Now there cannot be any doubt that the hold which this teaching has had upon mankind has depended entirely on the extraordinary degree in which the teaching of the Bible has satisfied the conscience. Without that no miracles however overwhelmingly attested, no external evidence of whatever kind, could have compelled intellects of the highest rank, side by side with the most uncultivated and the most barren, to accept it as divine, nor could anything else have so often rekindled its old fire at times when faith in it had apparently withered away. The teaching of the Bible has always found and must always find its main evidence within the human soul.
And the fact that the teaching of the Bible, though when examined afterwards it turns out to be development or evolution, yet was always given at the time as a revelation, so far from diminishing the force of this internal evidence adds to it still more force than it would otherwise have. For what underlies the very conception of revelation is the doctrine that all progress in higher spiritual knowledge is bound up with conscious communion with God. Now it is an experience common to all believers that in that communion is to be found not only all strength but all enlightenment also. The believer knows that he learns spiritual truth in proportion as he refers his life to God's judgment, prays to God for clearer vision of what is duty and what is right faith, and makes it his one great aim to do God's will. He uses all the faculties that God has given him to understand the great divine law; but he perpetually looks to God for instruction, and whatever else may be said of that instruction his experience tells him that his advance in spiritual knowledge is in proportion to his nearness in thought and feeling to God Himself. That the progress of the human race in spiritual knowledge, unlike progress in scientific knowledge, should be due not to thinkers intellectually gifted, but to Prophets and Apostles inspired by God, thus exactly corresponds with what the spiritually-minded man finds within his own soul. And so too does it correspond with what he sees in others. Often and often the unlearned and untrained by sheer goodness of life attain to wonderful perception of spiritual truth, and the holiness of the unlettered peasant reveals to his conscience the law of right conduct in circumstances which perplex the disciplined and well informed. As the human race has learnt the highest spiritual truth by direct communication from God, so too on communion with God far more than on intellectual power, depends the progress of spiritual knowledge in every human soul.
But though the hold of the Bible on the faith of believers unquestionably depends on its satisfying the conscience in every stage of its enlightenment, it is equally certain that those who gave the messages recorded in the Bible claimed something more as proof of their authority than the approval of the conscience of their hearers. They professed to prove their mission by the evidence of supernatural powers; and the teaching of the Bible cannot be dissociated from the miraculous element in it which is connected with that teaching. If, indeed, the Old Testament stood alone we might acknowledge that the miraculous element in it occupied comparatively so small a place, and was so separable from the rest, and the evidence for it was so rarely, if ever, contemporaneous, that it might be left out of count. But we cannot say this of the New Testament, nor in particular of the account that has reached us of the sayings and doings of our Lord. The miracles are embedded in, are indeed intertwined with, the narrative. Many of our Lord's most characteristic sayings are so associated with narratives of miracles that the two cannot be torn apart: 'I have not seen so great faith, no, not in Israel;' 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work;' 'Son, thy sins be forgiven thee;' 'Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees;' 'It is not meet to take the children's bread and cast it to dogs;' 'This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting;' 'Were there not ten cleansed, but where are the nine?' 'Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.' In fact, there can be no real doubt that our Lord believed that He could work miracles, and professed to work them, and that His disciples believed that He worked many, and included that fact in their meaning when they spoke of Him as going about doing good. And these disciples professed to work miracles themselves and believed that they did work them. It is of course true that they had no strictly scientific conception of a miracle, and would often have called by that name what was in reality extraordinary but not miraculous. And it is true too that, if we take each miracle by itself, there is but one miracle, namely our Lord's Resurrection, for which clear and unmistakeable and sufficient evidence is given. But while the exclusion of any one miracle as insufficiently attested is possible, the exclusion of the miraculous element altogether is not possible without a complete surrender of the position taken by the first Christian teachers. As they claimed to be inspired and to have enlightenment which was not shared by mankind at large, so did they claim, if not each for himself, yet certainly for our Lord, power not shared by ordinary men, power to step out of the ordinary course of natural events, and, whether by virtue of some higher law operative only in rare instances, or by direct interference of the Almighty, to prove a divine mission by exhibiting in fact what is an essential part of the supremacy of the Moral Law, the dominion of that Law over the physical world.
The teachers of other religions besides the Christian have claimed supernatural powers, and have professed to give a supernatural message. This is a strong evidence of the deep-seated need in the human soul for such a direct communication from God to man. Men seem to need it so much that without it they are unable to accept the truth, or to hold it long if they do accept it. All who thus claim supernatural authority must, of course, justify their claim. They must justify their message to the human conscience. What they teach must be an advance towards, and finally an expression of, the Supreme Moral Law. And if they profess to have miraculous power they must give reasonable evidence that such power is really theirs. But if they fail in this, still the fact remains that their very claim must answer to something in the spiritual nature of man, or it would not be so invariably made nor so largely successful.
It seems as if, whatever may be the ground of belief when once revelation has penetrated into the soul, the exercise of supernatural power was needed to procure that access in the first instance. We believe because we find our consciences satisfied, and we bring up our children in such discipline of conscience that they too shall have sufficient training to recognise and hold fast divine truth. And if we had lived at the time and could have had our eyes opened to see the spiritual power of the Christian Faith, we might have believed without any external evidence at all. But the first receivers of the message, to whom the revelation was new, and, as must have often happened and we actually know did happen, to whom it was hard to reconcile that revelation with previous teaching, how sure were they to need some other and outer evidence that it really came from God. The supernatural in the form of miracles can never be the highest kind of evidence, can never stand alone as evidence; but it seems to have been needed for the first reception. And there seem to be minds that need it still, and to all it is a help to find that reasonable ground can be shown for holding that such evidence was originally given.
Revelation, in short, takes a higher stand than belongs to all other teaching, and except for its having taken that higher stand it does not appear that the highest teaching would have been possible. To look back afterwards and say that we find a development or an evolution is easy. And at first sight it seems to follow that, being an evolution, it may well be no more than the outcome of the working of the natural forces. But look closer and you see the undeniable fact that all these developments by the working of natural forces have perished. Not Socrates, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor the Stoics, nor Philo have been able to lay hold of mankind, nor have their moral systems in any large degree satisfied our spiritual faculty. Revelation, and revelation alone, has taught us; and it is from the teaching of revelation that men have obtained the very knowledge which some now use to show that there was no need of revelation. That altruism which is now to displace the command of God is nothing but the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount robbed of its heavenly power, robbed of the great doctrine which underlies the whole sermon. For that doctrine is the Fatherhood of God which has been shown most especially in this, that from the beginning He has never forgotten His children.