Tearfully pause the mourners
Above the broken sod,
And Ludwig waits beside it,
A humble priest of God.
NEWMAN ON MIRACLES. [53]
These essays are here reprinted from the original editions of each, with only the addition of a few bracketed notes, and with some slight emendation of the wording of a few sentences of the text of a merely literary character. For many years, Dr. Newman has been a public man in the English theological world, so much so that, as he himself expressed it, “he is obliged to think aloud.” His writings have passed into the domain of English literature, and are public property. It is not now in his power to withdraw any portion of them, much as he might desire to do so. Under existing circumstances, he has judged it the better course—or, at least, the lesser evil—that they should be republished under his own eye, with such corrections in bracketed notes as will indicate what he would now correct or retract.
These two essays mark very distinctly two stages in the career through which, as he fully explains in his Apologia, Dr. Newman has passed.
The first one, written to defend the miracles recorded in the Holy Scriptures against the attacks of Hume, Gibbon, and other infidels, dates from 1825-26, while he was yet young, and a staunch Protestant, somewhat imbued with evangelical feelings, especially in the matter of Popery. Hence, while ably conducting the exposition and defence of the Scripture miracles, he omits no opportunity of hitting at the other miracles recorded to have occurred in the Catholic Church since the days of the apostles. In fact, he had, as he tells us elsewhere, read the work of Middleton on The Miracles of the Early Church, and had imbibed his spirit. He was guided also by Bishop Douglas, whose Criterion he often quotes.
Seventeen years of continuous study and mature thought produced their fruit in his clear and candid mind. In 1842-43, he wrote the second essay as a preface or introduction to a portion of Fleury’s Ecclesiastical History, then being published in an English translation.
Though still a Protestant, he had entirely changed his views on these ecclesiastical miracles. So much so, that this essay may be read as his own confutation of what he had said against them in his earlier essay. In the present volume, the bracketed foot-notes subjoined to that essay are, for the most part, mere references to the paragraphs of the second essay, in which the immature errors of the first are corrected. With the traditional prejudices of Protestantism then strong in him, he had looked on these ecclesiastical miracles as rivals, and as, in some way, antagonistic to the miracles of Scripture which he was upholding; and he had striven to find points of difference as well in their internal character as in the evidence needed to prove them. All this he fully meets in the second essay. In the second, third, and fourth chapters of it, treating of “The Antecedent Probability of Ecclesiastical Miracles,” of their internal character, and of the evidence in support of their credibility, he shows how the admission of Scripture miracles utterly does away with the ground taken by some against the possibility or probability of ecclesiastical miracles, how the two classes agree in their chief and essential characteristics, and how, in fact, they rather merge into one general class of events, under the moral order of divine Providence, established for man’s salvation—an order distinct from and superior to the physical order of nature. Nothing can be more lucid than his replies to the objections of Douglas, Warburton, Middleton, and other Protestant writers on this subject. He shows, with the utmost clearness, how all that they urge against these ecclesiastical miracles in the Catholic Church can be turned by unbelievers, with equal plausibility, and in the same sophistical spirit, against the miracles of the apostles themselves.
Dr. Newman, in both dissertations, frankly admits—what indeed cannot be denied—that not a few of the Scripture miracles are to be believed by us simply because they have been recorded by divinely inspired writers. We have no other knowledge of them, no other evidence of their having occurred, than that we read them on the inspired page. Such miracles are for us matters of faith, not proofs in evidence. They are themselves proved by Scripture. Whatever they were to those who witnessed the occurrence, they are not now for us historical evidence in support of divine revelation. Writing as a Protestant, Dr. Newman did not advert to another important truth lying further back which Protestant writers generally ignore. Our knowledge of the inspiration and divine authority of the Scriptures as we have them—distinguished, that is, from the numerous other gospels, acts, epistles, apocalypses, and other pretended sacred writings, more or less current among and accepted by the sectaries of the early Christian ages—depends entirely on the decision of the Catholic Church, made after the death of the apostles. Hence, the value of the Scripture testimony as to these miracles, and our duty to recognize and accept it as divinely inspired, and therefore unerring, depend, in the last analysis, on the divine authority and character of the Catholic Church—of that same church which has always claimed that God continues to work miracles within her fold. To say that she errs on this latter point leaves room, to say the least, for the imputation or the suspicion that she may have erred in the other decision likewise; and so those Scripture miracles which lack, as most of them do, other corroborative testimony, would stand without sufficient proof. On the contrary, for the ecclesiastical miracles, because they occurred nearer our own times, there might still remain, as in many cases there does remain, ample historical evidence from contemporary witnesses.