P 
 
 ” 
 ” ae 
 
 [wy 
 d ’ or DE ‘ . 
 t hd | ial é 
 
 4 ot N of Frings / 
 | ar 
 
 - 
 
 +i Tanulael Hen eee . 
 
 rs ‘ f 
 
 YY 
 
 ~ 
 pus 
 = 
 
THOMAS J..DODD, D. D. 
 
MIRACLES: 
 Were They, or Were 
 They Not, Performed 
 by Jesus? @y 
 
 A QUESTION of FACT, NOT 
 oF SCIENCE or THEOLOGY 
 
 «The question as to what Jesus actually 
 said and did is capable of solution by no 
 other methods than those ordinarily 
 practiced by the historian and literary 
 critic.’—Prof. Huxley. — 
 
 By THOMAS J. DODD, D.D. 
 Cy 
 NSS 
 
 CINCINNATI: CURTS & JENNINGS 
 NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1899, 
 BY THE WESTERN 
 METHODIST BOOK 
 CONCERN # #@ @ 
 
Preface 
 
 HILE we shall endeavor to make our 
 argument sufficiently concise, we shall 
 
 yet make it as comprehensive as the limits we 
 have allowed the subject can permit. We 
 shall, therefore, along with the other miracles 
 of Jesus, include the great, final miracle of his 
 resurrection from the dead. But neither as to 
 this, nor any of the other miracles, shall we 
 attempt a distinct specific argument. We as- 
 sert the general proposition that miracles were 
 wrought by Jesus, and we hope to show that 
 the proof of this afforded by the Gospels is, 
 in all regards, of the most convincing nature, 
 and able to endure the severest tests to which 
 the most critical investigation can subject it. 
 We can not hope, however, that all who 
 read the argument shall be convinced. Mere 
 argument rarely convinces those of adverse 
 views, especially when with those views the 
 holders of them are content; and more espe- 
 
 cially still, when such views have been founded 
 3 
 
4 PREFACE 
 
 upon prepossessions or assumptions which 
 have been permitted to usurp in the mind the 
 place of great fundamental principles of belief. 
 When one lays down the arbitrary dictum, as 
 Rénan has done, that “supernatural relations 
 are not to be accepted as such,’ or with Buch- 
 ner asserts the “natural impossibility of a mir- 
 acle,” or like Strauss, can speak of belief in 
 miracles as “debasing to the reason,’ he vir- 
 tually announces a determined adherence to 
 his views, and that no amount or kind of evi- 
 dence shall affect his disbelief. 
 
 And there are others whom the argument 
 can not reach. There can be no argument for 
 miracles, either with the man who denies the 
 being of a God, or with him who regards the 
 Sacred Scriptures as a mere tissue of falsehood 
 or fable. With such a one the foundation can 
 not be laid upon which to rear an argument. 
 To reason with such a one as to deeds which 
 Omnipotence alone could have accomplished, 
 or as to facts of the past for which no historical 
 basis is allowed, were as absurd as had been 
 
 1Life of Jesus, p. 45. 2New Life of Jesus, p. 11. 
 
PREFACE i: 
 
 the effort to move the world without the Dos 
 Pou Sto from which to ply the lever. 
 
 There are those, however, that reject the 
 miracles whose minds are yet open to convic- 
 tion. Some of these, fully persuaded of the 
 great fundamental truths of the Christian re- 
 ligion, are the sincere followers of Jesus, not- 
 withstanding the miracles have been to them 
 a hindrance rather than an aid to faith; while 
 others, failing to distinguish between these 
 fundamental truths and each particular kind of 
 evidence by which these truths have been es- 
 tablished, have so associated the miracles with 
 the redemptive work of Jesus that in the rejec- 
 tion of the former they have, as if bound by 
 an invincible necessity, rejected the latter like- 
 wise. Such persons are, therefore, disbelievers 
 of the gospel more through an error in their 
 logic, than from any hostile attitude either to 
 the person or to the work of Jesus. 
 
 Both of these classes would believe were the 
 evidence properly set before them. They are 
 not wedded to their unbelief; they make no 
 effort to resist conviction; and in many cases 
 would readily yield to any argument that af- 
 
6 PREFACE 
 
 fords a satisfactory basis for their adoption of 
 the commonly-accepted faith. ‘To unbelievers 
 such as these, and to all whose minds are suf- 
 ficiently free from prejudice or other fetters to 
 weigh the evidence aright, the following pages 
 have been addressed. It is hoped that the ar- 
 gument may contribute something toward 
 bringing the lovers of the truth into closer fel- 
 lowship of thought and faith upon the subject, 
 and the author would be profoundly grateful 
 should it substitute belief for unbelief in a 
 single mind that struggles with its doubts. 
 
 Such quotations as the reader may desire 
 to verify are taken from the following editions 
 of the works referred to: 
 
 Huxley’s “Essays on Some Controverted Ques- 
 tions,” 1892. 
 
 Huxley’s “Essays on Christianity and Agnosti- 
 cism,”’ New York, 18809. . 
 
 Strauss’s “New Faith and Old,” New York, 1873. 
 
 Strauss’s “New Life of Jesus,’ London, 186s. 
 
 Mill’s “Three Essays in Religion,’ New York, 1874. 
 
 Rénan’s “Life of Jesus,” New York, 1864. 
 
 Rénan’s “Life of Jesus,” Thirteenth Edition, Paris, 
 1867. 
 
 Rénan’s “The Apostles,’ New York, 1866. 
 
 Hume’s “Essays,” Edinburgh, 1800. 
 
 Rousseau’s ‘Emile,’ Paris, 1851. 
 
PREFACE 7 
 
 Bayle’s “Historical and Critical Dictionary,’ Lon- 
 
 don, 1734. 
 Ockley’s “History of the Saracens,’ Cambridge, 
 
 1757. 
 Biichner’s “Force and Matter,” London, 1870. 
 Paley’s Works, London, 1817. 
 
 Duke of Argyll’s “Reign of Law,” New York, 1869. 
 Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall,” etc., London, 1815. 
 
Contents 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 STATEMENT OF THE QUESTION AND THE 
 EVIDENCE 
 
 THE Existence of God and the General Credibility 
 of the Gospels assumed.—The Miracles consid- 
 ered as Mere Facts in History.—Irrelevancy 
 of all Theories of the “Natural’’ or “Super- 
 natural.”—The Question not, How are the 
 Miracles related to Law, Nature, etc., or How 
 were the Miracles produced? but simply this, 
 Have we Adequate Proof that the Miracles, 
 whatever they were, were really performed by 
 Jesus?—The Subject thus placed beyond the 
 Sphere of Conflict with Science.—The Scien- 
 tific Method of ascertaining the Truth of Re- 
 ported Facts.—Such Method adopted in the 
 following pages.—Definition of Miracles con- 
 sidered.—Not the Supernatural in the Miracles, 
 but the Superhuman in the Performer of them 
 that gives them Evidential Value.—That the 
 Miracles were, in the true sense, Extraordinary 
 Deeds performed by Jesus, all that can be as- 
 serted here—These Deeds to be proven in the 
 same way as other Events in History; but, as 
 Extraordinary Deeds, only Extraordinary Evi- 
 dence can make them Credible.—Ordinary 
 “Authorities” not sufficient for this.—There 
 must be an Unbroken Line of Authorities back 
 to the Original Witnesses—Other Qualities 
 that must mark the Evidence—The Evidence 
 
 9 
 
Io CONTENTS 
 
 briefly stated in the Narratives of Matthew, 
 Mark, Luke, John, the Acts, and Paul.—Date, 
 Authorship, and General Historical Value of 
 these Narratives.—Admissions of Strauss, Ré- 
 nan, and Others.—These Admissions as to the 
 Written, a virtual admission of the Actual 
 Life of Jesus.—Inconsistency of admitting the 
 Gospels as in the main Historical, and then 
 expunging or explaining away the Miracles. 
 Who would deny or eliminate the Battles from 
 Thucydides or the Parasangs from Xeno- 
 DHONL awe Nees shby Bee Benin eee amen ae tee ¢ 19 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 FURTHER CONSIDERATION OF THE EVI- 
 DENCE 
 
 ALonc with their own, the Evangelists give the 
 Testimony of numerous other Witnesses; as 
 (1) That of the Mixed Multitudes that followed 
 Jesus; (2) That of the Scribes and Pharisees, 
 Enemies of Jesus; (3) That of the Disciples; 
 and (4) That of Jesus Himself.—The Character 
 of these several Witnesses described.—The Tes- 
 timony of Unbelievers as to the Character of 
 Jesus.—Quotations from Mill, Lecky, Rénan, 
 and Theodore Parker.—General Features of 
 the Evidence considered.—The Evidence the 
 same as that upon which we admit the other 
 Facts of Jesus’ Life—The Evidence is the Tes- 
 timony of the Senses.—Superiority of such Evi- 
 dence to that of the Reasoning Faculties.— 
 Such Testimony to be admitted, unless either 
 the Mind, the Eye, or the Veracity of the Wit- 
 nesses is in Question.—Reasons why we may 
 not challenge the Witnesses as to either of 
 
CONTENTS It 
 a 
 
 these things.—That both the Friends and Ene- 
 mies of Jesus testified, an Argument against 
 the Fabrication of the Evidence.—The Number 
 of the Witnesses, an Argument against both the 
 Designed Deception of the People, and the 
 Self-Deception or Delusion of the Witnesses.— 
 The Nature of the Miracles forbids their being 
 ascribed to the Faith or other Mental Oper- 
 ation of the Beholders.—The Cause espoused, 
 a guarantee that the Disciples had satisfied 
 themselves as to the Genuineness of the Mir- 
 acles—Even admitting the Possibility of De- 
 ception or Delusion on the part of the Wit- 
 nesses, Jesus himself could not have been 
 deceived.—Neither could He have practiced 
 Deception upon the People.—The Testimony 
 of Jesus decisive of the Question.—The Evi- 
 dence for the Miracles compared with that 
 given for other Events generally, if not uni- 
 versally, admitted—Absurdity of comparing 
 the Greek and Roman Classic Legends with 
 these Deeds of Jesus.—But little better the Evi- 
 dence for the Facts of Ancient Authentic His- 
 tory.—No more Satisfactory the Evidence for 
 much that Science teaches.—While both His- 
 toryand Science are compelled to give up Facts 
 and Theories as Research is made, the Evi- 
 dence for the Miracles better established to-day 
 than at any former period.........ccccccccecce 55 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 ASSAULTS UPON THE EVIDENCE BY RENAN, 
 MILL, HUXLEY, AND HUME 
 
 OBJECTIONS to Supernaturalism in the Miracles.— 
 Strauss and Rénan.—Rénan’s “Principle of 
 Historical Criticism” reviewed.—Absurdity of 
 
I2 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 objecting to the “Supernautral as such.”— 
 Each “Supernatural Relation” to be judged by 
 its own Evidences.—J. S. Mill’s Objection, that 
 “We have not the Direct Testimony of our 
 Senses;” that ‘the Supernatural is always mat- 
 ter of Inference or Speculation.”—The Objec- 
 tion lies with equal force against much of our 
 knowledge of the Natural.—Force or Power in 
 Nature is known to us only by Inference or 
 Speculation.—To be consistent, therefore, Mr. 
 Mill must reject all but the bare Facts or Phe- 
 nomena of the Natural World. The Falling 
 Stone he may admit, but Gravitation he can not 
 know.—Mr. Mill’s Objection to the “Evidence 
 of Books and Traditions” equally weak. Books 
 and Traditions not necessarily false. Not until 
 Mr. Mill shall prove Falsehood of the partic- 
 ular Books in question can we admit his Ar- 
 gument.—Why we do, and should, admit the 
 Evidence of others’ Senses to the Miracles.— 
 Professor Huxley’s Assault upon the Evi- 
 dence.—Unreasonableness of discrediting Evi- 
 dence furnished by men of “Ingrained” 
 Minds.—The Professor’s Objection either an 
 Ingenious Assumption of the Case in hand, or 
 the Assertion of a Principle favorable to his 
 own Argument.—Weakness of Mr. Hume’s 
 Charges against the Evidence.—His Objection 
 (1) to the Evidence; (2) to the Miracles them- 
 selves—Two Fundamental Errors in the Ar- 
 gument: (1) Experience does not form the 
 basis of our Beliefs; (2) We have no two op- 
 posite Experiences as to Miracles —Mr. Hume 
 makes no application of his Argument to the 
 Miracles of Jesus—He argues as to Miracles 
 in general and Experience in general.—The 
 
CONTENTS | 13 
 
 only Experience of which we have any Record 
 as to the Miracles of Jesus is to the effect that 
 THEY WELE PETIOLINIE Vale ce ba caede ceeueasaeeey' sii\,0F 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 ALLEGED INHERENT INCREDIBILITY OF 
 MIRACLES 
 
 Tue Argument, more fully considered, as to Vio- 
 lation of Law in Nature-——The Impossibility, 
 and, therefore, the Incredibility of Miracles.— 
 Prevalent Idea of the Relation of Miracles to 
 Law.—A Gratuitous Assumption.—Belief or 
 Disbelief of Miracles dependent upon the qual- 
 ity of our Belief in God.—Given the Existence 
 of a God, Personal, Intelligent Ruler of the 
 Universe, there is nothing in Miracles at which 
 Belief should stagger.—Exceeding our Com- 
 prehension or Experience, a far different thing 
 from exceeding the Power of God.—Evidence, 
 not Comprehensibility, determines our Belief.— 
 Admission of Huxley and Mill that the ques- 
 tion assumes a new aspect when the idea of 
 God is introduced. Mill allows the question 
 to be decided by what we know of God’s way 
 of governing the world——What we know of 
 this considered—The Scientific Method of 
 reading the Past applied to the Moral History 
 of Mankind.—We may thus read of Miracles 
 as we read of immense Fern Growths, Ice- 
 bergs, or Glaciers, where none of these now 
 exist—Miracles not only Possible, but Prov- 
 able; Provable, not by “Inference or Specu- 
 lation,” but by the Testimony of Eye-witnesses. 
 Mr. Mill’s position here really in our favor.— 
 
14 CONTENTS 
 
 Huxley’s Error as regards the “Interpretation 
 of the Facts.”—Rénan’s Objection of the want 
 of “Scientific Conditions’ in the Testimony, 
 and the inability of the Witnesses to determine 
 the “Miraculous Character of an Act.”—But 
 the Witnesses made no profession—gave no 
 testimony—as to this: only of the Facts them- 
 selves, as Facts, did they testify. Mr. Mill 
 again on one side of the Question.—Rénan’s 
 Error as to a Matter of Fact. His Commission 
 of Savans considered.—These could have de- 
 cided upon the Acts of Jesus no better than 
 those Disciples did. No “Scientific Condi- 
 tions’ necessary that those Witnesses should 
 have known whether the Deaf were made to 
 hear, the Blind to see, the Dead to rise.— 
 With all our Science, plain Common Sense de- 
 cides to-day whether men are sick, blind, deaf, 
 etc., and whether they have recovered from 
 these Ailments.—Scientists are not called in to 
 determine whether a man is dead, and cer- 
 tainly we need no body of wise Philosophers 
 to tell us that a man is alive...... yah ie eg i 113 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 GENERAL, REVIEW OF THE ADVERSE ARGU. 
 MENT 
 
 INDIRECTION of the Argument opposed to Mir- 
 acles.—But rarely, has the Proof itself been 
 directly assailed; that is, charged with being 
 False or Spurious.—From the Nature of the 
 Miracles has been drawn the Argument to dis- 
 prove the Fact of Miracles.—Absurdity of all 
 such reasoning.—Fallacies of Mill, Huxley, 
 Hume, and Others considered.—Bold Asser- 
 
CONTENTS 15 
 aie SALA Mine ns St ai kek ea Ble Radi A a UE A El Meera 
 tion, Irrelevancy, Foregone Conclusion, etc., 
 abound in all their Arguments.—Statement of 
 the Argument by which the Miracles of Jesus 
 should be disproved—Such Argument has 
 never been attempted.—Three Leading Ques- 
 tions to be answered before the Gospel Evi- 
 dence can be set aside: First, If the Miracles 
 were not performed, how came we to have 
 the Testimony in the Case? Second, How 
 came it that this Testimony was not contra- 
 dicted at the time when it might have easily 
 been proven false? Third, How did the World 
 get its high estimate of Jesus, and how came 
 his Kingdom to be established in the world?— 
 Inadequacy of all efforts to prove the Testi- 
 mony to be Designed Deception, or to prove 
 Delusion on the part of the Witnesses, grant- 
 ing the possibility of such Delusion as has been 
 asserted of the Witnesses, How can the De- 
 lusion be accounted for?—The Myth Theory of 
 Strauss; the Theory, besides being in itself Ab- 
 surd, contradicts both the Logical and the 
 Chronological Order of Events in the Life of 
 Jesus.—Rénan’s Application of the Myth to 
 the Resurrection of Lazarus. His “Interpre- 
 tations” of the Resurrection of Jesus.—General 
 Remarks upon these Theories of Rénan and 
 Strauss.—More Particular Consideration of 
 Rénan on the Resurrection of Jesus. Self- 
 contradiction of the Critic. His Hypothesis 
 a sad travesty of the Facts and Workings of 
 the Human Mind.—The Second Question, Why 
 the Testimony was not contradicted?—Not 
 only no Contradiction, but “Many Miracles” 
 admitted even by the enraged Priests and 
 Pharisees that arraigned and crucified Jesus.— 
 These Enemies did all in their Power to crush 
 
16 CONTENTS 
 
 the Cause of Jesus, except this one easy thing 
 of denying the Miracles—It belongs to the 
 Unbeliever to show either why the Miracles 
 were not denied, or, ifthe Denial was ever 
 made, why it has not been transmitted to our 
 times.—The Third Question, How came the 
 World to have its high estimate of Jesus, and 
 How came his Kingdom to be established in 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 MIRACLES THE ONLY EXPLANATION OF 
 CHRIST’S POWER AND KINGDOM IN THE 
 WORLD. GENERAL CHARACTER- 
 ISTICS OF THE ARGUMENT 
 
 THE Question asked at the close of the preceding 
 Chapter not to be answered by reference to 
 the Exalted Personal Character of Jesus and 
 the Pure Moral System which he taught.—The 
 World in those days, even in our own, not far 
 enough advanced to appreciate the Power of 
 mere Moral Forces when associated with such 
 Repellent Features as marked the Outward Life 
 of Jesus.—But granting all that may be claimed 
 for the Power of Jesus’ elevated Life and Teach- 
 ings, we yet see no answer to our question, 
 Without the Miracles Jesus’ Life and Character 
 comparatively unknown to us.—The World 
 had never, passed its encomiums on Jesus 
 merelyin consideration of those Exalted Teach- 
 ings; men have never judged their fellow-men 
 by what they have taught, but by how they 
 have lived and what they have done.—Excerp 
 the Miracles, and Jesus did but little to call 
 
CONTENTS 17 
 
 aa 
 
 forth Praise or Admiration.—Where did Mill, 
 Lecky, Parker, etc., get their High Ideas of 
 Jesus? Waiving all this, however, let us, con- 
 trary to the rule by which men in general are 
 judged by their fellow-men, judge Jesus by his 
 Words, his Teachings. Even here are we baf- 
 fled at the outset, for among these Teachings 
 of Jesus we find him most emphatically assert- 
 ing that he was a Worker of Miracles,and these 
 he offered as Proof of the Reliability of his 
 Teachingson all other subjects.—Not sostrange 
 that the world to-day entertains its High Regard 
 for Jesus; but how came those Contemporaries, 
 many of them at least, to have the same High 
 Estimate?—Difficult enough for those men to 
 have admitted the plain Moral Precepts of 
 Jesus.—How, then, yield to those Bold Denun- 
 ciations of their Faith and Practices, and those 
 Extravagant Claims as to his own Personality, 
 that he was Greater than Jonah, a Greater than 
 Solomon, had come forth from God, etce.?— 
 How, above all, came those Contemporaries 
 thus to honor Jesus when he professed, as the 
 Proof of these Strange Teachings, Miracles 
 which he did not perform?—Not enough to 
 say that the Disciples believed that Jesus 
 wrought these Miracles, and that this Belief, 
 though a Delusion, was sufficient to account 
 for their Acceptance of Jesus and his Claims.— 
 If the Miracles were believed when they had 
 no existence but in the brains of these Wit 
 nesses, these latter were all insane, and there 
 is no good sense in talking about Delusion, 
 Myths, etc., as explaining the Honors paid to 
 Jesus.—Sane or insane, such a belief in Mir- 
 acles, where no Miracles were wrought, fully 
 2 
 
18 CONTENTS 
 ce 
 
 as Contrary to Nature and Experience as the 
 Miracles themselves had been.—Leaving, then, 
 all consideration of Nature and Experience, we 
 come back again to the simple statement that 
 Testimony must decide the case.—General 
 Characterization of this Testimony and Ré- 
 sumé of the Argument.—Logical Results of 
 Denial sof the |Miraclesiy iA eee roksan 187 
 
MIRACLES 
 
 CHART RR id 
 
 Statement of the Question and the 
 Evidence 
 
 HERE can be no belief in miracles with- 
 out belief in God, and no belief in the 
 miracles of Jesus without admission of the 
 general credibility of the records of the life 
 of Jesus. The reader is, therefore, assumed 
 to be a believer in God, and the Gospels are 
 assumed to be, in the main, of at least equal 
 authority with other ancient historical narra- 
 tives. No claim is made, however, for the 
 Divine origin or the infallible verity of these 
 writings. Our effort shall be, independently of 
 any Divine authority in the Gospels, to show 
 that the evidence which they afford of the 
 miracles of Jesus is such that to doubt or dis- 
 believe these miracles is in the highest degree 
 
 unreasonable, if not absurd. 
 19 
 
20 MIRACLES 
 
 We attempt no definition of the miracles; 
 and we offer no theory as to their relations to 
 law or nature. There is no need of this. We 
 
 view the miracles merely as so many events 
 in the life of Jesus, differing from other his- 
 torical events solely in being of a most ex- 
 traordinary nature, and in being rendered 
 credible only by evidence of the most trust- 
 worthy and unexceptionable character. Con- 
 sidered thus, much that might otherwise be 
 said upon the subject is omitted here. We 
 enter upon no discussion of the moral or the- 
 ological bearings of the question, and except 
 so far as may be necessary in the answering 
 of objections, we shall have but little to say of 
 
 39 66 
 
 “law,” “order,” or “course of nature.” We 
 shall avoid, so far as possible, all terms or 
 phrases involving theories as distinguished 
 from the facts of miracles, and address ourself 
 to the simple question, Did Jesus do the deeds 
 called miracles, of which the Gospels tell us? 
 a mere question of fact of the very same na- 
 ture with, Was Jesus born in Bethlehem? or, 
 Was he slain on Calvary? 
 
 In thus reviewing miracles in their own 
 
QUESTION AND THE EVIDENCE ah 
 
 light, as simple facts in history, we rid our- 
 selves at the outset of many difficulties which 
 must otherwise beset the subject. Especially 
 do we free ourselves from fear of the conflict 
 with physical science. Whatever science may 
 do with questions of the “natural” or ‘‘super- 
 natural,’ she can never disprove as facts these 
 mighty works of Jesus. Antecedently to an- 
 nouncement of what appears to contradict the 
 established truths of science, the latter may 
 raise her voice and declare that whatever shall 
 thus truly contradict can not be believed; but 
 announcement of the fact once made, science 
 has nothing to do, if she would be consistent 
 with herself, but to examine the proof, and 
 accept or reject according to the evidence pre- 
 sented. It is thus, and thus only, that science 
 has made her advances in the past; thus only 
 can she make advancement in the future. 
 What would be the case if a number of men, 
 or even a single individual of established 
 credit, should announce that he had discov- 
 ered a new world of extraordinary brilliancy, 
 nearer the sun than ourselves, and that upon 
 calculation he had ascertained that it would be 
 
*4e 4 MIRACLES 
 
 seen again at or near a given time? The mere 
 sciolist might declare the thing to be impos- 
 sible, and dismiss the subject; but the scientist, 
 seeking truth and open to conviction of the 
 truth, would wait until the time comes round, 
 and would then direct his instrument and 
 make investigation. In case the planet were 
 not seen, he would, if he had it on good au- 
 thority that it had been seen by others, con- 
 clude that the error had been his own, and 
 would wait again for opportunity to renew 
 his observations. Convinced at last that the 
 new world really existed, he would have little 
 or nothing to say of law, order, or irregularity, 
 further than that his own and others’ notions 
 of these things had been erroneous. ‘This 
 new world,” he would doubtless say, ‘breaks 
 in upon our old ideas of things—breaks in 
 upon gravitation and the ‘order’ of the uni- 
 verse; but ‘order’ and ‘gravitation,’ as we have 
 understood the terms, must be submitted to 
 new investigations. Order or no order, the 
 thing is a fact, and it must be believed.” 
 Now, what we call the miracles of Jesus are 
 / so many alleged facts, which as facts must be 
 
QUESTION AND THE EVIDENCE 23 
 
 considered regardless of all theories of law or 
 nature. Shall we reject the miracles because 
 some may interpose, and say that miracles are 
 impossible, being inconsistent with the reign 
 of law, at variance with the order and harmony 
 of the physical universe? If it can be shown 
 that no such things have ever taken place, we 
 may reasonably exclaim, “No wonder, for 
 these things are contradictions of what we 
 know of natural laws;”’ but all such declara- 
 tions prior to the investigation of the facts 
 themselves, and made in order to prove that 
 the facts did not occur, are but bold assump- 
 tions of the point discussed, and in any other 
 sphere of thought than that which opposes 
 religion the absurdity of such reasoning would 
 be most glaring. 
 
 But where did we get this idea of miracles 
 being inconsistent with law in nature? Cer- 
 tainly not from science. Science can no more 
 define a miracle than she can define eternity or 
 God; and the Bible gives us no idea of what 
 a mircale is, other than that it is “a sign,” or 
 “wonder,” or “mighty deed;” sign, if you 
 please, of a power and wisdom not possessed 
 
24 MIRACLES 
 
 by man; sign of a higher power brought to 
 bear upon the ordinary line of cause and effect 
 in the physical world. The value of miracle 
 
 as evidence consists in its implying control 
 
 of nature not possible to man, or results 
 worked out by processes not within the reach 
 of man. But this neither implies the violation, 
 nor excludes the operation, of nature’s laws. 
 
 -The miracles themselves may have been 
 
 ie 
 
 wholly within the order of nature, while the 
 power that produced them was altogether out 
 of and beyond that order. It is not the super- 
 
 ‘natural element in the miracle, but the super- 
 
 human power of the performer, that gives it 
 weight as evidence of the Divine mission of 
 Jesus. If Jesus, therefore, wrought his mir- 
 acles by controlling the laws of nature so as to 
 make them effect results impossible to their 
 ordinary operations and beyond the skill of 
 man, the miracles were as really signs, such as 
 they were intended to be, as if every law of 
 the universe had been violated or suspended. 
 
 To maintain that the miracles were not 
 wrought through natural law, is to assume 
 that we know something of the way in which 
 
QUESTION AND THE EVIDENCE 25 
 
 they were performed, and that we know, be- 
 sides, all the laws of the universe, and all the 
 operations which can be accomplished by 
 them. Any impossibility which the Christian 
 believer may here assert is equally unscientific 
 and equally dishonoring to God, with the op- 
 positions of those who reject the miracles. 
 Neither believer nor disbeliever is authorized 
 to assert that miracles are violations of the 
 laws of nature. If nature herself produces 
 phenomena by combination or adjustment of 
 her laws, and if man can, by the same pro- 
 cesses, work out results that apparently vio- 
 late or contradict all known laws, certainly 
 Jesus, whether he was the Mighty God him- 
 self, or only an ambassador endowed with Di- 
 vine power and wisdom, could have done the 
 same. 
 
