were deeply laid in the first constitution of the law ; andj;iow, at this
turning point of the world's history, by the providence of God, who had
arranged all things from the beginning of the world for the glory of his
Son, did at his bidding emerge. Yet single and without analogy as
they were, they belonged to the law as truly as when the aloe puts forth
its flower, or is said to put it forth, once in its hundred years, it yet does
this according to its own innermost nature. For ninety and nine years
it would have seemed to men not to be the nature of the plant to flower,
yet the flowering of the hundredth year is only the coming out of its
truest nature.
We see in this scheme that attempt to reconcile and atone between \
revelation and science, which was the great purpose of Schleiermacher's \
writings. Yet it is impossible to accept the reconciliation which he of-
fers ; as it is really made, however the sacrifice may be concealed, alto-
gether at the expense of the miracle ā which, in fact, is no miracle, if it
lay in nature already, if it was not a new thing, if it was only the evok- \
ing of old and latent forces in nature, not the bringing in of the new
powers.^f a higher world, if the mysterious processes and powers by .
which those works were brought about, are only undiscovered, not undis-
coverable, by the efforts of human inquiry. '
Augustine has sometimes been quoted as maintaining this scheme of
the relatively miraculous, but altogether with injustice. It is quite true
that, in arguing with the heathen, he does demand why they refuse to
give credence to the Scripture miracles, when they believe so much that
can in no way be explained by any laws which their experience gave
them, and adduces some curious but actual, and some also entirely fab-
ulous, ffhenomena of the natural world, such as fountains cold by night
and hot by day ā others which extinguished a lighted torch, but set on
fire an extinguished one ā stones which, once kindled, could not be
quenched ā magnets which attracted iron, and other wonders, to which
he and they gave credence alike.* But it is not herein his meaning to
draw down the miracles to a level with natural appearances, hitherto
unexplained, but capable of, and waiting their explanation. Rather in
* De Civ. Dei, 1. 21, c. 5.
c-M-
G6 THE ASSAULTS ON THE MIRACLES.
these natural appearances he sees direct interpositions of the Divine
Power ; he docs not reckon that any added knowledffe will bring thenn
under laws of human experience, and therefore he lifts them up to a
level with the miracles. He did not merge the miracles in nature, but
drew up a portion of nature into the region of the miraculous. However
greatly as a natural philosopher he may have been here at fault, yet all
extenuating of the miracle was far from him ; indeed he ever refers it to
the omnipotence of God as to its ultimate ground.*
When he affirms that much seems to be against nature, but nothing
truly is, this may sound at first like the same statement of the miracu-
lous being what it is merely in relation to certain persons and certain
stages of our knowledge of this outward world. But it is only in sound
that it is similar. He has quite a different thought of nature from any
that will allow such to be his meaning. Nature is for him but the out-
ward expression of the will of God ; and all which he affirms is, that
' ^ji- , God never can be contrary to God ; that there can be no collision of his
wills ; that whatever comes in is as true an order, the result of as real
a law, as that which gives place to it; and this must needs be, since it
%JSh>^r has come in according to the will of God, which will is itself the highest
^^L
iT ivi-Ā«^ "T - %^' 6. The Rationalistic. (Paultjs.)
."^^'x^.' ... . .
y^ ^ f^' The rise of rationalism ā which term I use for convenience sake, and
without at all consenting to its fitness, for it is as absurd a misn.omer as
when that in the last century was called /ree-thinking, which was as-
'^ suredly to end in the slavery of all thought ā the rise of rationalism
^ ' seems to have been in this manner ; ā that it was an escape from the
" ^^ conclusions of mere Deists concerning Christ's person and his Word,
Kf*^ upon the part of those who had indeed abandoned the true faith of the
^ Ov^**, Church concerning its Head ; yet were not willing to give up the last
"Q^ lingering vestiges of their respect for Holy Scripture and for him of
whom Scripture testified. They with whom this system grew up could
^ , w no longer believe the miracles, they could no longer believe t^ie great
miracle in which all other are easily included, a Son of God, in the
J**- Ā» De Civ. Dei, I 21, c. 7.
