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Occasional Papers by R.W. Church

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The point of view from which the subject of miracles is looked at in
these Lectures is thus stated in the preface. It is plain that two
great questions arise--first, Are miracles possible? next, If they are,
can any in fact be proved? These two branches of the inquiry involve
different classes of considerations. The first is purely philosophical,
and stops the inquiry at once if it can be settled in the negative. The
other calls in also the aid of history and criticism. Both questions
have been followed out of late with great keenness and interest, but it
is the first which at present assumes an importance which it never had
before, with its tremendous negative answer, revolutionising not only
the past, but the whole future of mankind; and it is to the first that
Mr. Mozley's work is mainly addressed.

The difficulty which attaches to miracles in the period of thought
through which we are now passing is one which is concerned not
with their evidence, but with their intrinsic credibility. There
has arisen in a certain class of minds an apparent perception of
the impossibility of suspensions of physical law. This is one
peculiarity of the time; another is a disposition to maintain the
disbelief of miracles upon a religious basis, and in a connection
with a declared belief in the Christian revelation.

The following Lectures, therefore, are addressed mainly to the
fundamental question of the credibility of Miracles, their use and
the evidences of them being only touched on subordinately and
collaterally. It was thought that such an aim, though in itself a
narrow and confined one, was most adapted to the particular need
of the day.

As Mr. Mozley says, various points essential to the whole argument,
such as testimony, and the criterion between true and false miracles,
are touched upon; but what is characteristic of the work is the way in
which it deals with the antecedent objection to the possibility and
credibility of miracles. It is on this part of the subject that the
writer strikes out a line for himself, and puts forth his strength. His
argument may be described generally as a plea for reason against
imagination and the broad impressions of custom. Experience, such
experience as we have of the world and human life, has, in all ages,
been really the mould of human thought, and with large exceptions, the
main unconscious guide and controller of human belief; and in our own
times it has been formally and scientifically recognised as such, and
made the exclusive foundation of all possible philosophy. A philosophy
of mere experience is not tolerant of miracles; its doctrines exclude
them; but, what is of even greater force than its doctrines, the subtle
and penetrating atmosphere of feeling and intellectual habits which
accompanies it is essentially uncongenial and hostile to them. It is
against the undue influence of such results of experience--an influence
openly acting in distinct ideas and arguments, but of which the greater
portion operates blindly, insensibly, and out of sight--that Mr. Mozley
makes a stand on behalf of reason, to which it belongs in the last
resort to judge of the lessons of experience. Reason, as it cannot
create experience, so it cannot take its place and be its substitute;
but what reason can do is to say within what limits experience is
paramount as a teacher; and reason abdicates its functions if it
declines to do so, for it was given us to work upon and turn to account
the unmeaning and brute materials which experience gives us in the
rough. The antecedent objection against miracles is, he says, one of
experience, but not one of reason. And experience, flowing over its
boundaries tyrannically and effacing its limits, is as dangerous to
truth and knowledge as reason once was, when it owned no check in
nature, and used no test but itself.

