12. Further, the wholesome consciousness of the limitations of our knowledge will prevent us from describing miracles as ‘ violations of law,’ a phrase too commonly used, without any clear conception of the meaning of the words employed. If law bere means ‘law of the universe,’ of that sum of existence which includes God Himself, it is plain that such a phrase is self-contradictory ; the laws of the Cosmos, in this view, are the general principles of wisdom according to which the world is ruled, and these are, strictly, inviolable. Thus, when Butler suggests that ‘God’s miraculous inter- positions may have been all along by general laws of wisdom,’ { and that we shall be able to see
* The argument suggested in this paragraph was developed in an ingenious essay, published anoiymousty in 1834, under the title Flatland.
t Discourse on Miracles.
t Analogy, il. 4.
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this in a future state of wider knowledge, he means by ‘laws of wisdom,’ not physical sequences which have been observed to be invariable in our experience, but the reasons by which the Divine Being is guided in the action of His Providence. And his observation amounts to this, that although miracles, produced as they are by the direct inter- vention of the Divine volition, do not obey the ordinary rule that every physical effect may be accounted for by an antecedent physical cause, yet they are not, on that account, lawless. ‘hey are wrought for a worthy end, and in accordance with a wise plan. And Butler explains elsewhere * that there may be an inherent limit in the nature of things to the utility of miracles, beyond which they would produce injury and disadvantage ; the general bad result of the interposition being greater than the particular benefit produced by it. Thus one of the ‘general laws’ which might be sup- posed to govern miraculous interposition would be a Law of Economy, that it should take place only at exceptional crises in the history of man or of the universe.
13. But, no doubt, when miracles are described as ‘violations of law,’ what is generally meant by law is physical law, the kind of law which is ascertained in the laboratory, and whose operation comes within the sphere of the bodily senses to observe. Sucha law might be conceived as violated without any violence being done to our reason, for the sum of physical forces is not the entire Cosmos, or its most essential factor. But, as a matter of fact, observation could never demonstrate a viola- tion of law in this sense, save to a being who was omniscient. For (see NATURAL) we have no titie to assert that we know and can infallibly predict the outcome of a hitherto unobserved combination of physical forces; we cannot tell what is above nature, unless we know all that is within it. As Huxley tersely wrote: ‘If a dead man d¥? come to life, the fact would be evidence, νῶν that any law of nature had been violated, but tha those laws, even when they express the results of a very long and uniform experience, are necessarily based on incomplete knowledge, and are to be held only on grounds of more or less justifiable expecta- tion.?{ With our imperfect knowledge of the condi- tions of life, we are not justified in saying with con- fidence that the dead could not be restored to life by some, to us, unknown combination of physical forces. And thus the mere marvellousness of our Lord’s miracles by no means justifies us in ascribing them to supernatural agency. All that the evidence in respect of their extraordinary character would justify would be that they were what He Himself called them, ‘the works which none other did’ (Jn 15%). In this regard, suggestions have often been made to the effect that those phenomena which we now call miraculous may be all scientifically ac- counted for in the future, and shown to be the action of obscure natural causes, with whose action we are only partially acquainted. Archbishop Temple hints that ‘the miraculous healing of the sick may be no miracle in the strictest sense at all. It may be but an instance of the power of mind over body —a power which is undeniably not yet brought within the range of science, and which, nevertheless, may be really within its domain In other words, what seems to be miraculous, may be simply unusual.’§ And so all that the anomalous character of these recorded events would prove would be, that Christ’s healing acts
* Analogy, |. 7.
+ Augustine suggested that the miracle at Cana of Galilee 18 only the acceleration of a natural process: * Ipse fecit vinum in nuptiis qui omni modo hoe fucit in vitibus,’ It ts the rate of the process which is extraordinary.
Φ Hume,
». 130, § The Relation between Religion and Science, p. 195
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were at least relative miracles, in Schleiermacher’s well-known phrase, ‘miracles if not for the purpose of science, at least for the purpose of revelation, arresting attention on the Agent, accrediting Him as God’s messenger, singling Him out from other men and proving Him to be in possession of cre- dentials deserving serious consideration ; miracles for Christ’s own time if not for ours, and having for that time the function and value of genuine miraculous deeds.’