stance is a shadow also ; but they are worse than simple who are cozened by so palpa-
ble a fraud.

t Origen {Con. Cels., 1. 3, c. 22) charges him with not believing them.

t In the same way Arnobios [Adv. Gen., 1. 1, c. 48) brings in the heathen adver-



THE ASSAULTS ON THE MIRACLES. 57

lows the miracles, denying only the conclusions drawn from them ; but
rather denies that they have any credible attestation : in his blind hate,
setting them in this respect beneath the miracles of Apollonius, which
this " lover of truth,"* for under that name he writes, declares to be far
more wortiiily attested.

1 his Apollonius, (of Tyana in Cappadocia.) whose historical exist-
ence there does not seem any reason to call in question, was probably
born about the time of the birth of Christ, and lived as far as into the
reign of Nerva, a.d. 97. Save two or three isolated notices of an earlier
date, the only record which we have of him is a Life written by Philo-
stratus, a rhetorician of the second century, professing to be founded on
cotemporary documents, yet every where betraying its unhistoric char-
acter. It is in fact a philosophic romance, in which the revival and re-
action of paganism in the second century is portrayed. Yet was not
that Life written, I believe, with any directly hostile purpose against
Christianity, but only to prove that they of the old faith had their mighty
wonder-worker as well. It was composed indeed, as seems to me per-
fectly clear, with an eye to the life of our Lord ; the parallels are too
remarkable to have been the effect of chance ;f in a certain sense also
in emulation and I'ivalry; yet not in hostile opposition, not as implying
this was the Saviour of men, and not that ; nor yet, as some of Lucian's
works, in a mocking irony of the things which are written concerning
the Lord.:}: This later use which has often been made of the book, must
not be confounded with its original purpose, which was certainly differ-
ent. The first, I believe, who so used it, was Charles Blount, § one of
the earlier English Deists. And passing over some other insignificant en-
deavors to make the book tell against revealed religion, endeavors in
which the feeble hand, however inspired by hate, yet wanted strength

sary saying it is idle to make these claims (frustra tantiini arrogas Christo,) on the score
of the miracles, when so many others have done the like.

* Philalethes.

t See, for instance, upon the raising of the widow's son, the parallel miracle which
I have adduced from the life of Apollonius. The above is Baur's conclusion in his in-
structive little treatise, Apollonius von Tyana vnd Christus.

t His Philopseudes, for instance, and his Vera Histnria. Thus only the latter half
of this judgment of Huet's (Dem. Evang., prop. 9, c. 147,) seems to me to be true: Id
spectasse imprimis videtur Philostratus, ut invalescentem jam Christi fidem ac doctrinam
deprimeret, opposite hoc omnis doctrinae, sanctitatis, ac mirificee virtutis foeneo sirnulacro.
Itaque ad Christi exemplar hanc cxpressit effigiem, et pleraque ex Christi Jesu historia
ApoUonio accommodavit, ne quid Ethnici Christianis invidere possent.

§ In his now exceedingly scarce translation, with notes, of The two first Books of
Philostratus, London, 1680, with this significant motto from Seneca, Cum omnia in
incerto sint, fave tibi, et crede quod mavis.
5



58 THE ASSAULTS ON THE MIRACLES.

and skill to launch the dart, we come to Wieland's Agatlwdcemon, in
which neither malice nor dexterity were wanting, and which, professing
to explain upon natural grounds the miracles of Apollonius, yet unques-
tionably points throughout at one greater than the wonder-worker of
Tyana, with a hardly suppressed de te fahula narratur running through
the whole.*

The arguments drawn from these parallels, as far as they were ad-
duced in good faith and in earnest, have, of course, perished wiih the
perishing of polytheism from the minds of men, even the minds of those
who have not submitted themselves to the faith of Christ. Other mira-
cles can no longer be played off against his miracles ; the choice re-
mains between these or none.