, t See the quotation from Augustine, p. 21. That lie had clearly in his eye the es-
^*'*^; sential property of a miracle, how it should be the coming in of a new power of God
-tl* into nature, is plain from innumerable passages such as this {De Civ. Dei, 1. 10, c 16) :
. Miraculi, .... non ea dico quae intervallis temporum occultis ipsius mundi cau.-sis ve-
rumtamen sub divinft, providentia constitutis et ordinatis rtionstrosa contingunt, qualea
j^ 6unt inusitati partus animalium, et coclo terrSque reram insolita facies.
THE ASSAULTS ON THE MIRACLES. 67
Church's sense of the words ; they, too, were obliged to fall in with the
first principles of the infidel adversary, that any who professed to accom-
plish miracles was either self-deceived or a deceiver, even as they who
recorded such as having happened stood in the same dilemma.
But what if it could be shown that Christ never professed to do any
miracles, nor-the sacred historians to record any? if it could be shown
that the sacred narratives, rightly read, were against any such supposi-
tion, and that it was only the lovers of, and cravers after, the marvellous,
who had found any miracles there ; ā the books themselves having been
intended to record merely natural events? Were not this an escape
from the whole difficulty ? The divine, it is true, in these narratives
would disappear; that however they did not desire to save; that they
had already given up: but the human would be vindicated; the good
faith, the honesty, the entire credibility of the Scripture historians, would
stand fast. And in Christ himself there would be still that to which they
could look up with reverence and love ; they could still believe in him
as the truthful founder of a religion which they did not desire to re-
nounce altogether. No longer being, as the Church declared him, the
worker of wonders, clothed with power from on high, nor professing to
be that which he was not, as the blasphemers affirmed, he would still
abide for them in the fulness of his beneficent activity, as he went up
and down the world, healing and blessing, though with only the same
means which other men had at command.
Their attempt was certainly a bold one ; to suffer the sacred text to
stand, and yet to find no miracles in it, did appear a hopeless task ; for
this is that which altogether distinguishes this system from later mythic
theories, that it does accept the New Testament as entirely historic ; it
does appeal to the word of Scripture as the ground and proof of its asser-
tions ; its great assertion being that the Evangelists did not intend to re-
late miracles, but ordinary facts of every-day experience, works done by
Jesus, now of friendship and humanity, now of medical skill, now also of
chance and good fortune, or other actions which, from one cause or
other, seemed to them of sufficient significance to be worth recording.
Thus Christ, they say, did not heal an impotent man at Bethesda, but
only detected an impostor ; he did not change water into wine at Cana,
but brought in a new supply of wine when that of the house was ex-
hausted ; he did not multiply the loaves, but, distributing his own and
his disciples' little store, set an example of liberality which was quickly
followed by others who had like stores, and in this way there was suffi-
cient for all. He did not cure blindness otherwise than any skilful
oculist might do it ; ā which indeed, they observe, is clear ; for with his
own lips he declared that he needed light for so delicate an operation ā
68 THE ASSAULTS ON THE MIRACLES.
" I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day ; the night
comelh when no man can work ;" (John ix. 4) ; he did not walk on the
sea, but on the shore ; he did not tell Peter to find a piece of money in
the fish's mouth, but to catch as many fish as would sell for that money;
he did not raise Lazarus from the dead, but guessed, from the nature of
his disease, that he was only in a swoon, and happily found it so.
Tiiis entire scheme, which many had already tried here and there,
but which first appeared full blown and consistently carried through in
the Commentary of Dr. Paulus,* did not long survive in its first vigor.
It perished under blows received from many quarters; for, not to speak
of a reviving ftiith in the hearts of many, that God could do more than
man could understand, even the children of this world directed against
it the keenest shafts of their ridicule. Every philologist, nay, every
man who believed that language had any laws, was its natural enemy,
for it stood only by the violation of all these laws. Even the very ad-
\ Vance of unbelief was fatal to it, for in it there was a slight lingering
\ respect to the Word of God ; moved by which respect it sought forcibly
to bring that Word into harmony with its theory, as a better alternative
than the renouncing the authority of that Word altogether. But when
men arose, who did not shrink from the other alternative, who had no
desire to hold by that Word at all, then there was nothing to hinder
them from at once coming back to the common-sense view of the subject,
and one which no art could long succeed in concealing, namely, that
these Evangelists did intend to record supernatural events. Those to
whom the Scriptures were no authority had at least this advantage, that
they were not under the temptation to twist and pervert them, so to bring
them into apparent accordance with their systems.
