[35] "The Church asks, and it is entitled to ask the critic: Do you believe in the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus Christ?... If he replies in the negative, he has missed the way, and has put himself outside of the Church of Christ."—The Church's One Foundation, p. 4. [Note that "Incarnation" and "Resurrection" are terms which Dr. Nicoll construes as denoting physical miracles.]
What Dr. Nicoll here means by "outside of the Church" he indicates by saying elsewhere, that philosophers who reckon goodness as everything, and miracles as impossible, "are not Christians" (op. cit., p. 10).
This conditioning of Christian character upon an intellectual judgment concerning the reality of remote occurrences is both unbiblical and unethical, as well as absurd when practically applied. Some years since, Dr. E. A. Abbott, who admits no miracle in the life of Christ, published a book, The Spirit on the Waters, in which he inculcated the worship of Christ. Yet, according to Dr. Nicoll, such a man is no Christian!
[36] The Miraculous Element in the Gospels, p. 353.
VII
