Again, take the well-known case of the Berlin bookseller, Nicolai, who, having fallen into ill-health, for a whole year saw, when awake, visions so real and palpable that he may be said to have lived in the company of disembodied spirits, undistinguishable from actual men and women. This is a common phenomenon in vivid dreams, but the Berlin case takes us a step farther, and shows us how subjective impressions may assume the form of objective realities, even in the case of a man wide awake, of a sceptical turn of mind, and in full possession of his reasoning faculties. Why then should we be driven to the alternative of miracle or imposture, to account for similar dreams or visions being taken for objective realities by enthusiastic minds, living in an atmosphere of religious excitement, in an uncritical age, when supernatural occurrences were considered to be matters of course? And history is full of instances which show how any supernatural germ, planted in such a medium, propagates itself and extends to millions, almost as rapidly as the bacillus germ does in an epidemic of small-pox. St. Vitus’s dance, or the dancing mania, ran the round of Europe like the potato disease, and even yet survives in the hysterical affections of the sect of Shakers. The gift of tongues spread like wildfire through Irving’s congregation, and only died out because it had fallen on the uncongenial soil of the nineteenth century; even the story of the tail of the lion over the gateway of the old Northumberland House being seen by many passers-by to wag because one had asserted it, illustrates the contagiousness of nervous sympathy, and the tricks which ‘strong imagination’ can play with the senses.
Another great blow has been dealt against the miraculous theory by what can only be called the singular want of intelligence displayed in the exercise of miraculous power as commonly recorded. The raison d’être, or effect desired to be produced by miracles, is to convert mankind from sin, or to attest a divine mission by convincing proofs. Even ordinary human intelligence—and how much more so that of a superior Being—must see that to attain this end the means must be to make the proof convincing. There is no reason in itself why it should not be so. The fact that a man who was alive and signed a will is now dead, is attested as regards the latter proposition by a proper medical certificate, and as regards the former by two credible witnesses, who are prepared to come into court, give their names and addresses, depose on oath to the signature, and stand cross-examination. If this testimony is required to establish a fact so antecedently probable as that one particular man has undergone the common fate of millions of millions of other men, that is to say, that he has died after being alive, how much more must it be requisite to establish the fact so antecedently improbable, as that one man among those many millions after having died came back to life. And yet where is the recorded miracle for which even this minimum amount of testimony is forthcoming? Why are miracles so constantly performed in holes and corners, in obscure localities, among little knots of ignorant and enthusiastic adherents, attested by the vaguest hearsay evidence of unknown or incompetent witnesses, and apparently under circumstances inevitably calculated to defeat their object and engender doubts in the minds of reasonable and conscientious men. Take, for instance, the miracles now said to be wrought at Lourdes. The object must be taken to be to convert infidel France to the Catholic faith. But obviously this object would be far better attained by a single undoubted miracle wrought at Paris before a commission headed by a man like Pasteur, than by any number of miracles scarcely, if at all, distinguishable from those of Dr. Braid, alleged to occur at an obscure village in the presence of peasants and pilgrims. Or, take a higher instance, that of the demand made by the Pharisees to Jesus for a sign to attest his Messiahship. Consider the circumstances of the case, and see if it is at all possible that if he had possessed the power of working miracles he should have replied, ‘Why doth this generation seek after a sign? verily I say unto you, there shall no sign be given unto this generation’ (St. Mark ix. 12). In the first place the statement throws discredit upon all the miracles said to have been wrought, by the positive and explicit declaration that none should be wrought. But beyond this, the very essence of the mission of Jesus was contained in the words, ‘Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ He had a firm conviction that the kingdom of heaven, or a millennium of peace and goodwill, was close at hand, and its advent only retarded by the sinfulness and want of faith of his chosen people. He thought it his bounden duty to do all he could to remove the obstacle and expedite the coming of the kingdom. With this conviction, though fully seeing the risk and counting the cost, when he found that he was making no decided headway by preaching in a remote province, he determined to go to Jerusalem and make there one great effort to accomplish his object. Can it be doubted that he would use every means in his power to carry his mission to a successful conclusion? If, having the power to do so by working a miracle, he had refused, he would from his point of view have been guilty of a great sin—that of preventing the coming of the kingdom of heaven.
Again, who were the Pharisees? No doubt there were formalists and hypocrites among them, but the position of the sect in the Jewish nation was almost exactly similar to that of the English Puritans in the reign of Charles. They were the embodiment of the patriotic and religious spirit of the race, the sons of the heroic fathers who fought under Judas Maccabeus against Antiochus, the fathers of the equally heroic sons who made the last desperate stand against the legions of Titus. It was their duty, when a claim to Messiahship was advanced, before departing from the traditions of their ancestors, to require evidence. The universally expected evidence of a temporal deliverer being wanting, there remained only the evidence of miracles, which, moreover, were assigned as the test of a Messiah by all their prophets. To refuse them a sign, if a sign were possible, was to do injustice to many sincere and conscientious men. Nay, more, it was an act of cruelty if leaving them in their old faith entailed eternal punishment. The same thing applies to all records of miracles. They are never wrought under circumstances where they would be the most effective means for attaining proposed ends. They are never wrought under circumstances which leave them clear of the suspicion of being subjective illusions or misinterpretations of effects due to natural causes. They never convince any but those who are more than half convinced already.
