I

INTRODUCTION.

ON THE MIRACLES OF SCRIPTURE.

PROPOSE to attempt an extended comparison

between the Miracles of Scripture and those elsewhere related, as regards their nature, credibility, and evidence. I shall divide my observations under the following heads :—

§ I. On the Idea and Scope of a Miracle.

§ 2. On the antecedent Credibility of a Miracle, considered as a Divine Interposition.

3. On the Criterion of a Miracle, considered as a Divine Interposition.

4. On the direct Evidence for the Christian Miracles.

SECTION I.

A

ON THE IDEA AND SCOPE OF A MIRACLE.

MIRACLE may be considered as an event in

consistent with the constitution of nature, that is, with the established course of things in which it is found. Or, again, an event in a given system which cannot be referred to any law, or accounted for by the operation of any principle, in that system. It does not necessarily imply a violation of nature, as some have supposed,-merely the interposition of an external cause, which, we shall hereafter show, can be no other than the agency of the Deity. And the effect produced is that of unusual or increased action in the parts of the system.

It is then a relative term, not only as it presupposes an assemblage of laws from which it is a deviation, but also as it has reference to some one particular system; for the same event which is anomalous in one, may be quite regular when observed in connexion. with another. The Miracles of Scripture, for instance, are irregularities in the economy of nature, but with

a moral end; forming one instance out of many, of the providence of God, that is, an instance of occurrences in the natural world with a final cause. Thus, while they are exceptions to the laws of one system, they may coincide with those of another. They profess to be the evidence of a Revelation, the criterion of a divine message. To consider them as mere exceptions to physical order, is to take a very incomplete view of them. It is to degrade them from the station which they hold in the plans and provisions of the Divine Mind, and to strip them of their real use and dignity; for as naked and isolated facts they do but deform an harmonious system.

From this account of a Miracle, it is evident that it may often be difficult exactly to draw the line between uncommon and strictly miraculous events. Thus the production of ice might have seemed at first sight miraculous to the Siamese; for it was a phenomenon referable to none of those laws of nature which are in ordinary action in tropical climates. Such, again, might magnetic attraction appear, in ages familiar only with the attraction of gravity. On the other hand, the extraordinary works of Moses or St. Paul appear miraculous, even when referred to those simple and elementary principles of nature which the widest experience has confirmed. As far as this affects the discrimination of supernatural facts, it will be con

a

Campbell, On Miracles, Part i. Sec. 2.

sidered in its proper place; meanwhile let it suffice to state, that those events only are connected with our present subject which have no assignable second cause or antecedent, and which, on that account, are from the nature of the case referred to the immediate agency of the Deity.

A Revelation, that is, a direct message from God to man, itself bears in some degree a miraculous character; inasmuch as it supposes the Deity actually to present Himself before His creatures, and to interpose in the affairs of life in a way above the reach of those settled arrangements of nature, to the existence of which universal experience bears witness. And as a Revelation itself, so again the evidences of a Revelation may all more or less be considered miraculous. Prophecy is an evidence only so far as foreseeing future events is above the known powers of the human mind, or miraculous. In like manner, if the rapid extension of Christianity be urged in favour of its divine origin, it is because such extension, under such circumstances, is supposed to be inconsistent with the known principles and capacity of human nature. And the pure morality of the Gospel, as taught by illiterate fishermen of Galilee, is an evidence, in proportion as the phenomenon disagrees with the conclusions of general experience, which leads us to believe that a high state of mental cultivation is ordinarily requisite for the production of such moral teachers. It might