The following Lectures, therefore, are addressed mainly to the fundamental question of the credibility of Miracles, their use and the evidences of them being only touched on subordinately and collaterally. It was thought that such an aim, though in itself a narrow and confined one, was most adapted to the particular need of the day.
As Mr. Mozley says, various points essential to the whole argument, such as testimony, and the criterion between true and false miracles, are touched upon; but what is characteristic of the work is the way in which it deals with the antecedent objection to the possibility and credibility of miracles. It is on this part of the subject that the writer strikes out a line for himself, and puts forth his strength. His argument may be described generally as a plea for reason against imagination and the broad impressions of custom. Experience, such experience as we have of the world and human life, has, in all ages, been really the mould of human thought, and with large exceptions, the main unconscious guide and controller of human belief; and in our own times it has been formally and scientifically recognised as such, and made the exclusive foundation of all possible philosophy. A philosophy of mere experience is not tolerant of miracles; its doctrines exclude them; but, what is of even greater force than its doctrines, the subtle and penetrating atmosphere of feeling and intellectual habits which accompanies it is essentially uncongenial and hostile to them. It is against the undue influence of such results of experience—an influence openly acting in distinct ideas and arguments, but of which the greater portion operates blindly, insensibly, and out of sight—that Mr. Mozley makes a stand on behalf of reason, to which it belongs in the last resort to judge of the lessons of experience. Reason, as it cannot create experience, so it cannot take its place and be its substitute; but what reason can do is to say within what limits experience is paramount as a teacher; and reason abdicates its functions if it declines to do so, for it was given us to work upon and turn to account the unmeaning and brute materials which experience gives us in the rough. The antecedent objection against miracles is, he says, one of experience, but not one of reason. And experience, flowing over its boundaries tyrannically and effacing its limits, is as dangerous to truth and knowledge as reason once was, when it owned no check in nature, and used no test but itself.
Mr. Mozley begins by stating clearly the necessity for coming to a decision on the question of miracles. It cannot remain one of the open questions, at least of religion. There is, as has been said, a disposition to pass by it, and to construct a religion without miracles. The thing is conceivable. We can take what are as a matter of fact the moral results of Christianity, and of that singular power with which it has presided over the improvement of mankind, and alloying and qualifying them with other elements, not on the face of the matter its products, yet in many cases indirectly connected with its working, form something which we may acknowledge as a rule of life, and which may satisfy our inextinguishable longings after the unseen and eternal. It is true that such a religion presupposes Christianity, to which it owes its best and noblest features, and that, as far as we can see, it is inconceivable if Christianity had not first been. Still, we may say that alchemy preceded chemistry, and was not the more true for being the step to what is true. But what we cannot say of such a religion is that it takes the place of Christianity, and is such a religion as Christianity has been and claims to be. There must ever be all the difference in the world between a religion which is or professes to be a revelation, and one which cannot be called such. For a revelation is a direct work and message of God; but that which is the result of a process and progress of rinding out the truth by the experience of ages, or of correcting mistakes, laying aside superstitions and gradually reducing the gross mass of belief to its essential truth, is simply on a level with all other human knowledge, and, as it is about the unseen, can never be verified. If there has been no revelation, there may be religious hopes and misgivings, religious ideas or dreams, religious anticipations and trust; but the truth is, there cannot be a religion in the world. Much less can there be any such thing as Christianity. It is only when we look at it vaguely in outline, without having before our mind what it is in fact and in detail, that we can allow ourselves to think so. There is no transmuting its refractory elements into something which is not itself; and it is nothing if it is not primarily a direct message from God. Limit as we may the manner of this communication, still there remains what makes it different from all other human possessions of truth, that it was a direct message. And that, to whatever extent, involves all that is involved in the idea of miracles. It is, as Mr. Mozley says, inconceivable without miracles.
