7. This same law of Divine economy will bid us also to exclude from the category of miracles such events as may reasonably be referred to natural causes. Visions or voices which may be resolved into false perceptions or deceptions of the senses must be so classed. The extraordinary phenomena which are recorded as having accompanied the martyrdoms of Polyecarp,t of Savonarola, of Hooper, may readily enough be explained as the operation of physical forces, a little exaggerated perhaps by pious enthusiasm. Stories like that of the Thundering Legion and the rain which followed the prayers of the Christian host may be true in the main, although the events of which they tell are not necessarily miracles in any other sense than that in which every answer to prayer is a miracle (see above, i. § 15). In other cases the recorded phenomena are too like the tricks of a thaumaturgist for sober piety to recognize in them the finger of God; and in many the alleged
oni
* Pensées, ii, 235 (ed, Faugéres), + See Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers, τι. 1. 516.
of that character of σημεῖα which all true miracles have as revelations of the Divine will and purpose.
8. Next, in an overwhelmingly large number of the cases which remain, both of medixval and modern miracles, the evidence is entirely insuffi- cient. There is no @ priori probability in their favour, and very inadequate a posteriori testimony. In how few cases, outside the NT, have we got the evidence of the agent who is supposed to have worked the miracles! And it is to be feared that many stories of miracles worked by saints may be accounted for by the misguided piety of their biographers. All too soon in the Church’s history a false criterion of sanctity grew up. It was sup- posed that the measure of a man’s goodness was the amount of miraculous power by which his preaching was aided.* Now from the belief that the man who works miracles must be a good man, the transition is easy to the converse inference. This man was a good man, hence he must have worked miracles, and so it can be no harm to write down a few in his biography. He must have worked, if not these particular wonders, at least others very like them.t We thus find that the further removed in time the saint is from his biographer, the more is his life embellished with legend and glorified with miracle. We distrust the medi#val records on these grounds. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, we say. No criticism of this sort can be applied to the miracles of the NT; for here we have contemporary testimony of the principal persons concerned, and the miraculous is as prominent in the earlier as in the later canonical writings.
9. It is a suspicious circumstance that many of these medieval miracles happened so opportunely for the triumph of a particular party or the glorification of a particular individual. In one sense, indeed, it is very far from suspicious to read that a miracle came at the right moment, i.e. for the support of God’s truth, but in another sense it is suspicious. If men are anxiously expecting a sign from heaven to guarantee the piety of a doubt- ful undertaking or the suecess of a hazardous cause, it is very likely that they will see the finger of God in what is really only the operation of His ordinary laws, and it is not improbable that they may be the dupes of unscrupulous persons who play upon their prejudices.
10. All these qualifications being made, a re- siduum of recorded cases is left, which it is diffi- cult to explain. Men will view them differently, according to their predispositions. But it is not too much to say that no recorded occurrences in recent centuries seem to bear the character of σημεῖα in at all the same degree as the miracles of the Gospel, whether we have regard to the general circumstances under which they were worked, or the results, moral and spiritual, which were conse- quent upon men’s belief in them. Quite apart from the adequacy or inadequacy of the evidence brought forward in their favour, or the possibility of ‘natural? explanations, alleged miracles such as the apparition of the Blessed Virgin at La Salette, and the cures of pilgrims at the shrine which has been built at the spot, are lacking in the dignity and moral grandeur of the miracles of the Gospel. Whatever may be thought about them, it is plain that even if these and their like are really to be traced to the intervention of the Divine merey which loves to reward a simple faith (and it does not seem to us that the evidence is sufficient to establish such a conclusion), yet they do not serve as vehicles of revelation as the miracles
* See Mozley, Miracles, p. 150.
+ Newman lays down a principle very like this (University Sermons, p. 345).
396 MIRIAM
of the Gospel did.
They may be θαύματα, δυνάμεις, τέρατα, but they are not σημεῖα of a new spiritual message to mankind, which it sorely needed to
learn. And this is the essential characteristic of the miracles of the Christ.
On the whole subject of this article cf. Jesus CuRkIstT, in vol. ii. p. 624-628 ; and see NATURAL, NATURE, PROPHECY, SIGN.