It would be easy to multiply instances showing the inadequacy of the evidence adduced to establish such an exceptional and extraordinary fact as the occurrence of a real miracle. But it is unnecessary to do so, as all thinking minds have come, or are fast coming, to the conclusion of Dr. Temple, that ‘all the countless varieties of the universe were provided for by one original impress, and not by special acts of creation modifying what had previously been made.’
It is only when we look behind the phenomena of the universe at this Great First Cause, that I see anything to object to in the definition of Dr. Temple, and of Christian philosophers generally. They assume it to be a personal Deity, who is to a great extent known or knowable, and therefore must have attributes conformable to human perceptions which are the basis of all human knowledge. In other words, however much we may purify and enlarge these attributes, He must be essentially an anthropomorphic God or magnified man. To this theory there seems to me to be this fatal objection, that it gives no account of the origin of evil, or rather that it makes the Divine Creator directly responsible for it. The existence of evil in the world is as palpable a fact as the existence of good. There are many things which to our human perceptions appear to be base, cruel, foul, and ugly, just as clearly as other things appear to be noble, merciful, pure, and beautiful. Whence come they? If the existence of good proves a good Creator, how can we escape the inference that the existence of evil proves an evil one? This is never so forcibly impressed on me as when I read the arguments of those who insist most strongly on the conception of a one, anthropomorphic God. When Carlyle says, ‘All that is good, generous, wise, right—whatever I deliberately and for ever love in others and myself—who or what could by any possibility have given it to me but One who first had it to give? This is not logic, but axiom.’ I cannot but picture to myself the sledgehammer force with which, if he had approached the question without prepossessions, he would have come down on the cant, the insincerity, the treason to the eternal veracities, which refused to look facts in the face, and apply the same reasoning to the evil. Or if Arnold defines the Deity as the ‘Something not ourselves which makes for righteousness,’ how of the Something not ourselves which makes for unrighteousness? The only escape I can find from this dilemma is to accept existing facts and not evade them. It is a fact that polarity is the law of existence. Why we know not, any more than we know the real essence and origin of the atoms and energies which are our other ultimate facts. But we accept atoms and energies, and accept the law of gravity and other laws; why not accept also the law of polarity, and admit that it is part of the ‘original impress’: one of the fundamental conditions under which the evolution of Creation from its ultimate elements is necessitated to proceed. This the human mind can understand; beyond it is the great unknown or unknowable, in presence of which we can only feel emotions of reverence and of awe, and ‘faintly trust the larger hope’ that duality may somehow ultimately be merged in unity, evil in good, and ‘every winter turn to spring.’
As nations advanced in civilisation there has always been a tendency among the higher and purer minds to relegate the Great First Cause further and further back into the unknown, and to divest it of anthropomorphic attributes. When Socrates said, ‘that divinely revealed wisdom of which you speak, I deny not, inasmuch as I do not know it; I can only understand human reason,’ he spoke the identical language of Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, and those leaders of modern thought whom theologians call agnostics. Even in religions based on the idea of a single anthropomorphic Deity the same tendency often appears among the highest thinkers. Thus Emmanuel Deutsch, in his learned work on the Talmud, tells us, ‘Its first chapter treats of the Deity as conceived by Jewish philosophy. The existence of God is, of course, presupposed. But what of His attributes? Has He any? Scripture literally taken seems to affirm this. Yet taken in a higher sense, as understood by the Alexandrines, the Talmud, and the Targum, it denies it.’
The great Jewish doctors, Ibn Ezra, Jehuda Hilmi, and Maimonides, take this view of a divine origin shrouded in ineffable mystery. Maimonides says, ‘If you give attributes to a thing, you define this thing, and defining a thing means to bring it under some head, to compare it with something like it. God is sole of His kind. Determine Him, circumscribe Him, and you bring Him down to the modes and categories of created things.’ Even St. Paul says, ‘O the depths of God. How unsearchable are His judgments, and how inscrutable His ways’; and the Creed of our own Church, in the midst of a string of definitions all implying that God is comprehensible, has the words ‘the Father incomprehensible.’
It is evident that the reasons why these anticipations of the prevailing tendency of modern thought only appeared by glimpses, and among a very limited number of philosophic minds, arose from the fact that the miraculous theory of the universe everywhere prevailed. Every unusual occurrence was supposed to be owing to the direct supernatural interference of a Being acting in the main with human attributes, and therefore to be a direct refutation of the theory which denied the possibility of defining His attributes, and relegated Him to the dim distance of an incomprehensible Creator. With the utter breakdown of the miraculous theory, and the certainty that all the countless varieties of the universe arise, not from special interferences, but from one original impress, this theory of a reverent and devout agnosticism becomes impregnable and holds the field against all rivals. It, and it alone, is consistent with the facts of science, the deductions of reason, the axioms of morality, while at the same time it denies nothing, and leaves an ample background on which to paint the visions of faith, and to reflect back to us spectral images of our hopes and fears, our longings and aspirations.
Some seek for a solution of the mystery, and try to reconcile the existence of evil with that of an almighty and beneficent Creator, by assuming that in the long run everything will come right. Evolution, they say, has led constantly to higher and better things, and when carried far enough will lead to a state of society in which wars will cease, evil passions die out, and universal love and charity prevail—in other words, to a millennium.
Even if this were true, what of the untold millions of the human race who have perished in their sins while evolution was slowly working out this tardy millennium? Are they the chair à canons, whom a Napoleon-like Deity sacrifices with cynical indifference, in the calculated moves of the game of Creation? Is this their idea of an all-wise and all-merciful Father who is in heaven?