 We would not be understood as saying that 
 it was thus that Jesus wrought his miracles. 
 We do not know; and this—that we do not 
 _ know—is about all that we do know as to the 
 way in which his miracles were performed. 
 All that we can safely assert is, that the acts 
 ascribed to Jesus under the name of miracles, 
 
26 MIRACLES 
 
 whether achieved by Divine or other super- 
 human power, whether by processes of natural 
 law, or by means altogether supernatural, were 
 not in the line of ordinary nature. That they 
 were extra-ordinary, in the true sense of the 
 word, is all that we can properly claim for 
 them in any discussion of the evidences by 
 which they are to be established. 
 
 In determining, therefore, the question 
 whether or not these works of Jesus were 
 really performed, it is in the light of history 
 merely, not of science or theology, that the 
 subject is to be considered; and the question 
 must be settled in the very same way in which 
 we decide upon other events in history ; that is, 
 by appeal to the records of the past. 
 
 Of this last assertion, however, a most im- 
 portant qualification must be made. While it 
 is by the testimony of history alone that the 
 miracles are to be established, the testimony 
 must be far superior to that upon which other 
 events in history have generally been ad- 
 mitted. Where the events narrated involve 
 matters of faith and conscience, or are of such 
 a marvelous character—so yariant with the 
 
QUESTION AND THE EVIDENCE oT 
 
 course of nature and the general experience 
 of mankind—as were those wonderful deeds 
 of Jesus, they can not be admitted upon such 
 evidence as satisfies us as to the exploits of a 
 Cesar, an Alexander, or a Genghis Khan. 
 The mere statements of accredited historians 
 can not be admitted here, not necessarily even 
 when they are re-enforced by the authorities 
 from which they have been derived. There 
 must be an unbroken succession of authorities 
 back to the dates of the deeds in question, and 
 then these deeds must be attested by those 
 who had personal knowledge of them, and 
 who gave their testimony in circumstances 
 which forbid all reasonable imputation to them | 
 of any kind of fraud, or even of all kinds of 
 self-deception or delusion. 
 
 The testimony must have been given at 
 such times and places as afforded ample op- 
 portunity for investigation, and the facts them- 
 selves must have been of a nature to be cog- 
 nized by the senses. No mere mental phe- 
 nomenon, no belief, theory, or doctrine, can 
 be the subject of testimony. ‘The miracles 
 must have been discernible by the senses, and 
 
28 MIRACLES 
 
 at the same time they must not have tran- 
 scended or contradicted the senses. The 
 deeds themselves should have been seen, and 
 the performers of them seen; and that which 
 was performed is required to have been con- 
 sistent with what observation in the ordinary 
 exercise of our faculties tells us is really true. 
 
 such a miracle, therefore, as is claimed by 
 some in the transubstantiation of the mass, 
 can not be considered here. The eye does not 
 discern the miracle. The performer of the 
 miracle is not seen. So far as the senses tes- 
 tify, the bread is still bread, and the wine is 
 wine, notwithstanding the consecration. ‘The 
 miracle cotradicts, and can not, therefore, be 
 attested by the senses. 
 
 Not only must the testimony when deliv- 
 ered have been admitted by those who had 
 opportunity of putting it to the test, but the 
 admission must have been general; that is, 
 limited to no particular class or party of ob- 
 
 ' Servers. It must have been admitted by the 
 
 adherents of all creeds, in both political and 
 religious faith, and by the enemies as well as 
 
QUESTION AND THE EVIDENCE 29 
 
 the friends of the witnesses and of him whose 
 cause these latter had espoused. 
 
 To the above, and perhaps other tests, the 
 critical inquirer may subject the evidence for 
 miracles, and he should not be regarded un- 
 reasonable or unduly prejudiced, so long as 
 in his examinations he confines himself to the 
 methods of legitimate historical investigation. 
 
 There are bounds, however, which the in- 
 quirer not unfrequently transcends, and some 
 of these may now be named. The arbitrary 
 rejection, without examination, of the evi- 
 dence; the effort to make the peculiar nature 
 of the facts a proof that the facts did not oc- 
 cur; the rejection of the miracles because they 
 lie beyond the range of one’s own, or of the 
 general observation of mankind; the charging 
 of such numbers of witnesses with moral or 
 intellectual infirmity, when no other ground 
 can be found for this than the difficulty of ad- 
 mitting what they witness to; the assumption 
 that miracles are violations of the laws of na- 
 ture, when no man knows enough of any of 
 these laws to say whether in any given case 
 
30 MIRACLES 
 
 there has been a violation; asserting the im- 
 possibility of a miracle while yet admitting 
 the being of a God, or running the difficulty of 
 believing in miracles into an assertion of their 
 inherent incredibility, as if this belief were con- 
 tradictory of the laws of thought or reason,— 
 these and other like objections to the miracles 
 are not according to the methods of the true 
 historian; for these demand that, first of all, 
 the evidence be considered, and if this be un- 
 impeachable, the miracles are to be admitted, 
 unless it can be shown either that the miracles, 
 like creeds or dogmas, lie beyond the sphere 
 of human testimony, or that Omnipotence 
 itself can not work a miracle. 
 
 Let us now see what is the evidence to 
 which appeal is made in proof of those won- 
 derful works of Jesus. } 
 
 The multitudes that followed Jesus bore 
 witness to the miracles; the Jewish high 
 priests made open confession of them; Nico- 
 demus, a ruler of the Jews, added his testi- 
 mony ; Paul, with Thomas and the other apos- 
 tles, testified to the resurrection of Jesus from 
 the dead, and this, with many other of the 
 
QUESTION AND THE EVIDENCE 31 
 
 miracles, was particularly described by Mat- 
 thew, Mark, Luke, and John; while Jesus him- 
 self asserted miracles as the credentials of his 
 Divine mission to the world, and, without re- 
 serve or fear, told the multitudes of both 
 friends and enemies not to receive him unless 
 they saw the miracles performed. 
 
 For greater convenience of reference, we 
 give the miracles in the order in which they 
 occur in the Gospels. Their true chronolog- 
 ical order is not necessary to the argument. 
 
 The miracles, more or less minutely de- 
 scribed, are: 
 
 ~-/ Peter’s mother-in-law healed. (Matthew viii, 14.) 
 -* The calming of the storm. (Matthew viii, 24.) 
 ' The devils driven into the swine. (Matthew viii, 28.) 
 - Sight given to the blind. (Matthew ix, 27.) 
 4 A demoniac restored. (Matthew ix, 32.) 
 ~ Christ walking on the water. (Matthew xiv, 25.) 
 The Syrophenician maiden healed. (Matthew xv, 
 22.) 
 — Feeding of a multitude. (Matthew xv, 32.) 
 Money in the fish’s mouth. (Matthew xvii, 24.) 
 72 Sight given to the blind. (Matthew xx, 29.) 
 The fig-tree withered. (Matthew xxi, 18.) 
 A demoniac restored. (Mark i, 23.) 
 ~ A leper cleansed. (Mark i, 40.) 
 A withered hand restored. (Mark iii, 21.) 
 “74 Blind, dumb demoniac restored. (Mark iii, 19.) 
 -- Resuscitation of Jairus’s daughter. (Mark vy, 22.) 
 
32 MIRACLES 
 
 eee ene 
 
 Woman with the issue of blood. (Mark v, 25.) 
 Feeding of the multitude. (Mark vi, 34.) 
 Deaf stammerer cured. (Mark vii, 31.) 
 s0Sight given to the blind. (Mark viii, 22.) 
 
 A demoniac restored. (Mark ix, 14.) 
 
 The draught of fish. (Luke v, 1.) 
 
 A paralytic healed. (Luke v, 17.) 
 
 Centurion’s servant healed. (Luke vii, 1.) 
 
 » 5 Raising of the widow’s son. (Luke vii, 11.) 
 Spinal curvature healed. (Luke xiii, 10.) 
 Healing of the dropsy. (Luke xiv, 2.) 
 
 The cut-off ear restored. (Luke xxii, 49.) 
 
 Water turned into wine. (John ii, 1.) 
 3° Nobleman’s son healed. (John iv, 26.) 
 
 The cripple at Bethesda. (John v, 1.) 
 
 Sight given to a man born blind. (John ix, 1.) 
 
 Resurrection of Lazarus. (John xi, I.) 
 
 2,4 Resurrection of Jesus. (Matthew xxviii, 7; Mark 
 
 xvi, 9, etc.) 
 
 More general statements as to the miracles 
 are as follows: 
 
 “And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching 
 in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel 
 of the kingdom, and healing all. manner of 
 sickness and all manner of disease among the 
 people. And his fame went throughout all 
 Syria: and they brought unto him all sick peo- 
 ple that were taken with divers diseases and 
 torments, and those which were lunatic, and 
 those that had the palsy; and he healed 
 them.”—Matthew tv, 23. 
 
QUESTION AND THE EVIDENCE 33 
 
 “The men marveled, saying, What manner 
 of man is this, that even the winds and the sea 
 obey him?’’—Matthew viti, 27. 
 
 “Jesus answered and said unto them, Go 
 and show John again those things which ye 
 do see and hear: the blind receive their sight, 
 and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed, 
 and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up.’”’— 
 Matthew x1, 4. 
 
 “And great multitudes came unto him, hav- 
 ing with them those that were lame, blind, 
 dumb, maimed, and many others, and cast 
 them down at Jesus’ feet; and he healed 
 them.”’—Matthew xv, 30. 
 
 “And it came to pass, that when Jesus had 
 finished these sayings, he departed from Gali- 
 lee, and came into the coasts of Judea, beyond 
 Jordan; and great multitudes followed him; 
 and he healed them there.”—Matthew xix, I. 
 
 “And the blind and the lame came to him 
 in the Temple; and he healed them.”—Mat- 
 thew xxi, 14. 
 
 “And they were all amazed, insomuch that 
 they questioned among themselves, What 
 thing is this? What new doctrine is this? for 
 with authority commandeth he even the un- 
 
 3 
 
34 MIRACLES 
 
 clean spirits, and they do obey him.’”—Mark 
 Tete 7e 4 
 
 “And at even, when the sun did set, they 
 brought unto him all that were diseased, and 
 them that were possessed with devils. And all 
 the city was gathered together at the door. 
 And he healed many that were sick of divers 
 diseases, and cast out many devils.”—Mark 
 Bide 
 
 “And whithersoever he entered, into vil- 
 lages, or cities, or country, they laid the sick 
 in the streets, and besought him that they 
 might touch if it were but the border of his 
 garment: and as many as touched him were 
 made whole.’’—Mark vi, 56. 
 
 “And were beyond measure astonished, 
 saying, He hath done all things well: he mak- 
 eth both the deaf to hear and the dumb to 
 speak.’”’—Mark vii, 37. 
 
 “And they were all amazed, and spake 
 among themselves, saying, What a word is 
 this!’ For with authority and power he com- 
 mandeth the unclean spirits, and they come 
 out.”—Luke iy, 36. 
 
 “Now when the sun was setting, all they 
 that had any sick with divers diseases brought 
 them unto him; and he laid his hands on every 
 one of them, and healed them.”—Luke iv, 4o. 
 
QUESTION AND THE EVIDENCE 35 
 
 “And it came to pass on a certain day, as 
 he was teaching, that there were Pharisees and 
 doctors of the law sitting by, which were come 
 out of every town of Galilee, and Judea, and 
 Jerusalem: and the power of the Lord was 
 present to heal them.”—Luke v, 17. 
 
 “This beginning of miracles did Jesus in 
 Cana of Galilee, and his disciples believed on 
 him.”’—John ii, 11. 
 
 “Nicodemus . . . said unto him, 
 
 We know that thou art a teacher come from 
 God: for no man can do these miracles that 
 thou doest, except God be with him.’”’—John 
 SUES Whee 
 
 “T have greater witness than that of John: 
 for the works which the Father hath given me 
 to finish, the same works that I do, bear wit- 
 
 ness of me, that the Father hath sent me.”— 
 John v, 36. 
 
 “And a great multitude followed him, be- 
 cause they saw the miracles which he did.” — 
 John vi, 2. 
 
 “The works that I do in my Father’s name, 
 they bare witness of me.”—John x, 25. 
 
 “Tf I do not the works of my Father, be- 
 lieve me not. But if I do, though ye believe 
 not me, believe the works; that ye may know, 
 
36 MIRACLES 
 
 and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in 
 him.”’—John x, 37, 38. 
 
 “Then gathered the chief priests and the 
 Pharisees a council, and said, What do we? 
 for this man doeth many miracles. If we let 
 him thus alone, all men will believe on him: 
 and the Romans shall come and take away 
 both our place and nation.’’—John xi, 47. 
 
 “The people therefore that was with him 
 when he called Lazarus out of his grave, and 
 raised him from the dead, bare record. For 
 this cause the people also met him, for that 
 they heard that he had done this miracle.”— 
 John xii, 17. 
 
 “Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of 
 God. . by miracles and wonders and 
 signs, aren God did by him in the midst of 
 you, as ye yourselves also know.”’—Acts il, 22. 
 
 We have the following accounts of the 
 resurrection of Jesus: | 
 
 “Go quickly, and tell his disciples that he 
 is risen from the dead; and, behold, he goeth 
 before you into Galilee; there shall ye see him. 
 And as they went to tell his disciples, 
 behold, Jesus met them, saying, All hail. And 
 they came and held him by the feet, and wor- 
 shiped him.”—Matthew xxviii, 7. 
 
QUESTION AND THE EVIDENCE 37 
 
 “Now when Jesus was risen early the first 
 day of the week, he appeared first to Mary 
 Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven 
 devils. And she went and told them that 
 had been with him, as they mourned and wept. 
 And they, when they heard that he was alive, 
 and had been seen of her, believed not. And 
 after that he appeared in another form unto 
 two of them, as they walked, and went into the 
 country. And they went and told it unto the 
 residue: neither believed they them.’”—Mark 
 Xvi, 9. 
 
 “Jesus himself stood in the midst of them, 
 and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. But 
 they were terrified and affrighted, and sup- 
 posed that they had seen a spirit. And he said 
 unto them, Why are ye troubled? And why 
 do thoughts arise in your hearts? Behold my 
 hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle 
 me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and 
 bones as ye see me have. And when he had 
 thus spoken he showed them his hands and 
 his feet.” —Luke xxiv, 36. 
 
 “Then were the disciples glad, when they 
 saw the Lord.”—John xx, 20. 
 
 “But Thomas, one of the Twelve, called 
 Didymus, was not with them when Jesus 
 came. ‘The other disciples therefore said unto 
 
38 MIRACLES 
 
 him, We have seen the Lord. But he saith 
 unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the 
 print of the nails, and put my finger into the 
 print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his 
 side, I will not believe. And after eight days 
 again his disciples were within, and Thomas 
 with them: then came Jesus, the doors being 
 shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace 
 be unto you. Then saith he to Thomas, 
 Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; 
 and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into 
 my side: and be not faithless, but believing. 
 And Thomas answered and said unto him, 
 My Lord and my God.”—John xx, 24. 
 
 “To whom also he showed himself alive 
 after his passion by many infallible proofs, 
 being seen of them forty days, and speaking 
 of the things pertaining to the kingdom of 
 God.” —Acts i, 3. 
 
 ‘Him, being delivered by the. determinate 
 counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have 
 taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and 
 slain: whom God hath raised up, having loosed 
 the pains of death: because it was not possible 
 that he should be holden of it.”—Acts ii, 23. 
 
 “This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof 
 we all are witnesses.”’—Acts ii, 32. 
 
QUESTION AND THE EVIDENCE 39 
 
 “T delivered unto you first of all that which 
 I also received, how that Christ died for our 
 sins according to the Scriptures; and that he 
 was buried, and that he rose again the third 
 day according to the Scriptures: and that he 
 was seen of Cephas, then of the Twelve: and 
 after that, he was seen of above five hundred 
 brethren at once; of whom the greater part 
 remain unto this present, but some are fallen 
 asleep. After that, he was seen of James; then 
 of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen 
 of me also, as of one born out of due time.” — 
 Paul, in 1 Corinthians xv, 3. 
 
 Such is the evidence proposed of the mir- 
 acles and resurrection of Jesus, the testimony 
 of living witnesses, all of whom, with the ex- 
 ception of the Apostle Paul, were either the 
 daily companions of Jesus, or the occasional 
 attendants upon his ministry, or, as in the case 
 of Luke, had gotten their information from 
 “eye-witnesses and ministers of the Word.” 
 
 It will doubtless be conceded that this evi- 
 dence in itself is all that could be desired. 
 Nothing could be stated more clearly or more 
 definitely than that the miracles were per- 
 
40 MIRACLES 
 
 formed, and that Jesus rose from the dead: 
 and the most determined skeptic could not 
 demand that the evidence should be more 
 abundant. 
 
 We must now consider the sources from 
 which we get this evidence,—four little books 
 which have been ascribed to the writers al- 
 ‘ready named, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, 
 together with occasional statements in the 
 Acts of the Apostles and in the writings of 
 the Apostle Paul. 
 
 There can be no objection to our omitting 
 discussion of the dates and authorship of these 
 writings, provided we claim no more than has 
 been admitted by those who oppose the mir- 
 acles. For sake of the argument, we are will- 
 ing to let Renan describe these points. 
 
 By Rénan, Luke is said to have composed 
 his Gospel soon after the siege of Jerusalem, 
 which occurred in A. D. 70. The Gospel itself 
 is spoken of as “a work written entirely by the 
 same hand, and of the most perfect unity”’— 
 the work of a man who “selects, prunes, com- 
 bines.”! Matthew he places at an earlier date, 
 
 1Life of Jesus, pp. 18, 19. 
 
QUESTION AND THE EVIDENCE 4I 
 
 and Mark even before Matthew,” and after 
 expressing the opinion that both these Gos- 
 pels had received additions from earlier 
 sources, he speaks of them as bearing “not 
 wrongfully the name of ‘Gospel According to 
 Matthew,’ and ‘Gospel According to Mark.’ ’” 
 “Matthew clearly deserves unlimited confi- 
 dence as regards the discourses.”* “Mark, 
 the interpreter of Peter,” gives us “narratives 
 and sayings, composed from the accounts and 
 reminiscences of the Apostle Peter,’ and “‘is 
 full of minute observations coming without 
 any doubt from an eye-witness.’ 
 
 John’s Gospel is placed “towards the close 
 of the first century." Our critic says that its 
 worthiness, of “high consideration and often 
 of preference, is demonstrated, both by the in- 
 ternal evidence and by the examination of the 
 document itself, in a manner that leaves noth- 
 ing to be desired.”® Comparing the works of 
 the three Synoptists,® Matthew, Mark, Luke, 
 
 *Life of Jesus; pp. 19,.35.\\\; > Lbid,p..22)) 4 Tbid.'p. 34, 
 SIbid. p.20. *Ibidip.35. "Ibid: p. 25. | * Ibid. p. 25. 
 ®Dr. Schaff calls attention to the fact that this is the 
 proper form of the word in English: Synoptic is the 
 adjective, or the German noun.—Church History, Vol. J. 
 
42 MIRACLES 
 
 to the Memorabilia of Socrates, by Xenophon, 
 and the Gospel of John to the “Dialogues of 
 Plato,” and giving preference to the former 
 as expositions of the “Socratic Teaching,” he 
 calls the author of the Fourth Gospel “the 
 better biographer” of Jesus, because just as 
 Plato “knew most important things in regard 
 to the life of Socrates, of which Xenophon 
 was entirely ignorant,” so the fourth evangel- 
 ist “was better acquainted with the external 
 circumstances of the life’ of Jesus than were 
 those “whose memories made up the Synoptic 
 Gospels.”?° 
 
 , 
 
 “Upon the whole,” says Rénan, “I accept 
 the four Canonical Gospels as authentic. All, 
 in my judgment, date back to the first century, 
 and they are substantially by the authors to 
 whom they are attributed.’’"? 
 
 Not that we indorse everything here said, 
 do we quote thus freely from the Vie de Jesus: 
 we quote merely to give the other side of this 
 question the benefit of its own teachings as 
 to the matters of date and authorship. 
 
 With Rénan, therefore, as our authority, 
 
 10ife of Jesus, p. 33. Ibid. p. 34. 
 
QUESTION AND THE EVIDENCE 43 
 SUNT ee 
 
 we assign Mark’s Gospel to a date not far 
 from the middle of the first century ; Matthew 
 and Luke somewhat later, with John about 
 the year A. D. go—“all of them authentic,” 
 and each of them having its own peculiar ex- 
 cellences and special claim upon the respectful 
 consideration of the reader. 
 
 If the above dates are accurate, or proxi- 
 mately so, better times could not have been 
 selected for the composition of the Gospels— 
 better, that is, for faithful, discriminating his- 
 tories of the life of Jesus. The histories were 
 thus written at sufficient remoteness from the 
 events narrated to enable the writers to digest 
 both their own personal recollections and the 
 accounts which, from other sources, may have 
 been put into circulation among the people; 
 and yet not time enough had elapsed to dim 
 the memory or otherwise distort the picture 
 which had been retained of Jesus and his 
 mighty works, or, in the language of Rénan, 
 “the excellence of the Master, his miracles, and 
 
 his teachings.’'2, Nor had the generations 
 
 Fn ae he Ne Sh ete) 2 
 “Life of Jesus, p. 39. 
 
44 MIRACLES 
 
 passed away which might have critically de- 
 cided upon the merits of these writings. 
 
 These are facts which indicate that, not 
 only were the original authors of the Gospels 
 careful in their work of composition or selec- 
 tion, but that the most critical caution was ob- 
 served on the part of those who subsequently 
 adopted these works into the Sacred Canon. 
 Just as the disciples selected from among 
 themselves to take the place of Judas,’* only 
 one who had been both their own and Jesus’ 
 associate from the beginning of his ministry 
 to his resurrection from the dead, and one, 
 therefore, like themselves an eye-witness both 
 of the other miracles and of the resurrection, 
 so in their narratives of the life of Jesus the 
 successors of these disciples were cautious to 
 select for publication to the world and to fu- 
 ture ages only those reminiscences or tra- 
 ditions in the compilation of which there could 
 be least room for,error, and as to the truth of 
 which there could be least occasion for dis- 
 belief or doubt. Out of a number of histories 
 or memorabilia of Jesus they selected only 
 
 18 Acts i, 22. 
 
QUESTION AND THE EVIDENCE 45 
 
 those of the four evangelists of whom John 
 and Matthew had been the daily companions 
 of Jesus; Luke had carefully “traced all things 
 from the first,” following the accounts only of 
 “eye-witnesses and ministers of the Word,’’'* 
 and Mark had written as the amanuensis of 
 the Apostle Peter. Of these writers, there- 
 fore, it may be said that they give us substan- 
 tially only the testimony of eye-witnesses to 
 the events recorded. And this fact must now 
 be emphasized, that among all the distin- 
 guished characters of ancient times we can 
 find none whose life may be regarded as so 
 carefully or so accurately given as is that of 
 Jesus. 
 
 We say these Gospels were selected from a 
 number of memoirs known to the early 
 Church. That other narratives of the life of 
 Jesus were in existence before the formation 
 of the Sacred Canon is a fact well known; and 
 some of these were in almost equal esteem 
 with the other parts of Scripture. The “Acts 
 of Pilate,” for instance, is appealed to by both 
 Tertullian and Justin Martyr, the latter of 
 
 14T uke i, 1, 2. 
 
46 MIRACLES 
 
 whom tells us that these Acts “were recorded 
 under Pontius Pilate.”?® So early a writer as 
 Origen cites “The Gospel According to the 
 Egyptians,’’ the “Gospel According to the He- 
 brews,” the “Gospel of Matthias,” the ‘Gospel 
 of Peter,” with several others of like char- 
 acter; and by the time the Canon was ar- 
 ranged, more than one hundred of the Apocry- 
 phal writings, counting “Acts” and “Epistles” 
 as well as “Gospels,” were noticed by the 
 “Fathers,” near one-half of which are still 
 extantiis 
 
 But there is good evidence that many 
 works of this kind had been written before our 
 Gospels were composed. 
 
 I. Quotations are found in the “Fathers,” 
 of sayings of Jesus, which are not given in our 
 Gospels, and these sayings, if not mere loose, 
 unwritten tradition, must have been extracted 
 from books not now known to the world. “It 
 is more blessed to give than to receive,” is an 
 
 Justin Martyr: “First Apology,” page 28. Oxford, 
 1861. 
 
 McClintock and Strong’s Cyclopedia: Art. “ Apoc- 
 rypha,” where a complete list of these writings is given. 
 
QUESTION AND THE EVIDENCE 47 
 IR NAAR IE BI NAD EE A EE A eee ad bdo Aa Rt aad ASTI 
 
 instance in kind, given by Paul himself,17 and 
 the apostle’s caution to Timothy against giv- 
 ing heed to “myths and endless genealogies”’!8 
 looks very much like a reference to writings 
 concerning Jesus which he regarded mythical. 
 
 2. St. Paul again, in his famous chapter on 
 the resurrection,!® cites “Scriptures” which 
 narrated the rising of Jesus from the dead. 
 These Scriptures could not have been any of 
 those now called Gospels; for (1) the account 
 there given was, in several particulars, differ- 
 ent from any now known to us, and (2) if the 
 generally accepted chronology be correct, the 
 Epistle to the Corinthians was written several 
 years before the earliest of our Gospels was 
 published to the world. The dates of these 
 Gospels, according to Rénan, have already 
 been given to the reader. According to Dr. 
 Schaff, a more recent, and, to many, a more 
 acceptable authority than Rénan, all these 
 Gospels belong to the “seventh decade;” that 
 is, between 60 A. D. and 70 A. D., while this 
 
 Epistle was composed A. D. 57.2 
 
 see lk SNES Sa RAT RE NLR devs ON eR ALT NOL Palade tea AA 
 17 Acts xx, 35. rca Deb ragok iy Aer (Gor, eV. 
 *® History of the Church, Vol. I, pages 582, 758. 
 
48 MIRACLES 
 
 3. Besides this evidence from Paul, we 
 have the express testimony of Luke that be- 
 fore his Gospel was undertaken, “many had 
 taken in hand to set forth in order a declara- 
 tion of those things which were surely be- 
 lieved’?! among the followers of Jesus. 
 
 _ Now, the fact that from so many writings, 
 / only four small volumes, of a few hours’ read- 
 ing each, should have been authorized as con- 
 taining the true life of Jesus, and that these 
 four should so fully agree in all the essential 
 features of that life, is evidence that can not be 
 disregarded, that the Gospels, as we now have 
 them, were compiled with the ereatest pos- 
 sible care, and were sanctioned by the Church 
 only after thorough investigation of their con- 
 tents. 
 
 But with all this evidence of painstaking 
 accuracy in the compilation of these writings, 
 there are striking peculiarities of an apparently 
 opposite kind which must not be passed in 
 silence. We observe, for instance, an almost 
 total disregard of many of the most important 
 principles of historical composition. ‘There is 
 
 4 Luke i, 1. 
 
QUESTION AND THE EVIDENCE 49 
 
 Cit CAN ROTO ce SSRN MR UE EE ae ah aL 
 no proper observance of proportion as regards 
 the prominence of the events narrated; both 
 deeds and discourses are given out of their 
 true order or connections; liberties, in the 
 quotations from the Old Testament, are taken 
 with the text, which modern usage could not 
 permit; there is total absence of effort to 
 adorn or amplify, or even to set in their true 
 light, many of the most interesting portions 
 of the history; the most wonderful, and, ap- 
 parently, the most trivial incidents are de- 
 scribed in the same plain, matter-of-fact style, 
 and with equal length or brevity of descrip- 
 tion; facts are related by each with seeming 
 unconcern as to whether, in the particular in- 
 cidents, his own account agrees or not with 
 the accounts of his fellow disciples,—and all 
 this with a want of chronological precision 
 and biographical completeness which would 
 be fatal to other historical compositions. 
 
