CHAPTER IV.

MIRACLES-THEIR HARMONY WITH NATURE.

THE advocacy of miracles on the ground of coincidence may seem incompatible with their import. They are apt to be regarded as specific events, occurring under no influence of time or circumstance, destitute of analogy, nay, opposed to all other facts. This is a view I cannot accept. Because miracles stand alone in their phenomenal character, it does not follow that they have no harmonious relations to other events. Such relations can be pointed out; and were they ever so obscure, we know that the records of science are stored with seemingly isolated phenomena, which are nevertheless connected with the great system of Nature, as ultimate experience is sure to prove.

A miracle may be defined as a phenomenon out of the established line of natural causation, the result of a special intervention of Providence in Nature, showing an express volition of Deity for some particular end.

A messenger from heaven is to be accredited.

He is enabled to perform a miraculous act, such as giving sight to the blind, or raising the dead to life, to prove that God is with him.

The act is not to be termed repugnant to Nature, though deviating from it. Here is simply a new power for a new purpose. Regular powers are not violated; another power intervenes. Had Lazarus been permitted to remain in the grave, his body would have been consumed under the ordinary chemical agencies of Nature; but Providence preserved it from their influence, and renewed its vitality. So one takes a leaf out of a flowing brook and carries it higher up the stream. The laws of running water are not thereby violated; their action in this particular instance is only avoided. Had the current itself been compelled to carry the leaf upward instead of downward, there would have been a violation of a natural law, -as there would also have been in the case of Lazarus, had those material agents which would naturally have decomposed his body after death been made to reanimate it. But I know not how any natural law is invaded by protecting from its power some object over which that power would otherwise have been exerted.

Operations of this kind are continually going on in the physical world. When the cold atmosphere of winter would congeal the surface of a lake, the particles immediately exposed be

come specifically heavier by condensation and descend out of the reach of frost, leaving another and another stratum to repeat the process, till every drop has come in succession to the top,—by which time, if the water be of any considerable depth, the danger will probably have passed away. The freezing power of the air is not, in this case, violated, because the liquid strata, one after another, are removed from its influence. True, the removal is natural; but suppose it had been supernatural, the result would have been the same. The laws of Nature are violated no more in the one case than in the other.

Even, therefore, if the laws of Nature be regarded as the organic fixtures of the universe, of which it were difficult to believe that any violation should be permitted, there is no necessity for saying that any such violation takes place in the case of a Christian miracle. But Newton is said to have believed in no such fixtures, independent of the immediate agency of the Deity.

All this, however, belongs to the metaphysical and explanatory philosophy of miracles. In order to the credibility of a supernatural effect, it is not requisite that we should be able to explain it, or to unfold the precise process by which it is produced.

Are miracles possible? is the first inquiry.

Not that it is questioned whether the power of the Almighty be adequate to the performance of miracles; but whether such interruptions of the order of Nature be compatible with the Wisdom and Goodness by which that order was established. Natural science, it is argued, the whole system of inductive reasoning in its application to the material universe, involves the supposition of the universal and permanent uniformity of Nature, and no generalizing conclusion could ever be drawn from any physical phenomenon, if this uniformity were not maintained inviolate.

I answer, that natural philosophers themselves by no means unite in this opinion. Some of the most zealous and successful of them have been eminent believers in the Christian miracles, and these are the only miracles of which we are now speaking. We know of no miraculous interventions since. But even were there an occasional recurrence of such events, still how little would they interfere with scientific researches ! They would be known immediately for what they were. They would have their own supernatural signatures and indications. The miracle-worker would announce the nature of his work. He would appeal to it as the proof of his divine commission. It would not profess to be a natural phenomenon; and none would mistake it for a natural phenomenon.

The order which the Creator has established in the physical universe is unquestionably best -best, even as we can see-for his intelligent and sentient creatures. But should ever its interruption in particular instances be more beneficial on the whole than its unvarying continuance would be, then the principle of the rule would plainly become the principle of the exception, and the standing uniformity must yield to the change of circumstances.

Facts strikingly indicative of this accommodating character of systematic law are widely spread through the whole natural world. On the continent of New Holland there are forms of animal and vegetable life which might be called deviations from Nature, if Nature were uniformity,—such as seeds growing on the outside of the shell, black swans, white ravens, quadrupeds with bills, and the like. No doubt, in these anomalies peculiar circumstances were consulted; and we have only to suppose that the power which Jesus exerted of walking on the sea was likewise an adaptation to extraordinary occasions, and the case of miracles falls under the category of a natural arrangement.

It is easy to conceive of a faith so strong in a settled order of the universe, as to recoil from the idea of any departure from it. There is such a departure, apparently, in every miracle, that is, to a certain extent. A new