Mr. Mozley begins by stating clearly the necessity for coming to a
decision on the question of miracles. It cannot remain one of the open
questions, at least of religion. There is, as has been said, a
disposition to pass by it, and to construct a religion without
miracles. The thing is conceivable. We can take what are as a matter of
fact the moral results of Christianity, and of that singular power with
which it has presided over the improvement of mankind, and alloying and
qualifying them with other elements, not on the face of the matter its
products, yet in many cases indirectly connected with its working, form
something which we may acknowledge as a rule of life, and which may
satisfy our inextinguishable longings after the unseen and eternal. It
is true that such a religion presupposes Christianity, to which it owes
its best and noblest features, and that, as far as we can see, it is
inconceivable if Christianity had not first been. Still, we may say
that alchemy preceded chemistry, and was not the more true for being
the step to what is true. But what we cannot say of such a religion is
that it takes the place of Christianity, and is such a religion as
Christianity has been and claims to be. There must ever be all the
difference in the world between a religion which is or professes to be
a revelation, and one which cannot be called such. For a revelation is
a direct work and message of God; but that which is the result of a
process and progress of rinding out the truth by the experience of
ages, or of correcting mistakes, laying aside superstitions and
gradually reducing the gross mass of belief to its essential truth, is
simply on a level with all other human knowledge, and, as it is about
the unseen, can never be verified. If there has been no revelation,
there may be religious hopes and misgivings, religious ideas or dreams,
religious anticipations and trust; but the truth is, there cannot be a
religion in the world. Much less can there be any such thing as
Christianity. It is only when we look at it vaguely in outline, without
having before our mind what it is in fact and in detail, that we can
allow ourselves to think so. There is no transmuting its refractory
elements into something which is not itself; and it is nothing if it is
not primarily a direct message from God. Limit as we may the manner of
this communication, still there remains what makes it different from
all other human possessions of truth, that it was a direct message. And
that, to whatever extent, involves all that is involved in the idea of
miracles. It is, as Mr. Mozley says, inconceivable without miracles.

If, then, a person of evident integrity and loftiness of character
rose into notice in a particular country and community eighteen
centuries ago, who made these communications about himself--that
he had existed before his natural birth, from all eternity, and
before the world was, in a state of glory with God; that he was
the only-begotten Son of God; that the world itself had been made
by him; that he had, however, come down from heaven and assumed
the form and nature of man for a particular purpose--viz. to be
the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world; that he
thus stood in a mysterious and supernatural relation to the whole
of mankind; that through him alone mankind had access to God; that
he was the head of an invisible kingdom, into which he should
gather all the generations of righteous men who had lived in the
world; that on his departure from hence he should return to heaven
to prepare mansions there for them; and, lastly, that he should
descend again at the end of the world to judge the whole human
race, on which occasion all that were in their graves should hear
his voice and come forth, they that had done good unto the
resurrection of life, and they that had done evil unto the
resurrection of damnation,--if this person made these assertions
about himself, and all that was done was to make the assertions,
what would be the inevitable conclusion of sober reason respecting
that person? The necessary conclusion of sober reason respecting
that person would be that he was disordered in his understanding.
What other decision could we come to when a man, looking like one
of ourselves, and only exemplifying in his life and circumstances
the ordinary course of nature, said this about himself, but that
when reason had lost its balance a dream of extraordinary and
unearthly grandeur might be the result? By no rational being could
a just and benevolent life be accepted as proof of such
astonishing announcements. Miracles are the necessary complement
then of the truth of such announcements, which without them are
purposeless and abortive, the unfinished fragments of a design
which is nothing unless it is the whole. They are necessary to the
justification of such announcements, which, indeed, unless they
are supernatural truths, are the wildest delusions. The matter and
its guarantee are the two parts of a revelation, the absence of
either of which neutralises and undoes it.

A revelation, in any sense in which it is more than merely a result of
the natural progress of the human mind and the gradual clearing up of
mistakes, cannot in the nature of things be without miracles, because
it is not merely a discovery of ideas and rules of life, but of facts
undiscoverable without it. It involves _constituent_ miracles, to use
De Quincey's phrase, as part of its substance, and could not claim a
bearing without _evidential_ or _polemic_ ones. No other portion or
form of proof, however it may approve itself to the ideas of particular
periods or minds, can really make up for this. The alleged sinlessness
of the Teacher, the internal evidence from adaptation to human nature,
the historical argument of the development of Christendom, are, as Mr.
Mozley points out, by themselves inadequate, without that further
guarantee which is contained in miracles, to prove the Divine origin of
a religion. The tendency has been of late to fall back on these
attractive parts of the argument, which admit of such varied handling
and expression, and come home so naturally to the feelings of an age so
busy and so keen in pursuing the secrets of human character, and so
fascinated with its unfolding wonders. But take any of them, the
argument from results, for instance, perhaps the most powerful of them
all. "We cannot," as Mr. Mozley says, "rest too much upon it, so long
as we do not charge it with more of the burden of proof than it is in
its own nature equal to--viz. the whole. But that it cannot bear." The
hard, inevitable question remains at the end, for the most attenuated
belief in Christianity as a religion from God--what is the ultimate
link which connects it directly with God? The readiness with which we
throw ourselves on more congenial topics of proof does not show that,
even to our own minds, these proofs could suffice by themselves,
miracles being really taken away. The whole power of a complex argument
and the reasons why it tells do not always appear on its face. It does
not depend merely on what it states, but also on unexpressed,
unanalysed, perhaps unrealised grounds, the real force of which would
at once start forth if they were taken away. We are told of the obscure
rays of the spectrum, rays which have their proof and their effect,
only not the same proof and effect as the visible ones which they
accompany; and the background and latent suppositions of a great
argument are as essential to it as its more prominent and elaborate
constructions. And they show their importance sometimes in a remarkable
and embarrassing way, when, after a long debate, their presence at the
bottom of everything, unnoticed and perhaps unallowed for, is at length
disclosed by some obvious and decisive question, which some person had
been too careless to think of, and another too shy to ask. We may not
care to obtrude miracles; but take them away, and see what becomes of
the argument for Christianity.

