Regarding miracle as the natural product of exceptionally endowed life, there is no source from which more light can be shed on its Biblical record than in those studies of the exceptional phenomena and occult powers of life which are prosecuted by the Society for Psychical Research, whose results are recorded in its published Proceedings. For those familiar with this record the legendary element in the Bible tends to shrink into smaller compass than many critics assign it. In the interest both of the Bible and of science it is regrettable that the results of these researches, though conducted by men of high eminence in the scientific world, still encounter the same hostile scepticism even from some Christian believers that Hume directed against the Biblical miracles. Mr. Gladstone has put himself on record against this philistinism, saying that "psychical research is by far the most important work that is being done in the world." Were one disposed to prophesy, very reasonable grounds could be produced for the prediction that, great as was the advance of the nineteenth century in physical knowledge, the twentieth century will witness an advance in psychical knowledge equally great. In this advance one may not unreasonably anticipate that some, at least, of the Biblical miracles may be relieved from the scepticism that now widely discredits them.

FOOTNOTES:

[37] Luke i. 35.

[38] To what extent the law of atrophy has begun to work upon the doctrine of the virgin birth appears in the recent utterance of so eminent an evangelical scholar as Dr. R. F. Horton, of London. The following report of his remarks in a Christmas sermon in 1901 is taken from the Christian World, London. "We could not imagine Paul, Peter, and John all ignoring something essential to the Gospel they preached. Strictly speaking, this narrative in Matthew and Luke was one of the latest touches in the Gospel, belonging to a period forty or fifty years after the Lord had passed away, when men had begun to realize what he was—the Son of God—and tried to express their conviction in this form or that." The implication here is unmistakable, that, in Dr. Horton's view, subjective considerations in the minds of pious believers, rather than objective fact, form the basis of the story.

[39] See the Sermon on "Born of a Virgin," in the volume on The Incarnation of Our Lord.

[40] "Christian thought has not erred by asserting too much concerning the incarnation of God, but, on the contrary, too little.... If ever overblown by blasts of denial, it is for wanting breadth of base.... Men have disbelieved the incarnation, because told that all there was of it was in Christ; and they reject what is presented as exceptional to the general way of God. They must be told to believe more; that the age-long way of God is in a perpetually increasing incarnation of life, whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ."—From a discourse by the present writer on "Life and its Incarnations," in the volume, New Points to Old Texts. (James Clarke & Co., London. Thomas Whittaker, New York, 1889.)

[41] See page 97 and Note.

[42] Romans i. 4.

[43] 1 Corinthians xv. 16-23.

[44] Our Risen King's Forty Days, 1902.

[45] In strong contrast with this are the reactionary protests of Dr. W. R. Nicoll: "To talk of the resurrection of the spirit is preposterous. The spirit does not die, and therefore cannot rise.... The one resurrection of which the New Testament knows, the one resurrection which allows to language any meaning, is the resurrection of the body, the resurrection which leaves the grave empty" (op. cit. p. 134).

It should be noted here that Jesus' argument with the Sadducees on the resurrection (Luke xx. 37, 38) logically proceeds on the assumption that living after death and rising after death are convertible terms. Also, that the contrast involved in the idea of the resurrection (the anastasis, or rising up) is a contrast not between the grave and the sky, but between the lower life of mortals and the higher life immortal.

For an extended exhibition of this line of evidence see "The Assurance of Immortality," and "The Present Pledge of Life to Come" (in two volumes of discourses by the present writer), London, James Clarke & Co. New York, Thomas Whittaker, 1888 and 1889.

[46] Could it have been only an apparition? The "census of hallucinations" conducted some ten years since by the Society for Psychical Research evinced the reality of veridical apparitions of deceased persons at or near the time of their death, showing the number of verified cases to be so large as to exclude the supposition of chance hallucination (see Proceedings, August, 1894). Or could it have been a material body suddenly becoming visible in a closed room, as narrated by Luke and John? First-class evidence, if there can be any such for such occurrences, has been exhibited for such phenomena as the passage of solid substances through intervening doors and walls—easy enough, say mathematicians, for a being familiar with the "fourth dimension"—and of the levitation of heavy bodies without physical support. (See Proceedings, January, 1894, and March, 1895.) As to such things scepticism is doubtless in order, but dogmatic contradiction is not. Sub judice lis est.