 But what is most remarkable in these de- 
 fects or blemishes, if such they be, we see only 
 proof of the value of these writings, when they 
 are considered—as in the present discussion 
 
 they should be—merely as the sources or 
 4 
 
50 MIRACLES 
 
 authorities of our knowledge of the acts and 
 sayings of Jesus. The disagreement as to 
 incidents only makes more manifest the agree- 
 ment as to the main facts presented. Profes- 
 sor Huxley’s glorying is vain, as he discovers 
 the discrepancy in the accounts of the Gada- 
 rene miracle as to the number of men pos- 
 sessed of evil spirits,?* for the writers all agree 
 in the expulsion of the demons into the swine, 
 which Professor Huxley himself confesses to 
 be the “essential point.” As here, so 
 throughout these books discrepancies are 
 such as must inevitably exist in four different 
 recitals made by as many different men on 
 different occasions, and they only afford the 
 stronger evidence that each man presented the 
 truth of things as his own eyes had seen them, 
 and the disagreements in non-essentials set 
 before us in better light, and better proven, 
 the essential facts in Jesus’ life. 
 
 So of other objections made by some as to 
 the style of these biographies. The want of 
 arrangement so conspicuous, the lack of rhe- 
 
 Cf, Matt. viii, 28, with Mark v, 2, and Luke viii, 27. 
 * Christianity and Agnosticism, page 20. 
 
QUESTION AND THE EVIDENCE 51 
 
 torical effort, the easy, natural manner of nar- 
 rating the mighty deeds, the absence of appeal 
 to the reader’s sense of the marvelous, the 
 unconcern apparent at least as to the reader’s 
 acceptance or rejection of the narratives,—all 
 these, along with the direct, clear, bold, un- 
 adorned statement of facts, without equivoca- 
 tion, self-contradiction, or concealment, make 
 these Gospels appear to be the work of honest, 
 simple-minded men, whose only purpose was 
 the transmission to posterity and throughout 
 the world of the main deeds and teachings of 
 their Master. 
 
 Taken all in all, therefore, these peculiar- 
 ities add greatly to the prima facie credibility 
 of the Gospel histories. They sink the authors 
 into obscurity, they bring out their subject 
 into the bolder relief, and present us Jesus the 
 more fully as a real, living being, moving, 
 speaking, acting before our eyes. 
 
 All this has been fully admitted by the 
 ablest opposers of the miracles. More than a 
 century ago Rousseau declared that “the life 
 and sayings of Socrates were not nearly so 
 
52 MIRACLES 
 
 well attested as those of Jesus ;’* and recently 
 John Stuart Mill: “It is useless to say that the 
 Christ of the Gospels is not historical: his 
 character will abide after criticism has done 
 its utmost.”*° Strauss speaks of the first three 
 Gospels as “the reminiscences of the very man, 
 gathered and garnered on the very spot;’%® 
 while Rénan, as we have seen, says that they 
 are “all authentic,” and elsewhere speaks of 
 them “as better than formal, authoritative his- 
 tory.” Matthew “clearly deserves unlimited 
 confidence as regards the discourses ;”27 Mark 
 presents us both “the narratives and sayings 
 ‘of Jesus’ full of minute observations coming 
 without any doubt from an eye-witness;” 
 Luke is an author who “selects, prunes, com- 
 bines,” while John is even “a better biog- 
 rapher” than either of these, inasmuch as he 
 “was better acquainted with the external cir- 
 cumstances of the life of Jesus.” 
 
 It is thus seen that, whatever their idea of 
 _ the miracles, the best known and most fre- 
 
 eSNG Ea kad den el oe OU et) ie wa aad ee)» 
 *4Himile, p. 370. 
 * Three Essays in Religion, p. 353. 
 *®Old Faith and New, p. 57. ” Life of Jesus, p. 34. 
 
QUESTION AND THE EVIDENCE a 
 
 quently read among the authors who deny the 
 miracles give unequivocal testimony to the 
 writings in which the miracles have been nar- 
 rated. This testimony is virtually given to 
 the miracles themselves, and but for the gen- 
 eral character of the works from which the 
 above quotations have been made, the authors 
 of them might be understood as here contra- 
 dicting their own denials of the miracles. Of 
 course, however, we can not urge this point. 
 All that we now claim is the full admission of 
 the high character of the sources from which 
 we derive our evidence of the miracles, and 
 consequently the no less full admission of the 
 evidence as we propose to present it in the 
 argument. 
 
 The testimony being admitted as part of 
 the written life of Jesus, we can not see how 
 the miracles can be denied as part of the actual 
 life. These are so inwoven with the general 
 text of the Gospels that to eliminate them 
 would be such a disintegration of the records 
 as no just criticism could allow; to believe 
 them legendary or fabulous would be to throw 
 discredit upon the history from first to last. 
 
54 MIRACLES 
 
 There might be reasons for expunging here 
 and there the record of some particular deed, 
 just as one might challenge the authenticity 
 of certain passages in Thucydides or Xeno- 
 phon; but to assert that the main story of the 
 “Gospels is veritable history, while all accounts 
 of miracles are false, is equally absurd with 
 admitting the works of Thucydides and Xeno- 
 phon to be genuine histories, and yet all ac- 
 counts of battles in the one, or of stathmi and 
 parasangs in the other, are to be discarded. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 Further Consideration of the Evidence 
 
 O much, in brief, for the writings which 
 contain. the evidence. The authors of 
 these writings, it must be borne in mind, while 
 bearing testimony of their own, have recorded 
 that of large numbers of others whose evi- 
 dence is equally valid and equally trustworthy. 
 Long before the evangelists had composed 
 their histories, the apostles, other disciples, 
 the mixed multitudes of followers, Jesus him- 
 self, and the Jewish Sanhedrim had testified to 
 the miracles. ‘The testimony of these is none 
 the less valid because they had not themselves 
 set it down on parchment. They had given 
 their evidence in person, with the living voice, 
 and many of them were yet alive when the evi- 
 dence was published to the world. 
 Let us now see more particularly who these 
 other witnesses are. 
 As to the unnamed multitudes that wit- 
 
 nessed to the miracles, we can only take it for el 
 
 99 
 
N 
 56 MIRACLES 
 
 granted that they were men and women of the 
 average intellectual and moral character. To 
 suppose otherwise would be in violation of all 
 probability, and would evince an unfair spirit 
 inthe argument. The testimony of these mul- 
 titudes is all that could be desired. ‘What 
 manner of man is this, that the winds and seas 
 obey him?’ 
 
 “With authority commandeth he even the 
 unclean spirits, and they obey him.’? “He 
 hath done all things well: he maketh both the 
 deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak.’’ 
 
 But who were the scribes and Pharisees 
 that testified? Weknow them well. No class 
 of men in history is better known—known as 
 men of the most bigoted sectarian zeal; de- 
 voted to tradition; opposed to all innovation 
 that might contradict their usages or their 
 ideas; servants of the letter rather than the 
 spirit of the truth; bitter enemies of Jesus, and 
 very naturally so, for at their errors, their 
 blind follies, and hoary superstitions, Jesus 
 had, from the first, been leveling his severest 
 denunciations. It was these men, chiefly, that 
 
 Matt. viii, 27, ?QLuke iv, 36, %Mark vii, 37. 
 
CONSIDERATION OF THE EVIDENCE 57 
 
 persecuted Jesus, thwarted him at every step, 
 and at length when they could not otherwise 
 
 prevail, nailed him to the cross. These men, — _ 
 
 with all their hate, prejudice, malice, bore wit- 
 ness to the miracles. “This man doeth many 
 miracles. If we let him alone, all men will be- 
 lieve on him, and the Romans will come and 
 take away both our place and nation.’ 
 
 Of the disciples who testified we know this: 
 whatever may have been their faults, their 
 want of intellectual or social culture, or other 
 defects of character, they were men of strong, 
 determined will; men who, as they could not 
 be forced into recanting what they had said, 
 and believed that they had seen, so neither 
 were they likely to be persuaded or deluded 
 into believing as seen that which they had 
 not seen. ‘They were not weak, silly men, 
 such as easily believe the marvelous merely 
 because or when it supports their own views 
 or interests. On the other hand, they were 
 
 eminently skeptical men; they were the first — 
 
 to doubt the resurrection of Jesus from the 
 dead; they contemptuously jeered at the re- 
 
 ‘John xi, 47, 48. 
 
58 MIRACLES 
 
 port of Mary,° and in no one instance did they 
 credit each other’s testimony on the subject. 
 They must see, each with his own eyes, and 
 even then they did not believe until they had 
 taken hold of the body and satisfied them- 
 selves by the double evidence of sight and 
 touch that the apparition before them was 
 really Jesus.© These men were heroes in the 
 cause for which they labored. In strength of 
 soul and in hazardous achievement they stand 
 alone in history. They went forth, friendless 
 and unaided, in the midst of opposition, scorn, 
 persecution, and dangers of death, to establish 
 throughout the world what was apparently the 
 most absolutely hopeless enterprise ever con- 
 ceived by man; and they did establish it; in 
 the words of their enemies, they “turned the 
 world upside down,’” and to-day the world 
 advances and prospers just in proportion as it 
 regards what these men said and did. What 
 they chiefly did and said was in testimony of 
 Jesus, his miracles, and his resurrection. 
 Jesus himself bore witness to the miracles. 
 He did this in the most direct and positive 
 
 ——. 
 a 
 
 STuke xxiv, 11, ‘Luke xxiv, 36. ‘Acts xvii, 6, 
 
CONSIDERATION OF THE EVIDENCE 59 
 
 manner. When the Baptist sent to inquire 
 whether or not Jesus was the Christ, Jesus re- 
 plied, “Go and show John again those things 
 which ye do hear and see: the blind receive 
 their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are 
 cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are 
 raised up.” 
 
 On another occasion, immediately after the 
 working of a miracle, he made such emphatic 
 proclamation of himself as the worker of mir- 
 acles, and that, too, in the midst of an angry 
 mob, as to lay upon the miracles the entire 
 weight of the cause he had undertaken. “If I 
 do not the works of my Father, believe me 
 not. But if I do, though ye believe not me, 
 believe the works; that ye may know and be- 
 lieve that the Father is in me, and I in him.’” 
 
 Of the character of this witness there is no 
 room for doubt. Even in his own day, not 
 only those who had known him merely in 
 common fame, but those who by intimate as- 
 sociation knew him best, ascribed to him a 
 character above all that is ordinarily called 
 good or great. Far beyond all contempo- 
 
 8John x, 37, 38. 
 
60 MIRACLES 
 
 raries did they rank him. Some believed that 
 he was Elijah; others that he was Jeremiah or 
 another of the olden prophets come back to 
 the world. Herod was not the only one who 
 believed that he was John the Baptist risen 
 from the dead.® Pilate even called him “that 
 just person.”!° The Centurion and those with 
 him hesitated not to pronounce him even “a 
 Son of God.”!! Peter confessed that he was 
 “Christ the Son of the living God.”!? 
 
 This high estimate of Jesus has never 
 changed. Whatever have been the varying 
 opinions of men as to his Divine personality 
 and the religion which he taught, there has 
 been no variance as to the exalted character 
 which Jesus displayed in his mere human re- 
 lations. Mr. J. S. Mill ranks him, “even in the 
 estimation of those who have no belief in his 
 inspiration, in the very first rank of the men of 
 sublime genius of whom our species can 
 boast.”48 Mr. Lecky considers him “the ideal 
 character who has done more to regenerate 
 
 9Mark vi, 16; Matt. xvi, 14. 10Matt. xxvii, 24. 
 Matt. xxvii, 54. 12 Matt. xvi, 16, 
 18 Three Essays in Religion, pp. 254, 255. 
 
 Y _—— 
 
 PE as 
 
CONSIDERATION OF THE EVIDENCE oI 
 
 and soften mankind than all the exhortations 
 of moralists.’’!* 
 
 “The wise Jesus,’ “the incomparable 
 man,” “in the first rank of the grand family | 
 of the true sons of God we must place Jesus,” 
 is the enthusiastic utterance of Rénan. ‘God 
 does not speak to him from without; God is 
 in him. . . . He lives in the bosom of 
 God by uninterrupted communication. 
 Whatever be the surprises of the future, Jesus 
 will never be surpassed. . . . All ages 
 will proclaim that among the sons of men 
 there has been born none greater than 
 Jestis..7° 
 
 Theodore Parker testifies that “He unites 
 in himself the sublimest precepts and the di- 
 vinest practices, thus more than realizing the 
 dreams of prophets and sages; rises free from 
 all prejudice of age, nation, or sect; gives free 
 range to the Spirit of God in his breast, 
 and pours forth a doctrine beautiful as the 
 
 light, sublime as heaven, and true as God.’’?® 
 
 M4 History of Rationalism, Vol. II, p. 88. 
 
 1 Life of Jesus, pp. 94-104. 
 
 16 Discourses of Religion, quoted by Dr. Bushnell in 
 “Nature and the Supernatural.” 
 
62 MIRACLES 
 
 It were needless to comment on the char- 
 acter of this witness. A few remarks only we 
 offer upon the evidence as a whole. It is the 
 very same evidence by which we ascertain the 
 other events of Jesus’ life. Where Jesus was 
 born; where and how he passed his boyhood; 
 what he taught, how he taught; whom he 
 made disciples; how he died and was buried,— 
 these are all to be determined by the Gospel 
 histories, and it is to these alone as the simple 
 recitals of the acts of Jesus, that we appeal for 
 proof that among these acts the miracles are 
 found. Viewing, then, the miracles as mere 
 "facts of the past,/without regard either to the 
 agencies by which, or the purpose for which, 
 they are said to have been performed,\we have 
 the same evidence for them as for those other 
 more ordinary events as to which no doubt 
 exists. And we must bear in mind that the 
 
 fant evidence is that of the senses, not of the intel- 
 
 lect or understanding; that is, the witnesses 
 testified as to what their eyes had seen, and 
 not as to beliefs which had been adopted from 
 a course of reasoning. Had this latter been 
 the case, their testimony had been of little 
 
 . 
 —— eo 
 
CONSIDERATION OF THE EVIDENCE 63 
 
 worth, for testimony can not be admitted 
 as to beliefs or conclusions arrived at by rea- 
 soning. The logical faculty is always liable to 
 err except when its decisions are immediate, 
 as when the senses are addressed or where 
 mathematical demonstration is employed. 
 That this is so is seen in the fact that from 
 the same premises different conclusions are 
 drawn by even the wisest and best of men, and 
 when the conclusions differ all but one must 
 be erroneous, and even this may not be cor- 
 rect. But this uncertainty does not connect 
 with beliefs founded upon what the senses tell 
 us. A number of men looking upon a stream 
 or mountain may differ in their estimates of 
 distance, magnitude, elevation, or other things 
 not discernible by the eye; but not one of them 
 believes that the mountain is the stream or 
 the stream the mountain, and not one of them, 
 on a different occasion, believes that he sees 
 such things where none exist. What the eye 
 sees, or seems to see, the mind believes. The 
 belief is immediate, without doubt or reason- 
 ing; not only immediate, but irresistible; not 
 only so, but true; that is, the things seen are 
 
f 
 
 / 
 
 fo 
 f 
 
 64 MIRACLES 
 
 actual existences, and not mere states or con- 
 ditions of the mind. Just as when one sees 
 the sun to rise it is because the sun has risen, 
 so when those multitudes saw, or believed 
 they saw, the miracles, the miracles had been 
 performed. There can be no denial here, ex- 
 cept by showing either that those who re- 
 ported the miracles were in a dream, or had 
 minds abnormally affected, or eyes diseased, 
 so as to be unable to see aright; or that noth- 
 ing at all was seen, and the witnesses were 
 intentionally attempting to deceive the people. 
 
 Now, both the number and variety of the 
 witnesses preclude the idea either of their de- 
 signed deception of the people, or of their 
 being themselves deceived upon the subject. 
 It must be noted here that there is no vari- 
 ation in the testimony as to these acts of Jesus. 
 The witnesses differed greatly in their ideas 
 as to who Jesus was, some believing that he 
 was the Baptist risen, others Elias or one of 
 the prophets, others an agent of the prince of 
 devils, others the Messiah, the Son of God; 
 but as to the miracles, there is in all their utter- 
 ances not one word of doubt, controversy, or 
 
 —— ee ee ee ee eee =, =e 
 
CONSIDERATION OF THE EVIDENCE 65 
 
 dissent. There is here perfect agreement both i 
 
 of the evangelists among themselves, and of 
 the disciples, of the general multitudes, of 
 Jesus himself, and of the scribes and Pharisees, 
 his enemies. If, therefore, a single individual 
 of those witnesses told the truth as to what 
 had been done by Jesus, the truth was equally 
 told by all; and so, if one of them told a de- 
 signed falsehood, or testified erroneously be- 
 cause of defective vision or disordered mental 
 action, we must believe that all alike were sub- 
 ject to influences that prevented them from 
 seeing or telling the truth of things. Now, 
 while we may easily see that what is told by 
 a number of men in different, independent 
 narratives must be the truth, it would be diffi- 
 cult to find a man not wholly enslaved to prej- 
 udice who could admit that great multitudes 
 at different times, in different places, could, 
 even by prearranged compact, tell the same 
 falsehood, or that they could all display the 
 same peculiarities of defective vision, or all 
 alike be deluded by the same phantasmagoria 
 of the brain; and that such numbers of men 
 
 could testify erroneously to seeing the same 
 ni 
 
66 MIRACLES 
 Pee ae Lo Makan Moll ki NL vA Ls 
 
 things when different causes had operated to 
 falsify their visions, is yet more difficult to 
 admit. 
 
 Moreover, the circumstances were such 
 that the witnesses could not have been mis- 
 taken as to the nature of the facts attested by 
 them. The evidence is that the miracles were 
 performed openly in different localities, and in 
 full view of multitudes of all classes of men in 
 
 both Church and State. There were neve Ie 
 
 ‘chosen places, no screens or curtains, no me- 
 diums or “professors,” that could suggest the 
 idea of special contrivance or collusion. ‘The 
 witnesses had, therefore, every opportunity of 
 testing the genuineness of the miracles, and 
 they had the very same means of making satis- 
 factory tests that could be employed to-day. 
 All that was necessary to this was that they 
 could see: see that the leper was healed, that 
 the blind were made to see, that the dead were 
 raised. | 
 
 And, then, the miracles were generally of 
 such a kind that their genuineness could not 
 be doubted. They could not be ascribed to 
 
 the subject’s faith, imagination, or other oper- 
 
CONSIDERATION OF THE EVIDENCE 67 
 
 ations of the mind. In many instances they 
 were wrought upon inanimate objects, as in 
 the blasting of the fig-tree, turning the water 
 into wine, finding the coin in the fish’s mouth, 
 walking upon the water, calming the storm, 
 and multiplying the loaves and fishes. 
 
 It is, of course, readily granted that in the 
 healing of the sick the patient’s faith might 
 have effected much, and it would be no dis- 
 honor to Jesus to admit that there might have 
 been instances in which Jesus himself exerted 
 no power in the healing. The fact, however, 
 is that very seldom do we find the patient 
 exercising faith. In by far the larger number 
 of cases where faith was manifested or de- 
 clared, it was the faith, not of the persons upon 
 whom the miracles were performed, but of 
 those who made the request of Jesus in behalf 
 of others. Thus it was the faith of the cen- 
 turion, not of his servant who was healed; 
 the faith of Jairus, not of his daughter who 
 was resuscitated; of the sisters, Martha and 
 Mary, not of their brother who was called 
 forth from the tomb; and so of other instances 
 that need not be referred to. If the reader 
 
68 MIRACLES 
 
 will review, one by one, the different miracles, 
 he will be astonished to see how few were con- 
 sequent upon, or in any wise connected with 
 the faith of those who were the recipients of 
 the benefits bestowed by Jesus. Nothing 
 could be more absurd, then, than the effort 
 made by some to ascribe these deeds of Jesus 
 to the faith, hope, or other mental state or ac- 
 tion of the subject. 
 
 Again, the cause supported by the miracles 
 insures us against the idea of those witnesses 
 being mistaken as to what was done by Jesus. 
 That it was a cause upon which depended the 
 most momentous issues—a cause the most 
 difficult to establish the world had known, a 
 cause in many regards the most offensive to 
 human reason, and apparently opposed to at 
 least all earthly interests—must have made 
 those followers of Jesus think long and well, 
 and try all possible tests, before giving in to 
 what made such severe demands upon their 
 confidence, and such sacrifices of their per- 
 sonal ease and comfort. Those men were 
 no more likely than we of to-day to be- 
 lieve that the Son of Mary was also the Son 
 
CONSIDERATION OF THE EVIDENCE 69 
 
 of God, and they were not likely to leave 
 home, wife, children, houses, lands, and suffer 
 want and persecution in behalf of one who had 
 little else than these experiences to offer, with- 
 out satisfying themselves of the proof which 
 had been asserted of those bold claims. 
 
 And, then, whatever may have been the lia- 
 bility of others to err upon the subject, there 
 was no such liability with Jesus. He knew 
 very well whether he did what he professed to 
 be doing in proof of the Divine authority 
 under which he claimed to act. To speak of 
 the miracles which Jesus thought he was work- 
 ing, as Rénan has done,” is too absurd for 
 refutation, and can no more be admitted than 
 we can admit that Jesus could have attempted 
 fraud in the accomplishment of the Father’s 
 work. 
 
 Indeed, the testimony of this last witness 
 is decisive of the question. That Jesus did 
 testify to the miracles has not been doubted or 
 denied. No criticism that we know has at- 
 tempted to eliminate from the record the pas- 
 sages which set forth this fact, and there is no 
 
 MVife of Jesus, page 232. 
 
70 MIRACLES 
 
 conceivable way of escaping or annulling the 
 proof thus afforded in the case. If Jesus was 
 of the character which we have seen has uni- 
 versally been ascribed to him—both upright 
 and wise beyond all the men the world has 
 known—he could not have hazarded his claims 
 upon the profession of deeds that were not 
 wrought; he could not have mistaken for gen- 
 uine miracles mere feats of jugglery or sleight 
 of hand, which he had himself performed, and 
 much less could Jesus have spoken intentional 
 falsehood upon the subject. He who stood in 
 the “front rank of the grand family of the true 
 sons of God,” and “poured forth a doctrine 
 beautiful as the light, sublime as heaven, and 
 true as God,” can certainly be admitted as a 
 qualified witness to deeds which, he claimed, 
 were performed by himself—performed in 
 open day, before multitudes of people, in va- 
 rious localities, and in behalf of a cause so dear 
 that for its accomplishment he voluntarily laid 
 down his life. 
 
 We would now compare the evidence for 
 these events in Jesus’ life with that upon which 
 belief is based in other facts of history; and 
 
 a 
 
CONSIDERATION OF THE EVIDENCE 71 
 
 we are perfectly willing to have the compari- 
 son tested by the principle laid down by Pro- 
 fessor Huxley, that the question as to what 
 Jesus said and did “is capable of solution by 
 no other methods than those ordinarily prac- 
 ticed by the historian and literary critic.’”"** 
 
 First, let us consider other miracles of 
 which we read, those especially which have 
 been ascribed to ‘‘the saints’ and others who 
 have figured in the history of the Church. 
 
 As to these, our limits forbid that we enter 
 into a minute examination even of a single 
 one of them; but after careful consideration of 
 the subject, we feel prepared to assert the fol- 
 lowing propositions: 
 
 1. In by far the greater number of these 
 pseudo-miracles a living person as the per- 
 former of them is rarely seen. The agent that 
 appears as working the miracle is a sacred 
 relic—piece of the cross; blood, bones, or 
 tomb of a deceased saint; consecrated oil or 
 hallowed fountain; and, as Professor Huxley’® 
 confesses as to the best accredited miracles 
 
 18 Christianity and Agnosticism, page 16. 
 19 Christianity and Agnosticism. 
 
72 MIRACLES 
 
 recorded by Eginhard, the miracles are all of 
 a class in which “malingering is possible or 
 hysteria presumable.” 
 
 2. These miracles are either narrated (a) of 
 persons absent and out of reach of the wit- 
 nesses, so-called, who recorded them, as was 
 the case with St. Xavier, who was in the dis- 
 tant East when the miracles were ascribed to 
 him, and whose letters contain “express dis- 
 proof” of the miracles;?° or (b) of persons too 
 long dead for eye-witnesses to have borne tes- 
 timony to the fact, as with Gregory, whose 
 miracles were published a century and a half 
 alter his death;*! or (c) of those who during 
 their lifetime are well known to have made 
 no profesion of miraculous powers, and of 
 whom contemporaries made no such claims, 
 as is the case with the Virgin Mary. 
 
 3. Such miracles, therefore, are wholly 
 without the evidence of witnesses who could 
 have known the truth of their assertions. 
 
 4. Not one of these miracles is alleged to 
 have been wrought in support of a great cause 
 
 0 Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1889. 
 *1Paley’s Works, Vol. III, page 263. 
 
 aS <> aS 
 
CONSIDERATION OF THE EVIDENCE 73 
 
 which appealed to them for confirmation, and 
 which was actually founded upon belief in 
 them; not one of them drew upon the wit- 
 nesses such opposition and persecution as was 
 borne by those who testified to the miracles 
 and the resurrection of Jesus; and not one of 
 them was believed by all classes of men and 
 women to whom they were reported, so that 
 learned, unlearned, friends, and enemies were 
 alike convinced. 
 
 5. Consequently no such miracle is estab- 
 lished by evidence which will bear comparison 
 with that which we have for the miracles of 
 Jesus. 
 
 Let us now see how the case stands with 
 well-known marvels in ancient classic history. 
 
 It were folly to consider seriously the com- 
 parison which has been often made between 
 the accounts of these deeds of Jesus and the 
 early Greek and Roman legends. Such stories 
 as those of Prometheus, Hercules, Theseus, 
 the translation of Romulus, the conferences 
 between Numa and Egeria, make no show 
 even of a pretense to an historical basis. ‘The 
 authors of such works as contain these and 
 
74 MIRACLES 
 
 other like narrations wrote centuries and tens 
 of centuries subsequently to the exploits of 
 these mythical heroes, and not only so, but 
 they recite these things without attaching the 
 least credibility to them. To occupy the read- 
 er’s time, therefore, with any further compari- 
 son here would be like making a stately argu- 
 ment to prove that Julius Cesar was more of 
 a veritable historical character than Jack the 
 Giant-killer, or that Froude and Freeman are 
 more reliable narrators of facts than the au- 
 thors of the Arabian Nights or old Baron 
 Munchausen. 
 
 We pass on, therefore, to consider the 
 proof of the miracles as compared with the 
 proofs of what we call authentic history; that 
 is, history generally admitted, and as to which, 
 in the main, no doubt is entertained. Very 
 few of the events, at least of ancient history, 
 have been transmitted to us with evidence 
 that can bear such investigation as has been 
 given to those deeds of Jesus. Whatever may 
 have been the materials out of which histori- 
 ans have wrought their narratives, those ma- 
 terials are, with very few exceptions, inacces- 
 
CONSIDERATION OF THE EVIDENCE 75 
 eee 
 
 sible to us to-day, and hence our knowledge 
 of ancient history is knowledge, not of events 
 themselves, but only of what has been said of 
 the events by historians who could not pos- 
 sibly have known the certainty of what they 
 wrote. Even in the writings of those who, 
 like Thucydides and Cesar, have given us 
 fragmentary histories of their own times, few 
 things are recorded of which the writers had 
 any personal knowledge, and even as to these 
 there are no contemporary authors to con- 
 firm their stories. Asa general thing, we ad- 
 mit the accounts of the great “authorities,” 
 largely because we have no special interest 
 in the matter, and have really no concern 
 whether those acounts are true or false. If 
 we should subject the leading events of an- 
 cient history to such criticism as we demand 
 for the miracles of Jesus, where could we find, 
 for instance, proof of the battle of Marathon, 
 the exploits of Epaminondas and Alexander, 
 the wars of Marius and Sulla, or the assassi- 
 nation of Julius Cesar? Herodotus, the ear- 
 liest authority that we have for “Marathon,” 
 wrote about fifty years after the battle, him- 
 
76 | MIRACLES 
 
 self being but six years of age when the Per- 
 sians made their first invasion. It is only 
 through works written several centuries after 
 their deaths, that the deeds of Alexander and 
 Epaminondas are known to the world; and 
 as for the assassination of Czsar, what appears 
 to be our full knowledge of the event is de- 
 rived from men who wrote from one to two 
 hundred years after the event occurred. The 
 only contemporary information on the sub- 
 ject is found in the allusions of Cicero’s let- 
 ters and orations, which give us no formal or 
 detailed account of the matter, and the ‘‘con- 
 tents” of the hundred and sixteenth book of 
 Livy, the book itself being now unknown to 
 the world. 
 
