Miracle Plays. See Mystekies.
Miracles. In every age there are certain great movements of human thought, which more or less in- fluence the convictions of men in the mass, and carry them on to conclusions which, but a few years before, would have seemed altogether improbable. Sometimes it is very difficidt to account for these movements. There has often been no master-mind leading tlie way : whatever works have been written have rather been the result of the wave of thought passing over that small portion of the world which thinks than the cause of the wave. As far as cause can be traced, the new movement is a reaction, a recoil of the mind, from that which has gone before, wliether in the way of dissatis- faction at the sloth and inactivity of the previous age, and at its being ignobly content to have no high as- piration, no high sense of the nobleness of man's mis- sion, or a rebound from overstrained dogmatism and principles urged on to an extent which made them prac- tically a burden and wearisomeness too great for men to endure.
The latter is perhaps the.more common origin of new developments of thought, and is a power larger and more constantly at work than men are apt to imagine. But the explanation of tlie movements of the mind in our own time is rather to be sought in the meanness of the last century. Upon the whole, it was not a time of high purposes, though the War of Independence on the one side of the Atlantic, and the resistance to the despotism of Napoleon on the other, show that it was not wanting in great practical results. But as the pres- ent century advanced, the old lethargy which had en- wrapped the n)iuds of the English-speaking race gave way. Some men became intensely active in working for practical reforms; others set new modes of thought in motion, and everywhere there was an eager desire for thoroughness, and for probing the princiides of things to the very bottom. The old argument of "con- tinuance"— that a thing should still exist because it had existed — gave way to an intense realism, which woidd let nothing exist unless it could prove its right to ex- istence. Utilitarianism became the order of the day, and that poetry which often gihls a sleepy age, and makes it (Iwell at peace in a dreamland of repose, van- ished before tiie energy of men keenly alive to the ne- cessities and imperfections of the present.
It is this intense realism that has made men restless and ill at ease at having to believe in miracles. A miracle stands on entirely dilforent gnunids from the whole pres- ent order of things, and is out of harmony with the main
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current of our thoughts. There have been ages when men lived for the future, when the present was neglected, and things unseen were the realities which engrossed their thoughts. When we read the accounts of the trials for witchcraft iu New England a century or two ago, we find not tlie accusers only, but the accused full of ideas of the preternatural. What they saw had but shght influence upon them ; what they imagined had alone power over their minds. We, on the contrary, live in the present. The turn of our minds is to verify everything. We call for proof, and whatever cannot be proved we reject. It is not merely miracles which we treat thus, but mast of what the last century regarded as historical realities. The intense historical activity of the present day, which has rewritten for us the an- nals of Greece and Rome, of the Church and of Eng- land, of the great teras of Spain and the Netherlands, besides special studies of great value, has its origin in that same spirit for searching and proving which leads so many to reject miracles.
It is altogether imfair to lay the rejection of miracles to the charge of physical science. The leaders of sci- ence are as thoroughly realistic as our historians and men of letters, but not more so. They are themselves phenomena of an age which perpetually asks What is ? They inquire into the conformation of the earth and its constituents ; into the motions of the heavenly bodies, and the laws which govern them, with the same eager- ness to find out present facts, and the explanation of them, as animates the historian and the practical re- former. Old beliefs in our day can no more stand their ground than old laws and old customs, unless they can prove their right to stand by an appeal to present use- fulness. It is of no use to appeal to anything else. In the present state of men's minds, if a thing does not fit iu to the present, it seems to have no right to exist at all.
But if the progress of physical science has little to do with the dislike to miracles and the supernatural, the rapid increase of material wealth, and the advance made in everj'thing which tends to present comfort and en- joyment, have much to do with it. We are living in an age when the present is full of enjoyment. By our large ascendency over the powers of nature, the earth yields us its; treasures with a bountifulness never known before. Our homes are replete with comforts and lux- uries little dreamed of by those who went before ; and the secret forces of nature are pressed into our service, and do our bidding. Side by side wilh this subjection of nature there has grown up a greatness of material enterprise unknown before. Vast projects are under- taken and persevered in, before which the greatest mer- chant princes of antiquity would have quailed. There is a grandeur of conception, a nobleness of purpose, an unflinching courage in many of the commercial under- takings of the present day, which, though gain may be their final object, yet give them a dignity and a poetry that make them for the time enough to conceal the deep cravings which are man's peculiar endowment, and which mark him out as a being destined for no common purposes.