If you tell me that you do not believe in the miracles of the Bible, I will not argue, for that would do harm to both of us; but I will state simply and briefly where I stand in this matter. Life is as incomprehensible now as it was to Job in his day; I have neither time nor strength to wander uncertainly amid its mazes; and, having found in our Lord a sure Guide to truths which I can test by experience, I am ready to trust Him in this where neither I nor anyone else can prove or disprove what is stated as fact. I could not so commit my judgment to the Church; still less to "the results of scholarship," which vary like the fashions. But I am satisfied that, if my future is safe with our Redeemer, so also must be my intellect. From which it follows that it is my duty, first, to discover what He thought and said about miracles; and secondly, to accept what He thought and said as final. Instead of reducing my religion to a wrangle, I thus find that its very difficulties draw me, again and again, to His wisdom. Men dispute His words and limit His claim; I rest assured that He is in the right.
For when I tell you, as I have done, how carefully Jesus read His Old Testament, I am in effect reminding you that, from a boy upwards, He also had to face this problem of the supernatural. We say to ourselves that miracles happened many centuries ago; that there is no witness, still living, to bear testimony to them; and that the age of miracles is past and gone. We are only reviving the perplexities which faced Him when He in His day studied the signs and wonders of the Old Testament. We are expressly told that John the Baptist did no miracle, and that our Lord's first act of this kind was at Cana in Galilee, when He was thirty years of age. While He was a young man, there was not the slightest indication, except within Himself, that a new age of wonder was to dawn on a worn-out mankind. Yet in the world, thus devoid of "the supernatural," we cannot discover one hint that He ever doubted God's intervention in the affairs of our race. While He attacked the tradition of the elders, and announced the impending fall of the Temple, and overthrew the money-changers, He had no misgivings about the manna in the wilderness, the brazen serpent, and Jonah's great fish; and, on the Mount of Transfiguration, He met, not in controversy, but in communion, the two greatest workers of miracles in the past, Moses and Elijah--men whose deeds were as wonderful as their deaths. We know, therefore, that He reviewed this great matter in all its bearings, and His verdict is explicit. He worked miracles Himself. He gave that power to His disciples. When they returned to Him, exulting in what they had achieved, He did not reply, "But I must have evidence of this "; He accepted their word. And on hearing that men who did not follow His apostles were yet performing miracles in His Name, He did not say, "Absurd! Impossible!" On the contrary, His comment was: "Forbid them not." For they who exercise this power in His Name will not speak lightly of Him--in their miracles, we see their reverence.
His Works
Some of us think that we can ignore His miracles, provided that we accept and obey His teaching. If I were to try thus to cut the Gospels in half, I am sure that I should fail over it. To tear His words from His works is to rend Him in twain. Of our Saviour's Divinity, you cannot say: "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther." Of His birth, there are two, but only two, explanations. Nor can we, on the one hand, dismiss Gabriel, and, on the other hand, retain the Magnificat. If peace on earth and good-will for men was not an angel-song, what was it? Did the shepherds improvise it? How beautiful, you say, that we should be told by the Blessed Virgin to do "whatsoever He saith unto us "! But when did she so advise us, if it were not at the marriage-feast where He transformed the water of obedience into the wine of happiness? We claim His word, "I will--be thou clean," as a valid gift to ourselves. Was it, then, uttered in vain to the leper, or are we really to assume that leper and priest were mere fiction? We are to be sure that He forgives us our sins, and we are to know it because He said so. Yet we are to abolish the occasion which, as it were, locates the utterance? The house with its broken roof, the crowds, the paralytic on his bed, the four friends who carried him, and the muttering scribes--are they to fade like a dissolving view, leaving us the voice, not of a Saviour, but of a phantom? Of what use is it that we meditate on His words, "It is I, be not afraid," if the storm and His appearance on the water be merely an unsubstantial nightmare? Studying with dimmed eyes the line of small print that records your utter loss, how can you in this time of war look for comfort to Him who is the Resurrection and the Life, if He never wept for Lazarus, never commanded them to roll away the stone, never cried unto the dead, "Come forth"--or only recited the words as mockery amid the silent rebellion of the unyielding tomb? If He died for us, yet did not rise again, what becomes of His comments on Jonah; His promise to rebuild the Temple in three days; His pledge that He will receive us again unto Himself; His benediction on us who have not seen Him, yet believe; His desire that' Peter should feed His lambs; His final and unchangeable command that those who worship Him shall go into all the world and preach His Gospel? There is no intellectual process, however ingenious or erudite, by which men may enjoy the fullness of our Lord's utterances, while denying the fullness of His omnipotence.