 Really, all that we can learn of the assassi- 
 nation comes to us from Appian, Plutarch, 
 and Suetonius, who lived a century and a 
 half after it occurred, and Dion Cassius, who 
 wrote more than fifty years still later,—all of 
 whom, according to Mr. Froude, “relate in- 
 cidents as facts which are demonstrably 
 false.nc- 
 
 22Tntroduction to his Life of Cesar. 
 
 es 
 
CONSIDERATION OF THE EVIDENCE vas 
 
 And thus we might go through history 
 from the earliest days to a comparatively mod- 
 ern period, and with a like result; viz., that, as 
 a general thing, the so-called facts of the past 
 rest upon evidence which hardly deserves the 
 name, as compared with the evidence we have 
 for the miracles and the resurrection from the 
 dead of Jesus. 
 
 But little better appears the evidence on 
 which rests our belief in much that science 
 teaches. It were, of course, absurd to inti- 
 mate disparagement of the facts from which 
 science draws her inferences; that.is, so far 
 as these facts have been attested by the senses, 
 or by mathematical computation. Such facts, 
 however, form a comparatively small portion 
 of what passes under the name of science. 
 The greater part of science—science as dis- 
 tinct from the facts on which she builds—is 
 but hypothesis or theory, which, in the very 
 nature of things, can not be classed among 
 things known or proven. The nebular hy- 
 pothesis, the antiquity of the globe, the de- 
 scent of man, natural selection, the conserva- 
 tion of forces, the atomic theory, the ethereal 
 
78 MIRACLES 
 
 medium, and other like things, would only 
 excite our ridicule were we to call for the wit- 
 nesses to testify that they are true. Mr. Dar- 
 win himself could not have testified that men 
 are but highly-developed orang-outangs, or 
 apes. Mr. Wallace could not have testified to 
 a single fact of natural selection as the con- 
 trolling force in nature; no physicist has seen 
 an atom or a molecule, or subjected to the test 
 of sense the ethereal medium “which pervades 
 all space; and not a geologist that lives can 
 bear witness to those long periods of time 
 which we have all come to admit as clearly 
 proved. The utmost that can be said of be- 
 lief in any of these things is that it is logically 
 derived from consideration of the facts in- 
 volved in each. But this is only saying that 
 the belief is founded upon a course of reason- 
 ing, which is always attended with at least the 
 liability to error. In many cases the reason- 
 ing has been conducted through long, labori- 
 ous processes, in each of which the mind may 
 have been disturbed by one or more of the 
 “idols” described by Bacon. ‘The more of 
 reasoning the more of liability to error, and 
 
CONSIDERATION OF THE EVIDENCE 79 
 See nS 
 
 the greater the number of reasoners the 
 greater the variety of conclusions adopted; 
 and hence the history of science is a history 
 of conflicting theories, and thus necessarily 
 a history of errors mingled with its best es- 
 tablished truths. Every teaching in physical 
 science, beyond the bare foundation of facts, 
 rests upon a basis which may at any time give 
 way. Even “ ‘the eternal truths’ of which 
 metaphysicians speak have hardly ever lasted 
 more than a generation. In our own day 
 schools or systems of philosophy have died 
 before the founders of them.’”23 
 
 We must now note that while the progress 
 of scientific discovery and antiquarian re- 
 search have overthrown much of what both 
 science and history have taught the world, this 
 history on which we found our belief in the 
 miracles of Jesus has remained unchanged. 
 No theory in science—no record of the past— 
 has been more frequently or more critically 
 investigated than have been these records of 
 the life of Jesus, and yet while almost every 
 year weakens our faith in ancient history, and 
 
 Jowett; Plato 2: 25. 
 
80 MIRACLES 
 
 every generation at least reverses large por- 
 tions of what science teaches, nothing has oc- 
 curred to change our views of the genuine- 
 ness or authenticity of the Gospels, from 
 which we derive our evidence that Jesus per- 
 formed the great deeds therein recorded. In- 
 deed, the true historical character of these 
 Gospels is to-day better established than it 
 has ever been before, even in the days when 
 men still lived who were convinced by those 
 who had been eye-witnesses of the facts to 
 which they testified. All history grows in 
 credibility if it remains uncontradicted while 
 honest research is made, and we have, there- 
 fore, no hesitation in saying that, amid all the 
 discoveries of manuscripts and monuments, 
 and all the direct assaults upon the Gospels, 
 the testimony of these to “what Jesus actually 
 said and did” has been confirmed even by the 
 efforts that have been made to prove it false. 
 
 Now, we would not undertake to say that 
 the miracles, in consequence of this testi- 
 mony, are more easily believed than those 
 other things with which they have just been 
 compared. Actual belief depends fully as 
 
CONSIDERATION OF THE EVIDENCE SI 
 
 much upon the reader’s attitude toward the 
 subject as upon the evidence which may have 
 been adduced. There are idiosyncrasies of 
 thought and reasoning which may nullify the 
 evidence, even on the part of those who have 
 determined to be guided by the evidence 
 alone. But waiving all prepossessions and 
 undue assumptions, and taking the evidence 
 as it stands, in its own light and strength, 
 nothing is hazarded in saying that if to_the 
 unbiased mind the miracles of Jesus are not 
 fully proven, it is impossible to prove any 
 event of the past; and if the reader does not 
 assent to this, it must be because, in his case 
 at least, other considerations than the evi- 
 
 dence have formed his judgment. 
 6 
 
CHARTER LM 
 
 Assaults upon the Evidence by Rénan, 
 Mill, Huxley, Hume 
 
 HE reader will bear in mind that we have 
 been considering the miracles as we 
 would have considered any other events of 
 the past; that is, without regard to the differ- 
 ence that might exist between them and the 
 more ordinary facts of history. Considered 
 thus, it will be admitted that the miracles of 
 Jesus have been established beyond all con- 
 tradiction. Yet as miracles are not to be 
 classed as ordinary events—as all admit at 
 least their extraordinary nature—the evidence 
 given is not satisfactory in the eyes of many, 
 and we must now attend to the leading ob- 
 jections that have been brought against it. 
 First, however, we must observe the fact. 
 that some have paid little or no attention to 
 the evidence, denying the miracles solely upon 
 
 the ground of their supernatural character. 
 82 
 
ASSAULTS UPON THE EVIDENCE 83 
 
 To this class of objectors belong Rénan and 
 Strauss. Says the former, “Till we have new 
 light we shall maintain, therefore, this prin- 
 ciple of historical criticism, that supernatural 
 relations are not to be accepted as such;”? 
 and Strauss ‘knows for certain what Jesus 
 was not, and did not do—that is, nothing su- 
 pernatural’’?—and hence he starts out with the 
 definite determination that “in the person and 
 acts of Jesus no supernaturalism shall be suf- 
 fered to remain.’ 
 
 We shall not linger here to show that 
 speaking of the miracles as supernatural is 
 pure assumption. As to the means or agen- 
 cies by which the miracles were accomplished, 
 we know no more than we know of the cre- 
 ation of the world. One thing is certain: our 
 
 limited knowledge of nature prevents our ~ vat 
 
 knowing the line of separation between the 
 natural and the supernatural, and for aught 
 we know, therefore, the miracles may have 
 been as natural as any other events that have 
 
 1Life of Jesus, p. 45. 
 2New Life of Jesus, Vol. I, p. 216. 
 3 New Life of Jesus, p. 11 of Introduction. 
 
84 MIRACLES 
 
 occurred throughout the universe or through- 
 out all time. Doubtless they were as natural 
 to Jesus; and their supernaturalness to us may 
 consist only in their being inexplicable or un- 
 familiar. 
 
 But waiving this, it requires no very great 
 acumen to expose the fallacy of the objections 
 now considered. 
 
 At the outset we would ask where Rénan 
 obtained that “principle of historical criti- 
 cism” expunging the supernatural from his- 
 tory. From the earliest days the supernatu- 
 ral has been a part of history, and for the sim- 
 ple reason that it has figured so largely among 
 the beliefs of mankind. Not only the four 
 Gospels, the high estimate set upon which by 
 Rénan himself we have already seen, but large 
 portions of the history, both of the ages pre- 
 ceding and of those subsequent to the compo- 
 sition of the Gospels, show this belief to have 
 been not only one of the most deeply fixed, 
 but one of the most widely prevalent known 
 to the world. The belief has not been con- 
 
 fined to the ignorant and superstitious; the . 
 
 wisest and best men, by large majority, in all 
 
 7 ae setae Acer. to res 
 
ASSAULTS UPON THE EVIDENCE 85 
 
 times, have entertained it, and Rénan has no 
 right, therefore, to set up, by mere assump- 
 tion, the principle that “supernatural rela- 
 _ tions” are necessarily false. The true prin- 
 ciple applies here that rules in all other rela- 
 tions; namely, that each instance of the 
 alleged supernatural is to be judged by the 
 evidence in the particular case considered. 
 Had supernatural relations been classed by 
 mankind in general, or even by the learned 
 alone, along with things per se incredible or 
 impossible—as, for instance, that of a body 
 being, and at the same time not being, or of 
 a body existing in two different places at the 
 same time—Rénan’s principle of criticism had 
 been quite valid; but as things now are, while 
 the great masses of mankind, in all ages and 
 of all grades of enlightenment, have included 
 the supernatural equally with the natural in 
 their beliefs, no one man or class of men can 
 presume, by a mere ipse dixit, to reject all 
 accounts of the supernatural as incredible or 
 false. The “new light,” therefore, which the 
 French savant should have looked for is that 
 which shall disprove supernatural facts as such, 
 
86 MIRACLES 
 ee 
 
 Not until the non-existence of a supernatural 
 realm can be proven, can the “relations” of 
 supernatural things be arbitrarily rejected. If 
 there is a supernatural realm—a realm of 
 things not seen by the eye or cognized by the 
 other senses—there surely can be nothing un- 
 reasonable in the belief of the existence of such 
 things; nothing unreasonable, therefore, in 
 admitting well-accredited evidence of their ex- 
 istence at any particular place or time. That 
 there are supernatural things Rénan himself 
 by no means denies, at least not in his Life of 
 Jesus. The dedication of his work to a de- 
 ceased sister shows most plainly, unless he 
 thus means to insult the memory of one dear 
 to his heart, his confident belief in this class 
 of things. He also believes—at least so 
 teaches his Life of Jesus—in the being of a 
 God, and not a word here intimates that this 
 belief of his differs from that generally enter- 
 tained of the Supreme Ruler of the universe. 
 Admitting thus the immortality of the soul 
 and the Divine Existence, he can not, does 
 not, deny the supernatural as such, and for 
 him to announce, therefore, in oracular style, 
 
ASSAULTS UPON THE EVIDENCE 87 
 
 the falsehood of everything that may be said 
 of the supernatural world, is not only inex- 
 cusable inconsistency with his own belief, but 
 is an assumption of the most daring and pre- 
 sumptuous kind. 
 
 We repeat, therefore, that supernatural re- 
 lations are to be investigated, each by its own 
 evidences, and not contemptuously tossed 
 aside as if in themselves unworthy of atten- 
 tion. 
 
 Mr. Mill’s objection to the supernatural is 
 
 that it can not be known to us “as such,” be- 
 cause it can not be discerned by the senses. 
 “Tf we had,” says he, “the direct testimony of 
 our senses to a supernatural fact, it might be 
 as completely authenticated and made certain 
 as any natural one. But we never have. The 
 supernatural character of the fact is . . . 
 always matter of inference and speculation.”* 
 
 Without the least hesitation or reserve, we 
 may admit every word here written. The su- 
 pernatural character of the fact is, and in the 
 necessity of things must be, matter of infer- 
 ence and speculation; but inference and specu- 
 
 4Three Essays in Religion, p. 234. 
 
88 MIRACLES 
 eee een nn te ee 
 
 lation are neither necessarily false nor neces- 
 sarily untrustworthy. The larger part of what 
 we know, or at least regard ourselves as know- 
 ing, is only matter of inference, and much of 
 it at one time was matter of bare speculation. 
 Speculation has started many a current of 
 thought which has ended in inference, which 
 the world has accepted as established truth. 
 What we call gravitation was in this way dis- 
 covered. Both this and all other forces in na- 
 ture are known to us only by inference. No 
 one has ever tested by the senses the forces 
 of cohesion, affinity, molecular attraction. All 
 that we know of such forces is the phenomena 
 that we ascribe to their operations. It mat- 
 ters not what we call the force or power to 
 which we ascribe any phenomenon, or class 
 of phenomena, and it matters nothing how 
 much or how little we know of the laws by 
 which it acts in nature; as to the power itself 
 we have no doubt, but the power can be 
 known or believed in by inference alone. 
 
 And we do not hesitate, by inference, to 
 discriminate between two or more kinds of 
 forces, We say that gravitation is the cause 
 
 Le a ee 
 
ASSAULTS UPON THE EVIDENCE 89 
 
 of one class of phenomena, while electricity, 
 magnetism, chemical affinity, are causes of 
 other phenomena. We make this discrimina- 
 tion because of our inability to understand 
 how phenomena so diverse can be produced 
 by one and the same natural force. Certainly 
 if the leper was cleansed, and the dead raised 
 by, so far as one could see, the mere speaking 
 of a word, there was a power exerted as dif- 
 ferent from each of the forces just named, as 
 either of these is different from the others; 
 and this new power evidently belongs to a 
 class of things which can not be identified 
 with any of the forces of which science treats. 
 It can not here be replied that all forces are 
 now considered as but modifications of one 
 original force, for the fact that these modifi- 
 cations are still distinctly named and de- 
 scribed, and that science has never yet been 
 able to assert that they are interchangeable 
 with each other as to their operations in na- 
 ture, so that, for instance, the phenomena of 
 gravitation may be produced by magnetism, 
 or magnetism may accomplish what we as- 
 cribe to chemical affinity; the fact that these 
 
90 MIRACLES 
 
 distinctions are still observed shows the es- 
 sential difference in the forces under consider- 
 ation. Should it be urged that these several 
 forces all proceed from one and the same orig- 
 inal force, the objection only confirms our 
 reasoning, for we here come to a new force 
 or power lying entirely beyond our knowledge 
 of nature. 
 
 This new power must be either supernatu- 
 ral, therefore, or a very remote unknown 
 natural power; and it can make no difference 
 as regards the argument whether this remote 
 unknown power is called natural or super- 
 natural; it is known to us by inference just as 
 logical and scientific as the so-called natural 
 powers are. What we need that we may infer 
 and believe in the power that performed the 
 miracles, is just what we need before we can 
 infer the existence of any other more familiar 
 natural power; namely, the phenomena in any 
 given case; and whether it is our own or 
 others’ senses that witness these phenomena, 
 we believe in their existence, and infer the 
 powers by which they are produced when sat- 
 
ASSAULTS UPON THE EVIDENCE gI 
 
 isfactory evidence is presented that the phe- 
 nomena exist, or have existed. 
 
 This brings us to consider another portion 
 of Mr. Mill’s objection to the miracles; which 
 is that the evidence “‘is not the evidence of 
 our senses, but of witnesses, and even this not 
 at first hand, but resting on the attestation 
 of books and traditions.’ | 
 
 True, it is not the evidence of our own 
 senses that we have, but Mr. Mill does not 
 deny that we have the evidence of the senses 
 of the witnesses; and just before penning the 
 above he had, in terms most unmistakable 
 and emphatic, declared the validity of this 
 kind of evidence. “It is evidently impossible,” 
 says he, “to maintain that if a supernatural 
 fact really occurs, proof of its occurrence can 
 not be accessible to the human faculties. The 
 evidence of our senses can prove this, as it can 
 prove other things,’ 
 
 The reader must here bear in mind that 
 this objection of Mr. Mill is not that the evi- 
 
 °Three Essays in Religion, p. 219. 
 °Three Essays in Religion, p. 217. 
 
92 MIRACLES 
 
 dence is false or insufficient, but that it is not 
 the evidence of our senses, only the “‘attesta- 
 tions of books and traditions.” 
 
 The objection is wholly futile unless it can 
 be shown either that all books and traditions 
 are unreliable, or that these particular books 
 recording the miracles are thus to be re- 
 garded. Besides, it were an ample reply to 
 say that the objection, if applied to miracles, 
 might equally be applied to all other events 
 which we have never seen. In taking what 
 was evidence to those disciples and the multi- 
 tudes as evidence to ourselves, we are only 
 pursuing the method by which all other events 
 of the past have been determined. ‘There is 
 no other method to be pursued. There is no 
 experimental or scientific test that can be pro- 
 vided; mathematical rules or formulz can here 
 find no place; abstract reasonings are of no 
 avail; the senses, our own senses, can make 
 investigation only of such facts as come under 
 our own observation, and to demand, there- 
 fore, the evidence of these for the miracles of 
 Jesus is to attempt the establishment of a prin- 
 ciple which would overthrow all history and 
 
 SS. 
 
ASSAULTS UPON THE EVIDENCE 93 
 
 many of the best authenticated facts of sci- 
 ence. How would the “historian or the lit- 
 erary critic’ deal with the narratives of events 
 as to which he might have cause for doubt, 
 and how, in like case, would the scientist pro- 
 ceed? Neither of these would reject the testi- 
 mony of others merely because they tell of 
 things that have lain beyond the range of his 
 own observations. Mr. Wallace, we believe, 
 once said that if a new fact in science is an- 
 nounced, one’s brother scientists accept it 
 with the faith which a devout Romanist enter- 
 tains toward the dictum of his priest or pope; 
 and this is the way the world at large, both of 
 the learned and unlearned, treats testimony 
 as to things not seen. ‘Thus the ordinary 
 transactions of life are conducted, and the far- 
 thest advance of critical thought will never 
 reach the point at which evidence ample, ade- 
 quate, and unimpeachable shall be rejected, 
 because it can not be subjected to the scrutiny 
 of our own senses. Our confidence in the tes- 
 timony of other persons’ senses is as absolute 
 as in the testimony of our own, provided we 
 believe that others have seen as they declare 
 
94 MIRACLES 
 SP AC se SE SS ARUSHA Se RU lS 
 
 they have. When we believe in the veracity 
 of a witness to a case in court, even when life 
 and death are pending, we admit his testimony 
 without the least misgiving, and it never oc- 
 curs to us to doubt, because we ourselves have 
 not beheld the facts in question. 
 
 Those contemporary witnesses believed the 
 miracles, because with their own eyes they be- 
 held what Jesus did, and there can be no doubt 
 that had we to-day the evidence which con- 
 vinced them of the miracles, we should now 
 believe no less than they believed. No new 
 facts have been developed to diminish or de- 
 stroy the power of the evidence; the human 
 mind has undergone no change; the advance 
 in science has rendered us none the less quali- 
 fied to use our eyes aright—none the less dis- 
 posed to believe what our eyes have seen. 
 Just as an event testified to by witnesses to- 
 day—testified in a way that leaves no room 
 for doubt, and the testimony remaining un- 
 impaired or uncontradicted—would be equally 
 credible two thousand years in the future ; so 
 with an event that was properly attested two 
 
 eS ee ee 
 
 er et eg 
 
ASSAULTS UPON THE EVIDENCE 95 
 
 thousand years ago. The miracles can form 
 no exception to this statement. The miracu- 
 lous or, if one please, the supernatural char- 
 acter of the miracles may justify the demand 
 for an extraordinary amount or quality of the 
 evidence; but lapse of time can not affect the 
 evidence already given, neither can the na- 
 ture of the miracles be taken in proof that the 
 evidence was not given, or that the evidence, 
 when given, was not valid. 
 
 The only reason we can have for doubting 
 the testimony in the case before us is the 
 strange, inexplicable character of the facts 
 concerned. But strange, inexplicable things 
 have always been seen as easily as more fa- 
 miliar things, and when a number of men 
 assert that such things have been seen by 
 them, we violate common sense if we reject 
 their statements, unless we have reason, out 
 of and beyond the things themselves, either to 
 charge the witnesses with falsehood in the 
 premises, or with having eyes or minds in- 
 capable of performing their normal functions. 
 
 Professor Huxley offers an indirect objec- 
 
96 MIRACLES 
 
 SORES WALL ales. adam dt wld teen OE PN 
 tion to the evidence in the following spirited 
 style: 
 
 “Neither considerable intellectual ability, 
 nor undoubted honesty, nor knowledge of the 
 world, nor proved faithfulness of historians, 
 nor profound piety on the part of eye-wit- 
 nesses and contemporaries affords any guar- 
 antee of the objective truth of their state- 
 ments when we know that a firm belief in the 
 miraculous was ingrained in their minds, and 
 was the presupposition of their observations 
 and reasonings.’”7 
 
 Whatever be its logical value, a more em- 
 phatic statement has not been made in all the 
 literature opposed to miracles. But let us 
 make a brief analysis of it, and see what it 
 amounts to in the way of accomplishing the 
 purpose for which it was designed. Neither 
 intellect, honesty, piety, knowledge of the 
 world, nor even acknowledged historical fidel- 
 ity can prove a miracle “when we know that 
 a firm belief in the miraculous was ingrained 
 in the minds of the witnesses, and was the pre- 
 
 supposition of their observations and reason- 
 reso tt DO Pe Re] AG 8 Pinan) IN 
 
 "Christianity and Agnosticism, p. 210. 
 
ASSAULTS UPON THE EVIDENCE 97 
 
 ings.” Now, if all this be true, it must be so 
 from the constitution of the human mind, and 
 not because of the particular subject to which, 
 in this case, the mind has been directed. 
 Professor Huxley would hardly presume, 
 upon his own authority, to single out from all 
 the varied subjects upon which the mind may 
 be employed this one subject of the miracles, 
 and say that it alone so warps and distorts the 
 judgment that even such testimony as he has 
 described can not be decisive of the question. 
 If the professor does mean this, his propo- 
 sition, instead of being an argument in the 
 case, is only a skillfully-concealed assumption 
 of the conclusion to be established, and 
 amounts to nothing more than a bare denial 
 of the miracles. And so, if he means that all 
 those excellences of intellectual and moral 
 character can not qualify for trustworthy tes- 
 timony in the case, and yet does not mean to 
 assume the point at issue, he virtually makes 
 the all-sweeping declaration that no man’s tes- 
 timony can avail on any subject, if his mind 
 has been previously ingrained with presuppo- 
 
 sitions or belief. Now, if presupposition or 
 7 
 
98 MIRACLES 
 SAS GU aOR SIE Ea Ly 8 
 
 belief can render nugatory argument and tes- 
 timony in favor of the miracles, it must have 
 the like effect upon all reasonings against the 
 miracles. Belief and disbelief are but one and 
 the same state or action of the mind, accord- 
 ing to the view or point of observation of the 
 reasoner. Professor Huxley thus becomes 
 entangled in the meshes of his own net. He 
 can not make an argument against the mir- 
 acles that unbiased reason can admit, nor can 
 he testify as to matters of scientific fact upon 
 the subject. If his recent discussion in 
 “Christianity and Agnosticism” fairly repre- 
 sents the professor’s mind, no man has been 
 more deeply ingrained with disbelief; that is, 
 with belief that no miracle has ever been ac- 
 complished, and this belief is evidently the pre- 
 supposition of all he says upon the subject. 
 
 The same incapacitation for giving evi- 
 dence, or making argument, may be asserted 
 more or less of every man who has written 
 either upon this or any other subject in which 
 the laws of nature are involved. 
 
 The mind has been ingrained with belief 
 in the universality and immutability of these 
 
ASSAULTS UPON THE EVIDENCE 99 
 
 laws. Upon this presupposition all our rea- 
 sonings have been founded. Take away this 
 presupposition or belief, and the fabric of 
 modern science falls to the ground. “Neither 
 considerable intellectual ability, nor un- 
 doubted honesty, nor knowledge of the world, 
 nor proved faithfulness of historians, nor pro- 
 found piety on the part of eye-witnesses and 
 contemporaries” can prove a fact or principle 
 in science “when we know that a firm belief’ 
 in the invariability of natural law has been 
 “ingrained in the minds” of scientists, and has 
 been the “presupposition of their observations 
 and reasonings.” 
 
 Mr. Hume® must now be heard upon the 
 subject: 
 
 ‘There is not to be found in all history any 
 miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, 
 of such unquestioned good sense, education, 
 and learning, as to secure us against all de- 
 lusion in themselves; of such undoubted in- 
 tegrity as to place them beyond all suspicion 
 of any design to deceive others; of such credit 
 and reputation in the eyes of all mankind, as 
 
 8 Hssays,Vol. II, , p. 122. 
 
I0O MIRACLES 
 RLS sta OS AN A BULAN, BAR AHL MO aC ALL call eld 
 
 to have a great deal to lose in case of their 
 being detected in any falsehood, and at the 
 same time attesting facts performed in such a 
 public manner and in so celebrated a part of 
 the world as to render the detection unavoid- 
 able.” 
 
 Let us now compare the different portions 
 of this formidable statement with the facts al- 
 ready given—facts as to which there can be 
 no denial: 
 
 “Attesting facts performed in such a public 
 manner, and in so celebrated a part of the 
 world as to render the detection unavoid- 
 able.” 
 
 _ The miracles were wrought in one of the 
 most important and enlightened provinces of 
 the Roman Empire, then at the zenith of her 
 glory, and if, in the presence of the vast mis- 
 cellaneous multitudes that followed Jesus, 
 they were not performed with such publicity 
 as to render detection unavoidable, then such 
 publicity can not be reckoned among things 
 possible to man. 
 
 “Of such credit and reputation in the eyes 
 
ASSAULTS UPON THE EVIDENCE IOI 
 
 Pan LEER a a a aaaS 
 
 of all mankind as to have a great deal to lose 
 in case of their being detected in any false- 
 hood.” 
 
 Whatever may, or may not, have been their 
 reputation, the witnesses knew very well what 
 they had to lose. Loss of goods, persecution, 
 imprisonment, death oftentimes in its most 
 cruel forms awaited them, whether they were 
 detected in any falsehood or were seen to tell 
 only the undeniable truth. Experiences such 
 as these are terrors to the lowliest and most 
 obscure equally with those of highest name, 
 and in such a case it is folly to argue about 
 distinctions as to the credit or reputation of 
 the witnesses. 
 
 “Of such undoubted integrity as to place 
 them beyond all suspicion of any design to de- 
 ceive others.” 
 
 Were Mr. Hume now living, he would see 
 that the disposition to charge the witnesses 
 of Jesus’ miracles with intentional deception 
 has long since passed away; and that the prob- 
 lem now is, not to prove the honesty of the 
 witnesses, but, according this in the fullest 
 
102 MIRACLES 
 LLL ene 
 
 degree, to account for the testimony under 
 consideration, if the fact of the miracles is to 
 be denied. 
 
