Part 5 (2/2)

But in the New Testament we stand on different ground. And we have here first the evidence which Paley has put together to show that the early Christians spent their lives and finally surrendered their lives as witnesses to a Gospel which included miracles both among its evidences and as part of its substance. It is not possible to get rid of miracles nor the belief in miracles from the history of the Apostles. They testify to our Lord's Resurrection as to an actual fact, and make it the basis of all their preaching. They testify to our Lord's miracles as part of the character of His life. It is necessary to maintain that they were mere fanatics with no claim to respect but rather to the pity which we feel for utterly ignorant goodness, if we are to hold that no miracle was ever wrought by our Lord. It is difficult to maintain even their honesty if they preached the Resurrection of our Lord without any basis of fact to rest on. No man who is not determined to uphold an opinion at all hazards can question that St. Paul and St. Peter believed that our Lord rose from the dead, and that they died for and in that belief.

But, in the second place, behind the Apostles stands our Lord Himself, and whatever may be said of the doc.u.ments that compose the New Testament, they are at any rate sufficient to show that our Lord was universally believed by His disciples to have the power of working miracles and to have often worked them. There is no hesitation in regard to this; no hint of any doubt. But not only so, there is no hint of any disclaimer on His part. He must have known whether He could work miracles or not. He must have known that His disciples believed Him to possess the power. There is not the slightest trace of His ever having implied that this was a misconception. He did sometimes disclaim what was ascribed to Him, even when what was ascribed to Him was truly His, but was ascribed to Him without real knowledge of what it implied. 'Why callest thou Me good? There is none good but One, that is, G.o.d,' we DO find. But 'Why askest thou Me to do this? There is none that can do this but One, that is G.o.d,' we do NOT find. It is plain that He accepted the belief that a.s.signed Him powers above those of other men--powers given Him by His Father in heaven--and never discouraged it. Nay, He demanded it. Take the lowest ground, and admit for argument's sake that the New Testament contains a legendary element, and still you cannot cut the miracles out of the Gospels and Epistles without altering them beyond recognition. The Jesus Christ presented to us in the New Testament would become a different person if the miracles were removed. And if He claimed to possess and exercise this power, the evidence becomes the evidence of One Who must have known and Whom we cannot disbelieve.

And this claim, which He has thus made, and which was thus accepted by His disciples, is corroborated by the power, different in form but similar in kind, which He exerted then on the men of His own day, and has ever since continued to exert on all succeeding generations. The first disciples were under His absolute dominion. They preached Christ and not themselves. They referred everything to Him, and professed to have no power but from Him. St. Paul with all his genius and marvellous power of influence, yet professes to be nothing without Christ and to be everything in Christ. Our Lord left no writing behind Him, but committed His Revelation to His Apostles, and we only know Him through them. But they are not like ordinary disciples of a great teacher; philosophers succeeding a philosopher; prophets succeeding a prophet. To no one of them does it occur for a moment to teach anything except as from Him.

St. Paul gives advice sometimes which he does not profess to be giving by our Lord's command, but when he does so, he puts the mark of his own inferiority on what he says, and claims for it no such authority as belongs to a word from Christ. A word from Christ was final on all subjects.

And this power over men has never weakened from that day to this. There is no other power like it in the world. Science proceeds in far the majority of cases by trial of some theory as a working hypothesis. Such too has been the procedure of Christian Faith. Trust Christ; stake your happiness on Him; stake your hope of satisfying all spiritual aspirations on Him; stake your power of winning the victory over temptation on Him--this is the exhortation of Apostle, and martyr, and saint, and evangelist, and pastor, and teacher. And those who have thus tried the strength of the Christian hypothesis have not failed. The Christian Church has been stained with many a blot. Ill deeds have been wrought in the name of Christ. Evil laws have been pa.s.sed. Strange superst.i.tions have prevailed. But no other body can show such saints, no other body can produce so great a cloud of witnesses. It is certain that the lives and the deaths, the characters and the aims, of those who have trusted their all to Christ have made them what He bade them be, the salt of the earth. And they testify with one voice that they know no other power which has upheld them but the power of Christ whom they have taken for their Lord. Others have sometimes been set up as in some sort rivals to Him as teachers or as examples; but here there is no rival even pretended. In no other man have men been called on to believe as a living present power, able to give strength and victory in the conflicts of the soul. The Church, too, has pa.s.sed through times of spiritual depression, we may almost say of degradation. And in the worst of times within the Church there has always remained a wonderful recuperative power, which has shaken off inconsistencies and defects in the past, and will do so yet more in the future. But this recuperative power has always shown itself in one form, and in one form only, namely, a return to Christ and to trust in Him, a trust which has never been falsified.

