Now to deal with this second assertion first, we must ask what is the nature of the evidence that would be deemed sufficient? If the inquirer does not believe that God created and still governs the world, assuredly no evidence will ever be sufficient to convince him that God has worked a miracle. The existence of God is certainly not to be proved by His interference with nature. Had He desired to reveal Himself to us primarily in that way, He would have wrought many more miracles than we now know of, and would have kept our faith alive by perpetual and unmistakeable manifestations of His presence and power. But He has not so willed. He has made our belief in Him rest mainly on the voice within ourselves, in order that we might walk by faith and not by sight. It will be a hopeless task to convince men that there is a God by pointing, not to His creation but to His interference with creation. But if a man do believe there is a God, what kind of evidence ought he to expect to show him that God has interfered in the course of the creation?
In the first place, he must not expect that the physical evidence, that is the miraculous evidence, for Revelation should be of such a character as to stand above the spiritual evidence. Just as the fundamental evidence for the existence of a God is to be found in the voice of conscience, and the arguments from design and from the order and beauty and visible purpose of the creation are secondary—corroborative not demonstrative—so too the primary evidence of a Revelation from God must be found in the harmony of that Revelation with the voice of conscience, and only the secondary and corroborative evidence is to be looked for in miracles. And in both cases the reason is the same. For it is not God's purpose to win the intellectually gifted, the wise, the cultivated, the clever, but to win the spiritually gifted, the humble, the tender-hearted, the souls that are discontented with their own shortcomings, the souls that have a capacity for finding happiness in self-sacrifice. It would defeat the purpose of the Revelation made to us if the hard-headed should have an advantage in accepting it over the humble-minded. The evidence must be such that spiritual character shall be an element in the acceptance of it. There would be a contradiction, if the faculty whereby we mainly recognised God were the spiritual faculty, and the faculty whereby we mainly recognised His Revelation were the scientific faculty.
And, in the second place, we have no right to expect that the evidence for miracles wrought in one age should be such evidence as properly belongs to another age. It is sometimes urged that the evidence supplied by the testimony of the early Christians is of little value because it was never cross-examined. No such precautions surrounded the evidence as would now be required to give any value to evidence of similar events. The witnesses gave up their lives to attest what they taught; but there was no one to scrutinise what they asserted. St. Paul's evidence on our Lord's Resurrection cannot now be put to the test of searching questions. But to make such objections as these is to make what is on the face of it an absurd demand. It is to ask that the scientific processes of the nineteenth century should have been anticipated in the first, that men should be miraculously guided to supply a kind of evidence which would be utterly superfluous at the time in order to be convincing eighteen hundred years afterwards. This would indeed have put the miraculous incidents in the New Testament narrative altogether out of place, and made the miracles more important than the Revelation which they were worked to introduce.
Now, if these two conditions are borne in mind, it is difficult to see what better evidence could be obtained of a miraculous life than we possess concerning the life of our Lord.
The moral and spiritual evidence is His own character which intentionally overshadows all the rest, and it is inconceivable that He should have made a false claim. And the material evidence is the testimony of men who freely gave their lives in proof of what they said. Nor has anything yet been said or written to shake Paley's argument on this point.
But, if we pass on to the other objection, that no evidence can ever be sufficient to prove a miracle because the evidence for the uniformity of nature is so overwhelming, we can only see in such an assertion an instance of that inability to get out of an accustomed groove against which Science has perpetually to guard. In Science the uniformity of nature is so indispensable a postulate, that without it we cannot stir a step. And if the student of Science is to admit a breach, it can only be by stepping outside of his science for the time and conceiving the possibility that there is some other truth beside scientific truth, and some other kind of evidence beside scientific evidence. We have all heard of the need of guarding against the bondage in which custom binds the mind. We have heard of the student who when first he saw a locomotive looked perseveringly for the horses that impelled it, because he had never known, and consequently could not imagine any other mode of producing such motion. But this danger attends not only the separate investigations which Science makes into phenomena; it attends Science as a whole. And it is necessary repeatedly to insist on the fact that Science has not proved and cannot prove that the scientific domain is co-extensive with nature itself.
The evidence for the uniformity of nature consists in the fact that from the beginning of Science the known reign of physical law has been steadily extending without a check; that instance after instance of apparent exception has been brought by further examination within its province; that the hypothesis of uniformity has now been long on trial and has never yet been found to fail; that no one who has so tried it has the slightest hesitation in trusting it for the future, as he has proved it in the past. But clearly as this evidence proves a general, it never gets beyond a general, uniformity. It has not succeeded in showing that the human will comes under the same rule. It has not succeeded in silencing the voice within us, which claims superiority for the moral over the physical. And when the utmost extent of human knowledge is compared with the vastness of nature, the claim to extend the induction from generality to universality is seen to be utterly untenable. So much as this, indeed, Science has rendered highly probable, that the uniformity of nature is never broken except for a moral purpose. It is only for such a purpose that the will is ever free. It is only for such a purpose that Revelation has ever claimed to be superior to nature. But beyond this Science cannot go. Let it be granted that the claim for freedom of the will has been often unduly pushed far beyond this limit, and let it be granted that religions professing to be revelations have included records of miracles which had no moral purpose. This does not affect the general conclusion that the evidence for uniformity has never succeeded, and can never succeed in showing, that the God who made and rules the universe never sets aside a physical law for a moral purpose, either by working through the human will or by direct action on external nature.
Science will continue its progress, and as the thoughts of men become clearer it will be perpetually more plainly seen that nothing in Revelation really interferes with that progress. It will be seen that devout believers can observe, can cross-question nature, can look for uniformity and find it, with as keen an eye, with as active an imagination, with as sure a reasoning, as those who deny entirely all possibility of miracles and reject all Revelation on that account. The belief that God can work miracles and has worked them, has never yet obstructed the path of a single student of Science; nor has any student who repudiated that belief found any aid in his study from that repudiation. The rush of Science of late years has for the time made many men fancy that Science is everything; and believers in Revelation have helped this fancy by insisting on their part that Revelation is everything; but such waves of opinion, resting really on feeling, are sure to pass away, and scientific men will learn that there are other kinds of knowledge besides scientific knowledge, as believers are already learning that God teaches us by other methods besides the method of Revelation. The students of the Bible will certainly learn that Revelation need not fear the discoveries of Science, not even such doctrines as that of Evolution. And the students of nature will certainly learn that Science has nothing to fear from the teaching of Revelation, not even from the claim to miraculous power. For most certainly both Science and Revelation come from one and the same God; 'the heavens declare His glory, and the firmament showeth His handywork; His law is perfect, converting the soul; His testimony is sure, making wise the simple.'