This scheme of interpretation, thus assailed from so many sides,
and being merely artificial, quickly succumbed. And now, even in
the land of its birlh, it has entirely perished ; on the one side a deeper
faith, on the other a more rampant unbelief, have encroached on and
wholly swallowed up the territory which it occupied. It is indeed so
little the form in which an assault on Revelation will ever again clothe
itself, and may be so entirely I'egarded as one of the cast-off garments
of unbelief, 'now despised and trodden under foot even of those who
once glorified themselves in it, that I have not alluded, save very
slightly and passingly, to it in the body of my book. Once or twice I
have noticed its curiosities of interpretation, its substitutions, as they
have been happily termed, of philological for historical wonders. The
reader who is curious to see how Dr. Paulus and his compeers arrived
Ā» First published in 1800.
THE ASSAULTS ON THE MIRACLES. 69
at the desired result of exhausting the narrative of its miraculous
element, will find specimens in the notes upon the feeding of the five
thousand, and the finding of the stater in the fish's mouth.
7. The Historico-Critical. (Woolston, Strauss.)
The last assault upon the miracles is that which may be not unfitly-
termed the historico-critical. It affirms that they are so full of contra-
dictions, psychological and other improbabilities, discrepancies between
the accounts of one Evangelist and another, that upon close handling
they crumble to pieces, and are unable to stand as history. Among
the English deists of the last century, Woolston especially addressed
himself in this way to the undermining the historic credit of these narra-
tives. He was brought to this evil work in a singular way, and abides
a mournful example of the extremes whither spite and mortified vanity
would carry a weak man, though, as all testimonies concur in acknow-
ledging, at one time of estimable conversation, and favorably known
for his temperate life, his charity to tlie poor, and other evidences of an
inward piety. Born in 1669, and educated at Cambridge, where he
became a fellow of Sidney, he first attracted unfavorable notice by a
certain crack-brained enthusiasm for the allegorical interpretation of
Scripture, which he carried to all lengths. Whether he owed this to
the works of Philo and Origen, or whether he only strengthened and
nourished an already existing predilection by the study of their writings,
is not exactly clear ; but it had become a sort of " fixed idea " in his
mind. At first, although just offence was taken at more than one
publication of his, in which his allegorical system was carried out at
the expense apparently of the historic truth of the Scripture, yet as
it was not considered that he meant any mischief, as it was not likely
that he would exert any very wide influence, he was suffered to follow
his own way, unvisited by any serious censures from the higlier autho-
rities of the Church. Meeting however with opposition in many quar-
ters, and unable to carry the clergy with him, he broke out at last in
unmeasured invectives against them, and in a virulent pamphlet* styled
them " slaves of the letter," "Baal-priests," "blind leaders of the
blind," and was on account of this pamphlet deprived of his fellowship
(1721).
* In his Letter to the Rev. Dr. Bennett upon tJiis question, Whether the Quaker^
do not the nearest of any other sect resemble the primitive Christians in principle
and practices. By Aristobulus. London, 1720.
70 THE ASSAULTS ON THE MIRACLES.
From this time it seemed as if an absolute fury possessed him : not
merely the Church, but Christianity itself, was the object of his attack.