3. The Pantheistic. (Spinoza.)

These two classes of assailants of the Scripture miracles, the Jewish
and the heathen, allowed the miracles themselves to stand unquestioned
as facts, but either challenged their source, or denied the consequences
which were drawn from them by the Church. Not so the pantheistic
deniers of the miracles, who assailed them not as being of the devil, not
as insufficient proofs of Christ's absolute claims of lordship ; but cut at
their very root, denying tliat any miracle was possible, since it was con-
trary to the idea of God. For tliese opponents of the truth Spinoza may
be said, in modern times, to bear the word ; the view is ,so connected
with his name, that it will be well to hear the objection as he has uttered
it. That objection is indeed only the necessary consequence of his phi-
losophical system. Now the first temptation on making acquaintance
with that system is to contemplate it as a mere and sheer atheism ; and
such has ever been the ordinary charge against it; nor in studying his
works is it always easy to persuade one's self that it is any thing higher,
or that the various passages in which he himself assumes it as something
different, are more than inconsequent statements, with which he seeks to
blind the eyes of others, and to avert the odium of this charge of atheism
from himself. And yet atheism it is not, nor is it even a material, how-

* The work of Philostratus has been used with exactly an opposite aim by Christian
apologists, namely, to bring out, by comparison with the best which heathenism could
offer, the surpassing glory of Christ. Cudworth, in his Intellectual System, b. 4, c. 15,
occupies himself at a considerable length with Apollonius. Here may probably have
been the motive to Blount's book, which only followed two years after the publication
of Cudworth's great work. Henry More, too, in his Mystery of Godliness, b. 4, cc. 9
— 12, compares at large the miracles of Christ with those of Apollonius.



THE ASSAULTS ON THE MIRACLES. 59

ever it may be a formal, pantheism. All justice requires it to be ac-
knowledged that he does not bring down and resolve God into nature,
but rather takes up and loses nature in God. It is only man whom he
submits to a blind fate, and for whom he changes, as indeed for him he
does, all ethics into physics. But the idea of freedom, as regards God,
is saved ; since, however, he affirms him immanent in nature and not
transcending it, this is only because he has himself chosen these laws of
nature as the one unchangeable manner of his working, and constituted
them in his wisdom so elastic, that they shall prove under every circum-
stance and in every need, the adequate organs and servants of his will.
He is not bound to nature otherwise than by that, his own will ; the laws
which limit him are of his own imposing ; the necessity which binds him
to them is not the necessity of any absolute fate, but of the highest fit-
ness. Still, however, Spinoza does affirm such a necessity, and thus
excludes the possibility of any revelation, whereof the very essence is
that it is a new beginning, a new unfolding by God of himself to man,
and especially excludes the miracle, which is itself at once the accom-
paniment, and itself a constituent part, of a revelation.

It would not be profitable to say here more than a few words on the
especial charges which he brings against the miracle, as loweririg, and
unworthy of, the idea of God. They are but an application to a par-
ticular point of the same charges which he brings against all revelation,
namely, that to conceive any such is a dishonoring, and a casting a
slight upon, God's great original revelation of himself in nature and in
man ; an arguing that of such imperfection and incompleteness, as that
it needed the author of the world's laws to interfere in aid of those
laws, lest they should prove utterly inadequate to his purposes.* And
thus, as regards the miracle in particular, he finds fault with it as a
bringing in of disorder into that creation, of which the only idea worthy
of God is that of an unchangeable order; it is a making God to contra-
dict himself, for the law which was violated by the miracle is as much
God's law as the miracle which violated it. The answer to this objec-
tion has been already anticipated ; it has been already sought to be
shown that the miracle is not a discord in nature, but the coming in of
a higher harmony ; not disorder, but instead of the order of earth, the

* Tract. Theol. Pol., c. 6 : Nam cum virtus et potentia naturae sit ipsa Dei virtus
et potentia, leges autem et reguiae naturae ipsa Dei decreta, omnino credendum est, po-
tentiam naturae infinitam esse, ejusque leges adeo latas, ut ad omnia quae et ab ipso
divino intellectu concipiuntur, se extendant ; alias enim quid aliud statuitur, quam quod
Deus naturam adeo impotentem creaverit, ejusque leges et regulasadeo steriles statuerit,
ut ssepe de novo ei subvenire cogatur, si eam conservatam vult, et ut res ex vote succe-
dant, quod san^ k ratione alienissimum esse existimo.



60 TPIE ASSAULTS ON THE MIRACLES.

order of heaven ; not the violation of law, but that whicli continually,
even in this natural world, is taking place, the comprehension of a
lower by a higher; in this case the comprehension of a lower natural,
by a higher spiritual law ; with only the modifications of the lower,
necessarily consequent upon this.