[47] Professor Borden P. Bowne has thus exhibited this great mistake and its grievous consequence:—

"In popular thought, religious and irreligious alike, the natural is supposed to be something that runs itself without any internal guidance or external interference. The supernatural, on the other hand, if there be any such thing, is not supposed to manifest itself through the natural, but by means of portents, prodigies, interpositions, departures from, or infractions of, natural law in general. The realm of law belongs to the natural, and the natural runs itself. Hence, if we are to find anything supernatural, we must look for it in the abnormal, the chaotic, the lawless, or that which defies all reduction to order that may be depended on. This notion underlies the traditional debate between naturalism and supernaturalism.... This unhappy misconception of the relation of the natural to the supernatural has practically led the great body of uncritical thinkers into the grotesque inversion of all reason—the more law and order, the less God."—Zion's Herald, August 22, 1900.



VIII



VIII

SYNOPSIS.—The cardinal point in the present discussion, the reality not of miracles but of the supernatural.—Fallacy of pointing to physical events as essential characteristics of supernatural Revelation.—The character of a revelation determined not by its circumstances, but by its contents.—Moral nature supernatural to physical.—Nature a hierarchy of natures.—Supernatural Religion historically attested by the moral development it generates.—Transfer of its distinctive note from moral ideals to physical marvels a costly error.—Jesus' miracles a revelation, of a type common with others before and since.—The unique Revelation of Jesus was in the higher realm of divine ideas and ideals.—These, while unrealized in human life, still exhibit the fact of a supernatural Revelation.—The distinction of natural and supernatural belongs to the period of moral progress up to the spiritual maturity of man in the image of God. The divine possibilities of humanity, imaged in Jesus, revealed as our inheritance and our prize.

It remains finally to emphasize the point of cardinal importance in the considerations that have been presented. This is not the reality of miracles, but the reality of the supernatural, what it really is, as distinct from what it has been thought to be. The advance of science and philosophy has brought to the front this question: "Have those who reject the claims of supernatural Religion been misinformed as to what it is?" Is it, as they have been told, dependent for its attestation on signs and wonders occurring in the sphere of the senses? Does it require acceptance of these, as well as of its teachings? Or is its characteristic appeal wholly to the higher nature of man, relying for its attestation on the witness borne to it by this, rather than by extraordinary phenomena presented to the senses? There is at present no intellectual interest of Christianity more urgent than this: to present to minds imbued with modern learning the true conception of the supernatural and of supernatural Religion.

Miracles, legitimately viewed as the natural product of extraordinary psychical power, or, to phrase it otherwise, of an exceptional vital endowment, belong not to the Hebrew race alone, nor did they cease when the last survivor of the Jewish apostles of Christianity passed away at the end of the first century. This traditional opinion ought by this time to have been entombed together with its long defunct relative, which represented this globe as the fixed centre of the revolving heavens. Miracles have the same universality as human life. Nor will their record be closed till the evolution of life is complete. Animal life, advancing through geologic aeons to the advent of man, in him reached its climax. Spiritual life, appearing in him as a new bud on an old stock, is evidently far from its climax still. To believe in miracles, as rightly understood, is to believe in spirit and life, and in further unfoldings of their still latent powers.

This, however, is just now of subordinate importance. The present interest of chief moment is a riddance of the hoary fallacy that vitiates the current idea of a supernatural Revelation by looking for its specific characteristics to the physical world. By this deplorable fallacy Christian theology has blinded the minds of many scientific men to the essential claims of Christianity, with immense damage in the arrested development of their religious nature through the scepticism inevitably but needlessly provoked by this great mistake. When Elijah proclaims to idolaters that their deity is no God, and, as we read, corroborates his words by calling down fire from heaven to consume his sacrifice, it is reckoned as supernatural Revelation. But it is not so reckoned when the sage in the book of Proverbs proclaims to a nation of religious formalists the moral character of God: "To do righteousness and justice is more acceptable to the LORD than sacrifice." This is accounted as ethical teaching, somewhat in advance of the times. A pagan rather than a Christian way of thinking is discoverable here. In each of the cases cited the specific character of supernatural Revelation is equally evident,—the disclosure of spiritual truth above the natural thought of the natural men to whom it came. The character of any revelation is determined by the character of the truth made known, not by the drapery of circumstances connected with the making known. Clothes do not make the man, though coarse or careless people may think so. What belongs to the moral and spiritual order is supernatural to what belongs to the material and physical order.

This way of thinking will be forced on common minds by thoughtful observation of common things. Animate nature of the lowest rank, as in the grass, is of a higher natural order than inanimate nature in the soil the grass springs from. Sentient nature, as in the ox, is of a higher order than the non-sentient in the grass. Self-conscious and reflective nature in the man is of a higher order than the selfless and non-reflective nature in his beast of burden. In the composite being of man all these orders of nature coexist, and each higher is supernatural to the nature below it. Nature, the comprehensive term for all that comes into being, is a hierarchy of natures, rising rank above rank from the lowest to the highest. The highest nature known to us, supernatural to all below it, can only be the moral nature, whose full satisfaction is necessary to the highest satisfaction of a man, and in whose complete development only can be realized in permanency his perfected welfare as a social being.

