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MIRACLES
MIRACLES
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anil it is most natmal, most agreeable to the whole constitution of human nature, that it shall be animated, sustained, and governed by the Di\-ine Power and Life. Men of science, moreover, are increasingly willing to admit the necessity of the spiritual and rational as the ultimate giwmd of the physical ; and recent investigations into the make o'f the so-called ' atom," and the vast poten- tialities of Matter, will furtlier develop the distrust of all dogmatic assertion that nothing iu the nature of the events recorded in the Gospels and called ' miracles ' is possible or credible. .Sir Oliver Lodge- (ffibbcrt Journal, October 1902) writes :
'The root question or outstandini; controversy between science and faith rests upon two dijfinct conceptions of the universe : the one, that of a self-contained and self-sufficient universe, with no outlook into or links with anything beyond, uninfluenced bv any life or mind except such as is connected with a visible and tangible material body ; and the other con- ception, that of a universe lying o-ien to all manner of spiritual influences, permeated throuirh and throug:h with a Divine spirit, guided and watched by liring minds, acting through the medium of law indeed, but with intelligence and lo\ e behind the law ; a universe by no means self-suflicient or self-contained, but with feelers at every pore groping into another supersensuous order of existence, where reign laws hitheto unimagined by science, but laws as real and as" mightj- as tlose by which the material universe is governed.'
2. The nature of Hunun Persoiudity. — Re- searches, anthropological and psychological, into the nature and possibilties of man have greatly multiplied dtiring the present generation, and something of the vast region of ]x)tentiality lying above and beneath ani beyond all that is actually realized has been re ealed. The conception of the ideal human perscnality has been immeasurably enlarged and exaled. P.sychological investigation is only in its inancy, and yet enough has been arrived at to uake it certain that the powers of humanity renain essentially unfathomed. Be- neath or abo>' the ordinary consciousness of man, and beyond he powers which at present his will controls and 'I'ganizes, are other and larger powers at present ncontrolled and unorganized W the personal fove, but manifest in exceptional phases of human ife, such as dreams, liypnosis, clairvoy- ance, clai-vudience, somnambulism, or unwonted exciteraen and spiritual exaltation. We may call man, s we are acquainted with iiim, a person- ality, a iiing centre of original will and action, made in te image of the Deity. But yet it is far truer to r^'ard him as a personality which has not yet arriid, the mere rudiment of a personality whose j'wers, as he controls them, reach out beyond ds control to regions of potentiality as yet unrtognized, and showing that the trne'per- sonalit- is vastly greater and mightier than the presen actual. ' 'SI-aw partly is, and wholly hopes to be. The powers at present possessed and con- trollei by man are the veriest suggestion of the power that are his by right of nature, made as lie was fr intimate alliance witli tlie Divine Being. But X~ perfect Personality was realized in the Son of ^in who was also Son of God. The perfect Persfiality cannot be conceived of apart from the Divif Personality, for it is of the very essence of the 1(^1 Man that his nature shall be possessed and cont'Ued by the Divine. By the Divine power the imian natiire consists. And the Lord Jesus plain; marked it as the essential condition of His power-hat He was morally and spiritually one with ()d.
3. Jc Divine i\r«^?nT.— A wholesome feature of moder: conceptions of the Being of God is their sense ' mystery. Holding fast, on the one hand, t>.the essential knowableness of the Deity and to is self-revelation as the centre of ail Di\-ine ac?n, theologians, on the other hand, admit the ipossibility of giving dogmatic expres- sion to the lode of the Divine Being. ' In mys-
tery the soul abides,' not only the Divine but even the human soul. But taking the teaching of the Lord Jesus, interpreted as it was by His life before God and man, and a^ it is by an increasing Chris- tian experience, they conceive of God as the In- hnite Will and Intelligence that animates while it transcends the whole creation, visible and in\i.sible, a Divine Presence ever seeking self-realization and self-revelation in His creation, in some true mea.sure expressing Himself in all the works of His hands, even iu the non-human creation ; btit most really of all in human life with its mauilold synipatliies and powers, actual and potential, cons-cious and sub-conscious ^or super-conscious). The concep- tion is of a Living God present and active in all life, but supremely in the nobler impulses and humanities that glorify mankind. In the life of men as they ai'e, in their poor actual, the Divine Mind tinds a real though teeble and fragmentaiy expression, and as that nature is developed and its latent jiowers are evoked and made part of the conscious life, is destined to find a fuller channel for its living action. And the nature which was fitted to be a complete channel, and more than channel — an active co-operator with Himself — the Divine Being, revealing Himself as Father, tinds in Him who was perfectly one with man and at the same time morally, spiritually, and essentially one with God.