cult derogatory to the rights of God who alone is to be called upon in our distresses, — stamp them, prior to all examina- tion of the mode of their occurrence, as not from God. We are far more sure that they are not from God than we ever can be sure, after whatever scrutiny, of precisely how they are wrought. It is doubtless something like this that is expressed — it ought to be at least this that is meant
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