Whether his allegorical system of interpretation had indeed ended, as
it was very likely to do, in depriving him of all faith in God's Word,
and he retained his professed veneration for its spiritual meaning only
that he might, under shelter of that, more securely advance to the
assault of ils historical foundations, or wiiethcr he did still retain this
in trutii, it was now at any rate only subordinate and subservient to his
purposes of revenge. To these he was ready to offer up every other
consideration. When then in that great controversy whicii was raging
in the early part of the last century, the defenders of revealed religion
intrenched themselves behind the miracles, as defences from which
they could never be driven, as being irrefragable proofs of the divine
origin of Christianity, Woolston undertook, by the engines of his alle-
gorical interpretation, to dislodge them from these also, and with this
aim published his notorious Letters on the Miracles* It is his manner
* These six Letters, first published as separate pamphlets between 1727-29, had
an immense circulation, and were read with the greatest avidity. Voltaire, who was
in England just at the time of their publication, says that thirty thousand copies of
them were sold, and that large packets of them were forwarded to the American
colonies. In the copy I am using, the different letters range from the third to the
sixth edition, and this almost immediately after their first publication. Indeed, Swift
in his lines on his own death, written 1731, speaks of something much more tiian this,
and quite consents with Voltaire's account of the immense popularity which they
enjoyed. He makes Lintot, the bookseller, say, ā
" Here's Woolston's tracts, the twelfth edition,
'Tis read by every politician :
The county members when in town
To all their boroughs send them down :
You never met a thing so smart ;
The cou lie ^ iuive ihem all by heart ;" &c.
Their circulation was so great, and their mischief so wide, that above sixty answers
were published within a very short period. Gibson, then Bfshop of London, addressed
five pastoral letters to his diocese against them ; and other chief divines of England, as
Sherlock, Pearce, Smallbrooke, found it needful to answer them. Of the replies which
I have seen, Smallbrooke's (Bishop of St. David's) Vindication of our Saviour's
Miracles, 1729, is the most learned and the best. But one cannot help being painfully
struck upon this and other occasions with the exceeding poverty and feebleness of the
antideistical literature of England in that day of need ; the low grounds which it
occupies ; the little enthusiasm which the cause awakened in its defenders. With
regard to Woolston himself, the paltry shifts with which he sought to evade the con-
sequences of his blasphemy, ā and there is an infinite meanness in the way in which
he professes, while blaspheming against the works of Christ, to be only assailing them
in the letter that he rnay vindicate them in the spirit, ā tliis and other such poor eva-
THE ASSAULTS ON THE MIRACLES. 71
in these to take certain miracles which Christ did, or which were
wrought in relation of him, two or three in a letter, and he then seeks
to show that, understood in their literal sense, they contain such ex-
travagancies, contradictions, and the like, that we can never suppose
that Christ actually did them, or that the Evangelists, as honest men,
men who had the credit of their Lord at heart, intended to record them
as having been actually wrought, or desired us to receive them other-
wise than as allegories, spiritual truths clothed in the form of historic
events. The enormous difference between himself and those early
Church writers, to whom he appeals, and whose views he professes to
be only re-asserting, ā a difference of which it is impossible that he
could have been ignorant, ā is this : they said, This history, being real,
has also a deeper ideal sense; he upon the contrary, Since it is im-
possible that this history can be real, therefore it must have a spiritual
significance. They build upon the establishment of the historic sense,
he upon its ruins.*
When he wants to utter grosser blasphemies than in his own person
he dares, or than would befit the standing point which he has assumed
from whence to assault Revelation, he introduces a Jewish rabbi, and
suffers him to speak without restraint, himself only observing, " This is
what an adversary might say ; to these accusations we Christians ex-
pose ourselves so long as we cleave to the historic letter ; we only can
escape from thence by forsaking that, and holding fast the allegorical
meaning alone." I shall not (as it is not needful) offend the Christian
reader by the reproduction of any of his coarser ribaldry, which has
sufficient cleverness to have made it mischievous enough, but will en-
deavor to show by a single example the manner in which he seeks to
make weak points in the Scripture narratives. He is dealing with the
miracle of the man sick with the palsy, who was let through the broken,
roof of the house where Jesus was, and thereupon healed. (Mark ii.
sions failed to protect him from the pains and penalties of the law. He was fined
twenty-five pounds for each of his Letlers, sentenced to be imprisoned for a year,
and was not to be released till he could find sureties for his good behaviour. These he
was not able to procure, and he died in prison in 1731.
* Their canon was ever this, which Gregory the Great uttered when he said {Horn.
40 in Evang) : Tunc namque allegorise fructus suaviter carpitur, cum prius per histo-
rian! in veritatis radice solidatur ; and they abound in such earnest warnings as this
ā¢ of Augustine's : Ante omnia tamen, fi'atres, hoc in nomine Dei admonemus . . . ut
quando auditis exponi Sacras Scripturas narrantes quae gesta sunt, prius illud quod
lectum est credatis sic gestum quomodo ledum est, ne subtracto fiandamento rei gestae,
quasi in aere quseretis aedificare. Compare what he says on the history of Jonah, Ep.