The martyrdom of our Lord's disciples is enough to prove that belief in His supernatural powers and in His exercise of those powers was no gradual growth of later times, but from the very beginning rooted in the convictions of those who must have known the truth. The character of our Lord as revealed in the Gospels makes it impossible to disbelieve His claims whatever they may be. His power attested by generations of believers ever since corroborates those claims by the persistent evidence of eighteen centuries.

Against this evidence what is to be said?

It is said that the evidence for the uniformity of nature is so overwhelming that nothing can set it aside. And further it is said, that, even if it be conceded that it might be set aside, no evidence sufficient for the purpose has yet been produced.

Now to deal with this second a.s.sertion first, we must ask what is the nature of the evidence that would be deemed sufficient? If the inquirer does not believe that G.o.d created and still governs the world, a.s.suredly no evidence will ever be sufficient to convince him that G.o.d has worked a miracle. The existence of G.o.d is certainly not to be proved by His interference with nature. Had He desired to reveal Himself to us primarily in that way, He would have wrought many more miracles than we now know of, and would have kept our faith alive by perpetual and unmistakeable manifestations of His presence and power. But He has not so willed. He has made our belief in Him rest mainly on the voice within ourselves, in order that we might walk by faith and not by sight. It will be a hopeless task to convince men that there is a G.o.d by pointing, not to His creation but to His interference with creation. But if a man do believe there is a G.o.d, what kind of evidence ought he to expect to show him that G.o.d has interfered in the course of the creation?

In the first place, he must not expect that the physical evidence, that is the miraculous evidence, for Revelation should be of such a character as to stand above the spiritual evidence. Just as the fundamental evidence for the existence of a G.o.d is to be found in the voice of conscience, and the arguments from design and from the order and beauty and visible purpose of the creation are secondary--corroborative not demonstrative--so too the primary evidence of a Revelation from G.o.d must be found in the harmony of that Revelation with the voice of conscience, and only the secondary and corroborative evidence is to be looked for in miracles. And in both cases the reason is the same. For it is not G.o.d's purpose to win the intellectually gifted, the wise, the cultivated, the clever, but to win the spiritually gifted, the humble, the tender-hearted, the souls that are discontented with their own shortcomings, the souls that have a capacity for finding happiness in self-sacrifice. It would defeat the purpose of the Revelation made to us if the hard-headed should have an advantage in accepting it over the humble-minded. The evidence must be such that spiritual character shall be an element in the acceptance of it. There would be a contradiction, if the faculty whereby we mainly recognised G.o.d were the spiritual faculty, and the faculty whereby we mainly recognised His Revelation were the scientific faculty.

And, in the second place, we have no right to expect that the evidence for miracles wrought in one age should be such evidence as properly belongs to another age. It is sometimes urged that the evidence supplied by the testimony of the early Christians is of little value because it was never cross-examined. No such precautions surrounded the evidence as would now be required to give any value to evidence of similar events.

The witnesses gave up their lives to attest what they taught; but there was no one to scrutinise what they a.s.serted. St. Paul's evidence on our Lord's Resurrection cannot now be put to the test of searching questions. But to make such objections as these is to make what is on the face of it an absurd demand. It is to ask that the scientific processes of the nineteenth century should have been antic.i.p.ated in the first, that men should be miraculously guided to supply a kind of evidence which would be utterly superfluous at the time in order to be convincing eighteen hundred years afterwards. This would indeed have put the miraculous incidents in the New Testament narrative altogether out of place, and made the miracles more important than the Revelation which they were worked to introduce.

Now, if these two conditions are borne in mind, it is difficult to see what better evidence could be obtained of a miraculous life than we possess concerning the life of our Lord.

The moral and spiritual evidence is His own character which intentionally overshadows all the rest, and it is inconceivable that He should have made a false claim. And the material evidence is the testimony of men who freely gave their lives in proof of what they said.

Nor has anything yet been said or written to shake Paley's argument on this point.