Then, again, when he charges the miracle with resting on a false
assumption of the position which man occupies in the universe, as flat-
tering the notion that nature is to serve him, he not to bow to nature, ills
most true that it does rest on this assumption. But this were only a charge
which would tell against it, supposing that true, which so far from
being truth, is indeed his first great falsehood of all, namely, the substitu-
tion of a God of nature, in place of a God of men. If God be indeed
only or chiefly the God of nature, and not in a paramount sense the God
of grace, the God of men, if nature be indeed the highest, and man only
created as furniture for this planet, it were indeed absurd and inconceiva-
ble that the higher should serve, or give place to, or fall into the order of,
the lower. But if, upon the other hand, man is the end and object of all,
if he be indeed the vicegerent of the Highest, the image of God, if this
world and all that belongs to it be but a workshop for the training of
men, only having a worth and meaning when so considered, then that
the lower should serve, and, where need was, give way to the highest,
this were only beforehand to be expected.*

Here, as is so often the case, something much behind the miracle,
something much earlier in our view of the relations between God and
his creatures, has already determined whether we should accept or re-
ject it, and this, long before we have arrived at the consideration of this
specific matter.



4. The Skeptical. (Hume.)

While Spinoza rested his objection to the miracles on the ground
that the everlasting laws of the universe left no room for such, atid
while the form therefore which the question in debate assumed in his
hands was this, Are miracles (objectively) possible ? Hume, a legitimate
child and pupil of the empiric philosophy of Locke, started his objection
in altogether a diflcrent shape, namely, in this, Are miracles (subjec-
tively) credible? He is in fact the skeptic, which, — taking the word in

* They are the truly wise, he says, (Tract. Theol. Pol.,c. 6,) who aim not at this,
ut natura iis, sed contra ut ipsi naturae pareant, utpote qui certc sciunt, Deum naturam
dirigore proutejus leges universales, iion autem prout humanae naturae particulares leges
exigunt, adeoque Deum noii solius humaui generis, sed tolius naturae rationem habere.



THE ASSAULTS ON THE MIRACLES. Gl

its more accurate sense, not as a denier of the truths of Christianity, but
a doubter of the possibility of arriving at any absolute truth, — the other
is as far as possible from being. To this question his answer is in the
negative; or rather, in the true spirit of the philosophy which leaves
every thing in uncertainty. It is always more probable that a niiracle is
false than true ; it can therefore in no case prove any thing else, since
it is itself incapable of proof, — which thus he proceeds to show. In
every case, he observes, of conflicting evidence, we weigh the evidence
for and against the alleged facts, and give our faith to that side upon
which the evidence preponderates, with an amount of confidence propor-
tioned, not to the whole amount of evidence in its favor, but to the differ-
ence which remains after subtracting the evidence against it. Thus, if
the evidence on the side of A might be set as = 20, and that on the
side of B as = 15, then our faith in A would remain 20 - 15 = 5 ; we
give our faith upon the side on w[)ich a balance of probabilities remains.
But every miracle is a case of conflicting evidence. In its favor is the
evidence of the attesting witnesses ; against it the testimony of all expe- j
rience which has gone before, and which witnesses for an unbroken (
order of nature. When we come to balance these against one another,
the only case in which the evidence for the miracle could be admitted
as prevailing, would be that in which the falseness or error of the attesting
witnesses would be a greater miracle than the miracle which they ojjlrm. '.
But no such case can occur. The evidence against a miracle having j
taken place is as complete as can be conceived ; even were the evidence
in its favor as complete, it would only be proof against proof, and abso-
lute suspension of judgment would be the wise man's part. But further,
the evidence in favor of the miracle never makes claim to any such
completeness. It is always more likely that the attesting witnesses were
deceived, or were willing to deceive, than that the miracle took place.
For, however many they may be, they are always but a few compared with
the multitudes who attest a fact which excludes their fact, namely, the
uninterrupted succession of a natural order in the world, and those few
submitted to divers warping influences, from which the others, nature's
witnesses, are altogether free. Therefore there is no case in which the
evidence for any one miracle is able to outweigh the d priori evidence
which is against all miracles. Such is the conclusion at which he ar-
rives. The argument, it will be seen, is skeptical throughout. Hume
does not, like Spinoza, absolutely deny the miracle, only that we can
ever be convinced of one. Of two propositions or assertions that may be j
true which has the least evidence to support it ; but according to the
necessary constitution of our being, we must give our adherence to that ,



62 THE ASSAULTS ON THE MIRACLES.

which presents itself to us with the largest amount of evidence in its
favor.