It must be remembered that when this part of Christian evidence
comes so forcibly home to us, and creates that inward assurance
which it does, it does this in connection with the proof of
miracles in the background, which though it may not for the time
be brought into actual view, is still known to be there, and to be
ready for use upon being wanted. The _indirect_ proof from results
has the greater force, and carries with it the deeper persuasion,
because it is additional and auxiliary to the _direct_ proof
behind it, upon which it leans all the time, though we may not
distinctly notice and estimate this advantage. Were the evidence
of moral result to be taken rigidly alone as the one single
guarantee for a Divine revelation, it would then be seen that we
had calculated its single strength too highly. If there is a
species of evidence which is directly appropriate to the thing
believed, we cannot suppose, on the strength of the indirect
evidence we possess, that we can do without the direct. But
miracles are the direct credentials of a revelation; the visible
supernatural is the appropriate witness to the invisible
supernatural--that proof which goes straight to the point, and, a
token being wanted of a Divine communication, is that token. We
cannot, therefore, dispense with this evidence. The position that
the revelation proves the miracles, and not the miracles the
revelation, admits of a good qualified meaning; but, taken
literally, it is a double offence against the rule that things are
properly proved by the proper proof of them; for a supernatural
fact _is_ the proper proof of a supernatural doctrine, while a
supernatural doctrine, on the other hand, is certainly _not_ the
proper proof of a supernatural fact.

So that, whatever comes of the inquiry, miracles and revelation must go
together. There is no separating them. Christianity may claim in them
the one decisive proof that could be given of its Divine origin and the
truth of its creed; but, at any rate, it must ever be responsible for
them.

But suppose a person to say, and to say with truth, that his own
individual faith does not rest upon miracles, is he, therefore,
released from the defence of miracles? Is the question of their
truth or falsehood an irrelevant one to him? Is his faith secure
if they are disproved? By no means; if miracles were, although
only at the commencement, necessary to Christianity, and were
actually wrought, and therefore form part of the Gospel record and
are bound up with the Gospel scheme and doctrines, this part of
the structure cannot be abandoned without the sacrifice of the
other too. To shake the authority of one-half of this body of
statement is to shake the authority of the whole. Whether or not
the individual makes _use_ of them for the support of his own
faith, the miracles are there; and if they are there they must be
there either as true miracles or as false ones. If he does not
avail himself of their evidence, his belief is still affected by
their refutation. Accepting, as he does, the supernatural truths
of Christianity and its miracles upon the same report from the
same witnesses, upon the authority of the same documents, he
cannot help having at any rate this negative interest in them. For
if those witnesses and documents deceive us with regard to the
miracles, how can we trust them with regard to the doctrines? If
they are wrong upon the evidences of a revelation, how can we
depend upon their being right as to the nature of that revelation?
If their account of visible facts is to be received with an
explanation, is not their account of doctrines liable to a like
explanation? Revelation, then, even if it does not need the truth
of miracles for the benefit of their proof, still requires it in
order not to be crushed under the weight of their falsehood....
Thus miracles and the supernatural contents of Christianity must
stand or fall together. These two questions--the _nature_ of the
revelation, and the _evidence_ of the revelation--cannot be
disjoined. Christianity as a dispensation undiscoverable by human
reason, and Christianity as a dispensation authenticated by
miracles--these two are in necessary combination. If any do not
include the supernatural character of Christianity in their
definition of it, regarding the former only as one interpretation
of it or one particular traditional form of it, which is separable
from the essence--for Christianity as thus defined the support of
miracles is not wanted, because the moral truths are their own
evidence. But Christianity cannot be maintained as a revelation
undiscoverable by human reason, a revelation of a supernatural
scheme for man's salvation, without the evidence of miracles.

