[5] “To the whole world it is impossible to raise the dead, but to the Lord Christ, not only is it not impossible, but it is no trouble or labour to him.... This Christ did as a witness and a sign that he can and will raise from death. He does it not at all times and to every one.... It is enough that he has done it a few times; the rest he leaves to the last day.”—Luther (Th. xvi. p. 518). The positive, essential significance of miracle is therefore that the divine nature is the human nature. Miracles confirm, authenticate doctrine. What doctrine? Simply this, that God is a Saviour of men, their Redeemer out of all trouble, i.e., a being corresponding to the wants and wishes of man, and therefore a human being. What the God-man declares in words, miracle demonstrates ad oculos by deeds. [↑]
[6] This satisfaction is certainly so far limited, that it is united to religion, to faith in God: a remark which however is so obvious as to be superfluous. Hut this limitation is in fact no limitation, for God himself is unlimited, absolutely satisfied, self-contented human feeling. [↑]
[7] The legends of Catholicism—of course only the best, the really pleasing ones—are, as it were, only the echo of the keynote which predominates in this New Testament narrative. Miracle might be fitly defined as religious humour. Catholicism especially has developed miracle on this its humorous side. [↑]
[8] Culture in the sense in which it is here taken. It is highly characteristic of Christianity, and a popular proof of our positions, that the only language in which the Divine Spirit was and is held to reveal himself in Christianity is not the language of a Sophocles or a Plato, of art and philosophy, but the vague, unformed, crudely emotional language of the Bible. [↑]
[9] Many miracles may realty have had originally a physical or physiological phenomenon as their foundation. But we are here considering only the religious significance and genesis of miracle. [↑]
CHAPTER XIV.
THE MYSTERY OF THE RESURRECTION AND OF THE MIRACULOUS CONCEPTION.
The quality of being agreeable to subjective inclination belongs not only to practical miracles, in which it is conspicuous, as they have immediate reference to the interest or wish of the human individual; it belongs also to theoretical, or more properly dogmatic miracles, and hence to the Resurrection and the Miraculous Conception.