102, qu. 6, Ā§ 33.
72 THE ASSAULTS ON THE MIRACLES.
1 ā 12.) But how, he asks, should there have been such a crowd to
hear Jesus preach at Capernaum, where he was so well known and so
little admired ? and then, if there was that crowd, what need of such
urgent haste ? it was but waiting an hour or two, till the multitude had
dispersed ; " I should have thought their faith might have worked pa-
tience." Why did not Jesus tell the people to make way ? would they
not have done so readily, since to see a miracle was the very thing they
wanted ? How should the pulleys, ropes, and ladder have been at hand
to haul him up ? How strange, that they should have had hatchets and
hammers ready to break through the spars and rafters of the roof, and
stranger still that the good man of the house should have endured, with-
out a remonstrance, his property to be so much injured ! How did those
below escape without injury from the falling tiles and plaster ? And if
there were a door in the roof, as some, to mitigate the difficulty, tell us,
why did not Jesus go up to the roof, and there speak the healing word,
and so spare all*his trouble and damage and danger ?
But enough ; ā it is evident that this style of objection could be infi-
nitely multiplied in regard to any history. There is always something
else that might have been done besides the thing that was done. It is
after this taking to pieces of the narrative, this triumphant showing, as he
affirms, that it cannot stand in the letter, that he proceeds, as a sort of
salvo, to say it may very well stand in its spirit, as an allegory and
symbol of something else ; and that so, and so only it was intended.
This is wiiat he otfers by way of this higher meaning in the present
case : By the palsy of this man is signified " a dissoluteness of morals
and unsteadiness of faith and principles, which is the condition of man-
kind at present, who want Jesus' help for the cure of it" The four
bearers are the four Evangelists, " on whose faith and doctrine mankind
is to be carried unto Christ." The house to the top of which he is to
be carried is " the intellectual edifice of the world, otherwise called
Wisdom's house." But " to the sublime sense of the Scriptures, called
the top of the house, is man to be taken ; he is not to abide in the low
and literal sense of them." Then if he dare to "open the house of
wisdom, he will presently be admitted to the presence and knowledge
of Jesus."*
* Fourth Discourse on the ^Tirades, pp. 51 ā 67. Strauss's own judgment of his
predecessor in this line very much agrees with that given above. He says, " Wool-
ston's whole presentation of the case veers between these alternatives. If we are de- '
termined to hold fast the miracles as actual history, then they forfeit all divine charac-
ter, and sink down into unworthy tricks and common frauds. Will we, on the other
hand, not let go the divine in these narrations, then must we, with the sacrifice of
their historic character, understand them only as the setting forth, in historic guise, of
THE ASSAULTS ON THE MIRACLES. 73
Not very different is Strauss's own method of proceeding. He
wields the same weapons of destructive criticism, thinking to show how
each history will crumble at his touch ā will remain a heap of improba-
bilities, which no one can any longer maintain. It needs not to say
that he is a more accomplished adversary than Woolston, with far
ampler resources at command, ā more, if not of his own, yet of other
men's learning; inheriting as he does all the negative criticism of the
last hundred years, of an epoch, that is, which has been sufficiently
fruitful in this kind. Here indeed is in great part the secret of the vast
sensation wliich his work for a season caused : all that was scattered up
and down in many books he has brought together and gathered into a
single focus ; all which other men had spoken faintly and with reserve,
he with a greater boldness has spoken out ; he has dared to give utter-
ance to all which was trembling upon the lips of numbers, but which,
fnom one cause or another, they had shrunk from openly declaring.
Yet as regards the treatment of the miracles, ā for with that only we have
now to do, ā there are differences between him and Woolston. He
unites in his own person the philosophical and the critical assailant of
these; for he starts from the philosophic ground of Spinoza, that the .
miracle is impossible, since the laws of nature are the only and the ne- /
cessary laws of God ; and he then proceeds to the critical examination
of the Gospel miracles in detail ; but of course in each case to the trial