 As to the “sufficient number” of men of 
 “unquestioned good sense, education, and 
 learning, to secure us against all delusion in 
 themselves,” we would only remark that in the 
 evangelists, disciples, general mutitudes, 
 scribes and Pharisees of the Council, we have 
 a number of witnesses such as can not be pro- 
 duced for any other event in ancient history— 
 such a number that any one who can imagine 
 or believe that they were all under a delusion 
 must himself be under the power of a delusion 
 no less potent, and as for “the good sense, 
 education, and learning,” these, considering 
 the publicity of the miracles, and the fact that 
 they were all addressed to the senses of the 
 witnesses, were no more necessary to their 
 qualification as testifiers in the case, than had 
 they testified to the healing of the sick or 
 other ordinary events, as to which no miracu- 
 lous character is pretended. It required no 
 extraordinarily “good sense,” extraordinary 
 “learning,” or education for the blind man’s 
 
ASSAULTS UPON THE EVIDKNCE 103 
 
 hw ee ee 
 parents to know whether the man in John ix? 
 had been born blind, or for the man himself 
 to know whether he had been made to see; 
 and certainly he could know who it was that 
 had given him the power to see. The Phari- 
 sees, who tried every means of disproving the 
 miracle, were compelled to admit the fact; and 
 they were so far convinced of what they were 
 informed as to the resurrection of Lazarus 
 from the tomb that not only this, but “many 
 miracles” they declared Jesus had _per- 
 formed.?° 
 
 All that was necessary to determine Bait 
 
 whether or not Jesus had wrought the mighty 
 works recorded of him was for the witnesses 
 to have had ordinarily good eyes and ordi- 
 narily good common sense; they must only 
 have been not blind, not idiotic, or insane. 
 But let us see the objection of Mr. Hume 
 based upon the supposed antagonism between 
 the miracles and the laws of nature. This ar- 
 gument has lost none of its power or popu- 
 larity during the century and a half that has 
 elapsed since its publication to the world. Mr. 
 
 9John ix, 16-18. 10John xi, 47. 
 
104 MIRACLES 
 pr gt TE RN 
 
 Mill calls it “an argument which goes down 
 to the depth of the subject,’!! and Strauss 
 considers that it “carries with it such convic- 
 tion that the question may be regarded as 
 having been by it virtually settled.”!2 
 
 “When the fact attested,” says Mr. Hume, 
 “is such a one as has seldom fallen under our 
 observation, there is a contest of two opposite 
 experiences, of which the one destroys the 
 other as far as it goes, and the superior can 
 only operate on the mind by the force which 
 remains. ‘The very same principle of experi- 
 ence which gives us a certain degree of assur- 
 ance in the testimony of witnesses, gives us 
 also in this case another degree of assurance 
 against the fact which they endeavor to estab- 
 lish: from which contradiction there neces- 
 sarily arises a counterpoise and mutual de- 
 struction of belief and authority.’’1® 
 
 “A miracle is a violation of the laws of na- 
 ture; and as a firm and unalterable experience 
 has established these laws, the proof against 
 
 Ee heir te SS ope ery btn 500 OE RSMO ie 
 Three Essays in Religion, p. 217. 
 12 New Life of Jesus, Vol. I, p. 199. 
 Essays, Vol. II, p. 119. 
 
ASSAULTS UPON THE EVIDENCE I05 
 
 a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is 
 as entire as any argument from experience can 
 possibly be imagined.’’'* 
 
 “No testimony is sufficient to establish a 
 miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind 
 that its falsehood would be more miraculous 
 than the fact which it endeavors to establish; 
 and even in that case there is a mutual de- 
 struction of arguments, and the superior only 
 gives us an assurance suitable to that degree 
 of force which remains after deducting the 
 inferior. When any one tells me that he saw 
 a dead man restored to life, I immediately con- 
 sider with myself whether it be more probable 
 that this person should either deceive or be 
 deceived, or that the fact which he relates 
 should really have happened.”?° 
 
 It must be noted, before we proceed fur- 
 ther, that in the paragraph last quoted Mr. 
 Hume has used the word miraculous in a modi- 
 fied sense, a sense wholly different from that 
 demanded by the argument. The opposite of 
 
 14 Essays, Vol. II, p. 120. 
 1b Essays, Vol. II, p. 121; see also Strauss’s New Life, 
 Vol. I, p. 199. 
 
106 MIRACLES 
 
 probable—that is, improbable—is the meaning 
 now given to the term. “When any one tells 
 me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I 
 immediately consider with myself whether it 
 would be more probable that this person should 
 either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact 
 which he relates should really have happened.” 
 
 It would not be fair to hold the writer re- 
 sponsible for what may have been a mere care- 
 less use of language, and demand that improb- 
 able shall be the sense in which he uses the 
 word miraculous in the former portion of his 
 argument, and yet we must not fail to call 
 attention to the fact that he has here virtually 
 abandoned his position altogether. That a per- 
 son telling of a dead man’s being restored to 
 life should either deceive or be deceived is, 
 indeed, far more probable than that the fact 
 should really have occurred. One might rea- 
 sonably be called demented who should be- 
 lieve in a resurrection from the dead on the 
 statement of a single person, however up- 
 right, sensible, or learned he may be regarded. 
 In such a case delusion or deception of some 
 kind would certainly be believed; but the res- 
 
 —S ee ee ee ee 
 
 eo Cre 
 
ASSAULTS UPON THE EVIDENCE 107 
 
 urrection of Jesus is a far different thing, and 
 so of the other miracles. The testimony for 
 these is so abundant—the testimony of large 
 numbers of witnesses of different classes, 
 friends and enemies, in different places, at dif- 
 ferent times—that it can not be, and has not 
 been, assailed, otherwise than by bold denial 
 without the proof, or by assumptions and hy- 
 potheses that may either explain away the 
 miracles, or close the mind to the power of 
 evidence that can not be refuted. 
 
 Pure assumption is the ground upon which 
 Mr. Hume has based his definition; namely, 
 that a miracle is a violation of the laws of na- 
 ture. For this there is no warrant, either in 
 the teachings of natural science or in the dec- 
 larations of the Word of God. That a miracle 
 is a violation of the world’s general knowledge 
 or experience of the laws of nature, no one 
 will undertake to deny; but this only places 
 miracles, as regards this definition of them, 
 upon the same foundation with all new dis- 
 coveries, even of these laws themselves; and 
 for one to make a distinction here by declaring 
 that such discoveries, once understood, are 
 
108 MIRACLES 
 i ee 
 
 seen to be in harmony with all laws previously 
 known, is only saying that we know more of 
 these discoveries than we know of the way in 
 which Jesus wrought his miracles. One can 
 not reasonably say that a miracle is a viola- 
 tion of the laws of nature, unless he knows all 
 the laws of nature; knows them in all possible 
 combinations or relationships; knows how 
 they have operated in all the past, how they 
 may be made to operate in all coming time 
 and throughout all space; knows them as he 
 knows no other subject, however trivial or 
 familiar. 
 
 But saying nothing now as to what is or 
 what is not the nature of a miracle, there are 
 two fundamental errors in this reasoning of 
 the great English skeptic. In the first place, 
 he speaks as if we made experience the stan- 
 dard or basis of our beliefs, an assumption 
 easily seen to be, at variance with experience 
 itself, and the uses which we make of it in the 
 enlargement of our knowledge. Our experi- 
 ence is that there are comparatively but few 
 things out of the large number of things be- 
 lieved, as to which experience is the ground 
 
 ee 
 
 a ee ee fe ea 
 
ASSAULTS UPON THE EVIDENCE 10g 
 
 on which our beliefs are formed. Only the 
 very ignorant accept or reject a statement 
 according to its conformity or non-conform- 
 ity with experience—experience in the sense 
 in which Mr. Hume employs the term. As 
 science advances, and men become enlight- 
 ened, other sources of conviction come into 
 prominence, and experience is but little re- 
 garded where there is evidence of a different 
 kind satisfactory to the understanding. Not 
 only without, but directly contrary to, experi- 
 ence, we accept much of what modern science 
 teaches. The molecular structure of bodies— 
 each molecule so small that, counting at the 
 rate of ten million per second, two hundred 
 and fifty thousand years would be required to 
 count the molecules of a single pin-head’®— 
 the ethereal medium, “impalpable, imponder- 
 able, yet infinitely more compact than the 
 most solid substances, which can be felt or 
 weighed, . . . pervading the substances 
 of all bodies with little or no resistance as 
 freely as the air moves through a grove of 
 trees,”—these and other like teachings of sci- 
 
 16 Gage’s Physics, p. 7. 
 
IIo MIRACLES 
 
 er 
 
 ence are now universally accepted, yet they 
 are not only not in accord with our experi- 
 ence, but to our experience they are abso- 
 lutely and irreconcilably opposed. 
 
 Mr. Hume’s second error lies in his idea of 
 “two opposite experiences”—our experience 
 as to the testimony of witnesses, and our ex- 
 perience against the miracles. He speaks as 
 if we really had a number of witnesses to a 
 case in court, some of whom are testifying to, 
 others against, the miracles, and we must de- 
 cide by subtracting our confidence in the 
 veracity of the one set of witnesses from our 
 confidence in the veracity of the other set. 
 But where are these two sets of witnesses? 
 We have the witnesses who testify that the 
 miracles were performed; where are the op- 
 posing witnesses? “One is enough,” says 
 Mr. Hume: “Experience is the opposing wit- 
 ness.” Experience? ‘There is no experience 
 except that of some particular person or per- 
 sons, who have acquaintance with a matter 
 derived from personal observation, or knowl- 
 edge gained by what one sees, hears, tastes, 
 feels for himself, or is otherwise conscious of. 
 
ASSAULTS UPON THE EVIDENCE Irt 
 
 Where, then, is the experience against the 
 miracles? Who knows, who has seen, heard, 
 or otherwise learned for himself, that the blind 
 were not made to see by Jesus, the lame to 
 walk, or the dead to rise? ‘There were those 
 in the days of Jesus who testified, from their 
 own experience, that these things were accom- 
 plished; but no experience to the contrary has 
 been recorded. 
 
 Our experience to-day may be against our 
 having witnessed those deeds of Jesus; but 
 neither we, nor Mr. Hume, nor any one else 
 of whom the world has heard, has had experi- 
 ence contrary to what Jesus is reported to have 
 done. Mr. Hume, accordingly, does not 
 speak of the miracles of Jesus; not once in the 
 course of his entire essay has he applied his 
 argument to these; he speaks of experience in 
 general and of miracles in general—abstract 
 experience against abstract miracles. Against 
 miracles in general, if the phrase can have a 
 meaning, the world in general may have had 
 experience from the creation to the present 
 day; but this amounts to nothing in the argu- 
 ment, unless it can be shown that there has 
 
Li 24 MIRACLES 
 SNe MAAN LCG RMN a Rl CNSARMTE NNT LIA nea ce ula Nile al 
 
 been particular evidence against these par- 
 ticular miracles; in other words, that there 
 were contemporary with Jesus those who saw 
 and testified that the loaves and fishes were 
 not multiplied, that the widow’s son, and 
 Martha’s brother, and Jesus himself were not 
 taised from the dead. The experience of men 
 to-day, in Europe or America, or anywhere 
 else than at the places and times recorded of 
 Jesus, can not be contrary to what Jesus is 
 reported to have done. 
 
 Let it be borne in mind, therefore, that 
 whatever be the weakness or the strength of 
 the testimony to the miracles of Jesus, we have 
 no testimony, and the world has none, against 
 these miracles; and by Mr. Hume’s own show- 
 ing, if we make the subtraction called for “be- 
 tween the two opposite experiences,” the re- 
 mainder, large or small, is wholly in our favor. 
 
 ee 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 Alleged Inherent Incredibility of 
 
 Miracles 
 
 FE have seen that objections are made, 
 
 not only to the evidence, but to the 
 essential nature of the miracles. Somewhat 
 more in detail must these latter objections 
 now be considered. 
 
 Biichner says that “we should only waste 
 words in our endeavor to prove the natural 
 impossibility of a miracle,’ for “the laws ac- 
 cording to which nature actSh vs fl) ame 
 matter moves . . . are eternal and un- 
 alterable.’”* 
 
 J. S. Mill would have it that “a miracle de- 
 clares itself to be a supercession, not of one 
 natural law by another, but of the law which 
 includes all others, which experience proves 
 to be universal for all phenomena’”’—which is 
 
 1¥orce and Matter, p. 36. Ibid. p. 33. 
 3Three Essays in Religion, p. 122. 
 8 113 
 
114 MIRACLES 
 
 only a more cumbersome way of saying what 
 Mr. Hume has said so clearly—that “a mir- 
 acle is a violation of the laws of nature, and 
 as a firm and unalterable experience has es- 
 tablished these laws, the proof against a mir- 
 acle is as entire as any argument from 
 experience can possibly be imagined.” 
 
 Such assertions, it is easy to see, are all but 
 modifications of the two propositions: 
 
 1. That a miracle is a violation of the laws 
 of nature; and 
 
 2. That such a violation is an impossibility. . 
 
 In other words, the absolute impossibility 
 and incredibility of the miracles is assumed. 
 By absolute impossibility we mean impossibility 
 regardless of any power that may be supposed 
 in the performer of the miracles; by absolute 
 incredibility we mean incredibility regardless 
 of all evidence of whatsoever degree or kind— 
 that the miracles are incredible in their very 
 nature, incredible because impossible, and im- 
 possible because inconsistent with the general 
 order of the universe. 
 
 Now, to say that a miracle is a violation 
 of the laws of nature is a vague, indefinite 
 
INCREDIBILITY OF MIRACLES II5 
 
 form of speech, which, though apparently very 
 profound and forcible, is easily seen to be ex- 
 ceedingly superficial, and to have little or no 
 weight in the determination of the question. 
 The assertion either means that a miracle is 
 a violation of all the laws of nature, or of only 
 a portion of these laws; or it must mean that 
 each miracle is a violation of some one par- 
 ticular law with whose operation it is incon- 
 sistent. If the assertion means all the laws 
 of nature without exception, it is an assump- 
 tion too absurd to need other refutation than 
 the mere statement of it, for no man has ever 
 pretended to a knowledge of all these laws; / 
 if it means only a portion of these laws, it 
 leaves the matter wholly undetermined and 
 indeterminable, for it specifies not which of 
 the laws are to be considered in the question. 
 If it means some one particular law with 
 whose operations miracles can not be harmon- 
 ized, as, for instance, that Jesus’ walking upon 
 the water was a violation of the law of gravi- 
 tation, the objector himself is presupposing 
 the violation of a law of nature—a law which, 
 as Mr. Mill would say, “includes all others, 
 
116 MIRACLES 
 
 which experience shows to be universal for all 
 phenomena; namely, that no law of nature acts 
 independently and apart from all other laws.4 
 We know of no law of nature which has its 
 own independent action. Even the falling of 
 a stone involves a number of laws operating 
 in unison toward a common result; and the 
 same, so far as we can ascertain, may be said 
 of every other event, great or small, that oc- 
 curs throughout the universe. If there is a 
 law of nature, detached, separate, sole sov- 
 ereign of a realm of its own, acted upon 
 neither by other laws nor by any other ex- 
 ternal force, such a law is unchangeable in its 
 very nature. In the action of such a separate, 
 independent law we can no more conceive of 
 change than we can conceive the contradic- 
 tions of a self-evident truth. That a law can 
 
 J, hot change, violate, or stispend its Own ac- 
 
 Due e ri att. however, is no more cause for believing 
 it to be unchangeable by a force or power 
 from without, than that a man can not, by the 
 straps of his boots, lift himself into the air is 
 proof that no other power can lift him up. 
 
 *The Duke of Argyll’s Reign of Law, p. 76. 
 
INCREDIBILITY OF MIRACLES i 
 
 Allowing even that for all the time men 
 have been observing nature their observation 
 has been uniformly that of invariable “law” 
 and “order,” both the period and the sphere 
 of observation have been too limited to justify 
 conclusions as to that which is universal and 
 eternal. ‘To assert, therefore, either that a 
 miracle is a violation of the laws of nature, or 
 that these laws can not be violated, or other- 
 wise so controlled as to produce or allow the 
 miracles said to have been performed by Jesus, 
 is an instance of universal conclusion from 
 particular premises at variance equally with 
 the principles of sound logic and the humility 
 of true science. It presupposes either a 
 knowledge of nature and her laws possessed 
 only by Him who called nature into being, or 
 the knowledge that there is no God, or if there 
 is a God, he wields, or can wield, no other 
 sovereignty over the works of his hands than 
 such as we ourselves behold or can compre- 
 hend. 
 
 It is manifest, indeed, that our belief or 
 disbelief of miracles is dependent almost 
 wholly upon the quality of our belief in God. 
 
118 MIRACLES 
 
 If there is no such being as a God distinct 
 from the universe, and personal, the Creator 
 and Sovereign of nature, or if God himself is 
 the universe, or a mere law of the same acting 
 from an irresistible necessity, there may be 
 good reason for discarding miracles with the 
 supercilious disdain displayed by Buchner and 
 his school. The reader, however, is assumed 
 ‘to have an entirely different faith He be- 
 lieves with the old Roman, Deorum moder- 
 
 amine cuncta geri,—All things are subject to 
 _ Divine control; or with the more ancient He- 
 brew, that the “Lord hath prepared his throne 
 in the heavens, and his kingdom ruleth 
 over all.” He believes with the Duke of 
 Argyll, that “Science is already getting hold 
 of the idea that all kinds of force are but forms 
 or manifestations of some one central force 
 issuing from one Fountain-head of power,” 
 and that this power is God’s. He appreciates 
 the beautiful—beautiful, because to him 
 true—language of Professor Fiske, that “the 
 infinite and eternal Power that is manifest in 
 every pulsation of the universe is none other 
 than the living God;” that “the everlasting 
 
INCREDIBILITY OF MIRACLES 11g 
 
 Pie nn aueren te 
 source of phenomena is none other than the 
 infinite ‘Power that makes for righteous- 
 MESS .giie 
 
 With our reader, therefore, God’s connec- 
 tion with the order of events, or course of na- 
 ture, is not necessary and mechanical, but vol- 
 untary and intelligent. God is in nature, but 
 he is, at the same time, above and superior to 
 nature. He rules in nature, and he rules by 
 general laws; but it is he that rules, and not 
 the laws. He rules the laws, rules them by a 
 law that is above all other laws; that is, by the 
 exercise of an intelligent will. He rules in 
 uniform invariable consistency with this will; 
 but this will itself is that of infinite intelli- 
 gence, of unlimited freedom, and of infinite 
 superiority to the laws by which he rules, and 
 which he himself ordained. 
 
 Miracles, therefore, are not to be judged— 
 accepted or rejected—by comparison with any 
 fixed, unchangeable order in the processes of 
 the physical universe. If matter compre- 
 hended within itself all beings and all powers, 
 this way of dealing with the subject might do 
 
120 MIRACLES 
 See ee a a pangs one 
 
 very well; but allowing that there is an Author 
 of nature, the source of nature’s powers and 
 phenomena, we have an entirely different 
 norm by which to judge of facts, or reported 
 facts, in the physical world. Such facts as 
 harmonize not with the order of nature may 
 harmonize perfectly with the character and 
 will of the Author of nature. Facts which are 
 not possible to natural law in its own inde- 
 pendent action are possible to law under the 
 guidance of an all-wise, all-powerful God. 
 For such facts satisfactory reasons may be 
 assigned, and if, in addition to the reasonable- 
 ness of the facts, sufficient valid evidence be 
 adduced, these facts must be admitted like all] 
 other facts, whatever be our theory as to the 
 way in which they were accomplished. 
 Taking this view of the subject, miracles 
 are not only consistent with the power, wis- 
 dom, and will of God, or of one specially com- 
 missioned and endowed of God; they are no 
 less consistent with the principles which con- 
 trol our reasonings and beliefs. It is only the 
 
 Pee novelty or rarity of miracles which creates the 
 
 thought that they necessarily imply that at 
 
INCREDIBILITY (OF MIRACLES I2I 
 
 which belief must stagger. There is nothing A f 
 
 in the idea of miracles which does violence to 
 the laws of thought, or contradicts the funda- 
 mental perceptions of the mind. Whatever 
 does thus contradict we can not, of course, 
 admit; all the testimony in the world could 
 not convince us that, in the same sense, Jesus 
 caused the lame man to walk and at the same 
 time not to walk; that he multiplied the five 
 loaves, and yet only the five original loaves 
 remained; that he subtracted two from three, 
 and got a remainder of twenty thousand; that 
 he passed from one place to another without 
 going through the intervening space. ‘hese 
 things violate the very foundations of belief; 
 they shock our reason. These things we can 
 no more believe than we can believe that 
 black is white, or white black, or anything else 
 that is self-contradictory or absurd. It is 
 plain, however, that miracles do not belong to 
 
 this class of things. There is, per se, no more 
 
 violence to reason—provided we assume ade- 
 quate power—in believing that a man was 
 raised from the grave than in believing that 
 he was lifted from the ground or from his bed; 
 
 a 
 
122 MIRACLES 
 
 Sean EEE! 
 
 no more innate incredibility in the healing of 
 the sick, or blasting of the fig-tree, or walking 
 upon the water, by the instantaneous exercise 
 of a power invisible to us, than in the doing of 
 these things by instrumentalities operating 
 through periods of time, and manifest to our 
 sense of sight or touch. Neither the instan- 
 taneous performance of an action renders it 
 any the less, nor the slow, laborious perform- 
 ance of it any the more, comprehensible to our 
 minds; just as the frequency of an event makes 
 us comprehend it none the more, and the 
 rarity of it none theless. There is really noth- 
 ing that we comprehend in the sense of under- 
 standing either its real nature, or the way in 
 which it has been produced. What we call 
 knowing or comprehending is only the classi- 
 fying, bundling together, as it were, and nam- 
 ing of things—telling what other things these 
 first things are like—and our belief of things 
 has no connection in the world with our un- 
 derstanding of them. Eivery day, hour, mo- 
 ment we believe things which no man has 
 understood. We believe them because we see, 
 touch, taste, hear, or have other evidence 
 
INCREDIBILITY OF MIRACLES 123 
 
 which compels belief. This evidence may be 
 that of our senses, or it may be the records of 
 history, or a process of mathematical demon- 
 stration, according to the subject under con- 
 sideration; but in no case is belief conditioned 
 upon our understanding of the thing in ques- 
 tion; that is, our understanding how the thing 
 came about, or how it stands related to other 
 things that may have been well-known or fa- 
 miliar to us. The walking of Jesus upon the 
 water, sustained by the approved testimony of 
 those who had opportunity of knowing 
 whether or not this was done, comes within 
 the range of things credible just as really, 
 though not so easily, as his walking upon the 
 land or upon the vessel’s deck; and the only 
 reason why we believe the one act more easily 
 than the other, is not that we understand any 
 the better how it is accomplished; we believe 
 the more easily merely because the walking 
 on the land or the deck is an act with which 
 we have been familiar, and which can easily be 
 classed with other acts which we say we under- 
 stand. Familiar or unfamiliar, all that is log- 
 ically essential to belief in miracles is adequate 
 
124 MIRACLES 
 
 evidence in the case, and the miracles become 
 actually credible just in proportion as we bear 
 in mind the power by which they are asserted 
 to have been performed, and consider what 
 nature and history teach of the Divine ends 
 and methods in the government of the world. 
 
 In substantial agreement with the above is 
 one of the latest utterances of Professor Hux- 
 ley: “Looking at the matter from the most 
 rigidly scientific point of view, the assump- 
 tion that, amidst the myriads of worlds in end- 
 less space, there can be no intelligence 
 endowed with powers of influencing the 
 coursesoL matures ili )) seems tosme store 
 only baseless, but impertinent. Without step- 
 ping beyond the analogy of that which is 
 known, it is easy to people the cosmos with 
 entities in ascending scale until we reach 
 something practically undistinguishable from 
 omnipotence, omnipresence, and omnis- 
 cience.’’® 
 
 No less pertinent is the admission of Mr. 
 Mill: “Once admit a God, and the production 
 by his direct volition of an effect which in any 
 
 6 Hssays on Some Controverted Questions, p. 27. 
 
INCREDIBILITY OF MIRACLES 125 
 
 case owed its origin to his creative will, is no 
 longer a purely arbitrary hypothesis, but must 
 be reckoned with as a serious possibility. The 
 question then changes its character, and the 
 decision of it must now rest upon what is 
 known as to the manner of God’s government 
 of the universe.’”* 
 
 ‘Let us now see what we know of this— 
 “the manner of God’s government of the uni- 
 verse.” We are willing to leave the question 
 with those who can not be charged with undue 
 bias in the treatment of the subject. Mr. Mat- 
 thew Arnold® speaks of “the power that makes 
 for righteousness.” Mr. J. S. Mill tells us 
 that “good is gradually gaining ground from 
 evil,” and predicts “the very distant, but not 
 uncertain final victory of good;’® while Pro- 
 fessor Fiske’® declares that “the perfecting of 
 humanity is to be the consummation of na- 
 
 ture’s long and tedious work;” that “from the 
 first dawning of life we see all things working 
 
 toward one mighty goal, the evolution of the 
 
 7Three Essays in Religion, p. 232. 
 8Titerature and Dogma, p. 54; N. Y., 1877. 
 9Three Essays in Religion, p. 256. 
 10Destiny of Man, pp. 113, 118. 
 
126 MIRACLES 
 
 most exalted spiritual qualities which char- 
 acterize humanity.” 
 
 Now, while perhaps nothing could be fur- 
 ther from the minds of these writers than the 
 idea of this glorious consummation being ef- 
 fected, in any sense or degree, by such an in- 
 terruption of nature’s order as is implied in 
 the miracles of Jesus, yet one thing is certain: 
 if nature is ruled by a Higher Power, and that 
 Power has intended the “perfecting of human- 
 ity’ or the “final victory of God,” there can 
 be nothing unreasonable in believing that if 
 this interruption be necessary to the accom- 
 plishment of these ends, the interruption will 
 certainly be effected; in other words, miracles 
 will be wrought. There is nothing which sci- 
 ence more urgently insists upon than the ne- 
 cessity of means to the accomplishment of 
 ends, which is only another way of saying that 
 all effects must have adequate causes. 
 
 “Facts,” says Rénan, “are to be explained 
 by causes which are proportioned to them.’’?! 
 The authors just quoted would cheerfully ad- 
 mit that everything essential to the “consum- 
 (Pu Te ot Jesus pibs3. ANP ae 
 
INCREDIBILITY OF MIRACLES 127 
 
 mation of nature’s long and tedious work’’ 
 must surely come to pass, and no one could 
 object to our looking forward and inquiring 
 into the powers or causes by which this result 
 is to be brought about. Why may we not, 
 then, with equal freedom and propriety look 
 backward along the line of history, and seek 
 such causes as have thus far operated toward 
 this accomplishment? We can see no reason 
 why we may not here, in the history of Chris- 
 tian thought, apply the same reasonings by 
 which the scientist draws his conclusions as to 
 the past physical history of our world. If the 
 ethnologist can tell us of the habits of prehis- 
 toric man, asserting with confidence that in 
 one region of the globe only the stone age had 
 been reached, in another the age of iron, be- 
 cause present phenomena can be only thus 
 explained; if the philologist, because of cer- 
 tain peculiarities that mark their languages, 
 can assert the migrations of the primitive Celts 
 and Teutons from their original Aryan home, 
 though there be neither record nor tradition 
 of such migrations; if the geologist can point 
 backward to a time when the greater part of 
 
128 MIRACLES 
 
 North America was covered with ice and snow 
 as is Greenland now, or when immense forests 
 covered regions where now such a state of 
 things would be impossible, and tells us that 
 he believes in the period of ice and snow, and 
 in those forests of the primeval world, because 
 such facts were necessary as causes to the 
 present condition of things,—if science can 
 deal thus with the physical world, it can not be 
 unscientific or unreasonable to believe that 
 certain things now utterly unknown may have 
 taken place as causes introductory to con- 
 ditions at present existing in the moral or 
 ‘intellectual world. 
 