His Word
I have been writing for those who love the Redeemer--better, it may be, and certainly more worthily, than I do myself--who yet seek an escape from the demands of faith by an impossible severance of His words from His works. But I am aware that there is a larger challenge which cannot be passed by. Some of us would like to think that the entire life of Christ--words and works together--is an exquisite product of the human imagination, playing around an attractive Personality, who did not do or say one-tenth part of what is now attributed to Him. I ask the question: Whose imagination? I do not at the moment remember one great book or great poem written, or great picture painted, or great piece of music composed, by a committee! If our Lord be really a hero of fiction, who was the author of Him? You say that it is hard to think that He was born of God. Is it easier to believe that He was created in the brain of man? Homer and Shakespeare have at least a name by which they are known, and as we read their works we feel that they are greater than the children of their genius. Is it really credible that, in the hierarchy of literature, the man or men who, of their own intelligence, conceived the Redeemer of the world, and so transcended every other effort of the known immortals in art, remain anonymous, leaving behind them not one trace of their identity? I am told that Christ did not say, " I am the True Vine," and " I am the Bread of Life," and " I am the Good Shepherd." Then who did say it? Somehow or other these words came to the birth and cannot now be got rid of. What was their origin? We still await the answer of those who criticize. As someone has said, it must have taken a Christ to counterfeit the Christ.
I do not need to be told that miracles may be imagined or invented. About the Person of our Saviour Himself there have grown up many apocryphal legends, to which I may refer, merely as contrasts with the events recorded in the New Testament. We are told that, as a child, He transformed His playfellows into kids, because they declined to be His companions; how a boy who knocked Him down was cursed to death; and how a schoolmaster who corrected Him over His alphabet and struck Him, was rewarded with a withered arm. "Henceforward," Joseph is supposed to have said, "let us keep Him within doors, for whosoever sets himself against Him perishes." There, in all their absurdity and irreverence, you have, in actual language, the utmost achievements of mere tradition! The Evangelists did not argue about them. They did not discuss them in long treatises for the learned. They declared as a fact that no such miracles occurred; and, except as curiosities, not one of these preposterous myths has survived oblivion. Many miracles have been manufactured by the superstitious. That is true. But none such have endured.
For I notice a subtle yet fundamental difference between our Lord's angle of vision--when He regarded the miraculous--and ours. We look up to these events, as to the precipitous sky-line of some distant and inaccessible mountain, which hardly seems to be real, so loftily does it tower above us. But He regarded these matters from above, and the contour of rock and ice which startles us was to Him merged in the general landscape, where perhaps it looms no clearer than the roof of some cottage where children are playing. The multitudes, and even His apostles themselves, were constantly lost in amazement over these signs and wonders and powers, but to Him they were only a part of His daily duty. What interests us so greatly about Moses is the crossing of the Red Sea; and about Elijah, the ascent to heaven in a chariot of fire. On the high hills, where He met Moses and Elijah, He mentioned neither, but conversed rather of His approaching death at Jerusalem, not by miracle, but by violence. It was the manna sent from heaven that impressed the Jews. What He remembered was that this material manna did not sustain the body that dies. It was the brazen serpent as a symbol only that He mentioned; it was Jonah's three days, also as a symbol, that drew His comment. And when the Seventy returned in triumph over sickness and devilry and all the ills that flesh is heir to, He told them to rejoice rather because their names were written in the Book of Life. To Him, who values us all at our proper worth, you and I are of higher price than anything that we can hope to achieve. And where we regard the miracle as an almost incredible evidence of power, it was to Him but one among many revelations of the Divine Love.