question of miracles, therefore, it is not to Germany we must turn, but to England, where their reality is still maintained.
Archbishop Trench rejects with disdain the attempts of Schleiermacher and others to get rid of the miraculous elements of miracles, by making them relative, which he rightly considers to be merely "a decently veiled denial of the miracle altogether;"(1) and he will not accept any reconciliation which sacrifices the miracle, "which," he logically affirms, "is, in fact, no miracle, if it lay in nature already, if it was only the evoking of forces latent therein, not a new thing, not the bringing in of the novel powers of a higher world; if the mysterious processes and powers by which those works were brought about had been only undiscovered hitherto, and not undiscoverable, by the efforts of human inquiry."(2) When Dr. Trench tries to define what he considers the real character of miracles, however, he becomes, as might be expected,
voluminous and obscure. He says: "An extraordinary Divine casualty, and not that ordinary which we acknowledge everywhere, and in everything, belongs, then, to the essence of the miracle; powers of God other than those which have always been working; such, indeed, as most seldom or never have been working before. The unresting activity of God, which at other times hides and conceals itself behind the veil of what we term natural laws, does in the miracle unveil itself; it steps out from its concealment, and the hand which works is laid bare. Beside and beyond the ordinary operation of nature, higher powers (higher, not as coming from a higher source, but as bearing upon higher ends) intrude and make themselves felt even at the very springs and sources of her power."(1) "Not, as we shall see the greatest theologians have always earnestly contended, contra naturam, but præter naturam, and supra naturam."(2) Further on he adds: "Beyond nature, beyond and above the nature which we know, they are, but not contrary to it."(3) Dr. Newman, in a similar strain, though with greater directness, says: "The miracles of Scripture are undeniably beyond nature;" and he explains them as "wrought by persons consciously exercising, under Divine guidance, a power committed to them for definite ends, professing to be immediate messengers from heaven, and to be evidencing their mission by their miracles."(4)
Miracles are here described as "beside," and "beyond," and "above" nature, but a moment's consideration must
show that, in so far as these terms have any meaning at all, they are simply evasions, not solutions, of a difficulty. Dr. Trench is quite sensible of the danger in which the definition of miracles places them, and how fatal to his argument is would be to admit that they are contrary to the order of nature. "The miracle," he protests, "is not thus unnatural; nor could it be such, since the unnatural, the contrary to order, is of itself the ungodly, and can in no way, therefore, be affirmed of a Divine work, such as that with which we have to do."(1) The archbishop in this; however, is clearly arguing from nature to miracles, and not from miracles to nature. He does not, of course, know what miracles really are, but as he recognizes that the order of nature must be maintained, he is forced to assert that miracles are not contrary to nature. He repudiates the idea of their being natural phenomena; and yet attempts to deny that they are unnatural. They must either be the one or the other. The archbishop, besides; forgets that he ascribes miracles to Satan as well as to God. Indeed, that his distinction is purely imaginary, and inconsistent with the alleged facts of Scriptural miracles, is apparent from Dr. Trench's own illustrations; The whole argument is a mere quibble of words to evade a palpable dilemma. Dr. Newman does not fall into this error, and more boldly faces the difficulty. He admits that the Scripture miracles "innovate upon the impressions which are made upon us by the order and the laws of the natural world;"(2) and that "walking on the sea, or the resurrection of the dead, is a plain reversal of its laws."(3)
Take, for instance, the multiplication of loaves and fishes. Five thousand people are fed upon five barley loaves and two small fishes: "and they took up of the fragments which remained twelve baskets full."(1) Dr. Trench is forced to renounce all help in explaining this miracle from natural analogies, and he admits: "We must simply behold in the multiplying of the bread" (and fishes?)" an act of Divine omnipotence on His part who was the Word of God,—not, indeed, now as at the first, of absolute creation out of nothing, since there was a substratum to work on in the original loaves and fishes, but an act of creative accretion."(2) It will scarcely be argued by any one that such an "act of Divine omnipotence" and "creative accretion" as this multiplication of five baked loaves and two small fishes is not contrary to the order of nature.(3) For Dr. Trench has himself pointed out that there must be interposition of man's art here, and that "a grain of wheat could never by itself, and according to the laws of natural development, issue in a loaf of bread.(4)