9. We may now turn back to the miracles οὗ the Gospel. They fall into line at once, if the miracle of the resurrection is a fact; they become σημεῖα and ἔργα (as they are represented by St. John to be) of the Christ. The evidence for ἐξ is, prima facie, evidence for them. ‘True it is that St. Paul does not mention them at all in his letters, but it did not come within his purpose to do so. It was the permanent results, not the temporary incidents, as it were, of the Divine life on earth with which he and his correspondents were concerned. And yet it is worth observing that, so far is St. Paul from thinking that miracles are foreign to the Christian dispensation, that he claims the power of working them himself, and that in letters addressed both to strangers who did not know him and to friends who did. Christ wrought by him, he says, ‘in the power of signs and wonders’ (Ro 1518) ; ‘truly,’ he writes to the Corinthians, ‘the signs of an apostle were wrought among you in all patience, by signs and wonders and mighty works’ (2 Co 12!*) ; among the Divine gifts of the Church are ‘miracles (δυνάμεις), gifts of healings, divers kinds of tongues’ (1 Co 1228) ; and he asks the Galatians, ‘he therefore that worketh miracles (δυνάμεις) among you, doeth he it by the works of the law?’ (Gal 3°). If it had not been a matter of acknowledged fact that some such Divine powers had attended his apostolic ministry, it would have been truly extraordinary that he should have claimed them. And, further, it is plain that he would never have claimed powers for himself of which he believed his Master to have been destitute, so that his omission of any mention of the Lord’s miracles of healing cannot have any significance as regards St. Paul’s belief in the supernatural character of Christianity.
10. To this mass of evidence, a@ priori and a posteriori, in favour of the miracles of the NT, the answer that is usually returned in our time is not that of Spinoza (though his presuppositions are more widely accepted than is always recog- nized), nor of Hume, but of Matthew Arnold, who, while declining metaphysical disquisitions as to their possibility or credibility, attempted to settle the controversy by declaring that at any rate ‘miracles do not happen,’* and that the vast number of admittedly fabulous miracles recorded in ecclesiastical literature dispenses us from formal inquiry into the excellence of the evidence for those of one particular period. It is plain that the mere dictum, ‘miracles do not happen,’ has no application whatever in logic, unless the pro- pounder of it is prepared to accept the principles either of Spinoza or of Hume; and these we have already examined. The force of the statement resides in this, that the modern world is very chary in receiving the report of any alleged miracle, because we know of so many cases in which like reports have proved untrue. But that ‘miracles do not happen’ within a certain area of experience, does not prove that they have never happened outside that area. The rule ‘all or none’ is a very unsafe rule for common life. Every case that arises ought to be judged on its own
* God and the Bible, p. 22.
MIRACLE
merits. And the first question to be asked about the evidence for the NT miracles is, Were the witnesses predisposed to believe such things of Jesus Christ? In particular, was there any pre- conception in favour of His resurrection ? Were it so, there might be considerable room for hesita- tion in accepting report of it, and the rapid dis- semination of belief in it might be set down to a widespread credulity. Now (a) it is true that belief in the supernatural was quite common in the first century of our era, nor could men and women then have had the same intellectual diffi- culty in trusting the evidence for an alleged miracle that we, with our larger knowledge of the laws of nature, now experience. In particular, the lower classes of Roman society, though not ready to accept miraculous stories which interfered with their traditional beliefs, were steeped in an atmo- sphere of magic and superstition. But it was not so with the higher classes. The first century could not be called an ‘age of faith.’ Stoics and Epicureans alike were disinclined to believe in any irruption of the spiritual into the established physical order. (6) And when we turn from Gentile to Jew, when we consider the national prejudices alike of the first preachers as of the first hearers of the gospel, we see that nothing could have been more opposed to preconceived ideas than the doctrine of the Incarnation, with the resurrection as its appropriate and (so to speak) inevitable sequel (Mt 27%, Lk 2425, Jn 618 808 1033 etc.). his once recognized, there would, no doubt, have been no difficulty in believing that the ‘works’ of One like Christ should be superhuman, but this was not recognized at the first even by the faithful apostles. Prejudice in favour of the Incarnation, of the Resurrection, of the Ascension, there was none. The evidence can- not be set aside on the score that it grew up in the course of years as the outcome of presupposi- tions as to what the Messiah should be and do.