No miracles, on the whole (to take one after-view of the matter), could have been better tested: for two armies (not to mention all surrounding countries) must have seen it plainly and clearly: if then it had never occurred, what a very needless exposure of the falsity of the Jewish Scriptures! These were open, published writings, accessible to all: Cyrus and Darius and Alexander read them, and Ethiopian eunuchs; Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, with all other nations of the earth, had free access to those records. Only imagine if some recent history of England, Adolphus's, or Stebbing's, contained an account of a certain day in George the Fourth's reign having had twenty-four hour's daylight instead of the usual admixture; could the intolerable falsehood last a minute? Such a placard would be torn away from the records of the land the moment a rash hand had fixed it there. But, if the matter were fact, how could any historian neglect it?—In one sense, the very improbability of such a marvel being recorded, argues the probability of it having actually occurred.
Much more might here be added: but our errand is accomplished, if any stumbling-block had been thus easily removed from some erring thinker's path. Surely, we have given him some reason for faith's due acceptance of Joshua's miracle.
THE INCARNATION.
In touching some of the probabilities of our blessed Lord's career, it would be difficult to introduce and illustrate the subject better, than by the following anecdote. Whence it is derived, has escaped my memory; but I have a floating notion that it is told of Socrates in Xenophon or Plato. At any rate, by way of giving fixity thereto and picturesqueness, let us here report the story as of the Athenian Solomon:
Surrounded by his pupils, the great heathen Reasoner was being questioned and answering questions: in particular respecting the probability that the universal God would be revealed to his creatures. "What a glorious King would he appear!" said one, possibly the brilliant Alcibiades: "What a form of surpassing beauty!" said another, not unlikely the softer Crito. "Not so, my children," answered Socrates. "Kings and the beautiful are few, and the God, if he came on earth as an exemplar, would in shape and station be like the greater number." "Indeed, Master? then how should he fail of being made a King of men, for his goodness, and his majesty, and wisdom?" "Alas! my children," was pure Reason's just rejoinder, "[Greek: oi pleiones kakoi], most men are so wicked that they would hate his purity, despise his wisdom, and as for his majesty, they could not truly see it. They might indeed admire for a time, but thereafter (if the God allowed it), they would even hunt and persecute and kill him." "Kill him!" exclaimed the eager group of listeners; "kill Him? how should they, how could they, how dare they kill God?" "I did not say, kill God," would have been wise Socrates's reply, "for God existeth ever: but men in enmity and envy might even be allowed to kill that human form wherein God walked for an ensample. That they could, were God's humility: that they should, were their own malice: that they dared, were their own grievous sin and peril of destruction. Yea," went on the keen-eyed sage, "men would slay him by some disgraceful death, some lingering, open, and cruel death, even such as the death of slaves!"—Now slaves, when convicted of capital crime, were always crucified.
Whatever be thought of the genuineness of the anecdote, its uses are the same to us. Reason might have arrived at the salient points of Christ's career, and at His crucifixion!
I will add another topic: How should the God on earth arrive there? We have shown that His form would probably be such as man's; but was he to descend bodily from the atmosphere at the age of full-grown perfection, or to rise up out of the ground with earthquakes and fire, or to appear on a sudden in the midst of the market-place, or to come with legions of his heavenly host to visit his Temple? There was a wiser way than these, more reasonable, probable, and useful. Man required an exemplar for every stage of his existence up to the perfection of his frame. The infant, and the child, and the youth, would all desire the human-God to understand their eras; they would all, if generous and such as he would love, long to feel that He has sympathy with them in every early trial, as in every later grief. Moreover, the God coming down with supernatural glories or terrors would be a needless expense of ostentatious power. He, whose advent is intended for the encouragement of men to exercise their reason and their conscience; whose exhortation is "he that hath ears to hear, let him hear;" that pure Being, who is the chief preacher of Humility, and the great teacher of man's responsible condition—surely, he would hardly come in any way astoundingly miraculous, addressing his advent not to faith, but to sight, and challenging the impossibility of unbelief by a galaxy of spiritual wonders. Yet, if He is to come at all—and a word or two of this hereafter—it must be either in some such strange way; or in the usual human way; or in a just admixture of both. As the first is needlessly overwhelming to the responsible state of man, so the second is needlessly derogatory to the pure essence of God; and the third idea would seem to be most probable. Let us guess it out. Why should not this highest Object of faith and this lowest Subject of obedience be born, seemingly by human means, but really by divine? Why should there not be found some unspotted holy virgin, betrothed to a just man and soon to be his wife, who, by the creative power of Divinity, should miraculously conceive the shape divine, which God himself resolved to dwell in? Why should she not come of a lineage and family which for centuries before had held such expectation? Why should not the just man, her affianced, who had never known her yet, being warned of God in a dream of this strange, immaculate conception, "fear not to take unto him Mary his wife," lest the unbelieving world should breathe slander on her purity, albeit he should really know her not until after the Holy Birth. There is nothing unreasonable here; every step is previously credible: and invention's self would be puzzled to devise a better scheme. The Virgin-born would thus be a link between God and man, the great Mediator: his natures would fulfil every condition required of their double and their intimate conjunction. He would have arrived at humanity without its gross beginnings, and have veiled his Godhead for a while in a pure though mortal tenement. He would have participated in all the tenderness of woman's nature, and thus have reached the keenest sensibilities of men.
Themes such as these are inexhaustible: and I am perpetually conscious of so much left unsaid, that at every section I seem to have said next to nothing. Nevertheless, let it go; the good seed yet shall germinate. "Cast thy bread upon the waters, and thou shall find it after many days."
It may to some minds be a desideratum, to allude to the anterior probability that God should come in the flesh. Much of this has been anticipated under the head of Visible Deity and elsewhere; as this treatise is so short, one may reasonably expect every reader to take it in regular course. For additional considerations: the Benevolent Maker would hardly leave his creatures to perish, without one word of warning or one gleam of knowledge. The question of the Bible is considered further on: but exclusively of written rules and dogmas, it was likely that Our Father should commission chosen servants of his own, orally to teach and admonish; because it would be in accordance with man's reasonable nature, that he should best and easiest learn from the teaching his brethren. So then, after all lesser ambassadors had failed, it was to be expected that He should send the highest one of all, saying, "They will reverence my Son." We know that this really did occur by innumerable proofs, and wonderful signs posterior: and now, after the event, we discern it to have been anteriorly probable.