Says Dr. Taylor : " Whereas the alleged supernatural occurrences related, or apjjealed to by the earlier Chris- tian writers, are nearly all of an ambiguous kind, and such as may, with little difficulty, be understood with- out either the assumption of miraculous interposition, or the imputation of deliberate fraud, it is altogether otherwise with the miracles of the Church of tlie 4th, 5th, and Gth centuries. From the period of the Nicene Council and onward miracles of the most astounding kind were alleged to be wrought from day to day, and openly, and in all quarters of the Christian world. These wonders were solemnly appealed to and seriously narrated by the leading persons of the Church, Eastern and Western; and in many instances these very per- sons— the great men now set up in opposition to the leaders of the Reformation — were themselves the won- der-workers, and have themselves transmitted the ac- counts of them. But then these alleged miracles were, almost in every instance, wrought expressly in support of those very practices and opinions wliich stanil for- ward as the points of contrast distinguishing Romanism from Protestantism. We refer especially to the ascetic life— the supernatural properties of the eucharistic ele- ments— the invocation of the saints, or direct praying to them, and the efficacy of their relics ; and the rever- ence or worship due to certain visible and palpable re- ligious symbols" (ii, 235).
Dr. Hodge, commenting upon these Romish miracles, says, " they admit of being classified on diflferent prin- ciples. As to their nature, some are grave and impor- tant; others are trifling, childish, and even babyish; others are indecorous; and others are irreverent, and even blasphemous. . , . Another principle on which they may be classified is the design lor which they were wrought or adduced. Some are brought forth as proofs of the sanctity of particular persons or places or things; some to sustain particular doctrines, such as purgatory, transubstantiation, the worshipping of the saints and of the Virgin 3Iary, etc., some for the iilen- tification of relics. It is no injustice to the authorities of the Cluirch of Rome to say that whatever good ends these miracles may in any case be intended to serve, they have in the ayyreyate been made subservient to the accumulation of money and to the increase of power. . . . The truth of Christianity depends on the historical truth of the account of the miracles recorded in the N. T. The truth of Romanism depends on the truth of the miracles to which it appeals. What would become of Protestantism if it depended on the (henionology of Luther, or the witch-stories of our English forclathers? The Romish Church, in assuming the respon>iliility for the ecclesiastical miracles, has taken upon itself a bur- den which would crush the shoulders of Atlas" (iii,456; comp. Princet. Iter. April, 1856, art. v, especially ji. 272). And Dr. Schaff, who, as we have already seen, inclines to the belief that miracles may have been wrought in post-apostolic days, and may continue to be wrought to-day and liereafter, yet ventures to say that "the fol- lowing weighty considerations rise against the miracles of the Nicene and post-Nicene age; not warranting, in- deed, the rejection of all, yet making us at least very cautious and doubtful of receiving them in ]>articular: 1. These miracles have a much lower moral tone than those of the Bible, while in some cases they far exceed them in outward {)omp, and make a stronger appeal to our faculty of belief. JIany of the monkish miracles are not so much *'?/yjfj-natural and above reason as they are wwnatural and ayainst reason, attributing even to wild beasts of the desert, panthers and hyenas, with which the misanthropic hermits lived on confidential terms, moral feelings and states, repentance and con- version, of which no trace appears in the N. T. 2. They serve not to confirm the Christian faith in general, but for the most part to sujiport the ascetic life, the magical virtue of the s.acrament, the veneration of saints and relics, and other superstitious |iractices, which are evi- dently of later origin, and are more or less oflfeusive to
MIRACLES, ECCLESIASTICAL 323 MIRACLES, ECCLESIASTICAL
tlie healthy evangelical mind. 3. The further they are removed from the apostolic age, the more numerous they are, and in the 4th century alone there are more miracles than in all the three preceding centuries to- gether, while the reason for them, as against the power of the heathen world, was less. 4. The Church fathers, with all the worthiness of their character in other re- spects, confessedly lacked a highly-cultivated sense of truth, and allowed a certain justitication of falsehood ad majorem Dei gloriam, or frauspia, under the misnomer of policy or accommodation (so especially Jerome, Fpist. ad Pammachium) ; with the single exception of Augus- tine, who, in advance of his age, rightly condemned falsehood in every form. 5. Several Church fathers, like Augustine, Martin of Tours, and Gregory I, them- selves concede that in their time extensive frauds with the relics of saints were already practiced ; and this is confirmed by the fact that there were not rarely nu- merous copies of the same relict, all of which claimed to be genuine. 6. The Nicene miracles met with doubt and contradiction even among contemporaries, and Sul- pitius Severus makes the important admission that the miracles of St. Martin were better known and more firmly believed in foreign countries than in his own {Diulofj. i, 18). 7. Church fathers, like Chrj'sostom and Augustine, contradict themselves in a measure in some- times paying homage to the prevailing faith in miracles, especially in their discourses on the festivals of the mar- tyrs, and in soberer moments, and in the calm exposi- tion of the Scriptures, maintaining that miracles, at least in the Biblical sense, had long since ceased (comp. Eobertson, //{*•?. of the Christian Church to Gregory the Great [Lond. 1854], p. 334). We must, moreover, re- member that the rejection of the Nicene miracles by no means justifies the inference of intentional deception in everj' case, nor destroys the claim of the great Church teachers to our respect. On the contrary, between the proper miracle and fraud there lie many intermediate steps of self-deception, clairvoyance, magnetic phenom- ena and cures, and unusual states of the human soul, which is full of deep mysteries, and stands nearer the invisible spirit-world than the every-day mind of the multitude suspects. Constantine's vision of the cross, for example, may be traced to a prophetic dream ; and the frustration of the building of the Jewish Temple under Julian, to a special providence, or a historical judgment of God. The mytho- poetic faculty, too, which freelj' and unconsciouslj'- produces miracles among children, may have been at work among credulous monks in the dreary deserts, and magnified an ordinary event into a miracle. In judging of this obscure por- tion of the history of the Church we must, in general, guard ourselves as well against shallow naturalism and scepticism as against superstitious mysticism, remem- bering that