The question of miracles, then, of the supernatural disclosed in the
world of nature, is the vital point for everything that calls itself
Christianity. It may be forgotten or disguised; but it is vain to keep
it back and put it out of sight. It must be answered; and if we settle
it that miracles are incredible, it is idle to waste our time about
accommodations with Christianity, or reconstitutions of it. Let us be
thankful for what it has done for the world; but let us put it away,
both name and thing. It is an attempt after what is in the nature of
things impossible to man--a revealed religion, authenticated by God.
The shape which this negative answer takes is, as Mr. Mozley points
out, much more definite now than it ever was. Miracles were formerly
assailed and disbelieved on mixed and often confused grounds; from
alleged defect of evidence, from their strangeness, or because they
would be laughed at. Foes and defenders looked at them from the outside
and in the gross; and perhaps some of those who defended them most
keenly had a very imperfect sense of what they really were. The
difficulty of accepting them now arises not mainly from want of
external evidence, but from having more keenly realised what it is to
believe a miracle. As Mr. Mozley says--

How is it that sometimes when the same facts and truths have been
before men all their lives, and produced but one impression, a
moment comes when they look different from what they did? Some
minds may abandon, while others retain, their fundamental position
with respect to those facts and truths, but to both they look
stranger; they excite a certain surprise which they did not once
do. The reasons of this change then it is not always easy for the
persons themselves to trace, but of the result they are conscious;
and in some this result is a change of belief.

An inward process of this kind has been going on recently in many
minds on the subject of miracles; and in some with the latter
result. When it came to the question--which every one must sooner
or later put to himself on this subject--Did these things really
take place? Are they matters of fact?--they have appeared to
themselves to be brought to a standstill, and to be obliged to own
an inner refusal of their whole reason to admit them among the
actual events of the past. This strong repugnance seemed to be the
witness of its own truth, to be accompanied by a clear and vivid
light, to be a law to the understanding, and to rule without
appeal the question of fact.... But when the reality of the past
is once apprehended and embraced, then the miraculous occurrences
in it are realised too; being realised they excite surprise, and
surprise, when it comes in, takes two directions--it either makes
belief more real, or it destroys belief. There is an element of
doubt in surprise; for this emotion arises _because_ an event is
strange, and an event is strange because it goes counter to and
jars with presumption. Shall surprise, then, give life to belief
or stimulus to doubt? The road of belief and unbelief in the
history of some minds thus partly lies over common ground; the two
go part of their journey together; they have a common perception
in the insight into the real astonishing nature of the facts with
which they deal. The majority of mankind, perhaps, owe their
belief rather to the outward influence of custom and education
than to any strong principle of faith within; and it is to be
feared that many, if they came to perceive how wonderful what they
believed was, would not find their belief so easy and so
matter-of-course a thing as they appear to find it. Custom throws
a film over the great facts of religion, and interposes a veil
between the mind and truth, which, by preventing wonder,
intercepts doubt too, and at the same time excludes from deep
belief and protects from disbelief. But deeper faith and disbelief
throw off in common the dependence on mere custom, draw aside the
interposing veil, place themselves face to face with the contents
of the past, and expose themselves alike to the ordeal of wonder.