Here again, as on a former occasion, so long as we abide in the region
of nature, miraculous and improbable, miraculous and incredible, may
be allowed to remain convertible terms. But once lift up the whole dis-
cussion into a higher region, once acknowledge aught higher than
nature, a kingdom of God, and men the intended denizens of it, and the
whole argument loses its strenjith and the force of its conclusions.
Against the argument from experience which tells against the miracle,
is to be set, not, as Hume asserts, the evidence of the witnesses, which
it is quite true can in no case itself be complete and of itself sufficient,
but this, plus the anterior probability that God, calling men to live above
nature and sense, would in this manner reveal himself as the Lord
paramount of nature, the breaker through and slighter of the apparitions
of sense ; p^us also the testimony which the particular miracle by its
nature, its fitness, the glory of its circumstances, its intimate coherence
as a redemptive act with the personality of the doer, in Coleridge's
words, " its exact accordance with the ideal of a true miracle is the
reason," gives to the conscience that it is a divine work. The moral
probabilities Hume has altogether overlooked and left out of account,
and when they are admitted, — dynamic in the midst of his merely me-
chanic forces, — they disturb and indeed utterly overbear and destroy
them. His argument is as that fabled giant, unconquerable so long as
it is permitted to rest upon the earth out of which it sprung ; but easily
destroyed when once it is lifted into a higher world. It is not, as Hume
would fain have us to believe, solely an intellectual question ; but it is in
fact the moral condition of men which will ultimately determine whether
they will believe the Scripture miracles or not ; — this, and not the exact
balance of argument on the one side or the other, which will cause this
scale or that to kick the beam. -

He who already counts it likely that God will interfere for the higher
Avelfare of men, — who believes that there is a nobler world-order than*
that in which we live and move, and that it would be the blessing of
blessings for that nobler to intrude into and to make itself felt in the region
of this lower, who has found that here in this world we are bound by
Iheavy laws of nature, of sin, of death, which no powers that we now
Ipossess can break, yet which must be broken if we are truly to live —
he will not find it hard to believe the great miracle, the coming of the
Son of God in the flesh, and his declaration as the Son of God with
power by the resurrection from the dead ; because all the deepest de-
sires and longings of his heart have yearned after such a deliverer,
however little ho may have been able even to dream of so glorious a



THE ASSAULTS ON THE MIRACLES. 63

fulfilment of those longings. And as he believes that greatest miracle, so
will he believe all other miracles, which, as satellites of a lesser bright-
ness, naturally wait on and cluster round and draw their lustre from the
central brightness of that one. He, upon the other hand, to whom this
world is all, who has lost all sense of a higher world with which it
must once have stood connected, who is disturbed with no longings for
aught nobler than it gives, to whom "the kingdom of God" is an unin-
telligible phrase, he will resist, by an intellectual theory if he can, or if
not by that, by instinct, the miracle. Every thing that is in him predis-
poses him to disbelieve it, and the doctrines which it seals. To him
who denies thus any final causes, who does not believe that humanity is
being carried forward under a mightier leading than its own to a certain
and that a glorious end, to whom the history of the world and of man is
but the history of a bark, storm-tost long, and to be wrecked at last,
these moral probabilities are no probabilities ; and this being so, we
should learn betimes how futile it is to argue with men about our faith,
who are the deniers of all upon which any faith can be built.*

5. The Miracles only relatively Miraculous. (Schleiermacher.)

Another way of getting rid of the miraculous element in the miracle,
and one often united with Spinoza's a priori argument against h,\ ex-
plaining the phenomenon of an apparent miracle after that has shown
that a real one was impossible, has been the following. These works it
has been said were relative miracles, — miracles, in other words, for those
in regard of whom they were first done,— ^as when a savage believes
that a telescope has the power of bringing the far instantaneously near, —
but no miracles in themselves, being but in truth the anticipation of dis-
coveries in the kingdom of nature, the works of one who had penetrated
deeper into her mysteries than the men of his own age, and therefore
could wield powers which were unknown, and bring about results which
were inexplicable to them.ij: [t must be evident to the least thoughtful,
that however the fact may be sought to be disguised, the miracle does

" Augustine (De JJtil. Cred., c. 16) : Si enim Dei providentia non prsesidet rebus
humanis, nihil est de religione satagendum. See some valuable remarks on Hume
and on his posiiion in Mill's Logic, v. 2, p. 187, 2nd edit.

t As by Spinoza himself, Ep. 23 : Rogare mihi liceat an nos homunciones tantam
naturae cognitionem habeamus, ut determinare possimus, quousque ejus vis et potentia
se extendit, et quid ejus vim superat?

t Thus Ilase {LebenJesu, p. 108): Sie sind zwar nothwendig begriffen im Natur-
zusammenhange, daher nach diesem iiberall zu forschen ist, aber sie iiberschritten weit
die Kenntniss und Craft der Zeitgenossen.