 In these conditions are facts which are in- 
 explicable even from the “most rigidly scien- 
 tific point of view” only by the supposition 
 that the regular course of events, or ordinary 
 line of cause and effect, has been broken into 
 somewhere at some time. If all things have 
 gone on from the beginning in one unbroken 
 train of fixed antecedence and consequence; 
 if no extraordinary event, no extraordinary 
 power brought to bear upon the thoughts and 
 passions of mankind—no new force or impulse 
 
INCREDIBILITY OF MIRACLES 129 
 
 in morals or religion—can be discerned among 
 the ordinary forces that have produced the 
 phenomena of the world’s present, and for 
 many generations past, intellectual and moral 
 status, how can we account for the present fact 
 and past history of Christianity in the world? 
 The essential difference between Jesus him- 
 self and all other religious teachers, and be- 
 tween his system of truth and theirs, and be- 
 tween the agencies by which Jesus and other 
 religious teachers have sought to establish 
 their claims to recognition by the world, to- 
 gether with the superior estimation in which 
 Jesus was held by his contemporaries, and has 
 been held by subsequent ages, along with the 
 success which has so gloriously crowned the 
 work of Jesus,—these are things which can 
 not be explained by natural law or order, by 
 vague discussions of historical development, 
 sociological causes, spirit of the age, or other 
 like hypotheses. Let us suppose that these 
 things owe their origin to the influence 
 wielded by Jesus, believed in consequence of 
 the miraculous powers with which he pro- 
 
 fessed to be invested, to have been an ambas- 
 9 
 
130 MIRACLES 
 
 sador of peace and righteousness to the world, 
 and all is clear. We shall at least have, in this 
 supposition, the demand made by Rénan, that 
 “Facts are to be explained by causes which are 
 proportioned to them.” 
 
 Besides being both possible and credible, 
 the miracles, we repeat, were sensible; that is, 
 such as the senses could discern. This fact 
 must not be disregarded, as it affords an ample 
 answer to certain objections which are now to 
 be considered. 
 
 Professor Huxley tells us that when a man 
 testifies to a miracle, he not only states a fact, 
 but he adds an interpretation of the fact. “We 
 may admit his evidence as to the former, and 
 yet think his opinion as to the latter worth- 
 less;’!? and Professor Fiske: “Unless the wit- 
 ness has a clear conception of the difference 
 between the natural and the unnatural order 
 of events, his testimony, however unimpeach- 
 able on the score of honesty, is still worth- 
 less,’!? while Rénan declares that “‘no miracle 
 was ever performed before an assembly of men 
 
 2 Christianity and Positivism, p. 190. 
 13’The Unseen World, p. 136. 
 
INCREDIBILITY OF MIRACLES I3I 
 
 capable of establishing the miraculous char- 
 acter of an act.” 
 
 Now, as to the interpretation of the mir- 
 acles, it must be noted that the witnesses gave 
 no testimony or opinion whatsoever, and as 
 to a “clear conception of the difference be- 
 tween the natural and unnatural order of 
 events,’ this is no more an element in the 
 testimony to the events themselves than is a 
 knowledge of astronomy part of what a man 
 sees when the sun sets or rises. ‘Those wit- 
 nesses testified to what their eyes had seen, 
 and that was all. Had they gone farther than 
 this, and asserted that those deeds of Jesus 
 were miraculous in the sense understood by 
 Professor Huxley, Mill, and others, we our- 
 selves, equally with these objectors, should 
 have rejected their testimony as a mere ex- 
 pression of opinion concerning that which the 
 witnesses knew no better than ourselves. 
 Many of us might, indeed, from other causes 
 admit the miraculous nature of those deeds, 
 but not from any testimony of the witnesses. 
 And as to there never having been a miracle 
 
 4 The Life of Jesus, p. 44. 
 
132 MIRACLES 
 
 “performed before an assembly of men capable 
 of establishing the miraculous character of an 
 
 99 
 i) 
 
 act,” if Rénan, by “miraculous character,” 
 means a violation of the laws of nature, all that 
 he here affirms may be readily granted. We 
 fully agree that the assemblies before which 
 Jesus wrought his miracles were not compe- 
 tent to decide upon the miracles as thus de- 
 fined; and as has just been said, they made no 
 attempt at such decision. Neither could any 
 assembly that might be called to-day decide 
 the matter any better. With all our science, 
 we could not tell whether in any given case a 
 law of nature had been violated, or in any wise 
 prevented from producing its legitimate re- 
 sults. Science may now know only an infini- 
 tesimal part of what even the most familiar 
 laws may be made to accomplish. Who 
 knows but that at some future day gravitation 
 may be made to warm our dwellings, light our 
 streets, or become a motive power, drawing 
 with the accelerated speed of falling bodies 
 our locomotives across the continent? Who 
 knows all the capabilities of light, heat, elec- 
 tricity, magnetism, the ethereal medium? All 
 
INCREDIBILITY OF MIRACLES 133 
 
 that the wisest can say of amy law as regards 
 the miracles, is that, so far as 1s known, the 
 law has, or has not, been violated. And in all 
 humility we ask, What do we know of this? 
 Absolutely nothing that can justify the all- 
 sweeping assertions so often made upon the 
 subject. 
 
 Again, we emphasize the fact that the wit- 
 nesses gave no “interpretation” of the mir- 
 acles. ‘They testified only to what they had 
 themselves beheld, and no other miracle was 
 wrought by Jesus than such as the plainest, 
 most unlettered man could witness, and of 
 which his testimony was as valid as that of 
 the most learned sage. Indeed, Jesus seems 
 to have guarded this point with the utmost 
 care. He never told the multitudes of mir- 
 acles wrought in secret, or in distant lands, or 
 in communication with unseen spiritual 
 agents, such as have been often, by impostors, 
 given in proof of their pretensions, and on at 
 least one very marked occasion when it might 
 have been charged upon him that he was pro- 
 fessing things the certainty of which the mul- 
 titudes could not know, he changed the nature 
 
134 MIRACLES 
 
 of his act, or added an additional act, as to 
 which there could be no doubt. After the 
 paralytic had had his sins forgiven, “whether 
 is easier,’’ says Jesus to the multitude, “‘to say, 
 Thy sins be forgiven thee, or to say, Rise, take 
 up thy bed and walk?! as if to say, “You 
 may not know whether this man’s sins have 
 been forgiven, but you can see that his phys- 
 ical infirmity is healed.” 
 
 If it be claimed that the senses are an un- 
 certain source of knowledge, and that, there- 
 fore, those witnesses could not have had ab- 
 solute certainty of the deeds to which they 
 testified, we would refer the reader to what is 
 admitted on this point by Mr. Mill: “The evi- 
 dence of the senses can prove this (a miracle) 
 as it can prove other things. That our senses 
 have been deceived is a possibility which has 
 to be met and dealt with, and we do deal with 
 it by several means. If we repeat the experi- 
 ment, and again with the same result; if at the 
 time of the observation the impressions of our 
 senses are in all respects the same as usual, 
 rendering the supposition of their being mor- 
 
INCREDIBILITY OF MIRACLES 135 
 
 SLL 
 
 bidly affected in this one particular extremely 
 improbable; above all, if other people’s senses 
 confirm the testimony of our own, we con- 
 clude with reason that we may trust our 
 senses. Indeed, our senses are all we have to 
 trust to.’’® 
 
 Mr. Mill here lays down the conditions 
 under which the evidence of the senses may 
 be taken in proof of miracles. We now main- 
 tain that every one of these conditions belongs 
 to the evidence under consideration. The 
 miracles were surely often enough repeated. 
 How many of the sick were healed, how many 
 of the lame made to walk, of the blind made 
 to see, of the deaf to hear; how many of the 
 lepers were cleansed, how many demoniacs 
 dispossessed of their evil spirits, and, besides 
 the general statement of Jesus that he raised 
 the dead, we have distinct accounts of the 
 raising of the widow’s son, of Jairus’s daugh- 
 ter, of Lazarus, of Jesus himself. Should it be 
 objected that the attendant circumstances in 
 these several cases were not the same, and 
 that, therefore, there were no such repetitions 
 
 16‘Three Essays in Religion, pp. 217, 218. 
 
136 MIRACLES 
 
 as Mr. Mill demands, the reply is (1) that the 
 variety of circumstances only made more 
 manifest the miracles, for each variation 
 showed the more plainly that these deeds were 
 not mere juggleries previously arranged; and 
 (2) whatever may have been the circum- 
 stances, the miracles themselves were, all of 
 the like class, the same. The sight restored 
 was, in the one case, the same miracle as the 
 sight restored in the other cases; and so of the 
 hearing, walking, cleansing, and the raising of 
 the dead. 
 
 Not only the repetitions called for by Mr. 
 Mill are seen in the accounts of the miracles, 
 but “at the time of observation”’ the disciples’ 
 senses were evidently “in all respects the same 
 as usual.” There is no indication of undue ex- 
 citement on their part, no unusual depression 
 or exaltation of the spirits, no wild fanaticism, 
 no intoxication from wine, no insanity, no 
 more nearsightedness or blindness than is usu- 
 ally found where large numbers of men are 
 concerned; nothing leading to the belief that 
 those witnesses were in any abnormal con- 
 dition of either intellect or senses. 
 
INCREDIBILITY OF MIRACLES 137 
 
 And, then, each man who witnessed had his 
 senses confirmed by what “other people’s 
 senses’ told them. That this was the case no 
 one doubts. What one witness professed to 
 have seen was seen by all, and all believed that 
 what they saw was fact. 
 
 We desire no better statement of our case 
 than has just been made out by Mr. Mill. 
 
 But let us hear Rénan again: “None of the 
 miracles with which ancient histories were 
 filled occurred under scientific conditions.’’7 
 
 These conditions are thus plainly stated: 
 “Let a thaumaturgist present himself to- 
 morrow with testimony sufficient to merit our 
 attention. Let him announce that he is able, 
 I will suppose, to raise the dead. What would 
 be done? A commission, composed of physi- 
 ologists, physicians, chemists, persons experi- 
 enced in historical criticism, would be ap- 
 pointed. This commission would choose the 
 corpse, make certain that death was real, des- 
 ignate the hall in which the experiment should 
 be made, and regulate the whole system of 
 precautions necessary to leave no room for 
 
 li The Life of Jesus, p. 43. 
 
138 MIRACLES 
 
 ar EEEEEEEEEE RISES ERETEEEREREER REE 
 
 doubt. If, under such conditions, the resur- 
 rection should be performed, a probability al- 
 most equal to certainty would be attained. 
 If then, on repetition, the miracle suc- 
 
 ceeds each time, two things would be proven: 
 First, that supernatural actions do come to 
 pass in the world; second, that the power to 
 perform them belongs, or is delegated, to cer- 
 tain persons. But who does not see that no 
 miracle was ever performed under such con- 
 ditions; that always hitherto the thauma- 
 turgist has chosen the subject of the experi- 
 ment, chosen the means, chosen the public?’’?® 
 Upon the above we would remark: In the 
 first place, it is not true of Jesus, however, 
 it may have been with others, that he always 
 chose the subject and chose the public. Of 
 course, he did choose the means, and it were 
 absurd to object to this in one who professed 
 to do what none others could; but as to time, 
 place, subject, public, these were in every in- 
 stance chosen by others, or at least presented 
 by circumstances over which Jesus had no 
 control, unless it be admitted that he pos- 
 
 8 The Life of Jesus, p. 44. 
 
INCREDIBILITY OF MIRACLES 139 
 
 sessed power here of the very same kind that 
 must be admitted in the working of the mir- 
 acles. If Jesus knew beforehand that the fig- 
 tree was going to wither just when it did, and 
 had so ordered his own goings and the goings 
 of his disciples that he passed the tree just in 
 time to curse it, and thus make it appear to 
 have withered in consequence of his words; or 
 if he knew just when a storm was going to rise 
 upon the lake, and just when the storm would 
 abate, so that he could take his disciples into 
 the boat and row out from land, and fall 
 asleep, and be waked up just in time to com- 
 mand, “Peace, be still,’ and have the ensuing 
 quiet to pass off as the working of a miracle,— 
 if Jesus could choose subjects, times, and 
 places in such a way as this, we make no fur- 
 ther argument; our point is gained; here are 
 miracles in knowledge equally striking with 
 any miracles of power, and we could desire 
 none better proven. 
 
 Our second remark is: We grant that no 
 miracle, at least none of those by Jesus, was 
 ever performed under “scientific conditions,” 
 as prescribed in the paragraph just quoted. 
 
140 MIRACLES 
 
 And we can not see what had been gained, or 
 what could now be gained, by having the mir- 
 acles wrought in the presence of the “com- 
 mission” which Rénan would name. If it be 
 said that such an assembly would be more 
 careful to ascertain the facts involved, it may 
 be replied that it were hardly possible for a 
 body of grave philosophers, in calmly testing 
 the truth of the miracles, to display the zeal 
 or resolution of those old scribes and Phari- 
 sees in their determination to prove the mir- 
 acles false. See how, in the case of the man 
 born blind,!® they do all in their power to dis- 
 prove the miracle. They examine the man 
 himself, they examine his parents, to satisfy 
 themselves that he had really been blind from 
 birth; and that they then grew angry and 
 drove the man away shows how intense had 
 been their interest, and at the same time how 
 signal their failure to catch Jesus in a mere act 
 of fraud; and certainly it would not be con- 
 tended that the priests to whom Jesus him- 
 self sent the lepers for the determination of 
 their cleansing,?® could be indifferent or re- 
 
 Wyohn ix. 20 Mark i, 44; Luke v, 14. 
 
INCREDIBILITY OF MIRACLES I4I 
 
 PAVE Aer ON eke 
 miss in doing that as to which law, bigotry, 
 prejudice, hate, all combined to stimulate their 
 zeal. As for a body of “physiologists, chem- 
 ists, physicians, and persons experienced in 
 historical criticism” being better able to de- 
 cide the case than were those contemporaries 
 of Jesus, this is manifestly all assumption. 
 Such men could not have made the laws of 
 nature to act any the more or any the less reg- 
 ularly; they could not have caused the day- 
 light to shine any the more clearly, or the eye 
 to see any the more distinctly, or the intellect 
 to apprehend any the more unerringly. 
 Neither could they themselves have seen any 
 better than those witnesses whether or not the 
 lame man walked, or the sea was calmed. 
 That men unskilled and unlearned, like those 
 that followed Jesus, were more disposed than 
 Rénan’s “commission” would have been to 
 assign supernatural causes to what they 
 saw, is a fact most cheerfully admitted. 
 But those witnesses said nothing about such 
 causes. Even had they done this, their 
 testimony as to the causes had not invali- 
 dated their evidence as to the facts of the mir- 
 
142 MIRACLES 
 
 acles. ‘The peasant sees the moon eclipsed, or 
 the tornado carrying desolation in its sweep; 
 sees these things equally with the man of sci- 
 ence; and he sees them none the less clearly, 
 and he reports them none the less accurately, 
 because in his ignorance he ascribes them to 
 the agency of supernatural beings, to genii, or 
 demons. As to mere facts, what we require, 
 even with all our skill in criticism, is the testi- 
 mony of witnesses of good eyes and ears, 
 sound minds, and truth-telling habits; or when 
 such habits can not be ascertained, witnesses 
 of whom we have no reasonable ground for 
 believing them, from moral or intellectual in- 
 firmity disposed to falsehood or liable to de- 
 lusion. Other things being equal in plain 
 matters of eyesight or hearing, the testimony 
 of the illiterate man is equally valid, and is so 
 taken in the courts, with that of the most 
 learned or skilled logician. As to matters 
 generally, matters, too, of the gravest import, 
 “men of the people” and “men of the world” 
 determine both for themselves and others 
 without the aid of “scientific research,” “sci- 
 
 entific conditions,” or wise savans; and the 
 
 ——— ee 7. 
 
INCREDIBILITY OF MIRACLES 143 
 
 whole world of ‘“‘physiologists, chemists, phy- 
 sicians, persons experienced in historical criti- 
 cism’’ determine in the very same way. The 
 physiologist tells for himself; so does the phy- 
 sician, so the chemist, so all the world, learned 
 or unlearned, whether one is sick or not, and 
 whether his friend has really died. And were 
 a deceased friend to rise from the grave, the 
 humblest man in the world could tell just as 
 certainly as Rénan’s commission could, 
 whether the man was really alive. 
 
CHAP TE REY: 
 
 General Review of the Adverse 
 Argument 
 
 FE, have now considered the leading ob- 
 jections both to the miracles and to 
 the proof, and we have no hesitation in saying 
 that the proof, so far from being weakened or 
 obscured by these objections, is, on the other 
 hand, confirmed and set forth in clearer light. 
 As to the proof itself, very little has been pro- 
 posed by way of effort toward a direct refu- 
 tation of it; that is, effort to prove it false or 
 spurious. It is manifest, therefore, that it is 
 the miracles themselves, and not the evidence, 
 on which the objectors have based their op- 
 position. 
 
 In other words, from the nature of the 
 miracles has been drawn the argument by 
 _ which the fact of miracles is to be disproved, 
 a mode of reasoning in the highest degree 
 
 absurd, unless it can be shown that in the very 
 144 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT 145 
 
 REE EON 
 conception of miracles absolute impossibility 
 is implied; and as such impossibility has not 
 been shown, as, on the other hand, the possi- 
 bility of miracles in the light of theism has 
 been fully admitted by such men as Mill and 
 Huxley—and must be admitted by all who 
 believe in God—to argue against the miracles 
 because of any peculiarity in their nature, were 
 equally unreasonable with an effort to dis- 
 prove, in the same way, any other things in 
 the least degree peculiar. Such a mode of 
 reasoning, therefore, besides being unsound 
 in principle, would, if generally applied, be 
 found ruinous in its consequences. It would 
 check the advance of science; it would make 
 us reject many of the most familiar truths in 
 history, and cause us, sometimes, to doubt the 
 reality even of what our eyes have seen. 
 
 he miracles, like other alleged facts of his- 
 tory, are to be determined, not by consider- 
 ation of what they were, or how they were 
 performed, but by the simple question whether 
 or not we have the proof. Any other way of 
 treating the subject is unscientific in the high- 
 est degree. Professor Huxley says that “the 
 
146 MIRACLES 
 
 question as to what Jesus actually said and did 
 is capable of solution by no other methods 
 than those practiced by the historian and lit- 
 erary critic.”? If this be true, it follows that 
 the like method must be applied in ascertain- 
 ing, among the many things ascribed to Jesus, 
 what he actually did not say and did not do. 
 But this is far from being the method pursued 
 by those whose reasonings have been before 
 us. Instead of investigating the miracles as 
 the historian or literary critic would have dealt 
 with other events of the past; that is, by im- 
 partial consideration of the evidence in hand, 
 these objectors have paid very little attention 
 to the evidence, otherwise than by general, in- 
 direct assaults, the tendency of which has been 
 to induce in the reader’s mind such opposition 
 to the miracles themselves as might deprive 
 the evidence of its legitimate effect. They 
 
 | » have told us in’ decided terms what kind of 
 
 evidence can not, not what evidence can, sus- 
 tain these acts of Jesus; they have given broad 
 general statements of the fallibility of testi- 
 mony as a means of proof; they have discussed 
 
 1Christianity and Agnosticism, p. 16. 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT 147 
 
 the nature of miracles, and their relation to 
 law or order; but not one of them has under- 
 taken either to rebut the evidence by oppos- 
 ing evidence, or to cast discredit upon the 
 general character of the records from which the 
 evidence has been drawn. In instances not a 
 few they have reasoned in a way that sets logic 
 at defiance. Mr. Hume’s fallacy is most no- 
 torious. From first to last his argument runs 
 upon the contrariety between miracles and ex- 
 perience; but he nowhere tells us whether by 
 experience he means the experience of the 
 reader, the experience of the world in general, 
 or the uniform, invariable experience of all 
 mankind. If he means anything else than this 
 latter definition, he argues in support of a 
 proposition wholly irrelevant, and one that 
 needs no proof; and if this latter definition be 
 his meaning—if no individual of the human 
 race has seen a miracle—his argument is a 
 mere begging of the question, and amounts 
 only to saying that the disciples of Jesus had 
 seen no miracles, because miracles have never 
 been seen! 
 
 Mr. Mill, besides the irrelevancy in his at- 
 
148 MIRACLES 
 
 tempt to disparage the evidence by calling it 
 
 , 
 
 “the evidence of books and traditions,’ most 
 palpably contradicts himself when he objects 
 to the supernatural in the miracles as placing 
 them beyond our ability properly to discern; 
 for he most positively asserts, as we have seen, 
 that supernatural deeds can be known by the 
 senses just as other things are known, and vir- 
 tually admits that if we reject the testimony 
 of the senses here, we must equally reject it in 
 the other facts of life and history. No less 
 illogical is Professor Huxley seen to be. His 
 argument as to the “ingraining” of the mind 
 proves too much, and therefore fails to prove 
 the point in question. Besides this, a more 
 enormous extravagance was never perpetrated 
 than is seen in the assumption that the wit- 
 nesses’ minds were so ingrained with belief in 
 miracles that no degree or quality of intellec- 
 tual, moral, or'literary character could make 
 their testimony valid. An assumption, this, 
 bold enough and absurd enough as applied to 
 those friends who followed Jesus; applied to 
 those enemies who hated Jesus with a diabol- 
 ical frenzy, and placed themselves in antago- 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT 149 
 
 nism at every point, the idea that these men 
 were so fully controlled by their ingrained be- 
 lief as to be compelled to testify to the mir- 
 acles, and thus strengthen the cause of One 
 they were doing all in their power to resist, de- 
 mands a credulityatwhich old Apella might be 
 amazed. Ifit be allowed that both the friends 
 and enemies of a cause may be so “ingrained” 
 as to pervert the plainest facts, and in the 
 same direction, we may throw our logic as well 
 as physic to the dogs, and the world will be 
 the gainer. 
 
 As for the effort made by Hume and Hux- 
 ley to put other alleged miracles upon an 
 equality, as regards the evidence, with those 
 of Jesus, the utmost that their argument can 
 possibly effect is to show inconsistency on the 
 part of those who either accept or reject this 
 evidence. If there are those who, with what 
 to them is satisfactory evidence, will not admit 
 the miracles of Jesus, because this would com- 
 pel the admission of those other so-called mir- 
 acles; or who, on the other hand, reject these 
 latter because they have previously accepted 
 these works of Jesus, it is manifest that such 
 
150 MIRACLES 
 
 i’ 
 
 persons base their conclusions upon other 
 grounds than that of evidence, and hence, 
 whatever they may or may not do in the prem- 
 ises, the evidence itself is not affected, and all 
 said about the pseudo-miracles has nothing in 
 the least to do with the case. 
 
 Mill, Hume, Huxley, all dogmatically as- 
 sert what they can not know to be true, when 
 they pronounce the miracles incredible, as 
 being in violation of the laws of nature; and 
 in this assertion they presume to know either 
 that the Author of nature can not, or that he 
 will not, operate his laws to the accomplish- 
 ment of his own behests. 
 
 Indeed, it may be said—with becoming 
 
 modesty, we hope—that bold-assertion, indi- 
 rection, irrelevancy, foregone conclusion, are 
 leading features of the anti-miracle argument 
 by whomsoever made; and one would hazard 
 little in challenging the entire brotherhood of 
 disbelievers to construct an argument which 
 shall be free from these charges. ‘Theories, 
 
 ~~ not facts; hypotheses, not established truths; 
 
 assumptions, not generally admitted prin- 
 ciples, have largely furnished the material of 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT I51 
 
 SN EERE 
 
 the argument, and if the skeptical reader will 
 fairly analyze his own doubts or oppositions, 
 he will find them based upon one or more of 
 these erroneous ways of reasoning. 
 
 If the evidence for these miracles is to be 
 
 set aside, one of the following things must be —~ 
 
 done: Either show that the testimony given in 
 the Gospels is interpolation introduced by 
 fraudulent or misguided editors or transcrib- 
 ers, and hence forms no part of the original 
 records; in other words, that we have no evi- 
 dence for the miracles; or, bring forward op- 
 posing evidence—the testimony of men who 
 had opportunity of knowing the facts in ques- 
 tion, who yet declare that miracles were not 
 wrought by Jesus; or, show more reliable 
 memoirs or biographies of Jesus, which are 
 silent as to miracles; or, take the testimony 
 as we find it, and prove either self-contradic- 
 tion or mutual contradiction of the witnesses; 
 or, establish the mental or moral incompe- 
 tency of the witnesses; or, prove an alibi of 
 them, or that they were forced to give their 
 testimony, or that they had adequate reward 
 in view to induce them to invent a gigantic 
 
152 MIRACLES 
 
 falsehood; or, finally, show the essential im- 
 possibility of the miracles, that is, that mir- 
 acles are impossible, whether with or without 
 the power of God. 
 
 That not one of these things has been done, 
 or even attempted, it is quite needless to as- 
 sert. The incompetency of the witnesses and 
 the impossibility of miracles have been af- 
 firmed; but not only has no proof been offered 
 in the premises, but not even an argument has 
 been adventured on the subject. As to fraud- 
 ulent or interpolated records of the testimony 
 —or testimony contrary to that of the Gos- 
 pels—or more reliable records that make no 
 mention of the miracles, or contradictions of 
 any kind among the witnesses, as to the gen- 
 eral fact of the miracles being performed, or 
 as to proving alibi of the witnesses, or that 
 they were forced or otherwise made to give 
 their testimony,—as to all these things not one 
 word has been written by those whose objec- 
 tions have been under review. 
 
 Whatever may be the power of the adverse 
 argument, before this testimony can be over- 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT 153 
 
 thrown the following questions must be an- 
 swered : 
 
 1. How came it, if the miracles were not 
 performed, that the testimony was given to 
 the world? 
 
 2. How can we explain that the testimony 
 passed uncontradicted at the time when, if 
 false, it could have been so easily refuted? 
 
 3. How are we to account for the world’s 
 high estimate of Jesus, and the establishment 
 of his kingdom in the world? 
 
 As to the first of these questions, it will be 
 admitted unequivocally that the witnesses 
 either believed, or they did not believe, the 
 testimony which they gave. There is no mid- 
 dle proposition here. If they did not believe, 
 their testimony was a conscious, if not indeed 
 a fabricated, falsehood; if they did believe in 
 the miracles when no miracles had been per- 
 formed, they were under the power of some 
 strange infatuation, which either beguiled 
 their senses or befogged their reason, and they 
 were incapable of knowing the truth as to the 
 plainest facts. 
 
154 MIRACLES 
 
 Now, let us admit for a moment that the 
 miracles were not performed, and assume that 
 the testimony which we have was a concerted 
 scheme of falsehood. To maintain this po- 
 sition we must show not only sufficient motive 
 for the falsehood, but adequate means for the 
 successful propagation of it among the peo- 
 ple; in other words, show both why and how 
 those witnesses so deceived the world. 
 
 Let us here consider (1) that Jesus himself 
 bore testimony to the miracles, and (2) that 
 no less positively than either by Jesus or his 
 disciples was the testimony given by the ene- 
 mies of Jesus. Now, as to Jesus, no one, even 
 of the boldest, has dared to charge him with 
 falsehood, or an invention of the testimony; 
 and while we may easily see reason for his ene- 
 mies forging evidence in denial of the mir- 
 acles, it is utterly inconceivable that they 
 should have made up stories in proof that the 
 miracles were performed. We are equally at 
 a loss to understand, or conjecture even, why 
 the disciples and other friends of Jesus should 
 have attempted such a thing. Had those who 
 testified of the miracles been high officials in 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT 155 
 
 a Church of long standing and commanding 
 influence, deriving large income or honors 
 from their offices, there had been some reason 
 for believing that they might, if possible, 
 either have fabricated a marvelous story to 
 exalt their leader and themselves, or done all 
 in their power to make current such a story 
 devised by others. But such advantages were 
 not connected with the cause of Christ. There 
 was no Church except that whose highest dig- 
 nitaries were their enemies; there were no re- 
 wards or honors placed before them, no favors 
 to gain from either high or low. Scorn, con- 
 tempt, poverty, arduous toil, dangerous travel 
 by land and sea; all manner of discouragement 
 in the way of bonds, scourgings, imprison- 
 ments, death,—these were the honors, these the 
 rewards of the testimony by which they would 
 deceive mankind. Would a number of men 
 willfully invent and persistently carry through- 
 out the world a falsehood from which they had 
 not one thing to gain, but everything to lose? 
 
