invisible presence and power, working, for exigent reasons for a season, through His chosen agents. No fair treatment of the New Testament narratives can eliminate the miraculous element. This is the conclusion, summing up the verdict of German historical criticism.' "Whatever view men may take nowadays of the miracles attributed to Christ, three things are practically certain that the people among whom He lived believed that He wrought them; that this belief was a chief element in attracting men to Him as their Master, and confirming their faith in His divine mission; and that Jesus Himself meant and taught them so to believe." Prof. Seeley well wrote: "The fact that Christ appeared as a miracle-worker is the best attested fact in His whole biography." The apostolic reporters of them were competent witnesses, of sober, conscientious mind, affirming not from hearsay, but from personal knowledge, assured by three years of close observation. With respect to the critical suggestion, that these witnesses, as only observers, reporting the phenomena simply as seen and representing them as divine tokens, thus transcended the reach of external observation with an interpretation of the cause which was beyond sight, and in which they may have been mistaken, it is enough to remind ourselves that they were sustained in their interpretation by Christ Himself, who, as the worker of the miracles, was consciously cognizant of their cause or the source of the power operative in them, and who, at the same time, claimed to be working them as God's

1 See "Andover Review," June, 1889, pp. 561-569.

'Rev. D. W. Forrest, "The Christ of History and of Experience," p. 114.

"Ecce Homo,” pref., p. 9.

clear witness to His Messiahship and divine mission.' The miraculous basis of Christianity is asserted all through the apostolic writings. Whatever may be thought of Schleiermacher's concession that a belief in miracles is not directly involved in the faith of a Christian, he was certainly right in regarding a denial of them as destructive, because of its blightening effect in overthrowing confidence in the reliability of the apostolic account of Christ.2

The chief aspects of the function of the miracle become plain through a glance at the following points : 1. DEFINITION. The New Testament designates them as "signs" (onuêta), "wonders" (TéρATα)," (σημεια),3 "powers," or "acts of power" (dvváμas).5 But these designations do not give a definition. They present only certain aspects or uses of the phenomena. A miracle may, in general, be said to be an unusual event in physical nature wrought by direct action of God working for a moral end. More specifically, it is defined as "an event in the physical world wrought by God independ ently of the sequences through which He ordinarily works." It is the production, by the exercise of divine power, of a definite effect which could not otherwise take place. Analysis of this definition discloses its included elemental conceptions.

(a) It is based on the theistic conception of the world. It views the universe as the work of God, who is a personal Being of infinite power, creating and sustaining it

1 Matt. xi. 2-6, 20-24; Luke xi. 20; John v. 20, 36; ix. 4-7; x. 25, 32, 37, 38; xv. 24.

in rational and worthy purpose. And it declines to conceive of His power and efficiency as all transferred into the forces and laws of nature or as restricted to its established uniformities. We must avoid, as the Scriptures require and the best philosophy demands, both a pantheistic confounding of God with nature and a deistic separation of Him from it. Nature does not move on as an independent or inflexible mechanism. While God is above it as its Creator, He is also immanent in its forces and order, which depend and move in and on His abiding omnific Will. His free but permanent Will is the reason and source of all forces and their order. God and nature do not stand to each other in merely external relation, but He is in ever-living communication with it. "He upholds all things by the word of His power." "He is above all and through all and in all." "In Him we live and move and have our being."

(6) The definition assumes the reality of the distinction already made between nature and the supernatural. Much of the difficulty in the case comes from obscuring or refusing this clear and fundamental distinction. But just as soon as it is clearly seen and distinctly remembered that physical nature, with its divinely fixed uniformities, exists for an end beyond its own being and motion, viz.: as the presupposition and basis of a divine free moral administration for the life, welfare, and destiny of mankind, the difficulty ceases. For, at once, in connection with the further fact of humanity's lapse into sin, there opens to view both room and need of the whole supernatural providence of redemptive provision and help, in connection with which alone the miracles are declared to have been wrought.

"

(c) It implies for miracles no "violation" or suspen

sion" of the laws of nature. Definitions have often been given which involved such a conception of them. Hume and others have endeavored in this way to put them beyond the range of rational belief. But they imply no such antagonism to nature, and are not to be thought of as clashing with its proper order. They are due to a special and direct exertion of the divine will-power, without annulling any natural force or its sequences of cause and effect. God inserts His direct power for its own effect; and the natural forces admit the effect without either annihilation or interruption. The reality may be fairly illustrated in the operation of the human will-power. When this, through science and skill, inserts its directive touch in nature's ongoings, and turns water or electricity into driving forces for industry or commerce, or shapes the transparent glass into lenses for bringing the distant stars into view, no law of nature is violated or suspended. The result is accomplished by a special free causation-the free causation conforming its directive power to nature's laws, yet transcending them-for the special effect. When this free human power lifts a hand or casts a stone into the air, the law of gravitation is not infringed-every particle of matter in hand or stone still gravitating as before. The weight that is felt in lifting the stone or holding up the outstretched arm at once measures the continued gravitation and becomes proof that it does not surrender its rights while free-will causation seems to violate them or interrupt their action. When the sons of the prophets cut down a stick and cast it into the water and the ax-head swam (2 Kings vi. 6), neither the specific gravities of the water or iron were altered, nor was the law of gravitation suspended.

(d) This conception of miracles at once answers all allegations of their impossibility. Such allegations have been made to rest mostly on a supposed contradiction of miracles to the scientific principles of cause and effect and the consequent reign of the law of uniformity in nature -sometimes viewed as an a priori presupposition of science, though generally held rather as a conclusion inductively established by it. This law of continuity has sometimes been interpreted as constituting the physical universe in a balance of forces and necessitated movement that allows no break or disturbance whatever.1 How this continuity of ongoing forces in the universe is conceived of is illustrated in Fichte's wellknown supposition about the sand-grain on a seashore: "Let us imagine this grain of sand lying some few feet further inland than it actually does. Then must the storm wind that drove it in from the seashore have been stronger than it actually was. Then must the preceding state of the atmosphere by which this wind was determined have been different from what it actually was, and the previous changes which gave rise to this particular weather," etc." And Fichte goes on to picture the disasters which such a range of antecedents different from the actual ones might have involved, all "in order

1 See Baden Powell, in "Essays and Reviews," p. 150, where he speaks of "The grand foundation conception of universal law . . . the impossibility even of any two material atoms subsisting together without a determinate relation; of any action of the one or the other, whether of equilibrium or of motion, without reference to a physical cause; of any modification whatsoever in the existing conditions of material agents, unless through the invariable operation of an eternally impressed consequence, following in some necessary chain of orderly connection."

Quoted from Prof. H. L. Mansel, "On Miracles," etc., in "Aids to Faith" (D. Appleton, New York), p. 26.