If, then, a person of evident integrity and loftiness of character rose into notice in a particular country and community eighteen centuries ago, who made these communications about himself—that he had existed before his natural birth, from all eternity, and before the world was, in a state of glory with God; that he was the only-begotten Son of God; that the world itself had been made by him; that he had, however, come down from heaven and assumed the form and nature of man for a particular purpose—viz. to be the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world; that he thus stood in a mysterious and supernatural relation to the whole of mankind; that through him alone mankind had access to God; that he was the head of an invisible kingdom, into which he should gather all the generations of righteous men who had lived in the world; that on his departure from hence he should return to heaven to prepare mansions there for them; and, lastly, that he should descend again at the end of the world to judge the whole human race, on which occasion all that were in their graves should hear his voice and come forth, they that had done good unto the resurrection of life, and they that had done evil unto the resurrection of damnation,—if this person made these assertions about himself, and all that was done was to make the assertions, what would be the inevitable conclusion of sober reason respecting that person? The necessary conclusion of sober reason respecting that person would be that he was disordered in his understanding. What other decision could we come to when a man, looking like one of ourselves, and only exemplifying in his life and circumstances the ordinary course of nature, said this about himself, but that when reason had lost its balance a dream of extraordinary and unearthly grandeur might be the result? By no rational being could a just and benevolent life be accepted as proof of such astonishing announcements. Miracles are the necessary complement then of the truth of such announcements, which without them are purposeless and abortive, the unfinished fragments of a design which is nothing unless it is the whole. They are necessary to the justification of such announcements, which, indeed, unless they are supernatural truths, are the wildest delusions. The matter and its guarantee are the two parts of a revelation, the absence of either of which neutralises and undoes it.
A revelation, in any sense in which it is more than merely a result of the natural progress of the human mind and the gradual clearing up of mistakes, cannot in the nature of things be without miracles, because it is not merely a discovery of ideas and rules of life, but of facts undiscoverable without it. It involves constituent miracles, to use De Quincey's phrase, as part of its substance, and could not claim a bearing without evidential or polemic ones. No other portion or form of proof, however it may approve itself to the ideas of particular periods or minds, can really make up for this. The alleged sinlessness of the Teacher, the internal evidence from adaptation to human nature, the historical argument of the development of Christendom, are, as Mr. Mozley points out, by themselves inadequate, without that further guarantee which is contained in miracles, to prove the Divine origin of a religion. The tendency has been of late to fall back on these attractive parts of the argument, which admit of such varied handling and expression, and come home so naturally to the feelings of an age so busy and so keen in pursuing the secrets of human character, and so fascinated with its unfolding wonders. But take any of them, the argument from results, for instance, perhaps the most powerful of them all. "We cannot," as Mr. Mozley says, "rest too much upon it, so long as we do not charge it with more of the burden of proof than it is in its own nature equal to—viz. the whole. But that it cannot bear." The hard, inevitable question remains at the end, for the most attenuated belief in Christianity as a religion from God—what is the ultimate link which connects it directly with God? The readiness with which we throw ourselves on more congenial topics of proof does not show that, even to our own minds, these proofs could suffice by themselves, miracles being really taken away. The whole power of a complex argument and the reasons why it tells do not always appear on its face. It does not depend merely on what it states, but also on unexpressed, unanalysed, perhaps unrealised grounds, the real force of which would at once start forth if they were taken away. We are told of the obscure rays of the spectrum, rays which have their proof and their effect, only not the same proof and effect as the visible ones which they accompany; and the background and latent suppositions of a great argument are as essential to it as its more prominent and elaborate constructions. And they show their importance sometimes in a remarkable and embarrassing way, when, after a long debate, their presence at the bottom of everything, unnoticed and perhaps unallowed for, is at length disclosed by some obvious and decisive question, which some person had been too careless to think of, and another too shy to ask. We may not care to obtrude miracles; but take them away, and see what becomes of the argument for Christianity.
It must be remembered that when this part of Christian evidence comes so forcibly home to us, and creates that inward assurance which it does, it does this in connection with the proof of miracles in the background, which though it may not for the time be brought into actual view, is still known to be there, and to be ready for use upon being wanted. The indirect proof from results has the greater force, and carries with it the deeper persuasion, because it is additional and auxiliary to the direct proof behind it, upon which it leans all the time, though we may not distinctly notice and estimate this advantage. Were the evidence of moral result to be taken rigidly alone as the one single guarantee for a Divine revelation, it would then be seen that we had calculated its single strength too highly. If there is a species of evidence which is directly appropriate to the thing believed, we cannot suppose, on the strength of the indirect evidence we possess, that we can do without the direct. But miracles are the direct credentials of a revelation; the visible supernatural is the appropriate witness to the invisible supernatural—that proof which goes straight to the point, and, a token being wanted of a Divine communication, is that token. We cannot, therefore, dispense with this evidence. The position that the revelation proves the miracles, and not the miracles the revelation, admits of a good qualified meaning; but, taken literally, it is a double offence against the rule that things are properly proved by the proper proof of them; for a supernatural fact is the proper proof of a supernatural doctrine, while a supernatural doctrine, on the other hand, is certainly not the proper proof of a supernatural fact.
