Parents and children

by Charlotte M. Mason

Are we then unhoused? Undoubtedly we are upon one assumption—that assumption which it takes a brilliant novelist to put forth in its naked asperity—“Miracles do not happen.” The educated mind is more essentially logical than we are apt to suppose. Remove the keystone of miracle and the arch tumbles about our ears. The ostentatious veneration for the Person of Christ, as separated from the “mythical” miraculous element, is, alas! no more than a spurious sentiment toward a self-evolved conception. Eliminate the “miraculous” and the whole fabric of Christianity disappears; and not only so, what have we to do with that older revelation of “the Lord, the Lord, a God full of compassion and gracious”? Do we say, Nay, we keep this; here is no miracle; and, of Christ, have we not the inimitable Sermon on the Mount—sufficient claim on our allegiance? No, we have not; therein are we taught to pray, to consider the lilies of the field and the fowls of the air, and to remember that the very hairs of our head are all numbered. Here we have the doctrine of the personal dealing, the particular providence of God, which is of the very essence of miracle. If “miracles do not happen,” it is folly and presumption to expect in providence and invite in prayer the faintest disturbance of that course of events which is fixed by inevitable law. The educated mind is severely logical, though an effort of the will may keep us from following out our conclusions to the bitter end. What have we left? A God who, of necessity, can have no personal dealings with you or me, for such dealings would be of the nature of a miracle: a God, prayer to whom, in the face of such certainty, becomes blasphemous. How dare we approach the Highest with requests which, in the nature of things (as we conceive), it is impossible He should grant?

We cannot pray, and we cannot trust, may be; yet we are not utterly godless; we can admire, adore, worship, in uttermost humility. But how? What shall we adore? The Divine Being can be known to us only through His attributes; He is a God of love and a God of justice; full of compassion and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy. But these are attributes which can only be conceived of as in action, from Person to person. How be gracious and merciful unless to a being in need of grace and mercy? Grant that grace and mercy may modify the slightest circumstance in a man’s existence, spiritual or temporal, and you grant the whole question of “miracles”—that is, that it is possible to God to act otherwise than through such inevitable laws as we are able to recognise. Refuse to concede “the miraculous element,” and the Shepherd of Israel has departed from our midst; we are left orphaned in a world undone.

Such and so great are the issues of that question of “miracle” with which we are fond of dallying, with a smile here and a shrug there, and a special sneer for that story of the swine that ran violently down a steep place, because we know so much about the dim thoughts of the brute creation—living under our eyes, indeed, but curiously out of our ken. Grant the possibility of miracles, that is, of the voluntary action of a Personal God, and who will venture to assign limits of less or more?

How long halt we betwixt two opinions?—to the law and to the testimony. Let us boldly accept the alternative which Hume proposes, however superciliously. Let it be, that, “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 endeavours to establish.” Even so. We believe that Christ rose again the third day and ascended into heaven; or we credit the far more miraculous hypothesis that “there is no God”; or, anyway, the God of revelation, in His adorable Personality, has ceased to be for us. There is no middle way. Natural law, as we understand it, has nothing to do with these issues; not that the Supreme abrogates His laws, but that our knowledge of “natural law” is so agonisingly limited and superficial, that we are incompetent to decide whether a break in the narrow circle, within which our knowledge is hemmed, is or is not an opening into a wider circle, where what appears to us as an extraordinary exception does but exemplify the general rule.

We would not undervalue the solid fruits of Biblical criticism, even the most adverse. This should be a great gain in the spiritual life—that, henceforth, a miracle is accredited, not merely by the fact that it is recorded in the sacred history, but by its essential fitness with the Divine Character; just as, if we may reverently compare human things with divine, we say of a friend, “Oh, he would never do that!” or, “That is just like him.” Tried by this test, how unostentatious, simple, meekly serviceable are the miracles of Christ; how utterly divine it is

“To have all power, and be as having none!”

The mind which is saturated with the Gospel story in all its sweet reasonableness, which has absorbed the more confused and broken rays wherein the Light of the World is manifested in Old Testament story, will perhaps be the least tempted to the disloyalty of “honest doubt;”—for disloyalty to the most close and sacred of all relationships it is, though we must freely concede that such doubt is the infirmity of noble minds. Believing that faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God, that the man is established in the Christian faith according as the child has been instructed, the question of questions for us is, how to secure that the children shall be well grounded in the Scriptures by their parents, and shall pursue the study with intelligence, reverence, and delight.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] The Rev. E. Jackson, sometime of Sydney.

[8] See “Report of the Committee of the House of Laymen for the Province of Canterbury on the Duty of the Church with regard to the Religious Education of the Upper and Middle Classes.”—Nat. Soc. Depository, Westminster.