 But allowing the frenzy that might have 
 prompted such a course, we can not see how 
 such success should have crowned the mad de- 
 
156 MIRACLES 
 
 sign. That one or two men should have 
 formed a plan for the deception of their fellow- 
 men, and for awhile escaped detection in their 
 fraud, is by no means incredible; such things 
 have occurred. But that any considerable 
 number of men should have succeeded 
 through a long series of years in deluding en- 
 tire communities into the belief of a concerted 
 fraud, among the very people who might have 
 known, if indeed they did not already know, 
 the certainty of the matter—concerted, too, 
 at the very time when the subject of the gross 
 deception was in their midst creating an in- 
 terest that had aroused the hate and prejudice 
 of the authorities of both Church and State— 
 the fraud not even in the long generations fol- 
 lowing the deaths of the perpetrators of it 
 being discovered and announced, is incredible 
 beyond expression. 
 
 No more plausible is the idea of these wit- 
 nesses being the subjects of a wild hallucina- 
 tion when they told their stories. Shall it be 
 said that they were weak, credulous men, 
 those early followers of Jesus, sharing thus 
 the general spirit of their age, a love of the ~ 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT 157 
 
 marvelous and a ready belief, without investi- 
 gation, of whatsoever might strike the im- 
 agination, or feed their fondness for the mar- 
 velous? Now, however truly might thus be 
 described the Jews in general in those days, 
 nothing could be less applicable than such a 
 description to the men who followed Jesus. 
 We have already seen what kind of men those 
 followers of Jesus were. Let us now see how 
 they behaved themselves as regards the mir- 
 acles, at least that greatest of all miracles, the 
 resurrection of Jesus from the dead. See how 
 skeptical at first they were! The priests ap- 
 pear to have believed in the resurrection from 
 the very first. Their conversation with the 
 guard, and proposal to bribe them into telling 
 that the body had been stolen from the grave, 
 clearly shows us that they entertained no 
 doubt that the resurrection had really taken 
 place; but these disciples, how skeptical they 
 were! In no one instance did they believe 
 mere rumor or report, or even the solemn as- 
 severations made by members of their own 
 body. When Mary and the other women re- 
 ported that Jesus was alive again, they scouted 
 
158 MIRACLES 
 
 at their words as “an idle tale” or nonsense, as 
 the word may be better rendered. When the 
 two that went to Emmaus informed the others 
 that they had seen their Lord, again they 
 would not believe.? When Jesus appeared be- 
 fore them on the evening of the same day,‘ he 
 had to upbraid their unbelief, and gained their 
 assent only by calling upon them to handle 
 his hands and feet, and see. Thomas, in- 
 formed of this occurrence, would not believe 
 until he had not only seen with his own eyes, 
 but had laid his finger into the print of the 
 nails, and had thrust his hand into the 
 wounded side of Jesus.® 
 
 Had there been any error or deception 
 here, or had the disciples been under the 
 power of some strange, mysterious spell that 
 hoaxed or befooled their visions, they cer- 
 tainly had ample time, as they had ample oc- 
 casion, for their disenchantment. Had their 
 training, or want of training, made them con- 
 tent with their belief without investigation fur- 
 ther than they had already given, or had they, 
 
 2 Ajpoc, Luke xxiv, II. 3Mark xvi, 13. 
 4Mark xvi, 14; Luke xxiv, 36. 5John xx, 24 to 31. 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT 159 
 
 from any cause, been insensible to the obli- 
 gation of ascertaining the truth of the matter, 
 they could hardly have remained long in such 
 indifference; the hard fates encountered had 
 waked them up to at least the possibility of 
 their being deceived, and made them look 
 about for proof—absolute proof; proof against 
 which not even a suspicion could be raised. 
 But those disciples seem not only to have had 
 proof perfectly satisfactory to themselves, but 
 proof equally satisfactory to those before 
 whom they laid their cause. So far from hav- 
 ing the least suspicion of error or deception, 
 they go forth with a boldness almost super- 
 human, and succeed in making multitudes of 
 others believe the very things that had set 
 them wild. Set them wild? Could men with 
 such confidence in their statements, and such 
 success in making others, even their deadliest 
 enemies, equally confident with themselves— 
 could these men have been wild, insane? 
 These men, all, both those who told and those 
 who heard, believed the wonderful story. 
 Strange infatuation this! A number of men 
 had seen something, or thought they saw it, 
 
160 MIRACLES 
 
 which they took for Jesus risen from the dead; 
 they had seen divers persons or things in 
 divers places, which they had imagined to be 
 their risen Lord, and these grotesque imagi- 
 nations they had passed off as sober facts upon 
 thousands of sober-minded people, who them- 
 selves likewise immediately set to work telling 
 the same absurd stories; all of them, besides 
 making fools and madmen of themselves, 
 liable at any time to stripes or crucifixion, and 
 yet ultimately establishing their wild delusion 
 as the controlling belief of the leading nations 
 of the globe! 
 
 Now, allowing such wholesale delusion to 
 have been possible, how did it first get a start 
 among the people? How, in what condition 
 of things, in what event, in what interest, prej- 
 udice, superstition, could it have originated? 
 
 Inasmuch as this idea of delusion has been 
 made so popular through the writings of Ré- 
 nan and Strauss, we must consider it some- 
 what more at length. Seeing the impossibility 
 of refuting the evidence, these authors have 
 accepted the testimony as true, in the main, 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT 161 
 
 in regard to the subjective facts concerned; 
 they have denied the objective reality of the 
 miracles. The miracles were mere beliefs, vis- 
 ions, hallucinations, or illusions. 
 
 Thus Strauss: 
 
 “Tsaiah had prophesied that at that time, 
 the time of the Messiah, the eyes of the blind 
 should be opened, and the ears of the deaf 
 should hear; then shall the lame man leap like 
 a deer, and the tongue of the stammerer shall 
 speak fluently. Thus it was known in detail 
 what sort of miracles Jesus, having been the 
 Messiah, must have performed; and so it hap- 
 pened that, in the earliest Church, narratives 
 might be—nay, could not fail to be—invented 
 without any consciousness of invention on the 
 part of the authors of them.’ 
 
 That is, the people believed the miracles, 
 not because they had been performed by Jesus, 
 but because they, the people, were expecting 
 that miracles would be performed when the 
 Messiah should appear. 
 
 Several objections, any one of which is 
 
 6New Life, p. 202. 
 II 
 
162 MIRACLES 
 
 fatal, present themselves immediately upon 
 the reading of this myth theory of the great 
 German skeptic. 
 
 In the first place, Strauss has not shown‘ 
 us that the Jews placed such literal interpre- 
 tations upon those ancient prophecies, and 
 we can not believe that such vast numbers of 
 men were so illogical as to have reasoned in 
 the way here asserted of them. The Messiah 
 would work miracles. Jesus was the Messiah; 
 therefore Jesus had worked miracles! Men 
 might reason thus on mere abstract propo- 
 sitions, or about things as to which they could 
 not know the certainty, but never as to plain 
 statements of facts, the reality or unreality of 
 which was matter of eyesight, no mere infer- 
 ence or interpretation. Even allowing that 
 the prophecies concerning the Messiah might 
 have given rise to the belief in such miracles 
 as Strauss has named, there is a large variety 
 of them as to which the belief can not possibly 
 be thus accounted for. Those prophecies 
 
 7There is no contemporary Jewish history of those 
 days; that is, none except the Gospels: no contempo- 
 rary works of any kind by Jews. . 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT . 163 
 
 made no promise of such miracles as walking 
 on the sea, withering the fig-tree, or raising 
 the dead, or of Jesus himself rising from the 
 grave. 
 
 And, then, granting that “the earliest 
 Church” might have believed the miracles in 
 the way explained by Strauss, it certainly will 
 not be admitted that thus the belief originated 
 on the part of those who denied the Messiah- 
 ship of Jesus. rot 
 
 This theory violates both the logical and 
 the chronological order of events in the life 
 of Jesus. It violates the logical order in mak- 
 ing the myths arise out of the belief that Jesus 
 was the Messiah; whereas the records—the 
 very records which Strauss makes the basis of 
 his argument—show that the belief in the 
 Messiahship arose out of the working of the 
 miracles. “We know that thou art a teacher 
 come from God, for no man can do these mir- 
 acles that thou doest except God be with 
 him.” 
 
 The theory violates the chronological order 
 in assuming that the belief arose only after 
 
 8John iii, 2, 
 
164 MIRACLES 
 
 Jesus had virtually accomplished his ministry, 
 at least as a divine commissioner from God, 
 while we know that the belief existed almost 
 at the very opening of the public life of Jesus. 
 Only a short time after the baptism was held 
 the conversation with Nicodemus, from which 
 quotation has just been made, and it was but 
 little subsequent to this that Jesus declared, 
 as evidence of his Messiahship, that the blind 
 received their sight, the lame walked, the 
 lepers were cleansed, and the deaf heard, and 
 the dead were raised. 
 
 Again, it is not conceivable that myths as 
 to the miracles could have arisen among a 
 people who were contemporaneous with Jesus. 
 Admitting all that may be said as to the ra- 
 pidity with which myths may be formed, it is 
 impossible to believe that untrue stories of the 
 miracles could have connected with the name 
 of Jesus, Jesus himself not only being yet 
 alive, but even now and then, on different 
 occasions, calling their attention to the facts 
 as to which the myths are said to have been 
 believed. Had Jesus said nothing at all about 
 the miracles; or had he merely claimed the 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT 165 
 
 Nd ORANG Ee NR UR i ac 
 power, or only made the promise to perform 
 them at some other time; or had he given ac- 
 counts of miracles performed in distant places, 
 or in some past time, so that those whom he 
 addressed had had no opportunity of ascer- 
 taining the truth of what he said; or had the 
 miracles been reported by others only after 
 the death of Jesus, we might readily see how 
 among throngs of friends and admirers such 
 myths or legends, as Strauss supposes, may 
 have arisen, even at a very early day, and been 
 credited by many as actual facts. But how- 
 ever stich myths may have been regarded by 
 others, we can not believe that those disciples, 
 intimate associates of Jesus, could have been 
 deluded by them. Such men certainly knew 
 whether they saw the miracles, or were merely 
 listening to vague rumors that had no other 
 foundation than their uncertain interpreta- 
 tions of a few ancient prophecies. Can we 
 conceive of a man, even of large numbers of 
 men, not knowing the difference between a 
 set of myths and actual facts which purported 
 to have fallen under their own immediate ob- 
 servation? And could Jesus himself have 
 
166 MIRACLES 
 
 either believed or propagated myths as to 
 things said to have been accomplished by him- 
 self? or could he have gotten the multitudes 
 to believe that they had seen habitually, 
 from day to day, things which both eyesight 
 and memory told them they had never seen? 
 We might ourselves to-day be deceived into 
 believing as facts what were only the legends 
 of an age long past; but unless we should lose 
 our reason, nothing could make us thus to 
 blunder in regard to things said to be taking 
 place before our very eyes. 
 
 Of this myth theory Rénan makes appli- 
 cation only to the raising of Lazarus from the 
 grave. In the first edition of his Life of Jesus 
 (page 304, etc.), he freely admits that “some- 
 thing took place at Bethany which was re- 
 garded as a resurrection,’ but attempts to 
 make it a mere trick of Lazarus, who had 
 “caused himself to be swathed in grave-clothes 
 as one dead, and shut up in the family tomb;” 
 that Jesus thought Lazarus was dead, and upon 
 having the stone removed, that he might once 
 more look upon the beloved form, better than 
 was expected, Lazarus actually did come | 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT 167 
 
 forth, and then Jesus thought, and the friends 
 and relatives present all thought, that there 
 was a resurrection from the dead!’ 
 
 Rénan himself could not endure to see this 
 folly abiding permanently in his book, and 
 hence, in a subsequent edition, he “interprets” 
 differently that “supernatural relation.” He 
 now has it that a conversation as to the neces- 
 sity of some great miracle to persuade the 
 people had gotten turned and twisted until, by 
 frequent repetition, what was originally a 
 mere supposition or suggestion had, in the 
 popular belief, come to be an actual fact. Let 
 us see what he says: 
 
 “Weary of the poor welcome which the 
 kingdom of God was receiving from the Jews, 
 the friends of Jesus, it seems, desired that 
 some great deed should be accomplished 
 which would boldly strike the incredulous 
 Jews. A resurrection appeared to be what 
 was wanting to convince them. We may sup- 
 pose that Mary and Martha opened the sub- 
 ject to Jesus. Rumor had already ascribed 
 to him two or three deeds of this kind. ‘If one 
 should rise from the dead, doubtless,’ ex- 
 
168 MIRACLES 
 
 claimed the pious sisters, ‘the living would 
 perhaps repent.’ ‘No,’ said Jesus, ‘even 
 should a dead man rise to life, they would not 
 believe.’ Then, as they recalled a story which 
 was familiar to him, that of the poor Lazarus 
 who had died and been carried by angels into 
 Abraham’s bosom, ‘No,’ again replied Jesus, 
 ‘they would not believe though Lazarus 
 should return.’ In course of time singular 
 misunderstandings arose as to this conversa- 
 tion. The hypothesis became fact. Lazarus 
 was spoken of as raised from the dead. 
 
 When we bear in mind what cock-and-bull 
 stories arise from the gossipings of an Oriental 
 village, we can not regard it impossible that 
 a report of this kind should have reached 
 Jerusalem, and been attended with fatal con- 
 sequences.’”? 
 
 As to the resurrection of Jesus, Rénan re- 
 sorts to the notion of illusions or hallucina- 
 tions. Strauss, here, still holds on to his 
 myths or legends; but his explanations are so 
 similar to those of the French critic that a sep- 
 
 ®Vie de Jesus, XIIIth Edition, p. 372. Paris, 1867. 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT 16g 
 
 arate presentation of them need not here be 
 given.'° We present, therefore, only the res- 
 urrection as explained in the Frenchman’s 
 “Life of Jesus:” 
 
 “The disciples during the first hours which 
 elapsed after his [Jesus’] death, had in this 
 respect no fixed hope. The sentiments which 
 they so artlessly confide to us show that they 
 believed all to be over. They bewail and bury 
 their friend, if not as one of the common herd 
 who had died, at least as a person whose loss 
 was irreparable; they were sorrowful and cast 
 down; the expectation which they had in- 
 dulged of seeing him realize the salvation of 
 Israel is proved to have been vanity.’’"? 
 
 “The reign of God and the reign of the 
 Spirit consisted, in their ideas, in a complete 
 transformation of the world, and in the anni- 
 hilation of death. To acknowledge that death 
 could have the victory over Jesus, over him 
 who came to abolish the power of death, this 
 
 10New Faith and Old, p. 79; also New Life of Jesus, 
 
 I, p. 420, 
 ll The Apostles, p. 54. 
 
170 MIRACLES 
 
 was the height of absurdity. The very idea 
 that he could suffer had previously been re- 
 volting to his disciples. They had no choice, 
 then, between despair and heroic affirmation. 
 A man of penetration might have announced 
 during the Saturday that Jesus would arise. 
 The little Christian society on that day worked 
 the veritable miracle; they resuscitated Jesus 
 in their hearts by the love which they bore 
 toward him. They decided that Jesus had not 
 dieds’77 
 
 See now his explanation of the appearance 
 of Jesus to Mary: 
 
 “Peter and John having departed from the 
 garden, Mary alone remained at the edge of 
 the cave. One sole thought occupied her 
 mind, Where had they put the body? Sud- 
 denly she hears a light rustling behind her; 
 there isa man standing. . . . She thinks 
 that she hears herself called by her name, 
 Mary. It was the voice that had so often 
 thrilled her before. It was the accent of Jesus. 
 
 The miracle of love is accomplished. 
 
 12The Apostles, p. 56. 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT I7I 
 
 The resurrection has its first direct 
 witness.’’?? 
 
 One other “interpretation” of these “‘super- 
 natural relations” we give—the appearance of 
 Jesus to the two disciples on their way to 
 Emmaus: 
 
 “They were conversing together over the 
 recent events, and were full of sadness. On 
 the road an unknown Companion joined them, 
 and inquired the cause of their grief. ‘Art 
 thou, then, the only stranger at Jerusalem, 
 that thou knowest not what things are come 
 to pass there?’ . .°. ‘The day was draw- 
 ing to a close; the memories of the two dis- 
 ciples become more vivid. This hour of the 
 evening meal was that which they remem- 
 bered with the greatest pleasure and regret. 
 How often had they, at that very hour, seen 
 their beloved Master forget the duties of the 
 day in the abandon of pleasant conversation, 
 and, cheered by the repast, speak to them of 
 the fruit of the vine which he should drink 
 anew with them in the kingdom of his Father! 
 
 13The Apostles, p. 60. 
 
172 MIRACLES 
 
 rr 
 
 Giving way to a sort of pleasurable 
 sadness, they forget the stranger; it is Jesus 
 whom they see holding the bread. 
 
 The conviction of the two disciples was that 
 they had seen Jesus.”** 
 
 Of like character are all the “interpreta- 
 tions” by Rénan, of Jesus’ meetings with the 
 disciples. 
 
 Several considerations the reader must now 
 note in regard to these efforts to explain away 
 the facts in the face of the testimony which 
 has been admitted. 
 
 Rénan and Strauss both accept the sub- 
 jective verity of the Gospel miracles; the ob- 
 jective facts must, therefore, be allowed, un- 
 less the subjective verities can be otherwise 
 
 best explained. 
 
 Aside from the Gospels there are no writ- 
 ten documents or other information as to how 
 these illusions could have originated; none, at 
 least, except the apocryphal writings which 
 likewise narrate miracles in the life of Jesus. 
 Whatever is said, therefore, by way of ac- 
 ‘aaerhe Apostles, p65) hi way tn. eee 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT 173 
 
 counting for the belief in miracles as recorded 
 in the Gospels must be bare hypothesis. 
 
 If the “historical” or “literary method” is 
 to be pursued in this investigation, not every 
 supposition that has plausibility can account 
 for the origin of these visions or beliefs; the 
 supposition must rest upon a basis of generally 
 admitted historical facts as distinguished from 
 all mere speculation or hypothesis. 
 
 The supposition or hypothesis, therefore, 
 must itself need no explanation; that is, it 
 must not call for other hypotheses in explana- 
 tion of itself, neither must it, without other 
 such hypotheses, be more difficult to explain 
 than the beliefs in explanation of which it has 
 been devised. 
 
 Any hypothesis that would be accepted by 
 the historical or literary method must not only 
 satisfactorily account for these visions or hal- 
 lucinations; it must be the only satisfactory 
 explanation that can be given of them. So 
 long as two or more hypotheses can account 
 for any given fact, whether of the laws of mat- 
 ter or in the workings of the mind, such fact 
 
174 MIRACLES 
 
 | GSS SIS W EES RES EER POE SNE 9 EL SE EE TS SENS SLE LED RLS ELA, 
 
 remains wholly unexplained; just as no man 
 is proven guilty of a crime so long as it can 
 be shown, with equal plausibility, that any 
 other man, or men, might have done the deed. 
 
 Now, it is quite easy to see that none of 
 these conditions have been fulfilled in the “in- 
 terpretations” which have been given. ‘Re- 
 nan has not offered a better explanation of 
 the subjective facts than would be the simple 
 admission of the miracles. ‘Though recog- 
 nizing the necessity of having a true historical 
 foundation upon which to rest his hypothesis, 
 he has utterly ignored, or at best has sadly 
 perverted, the history in the case, and given 
 us a mere theory which is in direct contradic- 
 tion of the facts even as acknowledged by him- 
 self. Indeed, in the very statement of his 
 premises, he so glaringly contradicts himself 
 as to make it appear that he had given the sub- 
 ject but little serious consideration. First, he 
 tells us that the disciples thought that in the 
 death of Jesus all was lost. “They bewail and 
 bury their friend, if not as one of the common 
 herd, at least as a person whose loss was ir- 
 reparable; they were sorrowful and cast down; 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT 175 
 
 the expectation they had indulged of seeing 
 him realize the salvation of Israel is proved to 
 have been vanity.” 
 
 And yet a little further on he has these 
 same disciples so sanguine in the hope of a 
 resurrection, that “a man of penetration might 
 have announced on Saturday that Jesus would 
 arise; that is, the disciples were so hopeful of 
 a resurrection that the hope would soon, to 
 them, become father to the fact, and they were 
 going to announce, and at all hazards main- 
 tain as actual occurrence, that which had only 
 been their intense desire. 
 
 Again, Rénan has not only thus—by his 
 perversion of the records—virtually acknowl- 
 edged that he has no historical basis for his 
 supposition, but he has widely erred as to the 
 scientific facts involved. He contradicts the 
 facts and principles of a correct psychology. 
 He has failed to consider that while the mind 
 which believes or hopes may sometimes, in 
 imagination, see the object believed in or de- 
 sired, the mind which despairs or disbelieves 
 can have no such imaginary views of things. 
 A strange philosophy this which makes the 
 
176 MIRACLES 
 
 disciples, believing that Jesus was dead and 
 all was over, so confident of seeing him again, 
 that while his body is decaying in the ground 
 they imagine that they do actually see him 
 again, handle his hands and feet, dash into the 
 sea and swim to him ashore, hold long com- 
 munications with him, listen to his teachings 
 concerning the kingdom of God,’® and keep 
 up these experiences for forty days; or, as Re- 
 nan would say, for months, or even a couple 
 of years.*® 
 
 What a travesty of the facts and workings 
 of the human mind! Two or more persons,'* 
 beholding in imagination the same thing at 
 the same time, and hearing the same sounds, 
 without one of them, by word or otherwise, 
 making the least suggestion to the others; two 
 men, walking,!® talking, passing the evening 
 with a third man, both falling, at the same 
 time, into the same reverie; both “coming to” 
 at the same time, and ever after thinking that 
 the third man had been a fourth man whom 
 they had seen dead and buried three days be- 
 
 1b Acts i, 3 16The Apostles, p. 312 
 Matt. xxviii, 1. 8% Tuke xxiv, 13. 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT 177 
 
 PURINE UNE E BoMe deett 
 fore! Seven men,! all seeing at the same time 
 an eighth man at a distance on the shore, all 
 hearing him address them in the same words, 
 when there was no eighth man there; eleven 
 men,”° all at the same time seeing, conversing 
 with, and handling, hand and foot, a twelfth 
 man, when no such man was near; more than 
 five hundred”! men at once seeing the same 
 form and hearing the same voice, and all ever 
 afterwards believing to have been a reality, 
 and so declaring at the peril of their lives what 
 had been only a figment of the imagination! 
 One of these madmen,”? a poor fisherman of 
 the lakes, in a single harangue, a harangue in 
 which he had the insolence to charge upon his 
 hearers as they stood before him, that they 
 “had taken and with wicked hands” mur- 
 dered this same Jesus, whose resurrection he 
 was announcing, has such power in the telling 
 of his wild hallucination that three thousand 
 of the murderous throng accept the story with 
 a readiness that can be explained only by the 
 idea that all along they themselves have either 
 
 PRD SAAC AE USED UA RENOIR Ue doeiad eR NN LS 
 19John xxi, I. ~Tuke xxiv, 33, etc. 
 217 Cor. xv, 6, etc. 22 Acts ii, 14, etc. 
 12 
 
178 MIRACLES 
 
 known the resurrection to be a fact, or have 
 been under the same insane delusion that has 
 maddened Peter. At any rate, the fisherman 
 carries the day, and upon the conviction cre- 
 ated by his words is founded, among the most 
 determined enemies, a faith that overpowers 
 opposition, grows with the lapse of centuries, 
 and is to-day the most potent factor in life, 
 morals, civilization, and religion known to 
 man, 
 
 It is not now necessary to say that Rénan’s 
 hypothesis needs an additional hypothesis to 
 explain itself, and is more difficult of explana- 
 tion or belief than the proposition in explana- 
 tion of which it was devised. 
 
 Strauss perceived very clearly the frail sup- 
 port on which he rests his theory of the mir- 
 acles, and hence, after a formal statement of it, 
 he candidly speaks of it as “the assumption 
 which I have made, and which is not without 
 contradiction.”** 
 
 As for Rénan’s cock-and-bull story method 
 of explaining the resurrection of Lazarus, it 
 is too ridiculous to justify a comment. 
 
 23 New Life of Jesus, I, 202. 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT 179 
 
 Let us now consider the second question, 
 Why this testimony was never contradicted. 
 
 Let us note how the testimony came to be 
 given to the world. The multitudes who tes- 
 tified evidently did so out of their irrepressible 
 admiration of Jesus and his mighty works. 
 The evangelists reported the miracles as por- 
 tions of the life of Jesus, appearing to have 
 no other purpose than faithfully to record the 
 deeds and sayings of their Master; Jesus him- 
 self and his disciples made the miracles the 
 grounds upon which it was claimed that the 
 Messiahship should be admitted. The ene- 
 mies of Jesus gave their testimony in the bit- 
 terest hatred of Jesus and his cause, and in 
 face of the fact that the miracles were the very 
 means by which, more than all others, this 
 cause was making advancement among the 
 people. Now, it can not be believed that the 
 testimony thus given should have been al- 
 lowed to pass uncontradicted. Certainly there 
 were reasons why this should not have been 
 the case. The reports of the evangelists, if in 
 the least regard liable to criticism or objec- 
 tion, had been contradicted, if not from the 
 
180 MIRACLES 
 
 disposition to check the spread of error, at 
 least from the unwillingness of men silently to 
 allow one of their number to be so highly ex- 
 alted above themselves. Those religious lead- 
 ers of the people, proud, arrogant, vain, in- 
 tolerant, had not for a moment submitted to 
 this, could there have been the least semblance 
 of plausibility in their denial of the miracles. 
 And yet how many occasions there were 
 when such denial had been in place, was even 
 challenged by both friends and enemies. 
 When Jesus said, “Believe me for my works’ 
 sake,” “The works that I do in my Father’s 
 name, they bear witness of me,” “If I do not 
 the works of my Father, believe me not,” he 
 challenged contradiction from. whatsoever 
 source it might arise. When Peter preached 
 “Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God 
 by miracles, and wonders, and signs, 
 
 as ye yourselves also know,’** “this Jesus hath 
 God raised up, whereof we ail are witnesses,’** 
 he held himself and his fellow-disciples re- 
 sponsible for the proof of what he said, and 
 virtually dared high priests, scribes, and Phari- 
 
 * Acts ii, 22. > Acts \ii, 32. 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT 181 
 
 sees, all, to deny the declaration. How easy . 
 and how opportune had been denial here! 
 How easily the people might have clamored 
 out to Jesus, We do not believe; the works of 
 the Father we do not see, have never seen! 
 How easily those priests, with the guard, 
 might have rushed among the multitude, de- 
 claring that all that Peter said about the resur- 
 rection was a falsehood, they had the witnesses 
 there to prove it such! 
 
 Nowhere, throughout the entire land, from 
 any sect or class came one word in denial of 
 any of the miracles. These were sometimes 
 ascribed to other sources than the power and 
 will of Jesus—sometimes to God,”* sometimes 
 to Beelzebub;?? but this, so far from being a 
 denial, was an admission, clear and unequiv- 
 ocal, that the miracles had been performed. 
 Not only so; “many miracles” were openly 
 confessed, even by those intolerant Pharisees; 
 though every time a leperwas reported healed, 
 or a blind man made to see, or the lame to 
 walk, the foundations were more and more 
 shaken of that proud sacerdotalism which, had 
 
 John ix, 24. 27 Mark iii, 22. 
 
182 MIRACLES 
 
 it had the power, would have rent the earth 
 and heavens, rather than the cause of Jesus 
 should prevail. 
 