C4 THE ASSAULTS ON THE MIRACLES.

thus become no miracle,* and the doer of it can no longer be recognized
as one commanding nature in a way specifically different from other
men, but only as one who has a clearer or earlier insight than others
into her laws and the springs of her power. It is strange that any
should ever have been satisfied with this statement, which is indeed only
a decently veiled denial of the miracle altogether. f For thus it has no
longer an eternal significance ; it is no longer a halo which is to sur-
round the head of its worker for ever; with each enlargement of men's
knowledge of nature a star in his crown of glory is extinguished, till at
length it fades altogether into the light of common day — nay, rather de-
clares that it was never any more than a deceitful and meteor fire. For
it implies a serious moral charge against the doer of these works, if he
vents them as wonders, as acts of a higher power than nature's, or
allows others so to receive them, when indeed they are wrought but
according to her ordinary laws. It was well enough, according to the
spirit in which he was working, for one of the conquerors of the New
World to make the Indians, whom he wished to terrify, believe that in
his displeasure with them ho would at a certain hour darken the moon,
when indeed he was but foreknowing an eclipse of that orb : but in the
kingdom of truth to use artifices like these were but by lies to seek to
overturn the kingdom of lies.;}:

Schleiermacher§ endeavors so to guard this view that it shall not

* Mirabile, but not miraculum. Augustine's definition in one place,\Z)e Util. Cred.,
C. 16,) Miraculum voco quicquid arduum aut insolituin supra spem vel facultatem mi-
rantis apparet, is plainly faulty ; it is the definition of the mirabile, not of the miraculum:
Aquinas is more distinct {Sumin. Theol., 1. 1. qu. 110, art. 4): Nonsufficit ad rationem
miraculi, si aliquid fiat praeter ordinem alicujus naturae particularis, sic enim aliquis
miraculum faceret lapidem sursum projiciendo ; ex hoc autem aliquid dicitur miraculum,
quod fit praeter ordinem totius naturae creatae, quo sensu solus Deus facit miracula.
Nobis enim non omnis virtus naturae creatae nota ; cum ergo fit aliquid prteter ordinem
naturae creatae nobis notae per virtutem creatam nobis ignotam, est quidem miraculum
quoad nos, sed non simpliciter.

t J. Miiller (De Mirac. J. C. Nat.et Neccss., par. 2, p. 1,) well characterizes this
scheme : Quid vero ? num de miraculorura necessitate ordiamur h. nolione miraculi tol-
lenda? Si enim ex e&, sententia mirabilia Christi opera e propriis naturae viribus secun-
dum hujus legem, at abscondilum, orta sunf,certum et constans discrimen haec inter et
ilia, quae quotidie in natura fieri videmur, remanet nullum ; omnia fluunt et miscentur ;
qua; rerum natura heri gremio suo operuit, aperit hodie ; quae etiam nunc abscondita
sunt, posthac patcbunt. Si ver6, quod hodie miraculum, eras non erit, et hodie non
est, sed esse tantum videfur.

X Plutarch {De Def. Orac, c. 12) mentions exactly the same trick of a Thessalian
sorceress. A late writer upon the rule of the Jesuits in Paraguay accuses them of
using artifices of the like kind for acquiring and maintaining an influence over their
converts.

§ Der Chrisil. Glauhr, v. 1, p. 100 ; v. 2, p. 135.



THE ASSAULTS ON THE MIRACLES. 65

appear an entire denial of the miracles, to dress it out and prevent its
bareness from being seen, but he does not in fact lift himself above it.
Christ, he says, had not merely this deeper acquaintance with nature \
than any other that ever lived, but stands in a more inward connection \
with nature. He is able to evoke, as from her hidden recesses, her '
most inward sanctuary, powers which none other could; although still
powers vvhich lay in her already. These facts, which seem exceptional, ,