Now it is precisely in the progress of moral development that supernatural Religion manifests itself as a reality. Religion, indeed, is as natural to man as Art. But there is religion and Religion, as there is art and Art—the sexual religion of the primitive Semites, the animistic religion of China, the spiritual Religion that flowered on the Mount of the Beatitudes, embryonic religion and Religion adult; all, indeed, natural, yet of lower and of higher grade. Doubtless, Religion of whatever grade outranks all other human activities by its distinctive aspiration to transcend the bounds of space and time and sense, and to link the individual to the universal; and so all Religion sounds, feebly or distinctly, the note of the supernatural. But this is the resonant note of the spiritual Religion which unfolds in the moral progress of the world. As moral nature is supernatural to the psychical and the physical, so is its consummate bloom of spiritual Religion to be ranked as such, relatively to the religions which more or less dimly and blindly are yearning and groping toward the light that never was on sea or land. Thus defining the word according to the nature of the thing, supernatural Religion, with its corollary of supernatural Revelation not as an apparition from without, but as an unfolding from within, is both a fact and a factor in the development of spiritual man.

The term supernatural Religion has been rightly applied to that system of religious conceptions, ideals, and motives, whose effective culture of the moral nature is attested historically by a moral development superior to the product of any other known religion. Whether the greatest saints of Christianity are all of them whiter souls than any that can be found among the disciples of any other religion, may be matter for argument. There can be no gainsaying the fact that, of great and lowly together, no other religion shows so many saints, or has so advanced the general moral development in lands where it is widely followed. But its essential character has been obscured, its appeal to man's highest nature foiled, and its power lamed by the wretched fallacy that has transferred its distinctive note of the supernatural from its divine ideals to the physical marvels embedded in the record of its original promulgation, even conditioning its validity and authority upon their reality. Such is the false issue which, to the discredit of Christianity, theology has presented to science. Such is the confusion of ideas that in the light of modern knowledge inevitably blocks the way to a reasonable religious faith in multitudes of minds thereby offended. From this costly error Christian theology at length shows signs that it is about to extricate itself.[48]

As to the Christian miracles, there can be no reasonable doubt that "mighty works," deemed by many of his contemporaries superhuman, were wrought by Jesus. These, whatever they were, must be regarded as the natural effluence of a transcendently endowed life. Taking place in the sphere of the senses, they were a revelation of the type seen before and since in the lives of wonder-workers ancient and modern, in whom the power of mind over matter, however astonishing and mysterious, is recognized as belonging to the natural order of things no less than the unexplored Antarctic belongs to the globe. But the Revelation which he gave to human thought as a new thing, a heavenly vision unprecedented, was in the higher realm of the moral and spiritual life. This was the true supernatural, whose reality and power are separable from all its environment of circumstances, and wholly independent thereof. The characteristic ideals of Jesus, his profound consciousness of God, his filial thought of God, his saturation with the conviction of his moral oneness with God,[49] his realization of brotherhood with the meanest human being, still transcend the common level of natural humanity even among his disciples. As thus transcendent they are supernatural still. Till reached and realized, they manifest the fact of a supernatural Revelation in that peerless life as plainly as the sun is manifest in the splendor of a cloudless day.

In the coming but distant age, when man's spiritual nature, now so embryonic, shall have become adult, it will doubtless so pervade and rule the physical and psychical natures which it inhabits that the distinction between natural and supernatural, so important in the period of its development, will become foreign alike to thought and speech. But until the making of man in the image of God is complete, when the spiritual element in our composite being, now struggling for development, shall be manifest in its ultimate maturity and ascendency as the distinctive and proper nature of humanity, it is of supreme importance for the Christian teacher, who would point and urge to the heights of being, to free men's minds of error as to what the real supernatural is. Not the fancied disturber of the world's ordered harmonies, but that highest Nature which is the moulder, the glory, and the crown of all the lower.

Imaged to us in the human perfectness of Jesus, the ideal Son of man, it is revealed as the distinctive inheritance and prize of the humanity that essays to think the thoughts and walk the ways of God. To each of us is it given in germ by our human birth, to be fostered and nourished in converse with the Infinite Presence that inhabits all things, till its divine possibilities appear in the ultimate "revealing of the sons of God,"[50] full grown "according to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."[51]

FOOTNOTES:

[48] "Upon the conception of the supernatural as the personal," says Professor Nash, "apologetics must found the claims of Christianity."—Ethics and Revelation.