 It belongs to the unbeliever to show why 
 the miracles were not denied; or if the denial 
 was ever made, why it has not been trans- 
 mitted to our times. Professor Fiske would 
 have it that this argument, based upon the 
 want of denial of the miracles of Jesus, is 
 equally applicable to the miracles of Apollon- 
 ius and Simon Magus. At no other time has 
 the professor so closely imitated the “bonus 
 Homerus”’ of the olden time. But certainly 
 he is napping here. As for Simon Magus, our 
 only knowledge of him is what we get from 
 the “Acts,’’?8 where, among other like things, 
 we learn that he had befooled the people by 
 his sorceries, and had given out that “himself 
 
 b 
 
 was some great, one,” and all that we know 
 of Apollonius comes from Philastratus, who 
 wrote more than a hundred years subsequently 
 to his hero’s death. ‘That the miracles of 
 Apollonius and Simon Magus, therefore, were 
 not denied makes no figure whatever in the 
 
 * Acts viii, ix. 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT 183 
 
 (la al ISA Re IN IRC I sa eta 
 argument. There has been no need of deny- 
 ing that for which there is no authority. We 
 ask again why the miracles of Jesus were 
 never contradicted by those who knew, or 
 might have known, the facts concerned. 
 When the evangelists put on record their own 
 positive testimony, that of the other disciples, 
 that of the common people, that of Jesus him- 
 self, and that of those violent enemies of Jesus, 
 how did it occur that no one made or recorded 
 a denial, with the proof, of such enormous 
 falsehoods? 
 
 The question remaining to be answered is, 
 
 How came the world to have its high estimate —~_ : 
 
 of Jesus, and how came to be established that 
 remarkable kingdom which he preached? 
 What the world’s estimate of Jesus is, we 
 have already seen. Of no other name can 
 such things be spoken as have been declared 
 of the name of Jesus. Whatever men’s creeds 
 or practices as regards the religion he came to 
 teach, all admit that the world has had no 
 equal to Jesus of Nazareth. The quotations 
 made to this effect in a preceding portion of 
 our argument have all been taken from men 
 
184 MIRACLES 
 SE Sst CRON 
 
 who disbelieve the miracles, and some of 
 whom are open opponents of what we ordi- 
 _narily call the true cause of Christ, yet the 
 warmest advocates of this cause could not as- 
 sert the exalted character of Jesus in terms 
 more cogent or more beautiful. ‘Jesus, the 
 name high over all,” expresses a sentiment felt 
 and appreciated by all classes and grades of 
 men. Greek, Roman, Protestants, Catholics, 
 infidels, atheists, agnostics, many of the Jews, 
 and Mohammedans even, all unite in this one 
 utterance; and perhaps not an intelligent man 
 in the civilized world can be found who would 
 dissent from the proposition that “among the 
 sons of men there has been born none greater 
 
 EL ZAMS 9 
 
 than Jesus,” “the incomparable man,” stand- 
 ing in “the first rank of the men of sublime 
 genius of whom our species can boast,” “in 
 the very front rank of the grand family of the 
 true sons of God.” 
 
 And the kingdom which Jesus came to 
 establish is now the ruling kingdom of the 
 world. For sixty generations it has been ex- 
 ercising sway more and more along the ages. 
 Divine or human, the kingdom is among us; 
 
REVIEW OF ADVERSE ARGUMENT 185 
 
 Divine or human, it has worked its way among 
 the nations, and, more than all other forces 
 combined, is lifting them up to higher planes 
 of life and enterprise. Mr. Buckle*® and 
 others may deny that the truths preached by 
 Jesus have been the power that has made the 
 nations of the modern world; but the fact 
 stands before us, that these nations did not 
 acquire their ascendency until these truths had 
 wrought their way among them, and it is un- 
 deniable that power, virtue, progress, individ- 
 ual and national well-being are found to-day 
 among the nations just in proportion as these 
 truths have been the controlling forces in the 
 hearts and lives of their citizens. Matthew 
 Arnold’s “power” is making “for righteous- 
 ness’ throughout the world; Mill’s “final vic- 
 tory of good” is coming more and more cer- 
 tainly into view, as we contemplate the future; 
 and Professor Fiske’s “perfecting of human- 
 ity’ can be doubted only by those who close 
 their eyes to the facts of history and daily 
 observation. Whatever the phrase by which 
 this truth of the ultimate elevation of human 
 
 *9 History of Civilization, I, 183. 
 
186 MIRACLES 
 
 character may be expressed, the power by 
 which it is to be effected, or by which at least 
 it is being effected now, is the power of the 
 kingdom which Jesus preached. 
 
 Now, these facts—the world’s high esti- 
 mate of Jesus and its acceptance of his king- 
 dom—must be accounted for. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 Miracles the only Explanation of Christ’s 
 Power and Kingdom in the World 
 
 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ARGU- 
 MENT 
 
 OT to the exalted character of Jesus and 
 
 his sublime moral system are those facts 
 
 to be ascribed which have just been consid- 
 ered. Neither Jesus himself nor his disciples 
 demanded the world’s submission to his teach- 
 ings on any such grounds as these. The world 
 in those days was not far enough advanced 
 to be so impressed with the truth and beauty 
 of mere moral forces. Neither is the world 
 to-day, even in its most enlightened portions, 
 capable of feeling and appreciating the power 
 of such a life and character if associated with 
 the repellent circumstances which beset that 
 carpenter’s Son, as without the prestige of 
 either rank or learning, without friends in 
 
 power or wealth to aid him, he went about 
 187 
 
188 MIRACLES 
 AMA a AE Bd A SA tba Rabe a lle sce th ude EN LN OR yt 
 
 teaching that if men would abandon father, 
 mother, brother, sister, wife, houses, lands, 
 and whatsoever else was dear, bear all manner 
 of shame and opposition, and, if need be, even 
 death itself, they might be his disciples, and 
 follow him! Take the most highly-cultured 
 Christian community on the globe, send forth 
 into its midst a poor man of humble life teach- 
 ing contrariwise to prevailing beliefs and in- 
 terests, and we should soon see whether or not 
 he would receive the honor which his con- 
 temporaries bestowed on Jesus. In the 
 Church of God itself the poor patronless man 
 comes off well with the name of crank or her- 
 etic if he undertakes to correct false ideas or 
 establish new beliefs. Let such a one insist 
 that his teachings shall be accepted, that all his 
 innovations in belief and practice shall take 
 the place of those which for generations have 
 been deeply fixed in our hearts and con- 
 sciences; and besides the scorn, contempt, and 
 angry denunciations of the rabble, he would 
 soon discover that ecclesiastical censures have 
 not failed, nor anathemas been exhausted. 
 What, then, would be the case if this poor 
 
THE ONLY EXPLANATION 189 
 
 man—telling us that our religion is little bet- 
 ter than hypocrisy or a superstition, our bish- 
 ops, elders, Doctors of Divinity, and theolog- 
 ical professors only blind leaders of the blind 
 —should claim for himself a wisdom and au- 
 thority nowhere known to belong to man, a 
 dignity and glory before which that of the 
 greatest potentates of the world must dwindle 
 into insignificance? Can we conceive an ele- 
 vation of character either on the part of the 
 teacher or the taught, that could make us, 
 while one talked so wildly, accept his teach- 
 ings? Not only so, but leave all, and follow 
 him? Not only so, but, after the powers of 
 both Church and State have put to death the 
 rash enthusiast, worship him as God, and go 
 forth proclaiming his honors to the world, 
 bearing not only the reproach, but the severer 
 penalties of our mad career? 
 
 Allowing all that may be claimed in gen- 
 eral for the power of a noble life in enforcing 
 new and difficult truths, when we come to 
 apply the argument to the case before us it 
 most signally fails. Without the miracles it 
 it impossible to see that Jesus displayed the 
 
190 MIRACLES 
 UE LE EL ELS A OOO ON LS 
 
 life or character to which his power in the 
 world has been ascribed. It is by the miracles, 
 “almost wholly, that either the world to-day or 
 the men to whom Jesus preached came to 
 know what kind of a man Jesus was. ‘That 
 inexhaustible benevolence, tender compassion, 
 and forgiving love which endeared him to his 
 contemporaries, and with which his name has 
 been a synonym for centuries, were seen 
 chiefly, if not entirely, in the miracles which 
 he wrought. It is recorded of him that he 
 “went about doing good;” but how this was 
 done without the miracles the records give no 
 information. How, then, can we, without the 
 miracles, ascribe to Jesus that beautiful char- 
 acter with which he has so powerfully im- 
 pressed the world? Where did Mill, Lecky, 
 Rénan, Rousseau, James Freeman Clarke, and 
 others get those glowing tributes they have 
 rendered to the name of Jesus? Not from the 
 redemptive work of Jesus, his sufferings 
 upon the cross for man’s salvation—this work 
 these men deny equally with the miracles; not 
 from the enthusiasm of personal affection or 
 zealous devotion to his cause, for this cause 
 
THE ONLY EXPLANATION I9I 
 
 ial all lt lee ESS TR a 
 most of them at least have totally ignored; 
 not from the general tenor of the life of Jesus, 
 for, robbed of the miracles, few biographies 
 have been more barren of great and good 
 achievements. Nor yet again from those re- 
 markable teachings of Jesus could such ideas 
 of his character have been derived. Men can 
 not be judged by what they say or teach. Not 
 all those who have been distinguished for pure 
 and elevated teachings have been equally dis- 
 tinguished for their pure and noble lives; and 
 hence the world has long ago determined to 
 judge of men not by what they teach, but by 
 what they do, and how they live. Even ex- 
 empting Jesus from this rule, and basing our 
 judgment upon his teachings, we leave the 
 problem still unsolved. Indeed, there are 
 parts of these teachings which render the 
 problem yet more difficult. Much that Jesus 
 taught was in connection with the miracles, 
 and one very striking thing he taught, taught 
 more than once—taught publicly and most 
 emphatically—was that he did work miracles, 
 and that these were the proof that, as of a 
 teacher sent from God, his other teachings 
 
192 MIRACLES 
 
 were absolute, eternal truth. But the miracles 
 he did not work! In plain statements of fact, 
 which all could know and comprehend and 
 test, we see that his words are false. Judge 
 Jesus, then, by the excellence of his life and 
 teachings? At the very outset we find him 
 an unprincipled impostor and forger of false- 
 hood, or else a weak, insane zealot, who either 
 did not know what he was doing, or was un- 
 conscious of what he said. 
 
 Had Jesus limited his teachings to those 
 beautiful truths by which he would purify hu- 
 man life and conduct, we may conceive that 
 these, elevated as they were above the moral 
 conditions and appreciation of the people, 
 might gradually through the ages have 
 wrought their way to the world’s acceptance. 
 But two important facts we must bear in 
 mind: First, that no long ages intervened be- 
 “tween the announcement and the admission 
 of those truths proclaimed by Jesus; and, sec- 
 ~“ondly, Jesus announced many other truths— 
 truths far more difficult to admit than the 
 mere ethics of his kingdom. ‘The question, 
 therefore, which here demands an answer is 
 
THE ONLY EXPLANATION 193 
 
 not how subsequent ages—men of the nine- 
 teenth century, for instance—have embraced 
 that kingdom; neither is the question how 
 those Jews in Jesus’ day accepted the sublime 
 moral system he proclaimed. It is not at all 
 strange that the more cultivated portions of 
 mankind have to-day, nominally at least, ad- 
 _ mitted even all that Jesus taught. We have 
 witnessed long centuries of the honor in which 
 he has been held; we have seen his achieve- 
 ments in the power and progress of the na- 
 tions that have owned his sway; and, besides, 
 here as in other things, we have been under 
 the power of that strange principle in human 
 nature which, after the lapse of time, magni- 
 fies great men into heroes, and heroes into 
 demigods. It is natural enough, therefore, 
 that we to-day should revere the name of 
 Jesus; but that men should have honored and 
 worshiped as divine one who at the time was 
 living and teaching among themselves—men 
 who, daily perhaps—certainly very often— 
 heard announcements that stirred to the 
 depths their prejudices and aroused their 
 
 hate—that these men should have honored 
 13 
 
194 MIRACLES 
 ee Sena Aaa aes ML aa, 
 
 Jesus as they did, is, without the introduction 
 of other influences than those ordinarily oper- 
 ating on the human mind, inexplicable by any 
 principle which either the historian or the 
 logician can assert. 
 
 It was enough, in all reason, that those 
 men should have admitted portions of what 
 Jesus taught, even as to the plainest moral 
 duties. Men in those days no more liked to 
 hear “Blessed are the pure in heart,” “Blessed 
 are the poor in spirit,” “Blessed are the meek, 
 the merciful, the peacemaker, those that 
 mourn, those that bear wrong without retali- 
 
 3? 
 
 ation or revenge,” than many like to hear 
 these things to-day. ‘Tio enforce these and 
 other like ideas, however, was comparatively 
 an easy thing. Jesus here had to overcome 
 only the oppositions that arise from human 
 nature. The antagonisms of a perverse relig- 
 ious spirit were not encountered here. Big- 
 otry, intolerance, ecclesiastical vanity, zeal for 
 the letter and tradition had not yet been at- 
 tacked by Jesus. But the attack soon comes, 
 and never in the history of the world did a 
 people endure what was borne by many of 
 
THE ONLY EXPLANATION 195 
 
 those Jews to whom Jesus preached. How he 
 assaults their hallowed traditions, castigates 
 their honored teachers and their cherished 
 faiths and practices! Their washing of cups 
 and pots, and their scruples as to eating with 
 unwashed hands, were but substitutions of the 
 commandments of men for the law of God; 
 their punctilious observance of the Sabbath 
 was a superstition; the authority of the elders 
 he habitually set at naught, and even their 
 great legislator, Moses, must in some of his 
 enactments be set aside now that he, Jesus, 
 had appeared; and as for the priests and elders 
 of the people, publicans and harlots should 
 enter the kingdom of heaven before them. 
 The Sadducees, Pharisees, scribes, and doc- 
 tors of the law, authoritative expounders of the 
 truth and righteousness, were but blind lead- 
 ers of the blind, hypocrites, whited sepulchers, 
 generations of vipers, children of the devil. 
 He alone was the way, the truth, and the life, 
 and no man could come to God but by him.t 
 No man could take away his life from him; he 
 alone had power to lay it down, and he had 
 
 1John xiv, 6. 
 
196 MIRACLES 
 eens vnnoeensnsneetnenesienees 
 
 power to take it again.2, He was not of this 
 world, like the men to whom he discoursed2 
 He had dwelt with God in glory before the 
 foundation of the world,‘ and after his death 
 and burial he was going to rise from the dead,’ 
 and ascend to the throne of the eternal glory.’ 
 Fle was a greater than Jonah, greater than 
 Solomon,” greater than the Temple,’ Lord of 
 the Sabbath day,® had existed before Abra- 
 ham,*® was one and equal with God," and 
 they must honor him, as they had honored 
 their Father, God.12_ Not only so; Jesus 
 would make good these amazing claims by 
 doing deeds which none but God could do. 
 He would heal the leper with a word; he 
 would make the blind to see, the lame to walk, 
 the dumb to speak, and even the dead to rise. 
 These things he had done, and was doing 
 daily, before their eyes,!8 and if they beheld 
 not those works of God, they were not to ad- 
 
 mit those lofty claims.!4 
 AEE Ua We Ebel annie Mesh nats eek ae 
 
 2John x, 18, 7 Matt. xii, 4, etc. 2John v, 23. 
 8John viii, 23. 8 Matt. xii, 6. 3 Matt. xi, 4. 
 4John xvii, 5. 9Mark ii, 28. 4John x, 37 
 5 Matt. xx, 19. 10John viii, 58. 
 
 ®John xvi, Io. John x, 30. 
 
THE ONLY EXPLANATION 197 
 
 But, strangest thing of all, everything that 
 is here said by Jesus is admitted. That sub- 
 lime code of ethics, that pure spiritual wor- 
 ship, those extraordinary pretensions to Di- 
 vine power and wisdom, those extravagant 
 demands of the undivided homage and obedi- 
 ence of mankind, together with his assertions 
 of a pre-existent state and supernatural char- 
 acter, and his claims to have given proof of 
 all this by miracles, and even, in due time, his 
 resurrection from the dead, are admitted, all, 
 without dissent or doubt, by many of those 
 who had every opportunity to test these claims 
 by actual observation. 
 
 And this admission was not the zeal and 
 enthusiasm of a moment, nor was it limited to 
 those who had first associated themselves with 
 the cause of Jesus. But a few weeks after the 
 death of Jesus the band of disciples is aug- 
 mented by three thousand the first time those - 
 claims are laid before the people, and shortly 
 afterwards the number is swollen by thou- 
 sands more, and still the numbers are en- 
 larged. Persecution has little effect upon the 
 rising cause. Stephen is stoned; John and 
 
198 MIRACLES 
 
 STF a ena eda NU anatacer Son dh UMM PE 
 Peter are put in prison; the disciples are scat- 
 tered from their homes; high priests and Phar- 
 isees essay all means to suppress what before 
 long became known as the “prevailing doc- 
 
 5) 
 
 trine;” and, in far less time than Rome had 
 taken to extend her borders a score of miles 
 from the Tiber, are found in almost every cap- 
 ital of the ancient world those who testify their 
 belief in Jesus, and are ready to seal their 
 testimony with their blood. 
 
 Now, how can we explain all this? That 
 those strange teachings of Jesus, those wild 
 assertions were admitted without proof of the 
 exalted nature which he professed, is not for 
 one moment to be believed; and that Jesus 
 should have promised and professed the proof, 
 should have professed to do the miracles 
 which he did not do, should have promised 
 even a resurrection from the dead, and then 
 died, was buried, and decayed in the earth like 
 any other man; and yet the disciples not only 
 lost none of their original enthusiasm, but 
 went forth preaching Jesus, his wonderful 
 teachings, his miracles, and resurrection, with 
 a power which allied to itself at the very out- 
 
THE ONLY EXPLANATION 199 
 
 en 
 
 set thousands of those who, with wicked 
 hands, had slain their Master, and that these 
 in turn should set to proclaiming the new faith 
 by appeal to miracles which had not been 
 wrought, and to the resurrection which had 
 not taken place,—to believe that these dis- 
 ciples should have done all this, is an insult 
 to reason. 
 
 It will not do to say that the disciples be- 
 lieved the miracles, and that this belief, though 
 a delusion, was sufficient to explain their 
 course. Such a belief, if only a delusion, is as 
 difficult to account for as the fact to be ex- 
 plained. That a few men have, in isolated 
 cases, mistaken for actual facts things which 
 had existed only in their imaginations, espe- 
 cially when for such things their minds had 
 been prepared by previous habits of thought 
 and training, is a fact well known and ad- 
 ~ mitted; but we should search history in vain 
 for large numbers of men in different com- 
 munities, on different occasions, being so de- 
 luded or bewitched as to have visions of things 
 which had no reality; see deeds daily for a 
 number of years performed before their eyes, 
 
200 MIRACLES 
 
 a a a ESL UC GRU RIS Oona a 
 deeds offered in proof of claims and teachings 
 that antagonized the rites, creeds, and usages 
 which had controlled their minds and the 
 minds of their fathers for long generations, 
 and many of them persisting in seeing such 
 things with the terrors of persecution, exile, 
 and death confronting them at every step,— 
 such a delusion as this is without parallel in 
 history, is contrary to all we know of human 
 nature, and is more difficult to believe than 
 the miracles themselves, unless we take the 
 position that those men had become insane. 
 We need not speak of delusions here; of an- 
 cient prophecies or zeal for Jesus making 
 those men believe, as actually seen by the eye, 
 what had been only the creations of their 
 minds; men who repeatedly see and believe 
 such things have lost their reason, and we 
 need not emphasize the matter by descanting 
 on myths, visions, hallucinations, and other 
 like things. If these men were not insane, 
 there is no explanation of their conduct. That 
 men in full possession of their reason should 
 have admitted those teachings of Jesus— 
 teachings so repellent both to reason and to 
 
THE ONLY EXPLANATION 201 
 
 ree Onan ean ee 
 prejudice—without evidence given of a mis- 
 sion from the Father, or that this evidence 
 should have been professed by Jesus, but 
 never given to the world, and yet those mar- 
 velous pretensions were none the less admitted 
 and maintained—maintained at the greatest 
 sacrifice, and upon the basis of the proof that 
 was not given,—that men of sound minds 
 should have acted thus, is equivalent to saying 
 that sane men are insane, or insane men are 
 sane, or that we have no means of distinguish- 
 ing objective facts from mere mental states. 
 
 Should the objector now say that either 
 horn of this dilemma were preferable to ad- 
 mission of things so contrary to nature and 
 experience as were the miracles, it is replied 
 (1) that the miracles could not have been 
 more contrary to nature and experience than 
 such a belief or delusion had been; (2) that 
 contrariety to nature and experience are far | 
 different things from inconsistency with the 
 power and will of the Author of nature; and 
 (3) that the phrase nature and expervence 
 means nothing more nor less than our expert- 
 ence of nature, and no man has had enough of 
 
202 MIRACLES 
 
 this to say that miracles are contrary to nature 
 or her laws. Each man, it must be remem- 
 bered, has direct knowledge of his own experi- 
 ence only, and he can know the experience of 
 the rest of the world, therefore, only by the 
 testimony of every other man in the world, 
 and this testimony no man has had. And, 
 then, if testimony to experience against the 
 miracles is to be attended to, it is but fair that 
 we should equally attend to the experience 
 which has been asserted in favor of the mir- 
 acles. In other words, the new argument of 
 those who deny the miracles reduces the ques- 
 tion to one of testimony alone, and hence we 
 come back to the original proposition, that 
 the miracles of Jesus are to be discussed, like 
 all other alleged facts in history, not in the 
 light of the agencies by which they may have 
 » been produced, or their relation to law and 
 nature, but wholly in the light of the testi- 
 mony that has been produced. 
 
 Let us now, in conclusion, notice some of 
 the general characteristics of the argument 
 furnished by this testimony. } 
 
 The argument has been conducted with 
 
THE ONLY EXPLANATION 203 
 
 reference to the facts alone. It has called for 
 assistance from no hypotheses, theory, or as- 
 sumption, of any kind. Nothing has been 
 assumed as to the nature of the miracles, nor 
 as to the agencies by which they were accom- 
 plished; nothing as to the Divine origin and 
 authority of the sacred writings; nothing as 
 to the character of the witnesses that may not 
 be assumed of men in general; and we have 
 requested assent to no premise or conclusion 
 that would not be readily granted in the in- 
 vestigation of any other subject. 
 
 The argument has proceeded upon the 
 principle which runs through all reasonings 
 where we would have the surest basis of belief. 
 When we would have belief to guide us with 
 unerring certainty, we depend upon the testi- 
 _mony of the eye, not of the intellect or judg- 
 ment. In founding our argument, therefore, 
 : upon what the witnesses saw, instead of what 
 either they or we ourselves have believed from 
 a course of reasoning, we have for the mir- 
 acles of Jesus the very same evidence which 
 controls us in the most positive convictions 
 of our lives—the evidence by which we know 
 
204 MIRACLES 
 etn nc a aS SULT SRE el OA eT 
 the daily objects and events about us, by which 
 
 we conduct our intercourse with man and na- 
 ture, by which we administer our laws, make 
 our researches in physical science, and, in gen- 
 eral, fit ourselves into the varied conditions of 
 life and being in the world about us. In a 
 word, our belief in those extraordinary deeds 
 of Jesus rests upon evidend¢e the most satis- 
 factory and convincing known to man, and 
 evidence which has been transmitted to us 
 with a certainty that leaves no doubt as to its 
 having been familiar to the thousands who 
 had every opportunity of knowing whether it 
 was true or false. 
 
 The testimony presenting the evidence is 
 both ample and explicit; given without re- 
 straint or reservation, without concealment or 
 equivocation, without self-contradiction or 
 mutual contradiction of the witnesses, or con- 
 tradiction from others, either friends or ene- 
 mies of the cause in question; the testimony 
 of four different contemporary writers, two 
 of whom are admitted to have been eye-wit- 
 nesses to at least the general facts of Jesus’ 
 life, the other two to have gotten their ac- 
 
THE ONLY EXPLANATION 205 
 
 counts from those who knew the facts re- 
 corded by them; the testimony of multitudes 
 who followed Jesus, including the disciples 
 who, if they knew anything at all of Jesus, 
 certainly knew whether the miracles were per- 
 formed; numbers of scribes, Pharisees, and 
 other enemies, who were doing all they could 
 to crush the cause of Jesus; and, above all, the 
 testimony of Jesus himself, bearing a character 
 for wisdom and integrity accorded to no other 
 
 man since the world began. The world may ~~ ae 
 
 be challenged to produce another event in 
 times equally remote, for which we have such 
 evidence. Not one battle, siege, tyrannicide, 
 usurpation, or other fact in all ancient history 
 is so well proven as either the other miracles 
 or the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. 
 We go further, and without the least dispo- 
 sition to disparage other portions of the 
 Sacred Word, venture to assert that not in all 
 the history of the chosen people, not in the 
 lives of patriarchs, prophets, or apostles, not 
 even in the life of Jesus himself, have we one 
 other event so well attested, even according 
 to the most exact “historical or literary” 
 
206 MIRACLES 
 
 AROUSAL Dt EEE WORM ENR oA Se Coa | 
 methods, as are the signs, wonders, mighty 
 works, and resurrection from the dead of 
 Jesus. 
 
 Evidence such as this can not be refuted. 
 It may be resisted; false methods of investiga- 
 tion, the assumption of unauthorized views of 
 law and nature, may deprive the evidence of 
 its power as addressed to certain minds ; but 
 of the evidence itself there can be no refuta- 
 tion. There is nota fact in history, either of 
 f ancient or modern times, not a scientific 
 theory, not a case in court, that would not be 
 admitted as fully proven by evidence far less 
 satisfactory. If the miracles of Jesus are not 
 proven by it, human wisdom is incapable of 
 applying a mode of proof that could be more 
 effectual or convincing. A larger number of 
 witnesses could not be demanded; circum- 
 stances better adapted to test the honesty of 
 the witnesses could not be secured had we the 
 matter in our own hands to-day; and that such 
 a number of witnesses could have been de- 
 luded, could have persisted in their error, and 
 succeeded in deluding multitudes of others 
 into the same wild hallucination with them- 
 
THE ONLY EXPLANATION 207 
 
 selves, can be admitted only by those wholly 
 ignorant of the laws that govern human na- 
 ture, or resolutely determined, at every sacri- 
 fice of common sense and logic, to form their 
 convictions upon other grounds than evi- 
 dence. 
 
 The rejection of the miracles involves a 
 number of absurdities from which the mind 
 recoils. 
 
 Reject the miracles on the ground of want 
 or insufficiency of the evidence, and, to be 
 consistent, we should equally reject the 
 greater part of modern, and all of ancient, his- 
 tory; reject them because of either dishonesty 
 or delusion charged upon the witnesses, and 
 then no testimony can be admitted as that of 
 sane or honest men; reject them because of 
 liability to error in the senses, and we have no 
 absolute assurance as to things occurring 
 within our own observation and experience. 
 All history may thus be shown to be a fable, 
 all life a delusion or a dream. 
 
a 
 
 $ 
 
 esi Sele 
 We eo tt) ame 
 Ware’ tha Whe 
 
 Merle ss 
 Tay, Feiey tae 
 
 ; NF atuh ¥ 
 
Date Due 
 
 | 
 
 rg 
 
 G 
 
 Ba 
 
 a 
 
 ®@ 
 
uM 
 
 vat Med Ves 
 “ 
 
 5 4 
 
 NNN han PIN CAS aaa Psat 3 
 wy ERS OCR a oa aD Ah 
 ; i y Py / } } ; ' ; at Se “ iu Rae 
 Wat : ry. sme ’ p i i ip Hl ; Mie 
 i 4 a 
 
 WS en 
 Ai) Me ANA 
 
 Arai 
 \ exo | 
 
 Are Paar 
 AGH MDA 
 Olas Lh