remarkable economy in its exercise, the reasons for which we cannot fully comprehend.
8. There is, indeed, an intimate connexion be-
Here, however, we το τω τὺ with great caution.
* Cf. Mozley, 1.6. p. 168.
+ This train of thought ts carefully worked ont in Mason's Conditions of our Lord's Lifeon Earth, pp. 9 ff. 108%: οὗ Gore, Dissertations, pp. 80, 140, 165; and Westeott, Mebretos, p- 66.
MIRACLE
tween the several miracles of Christ, arising from the fact that the greatest miracle of all is the Person of Christ Himself. Sin is the true ἀνομία, the true violation of law ; and this finds its remedy in a corresponding miracle of grace, even the In- carnation. It is quite misleading to compare the evidence, say, for the raising of Lazarus with that for a miracle in the life of a medieval saint; for the heart of the Christian position is that the circumstances were quite dissimilar. Christians assert, at the outset, that the Person of Christ is supernatural, or rather that the perfectly ‘natural’ humanity which He took upon Him was associated with the unearthly spiritual powers of the God- head; and, that being so, it is natural, 1.6. con- gruous, that His advent and ministry should be attended with works ‘such as none other man did.’ All through the Fourth Gospel, Christ’s miracles are described as His ἔργα ; they did not stand, as it were, in a class by themselves, but they con- stituted a part of that Divine manifestation which dwelt in Him. We say that His life being greater and larger than that of a mere man like ourselves, was irradiated by the awful light of His super- human origin, and that therefore (as might have been expected) that superhuman origin betrayed itself by a superhuman energy of action, that, after a public life of superhuman works of mercy, He suffered, died, was buried, but rose again, appeared on several occasions to His followers, and finally in their presence ascended into heaven. This is not like the allegation of a single isolated miracle. The whole advent of Jesus Christ was miraculous, and therefore we refuse to isolate any one of His works from His life. ‘ Isolated events,’ it has been profoundly said, ‘are often incredi- ble,’ but the crowning miracle of Christianity is the Incarnation. If Christ were altogether an ex- ceptional personage, there is nothing to stumble at in the miracles recorded of Him, which in- deed then are seen at once in their true char- acter as σημεῖα, or épya,—His signs or His works, —but which refuse to rank themselves as θαύματα or prodigies which amaze and perplex. They are not specimens of His power, but manifestations of His Person.*
4. Another zonsequence of importance follows from these considerations. The miracles, the σημεῖα of Jesus Christ, are essential to the Gospel history. And this does not mean merely that Christianity is a ‘supernatural religion,’ and that it is impossible to retain its consoling and strengthening power over mankind if we reject the supernatural element, true and deeply important as this is. But it means that we cannot construct a consistent picture of the life of Jesus Christ from the Gospels, if we do not take account of His miraculcus powers, how- ever those ‘ miraculous’ powers are to be explained. His miracles are not like the miracles in Livy or in the history of many of the medieval saints, detached pieces that do not disturb the history, which goes on very well without them; but the whole history is grounded in them and presupposes them. Without making any assumption as to the date and manner of composition of the Synoptic Gospels, this fact stands out. We cannot con- trive any theory by which we may entirely elimi- nate the miraculous, and yet save the historicity, in any intelligible sense, of those wonderful nar- ratives. It is vain to say, as some have done, that possibly the original nucleus of the Gospels contained no miraculous stories. For what is the fact? Even if we attempt to reconstruct the original document which the Synoptic evan- gelists had before them when compiling their
*Mirum non esse debet a Deo factum mir (in Joan,
*So Augustine: aculum .. . magis gaudere quam mirari debemus* Tract, xvil. 1
590 MIRACLE
Gospels, by the simple (though unscientific) process
of rejecting everything as added which is not com- mon to al) three, and so arrive at the ‘triple tradition,’ we shall find that it still teems with miracle. The Feeding of the Five Thousand, the
Raising of Jairus’ daughter, the Stilling of the |
Storm, besides half a dozen miracles of healing, are still left.* We cannot, in short, by any arti- fice reach a primitive gospel which is not to a greater or less extent a miracle gospel, and so we cannot treat off-hand the Gospel history in the matter of rejecting miracles as we would treat the Acta Sanctorum. But if we admit one miracle, there is little intellectual hindrance to admitting twenty. There is no aid to faith in the mere reduction of the number of miracles. Matthew Arnold compared this modern tendency to saying that while it is extravagant to suppose Cinderella’s fairy godmother to have actually changed the pumpkin into a coach-and-six, we may believe that she did change it into a one-horse cab.t ‘The illustration is flippant, but it is just. There is nothing to be gained by the attempt to minimize the supernatural in the Gospel history. It is there, do what we will. ‘Miracles play so important a part in Christ’s scheme, that any theory which would represent them as due entirely to the imagination of His followers or of a later age, destroys the credibility of the documents not partially but wholly, and leaves Christ a personage as mythical as Hercules.’+ We have, indeed, no warrant for insisting that any particular expla- nation or theory of the miraculous shall be ac- cepted by a believer in the Gospels; but the fact of the miraculous, however we define it, remains. And a miracle reduced to its lowest terms, remains a miracle still.