So that, whatever comes of the inquiry, miracles and revelation must go together. There is no separating them. Christianity may claim in them the one decisive proof that could be given of its Divine origin and the truth of its creed; but, at any rate, it must ever be responsible for them.
But suppose a person to say, and to say with truth, that his own individual faith does not rest upon miracles, is he, therefore, released from the defence of miracles? Is the question of their truth or falsehood an irrelevant one to him? Is his faith secure if they are disproved? By no means; if miracles were, although only at the commencement, necessary to Christianity, and were actually wrought, and therefore form part of the Gospel record and are bound up with the Gospel scheme and doctrines, this part of the structure cannot be abandoned without the sacrifice of the other too. To shake the authority of one-half of this body of statement is to shake the authority of the whole. Whether or not the individual makes use of them for the support of his own faith, the miracles are there; and if they are there they must be there either as true miracles or as false ones. If he does not avail himself of their evidence, his belief is still affected by their refutation. Accepting, as he does, the supernatural truths of Christianity and its miracles upon the same report from the same witnesses, upon the authority of the same documents, he cannot help having at any rate this negative interest in them. For if those witnesses and documents deceive us with regard to the miracles, how can we trust them with regard to the doctrines? If they are wrong upon the evidences of a revelation, how can we depend upon their being right as to the nature of that revelation? If their account of visible facts is to be received with an explanation, is not their account of doctrines liable to a like explanation? Revelation, then, even if it does not need the truth of miracles for the benefit of their proof, still requires it in order not to be crushed under the weight of their falsehood…. Thus miracles and the supernatural contents of Christianity must stand or fall together. These two questions—the nature of the revelation, and the evidence of the revelation—cannot be disjoined. Christianity as a dispensation undiscoverable by human reason, and Christianity as a dispensation authenticated by miracles—these two are in necessary combination. If any do not include the supernatural character of Christianity in their definition of it, regarding the former only as one interpretation of it or one particular traditional form of it, which is separable from the essence—for Christianity as thus defined the support of miracles is not wanted, because the moral truths are their own evidence. But Christianity cannot be maintained as a revelation undiscoverable by human reason, a revelation of a supernatural scheme for man's salvation, without the evidence of miracles.
The question of miracles, then, of the supernatural disclosed in the world of nature, is the vital point for everything that calls itself Christianity. It may be forgotten or disguised; but it is vain to keep it back and put it out of sight. It must be answered; and if we settle it that miracles are incredible, it is idle to waste our time about accommodations with Christianity, or reconstitutions of it. Let us be thankful for what it has done for the world; but let us put it away, both name and thing. It is an attempt after what is in the nature of things impossible to man—a revealed religion, authenticated by God. The shape which this negative answer takes is, as Mr. Mozley points out, much more definite now than it ever was. Miracles were formerly assailed and disbelieved on mixed and often confused grounds; from alleged defect of evidence, from their strangeness, or because they would be laughed at. Foes and defenders looked at them from the outside and in the gross; and perhaps some of those who defended them most keenly had a very imperfect sense of what they really were. The difficulty of accepting them now arises not mainly from want of external evidence, but from having more keenly realised what it is to believe a miracle. As Mr. Mozley says—
How is it that sometimes when the same facts and truths have been before men all their lives, and produced but one impression, a moment comes when they look different from what they did? Some minds may abandon, while others retain, their fundamental position with respect to those facts and truths, but to both they look stranger; they excite a certain surprise which they did not once do. The reasons of this change then it is not always easy for the persons themselves to trace, but of the result they are conscious; and in some this result is a change of belief.