But, if we pa.s.s on to the other objection, that no evidence can ever be sufficient to prove a miracle because the evidence for the uniformity of nature is so overwhelming, we can only see in such an a.s.sertion an instance of that inability to get out of an accustomed groove against which Science has perpetually to guard. In Science the uniformity of nature is so indispensable a postulate, that without it we cannot stir a step. And if the student of Science is to admit a breach, it can only be by stepping outside of his science for the time and conceiving the possibility that there is some other truth beside scientific truth, and some other kind of evidence beside scientific evidence. We have all heard of the need of guarding against the bondage in which custom binds the mind. We have heard of the student who when first he saw a locomotive looked perseveringly for the horses that impelled it, because he had never known, and consequently could not imagine any other mode of producing such motion. But this danger attends not only the separate investigations which Science makes into phenomena; it attends Science as a whole. And it is necessary repeatedly to insist on the fact that Science has not proved and cannot prove that the scientific domain is co-extensive with nature itself.

The evidence for the uniformity of nature consists in the fact that from the beginning of Science the known reign of physical law has been steadily extending without a check; that instance after instance of apparent exception has been brought by further examination within its province; that the hypothesis of uniformity has now been long on trial and has never yet been found to fail; that no one who has so tried it has the slightest hesitation in trusting it for the future, as he has proved it in the past. But clearly as this evidence proves a general, it never gets beyond a general, uniformity. It has not succeeded in showing that the human will comes under the same rule. It has not succeeded in silencing the voice within us, which claims superiority for the moral over the physical. And when the utmost extent of human knowledge is compared with the vastness of nature, the claim to extend the induction from generality to universality is seen to be utterly untenable. So much as this, indeed, Science has rendered highly probable, that the uniformity of nature is never broken except for a moral purpose. It is only for such a purpose that the will is ever free. It is only for such a purpose that Revelation has ever claimed to be superior to nature. But beyond this Science cannot go. Let it be granted that the claim for freedom of the will has been often unduly pushed far beyond this limit, and let it be granted that religions professing to be revelations have included records of miracles which had no moral purpose. This does not affect the general conclusion that the evidence for uniformity has never succeeded, and can never succeed in showing, that the G.o.d who made and rules the universe never sets aside a physical law for a moral purpose, either by working through the human will or by direct action on external nature.

Science will continue its progress, and as the thoughts of men become clearer it will be perpetually more plainly seen that nothing in Revelation really interferes with that progress. It will be seen that devout believers can observe, can cross-question nature, can look for uniformity and find it, with as keen an eye, with as active an imagination, with as sure a reasoning, as those who deny entirely all possibility of miracles and reject all Revelation on that account. The belief that G.o.d can work miracles and has worked them, has never yet obstructed the path of a single student of Science; nor has any student who repudiated that belief found any aid in his study from that repudiation. The rush of Science of late years has for the time made many men fancy that Science is everything; and believers in Revelation have helped this fancy by insisting on their part that Revelation is everything; but such waves of opinion, resting really on feeling, are sure to pa.s.s away, and scientific men will learn that there are other kinds of knowledge besides scientific knowledge, as believers are already learning that G.o.d teaches us by other methods besides the method of Revelation. The students of the Bible will certainly learn that Revelation need not fear the discoveries of Science, not even such doctrines as that of Evolution. And the students of nature will certainly learn that Science has nothing to fear from the teaching of Revelation, not even from the claim to miraculous power. For most certainly both Science and Revelation come from one and the same G.o.d; 'the heavens declare His glory, and the firmament showeth His handywork; His law is perfect, converting the soul; His testimony is sure, making wise the simple.'

LECTURE VIII.

THE CONCLUSION OF THE ARGUMENT.

Uniformity of nature not demonstrated, but established, except in two cases; the interference of human will and of Divine Will. The exception no bar to the progress of Science. Unity to be found not in the physical world, but in the physical and moral combined. The Moral Law rests on itself. Our recognition of it on our own character and choice. But we expect it to show its marks in the physical world: and these are the purpose visible in Creation, the effects produced by Revelation.

Nevertheless a demand for more physical evidence; but the physical cannot be allowed to overshadow the spiritual. Dangers to believers from leaning this way: superst.i.tion; blindness; stagnation. The guarantee for spiritual perceptiveness: to take Jesus as the Lord of the conscience, the heart, the will.

LECTURE VIII.

THE CONCLUSION OF THE ARGUMENT.

'No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.'

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