[49] The words in which Jesus expresses this are much more extraordinary and profoundly significant than any of those mighty works of his, the like of which are recorded of the ancient prophets. Jesus was conscious of God as living in him, and of himself as living in God, in the unity of the one eternal life. Not merely as a man of God, but as a man in God, as no other man has consciously been, does Jesus utter such sayings as, "I am the light of the world," "I and my Father are one." (See "Jesus the Ideal Man," by the present writer. The New World, June, 1897.)

[50] Romans viii. 19.

[51] Ephesians iv. 13.



New Testament Handbooks

EDITED BY

SHAILER MATHEWS

Professor of New Testament History and Interpretation, University of Chicago

Arrangements are made for the following volumes, and the publishers will, on request, send notice of the issue of each volume as it appears and each descriptive circular sent out later; such requests for information should state whether address is permanent or not:—

THE HISTORY OF THE TEXTUAL CRITICISM OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

Prof. MARVIN R. VINCENT, Professor of New Testament Exegesis, Union Theological Seminary. [Now ready.

Professor Vincent's contributions to the study of the New Testament rank him among the first American exegetes. His most recent publication is "A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistles to the Philippians and to Philemon" (International Critical Commentary), which was preceded by a "Students' New Testament Handbook," "Word Studies in the New Testament," and others.

THE HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

Prof. HENRY S. NASH, Professor of New Testament Interpretation, Cambridge Divinity School. [Now ready.

Of Professor Nash's "Genesis of the Social Conscience," The Outlook said: "The results of Professor Nash's ripe thought are presented in a luminous, compact, and often epigrammatic style. The treatment is at once masterful and helpful, and the book ought to be a quickening influence of the highest kind; it surely will establish the fame of its author as a profound thinker, one from whom we have a right to expect future inspiration of a kindred sort."

INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOKS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

Prof. B. WISNER BACON, Professor of New Testament Interpretation, Yale University. [Now ready.

Professor Bacon's works in the field of Old Testament criticism include "The Triple Tradition of Exodus," and "The Genesis of Genesis," a study of the documentary sources of the books of Moses. In the field of New Testament study he has published a number of brilliant papers, the most recent of which is "The Autobiography of Jesus," in the American Journal of Theology.

THE HISTORY OF NEW TESTAMENT TIMES IN PALESTINE

Prof. SHAILER MATHEWS, Professor of New Testament History and Interpretation, The University of Chicago. [Now ready.

The Congregationalist says of Prof. Shailer Mathews's recent work, "The Social Teaching of Jesus": "Re-reading deepens the impression that the author is scholarly, devout, awake to all modern thought, and yet conservative and pre-eminently sane. If, after reading the chapters dealing with Jesus' attitude toward man, society, the family, the state, and wealth, the reader will not agree with us in this opinion, we greatly err as prophets."

THE LIFE OF PAUL

Prof. RUSH RHEES, President of the University of Rochester.

Professor Rhees is well known from his series of "Inductive Lessons" contributed to the Sunday School Times. His "Outline of the Life of Paul," privately printed, has had a flattering reception from New Testament scholars.

THE HISTORY OF THE APOSTOLIC AGE

Dr. C. W. VOTAW, Instructor in New Testament Literature, The University of Chicago.

Of Dr. Votaw's "Inductive Study of the Founding of the Christian Church," Modern Church, Edinburgh, says: "No fuller analysis of the later books of the New Testament could be desired, and no better programme could be offered for their study, than that afforded in the scheme of fifty lessons on the Founding of the Christian Church, by Clyde W. Votaw. It is well adapted alike for practical and more scholarly students of the Bible."

THE TEACHING OF JESUS

Prof. GEORGE B. STEVENS, Professor of Systematic Theology, Yale University. [Now ready.

Professor Stevens's volumes upon "The Johannine Theology," "The Pauline Theology," as well as his recent volume on "The Theology of the New Testament," have made him probably the most prominent writer on biblical theology in America. His new volume will be among the most important of his works.

THE BIBLICAL THEOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

Prof. E. P. GOULD, Professor of New Testament Interpretation, Protestant Episcopal Divinity School, Philadelphia. [Now ready.

Professor Gould's Commentaries on the Gospel of Mark (in the International Critical Commentary) and the Epistles to the Corinthians (in the American Commentary) are critical and exegetical attempts to supply those elements which are lacking in existing works of the same general aim and scope.

THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN LITERATURE UNTIL EUSEBIUS

Prof. J. W. PLATNER, Professor of Early Church History, Harvard University.

Professor Platner's work will not only treat the writings of the early Christian writers, but will also treat of the history of the New Testament Canon.

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Transcriber's Note (Significant Amendments):

p. 28, 'Saltpetriere' amended to Salpetriere.

THE END