It is evident that the effect which the visible order of nature
has upon some minds is, that as soon as they realise what a
miracle is, they are stopped by what appears to them a simple
sense of its impossibility. So long as they only believe by habit
and education, they accept a miracle without difficulty, because
they do not realise it as an event which actually took place in
the world; the alteration of the face of the world, and the whole
growth of intervening history, throw the miracles of the Gospel
into a remote perspective in which they are rather seen as a
picture than real occurrences. But as soon as they see that, if
these miracles are true, they once really happened, what they feel
then is the apparent sense of their impossibility. It is not a
question of evidence with them: when they realise, e.g., that
our Lord's resurrection, if true, was a visible fact or
occurrence, they have the seeming certain perception that it is an
impossible occurrence. "I cannot," a person says to himself in
effect, "tear myself from the type of experience and join myself
to another. I cannot quit order and law for what is eccentric.
There is a repulsion between such facts and my belief as strong as
that between physical substances. In the mere effort to conceive
these amazing scenes as real ones, I fall back upon myself and
upon that type of reality which the order of nature has impressed
upon me."

The antagonism to the idea of miracles has grown stronger and more
definite with the enlarged and more widely-spread conception of
invariable natural law, and also, as Mr. Mozley points out, with that
increased power in our time of realising the past, which is not the
peculiarity of individual writers, but is "part of the thought of the
time." But though it has been quickened and sharpened by these
influences, it rests ultimately on that sense which all men have in
common of the customary and regular in their experience of the world.
The world, which we all know, stands alone, cut off from any other; and
a miracle is an intrusion, "an interpolation of one order of things
into another, confounding two systems which are perfectly distinct."
The broad, deep resistance to it which is awakened in the mind when we
look abroad on the face of nature is expressed in Emerson's phrase--"A
miracle is a monster. It is not one with the blowing clouds or the
falling rain." Who can dispute it? Yet the rejoinder is obvious, and
has often been given--that neither is man. Man, who looks at nature and
thinks and feels about its unconscious unfeeling order; man, with his
temptations, his glory, and his shame, his heights of goodness, and
depths of infamy, is not one with those innocent and soulless forces so
sternly immutable--"the blowing clouds and falling rain." The two awful
phenomena which Kant said struck him dumb--the starry heavens, and
right and wrong--are vainly to be reduced to the same order of things.
Nothing can be stranger than the contrast between the rigid, inevitable
sequences of nature, apparently so elastic only because not yet
perfectly comprehended, and the consciousness of man in the midst of
it. Nothing can be stranger than the juxtaposition of physical law and
man's sense of responsibility and choice. Man is an "insertion," an
"interpolation in the physical system"; he is "insulated as an anomaly
in the midst of matter and material law." Mr. Mozley's words are
striking:--

The first appearance, then, of man in nature was the appearance of
a new being in nature; and this fact was relatively to the then
order of things miraculous; no more physical account can be given
of it than could be given of a resurrection to life now. What more
entirely new and eccentric fact, indeed, can be imagined than a
human soul first rising up amidst an animal and vegetable world?
Mere consciousness--was not that of itself a new world within the
old one? Mere knowledge--that nature herself became known to a
being within herself, was not that the same? Certainly man was not
all at once the skilled interpreter of nature, and yet there is
some interpretation of nature to which man as such is equal in
some degree. He derives an impression from the sight of nature
which an animal does not derive; for though the material spectacle
is imprinted on its retina, as it is on man's, it does not see
what man sees. The sun rose, then, and the sun descended, the
stars looked down upon the earth, the mountains climbed to heaven,
the cliffs stood upon the shore, the same as now, countless ages
before a single being existed who _saw_ it. The counterpart of
this whole scene was wanting--the understanding mind; that mirror
in which the whole was to be reflected; and when this arose it was
a new birth for creation itself, that it became _known_,--an image
in the mind of a conscious being. But even consciousness and
knowledge were a less strange and miraculous introduction into the
world than conscience.