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RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
RELIGION AND 
 MIRACLE 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE A. GORDON 
 H 
 
 MINISTER OF THE OLD SOUTH CHURCH 
 BOSTON 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 <&\}t fttoer?ibe $xt& Cambribge 
 
 1909 
 
B~ri7 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY GEORGE A. GORDON 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published October iqoq 
 
 \ 
 
* * * *i* 
 
 I dedicate this Book to the Inspiring 
 Memory of my Father, George Gordon, 
 of Insch, Scotland, — born and bred to 
 the vocation of farmer : a brilliant mind, 
 one of the bravest of men, to whom the 
 order of summer and winter, seed-time 
 and harvest was a token of the Infinite 
 good-will, and who toiled in the Fields 
 of Time in the sense of the Eternal. 
 
 * *h *b *b 
 
 304030 
 
jU. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 When a teacher and preacher of the Christian 
 religion moves from the circumference toward 
 the heart of faith, miracles fall out of the 
 sphere of his vision. He may not deny the 
 reality of miracles, but more and more mir- 
 acles cease to be significant for him. He is 
 dealing with the Eternal as it shines by its own 
 light, and in that case outward witness of any 
 kind for the things of the soul becomes super- 
 fluous. For many years I have lived in this 
 mood. Slowly miracles have ceased to serve 
 me in the evolution of my belief, in the moral 
 campaign of my spirit. For me the heart of 
 the universe is God, the Eternal Spirit; the 
 permanent force in man is the soul that an- 
 swers to the Infinite soul; the incomparable 
 genius of Christianity is in the way in which 
 it enables human beings to live in the con- 
 sciousness of our Father in Heaven. Christian- 
 ity is, in my judgment, incomparable as the 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 religion of revelation and reconciliation; it 
 brings spirit to light, the Divine and the hu- 
 man ; it brings peace. The words of the great 
 prophet of the exile describe with rare felicity 
 the privilege of the Christian preacher : " How 
 beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of 
 him that bringeth good tidings, that publish- 
 eth peace, that bringeth good tidings of good, 
 that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, 
 Thy God reigneth ! " ' It is said of Christ : " He 
 came and preached peace to you that were far 
 off, and peace to them that were nigh: for 
 through him we both have our access in one 
 Spirit unto the Father." 2 For the great apostle 
 to the nations the gospel became essentially 
 one thing, the gospel of reconciliation. Into 
 these divine depths in Christianity, the su- 
 preme religion of the spirit, all devout and 
 happy disciples of the Master and preachers 
 of his message at length come. 
 
 Sharing in this universal discipline of hon- 
 est and advancing souls, it never occurred to 
 me to write anything upon the subject of re- 
 1 Isaiah lii, 7. ' Ephesians ii, 17-18. 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 ligion and miracle. I had for many years 
 dwelt in a sphere far removed from outward 
 signs and wonders; I had, therefore, quietly 
 ceased to regard the tradition of signs and 
 wonders that accompanied the Lord. One day, 
 however, I fell into conversation with a com- 
 pany of young ministers ; I found them greatly 
 troubled. They felt that as honest men they 
 could not say that they believed in miracles ; 
 and that incapacity created suspicion as to 
 how much of the gospel remains when the 
 miracles are set aside. 
 
 This question I was invited to discuss at 
 our Boston Ministers' Meeting two or three 
 years ago, and the response which I then re- 
 ceived, alike from men of conservative opin- 
 ions and from men of radical views, led me to 
 reconsider the whole subject. At the same 
 time there came the invitation to lecture on 
 the Nathaniel W. Taylor Foundation in Yale 
 University. In this way the little volume now 
 published came into existence. 
 
 I am unwilling that any one who may look 
 into this volume should fail to grasp my pur- 
 
x PREFACE 
 
 pose in writing it. I have no interest in the 
 destruction of the belief in miracle. I am con- 
 cerned to show that where miracle has ceased 
 to be regarded as true, Christianity remains in 
 its essence entire; that the fortune of religion 
 is not to be identified with the fortune of 
 miracle; that the message of Jesus Christ to 
 the world is independent of miracle, lives by 
 its own reality and worth, self-evidencing and 
 self-attesting. If it shall be allowed by fair- 
 minded men that I have made even a slight 
 contribution toward the final emancipation of 
 the fundamental beliefs of Christian men from 
 the cycle of signs and wonders, and from the 
 fate that with the advance of science seems to 
 threaten the entire tradition of miracle, I shall 
 be satisfied. I conceive myself to be a genuine 
 conservative ; I am conscious that I work for 
 the preservation of essential historic Christian- 
 ity ; I consider myself to be, to the extent of 
 my power, a defender of the eternal gospel. 
 I regard the vision of God and of human ex- 
 istence, embodied in the message and person 
 of Jesus Christ, as the most precious posses- 
 
PREFACE jd 
 
 sion of mankind ; and I should be glad to 
 make it impossible for those who are unable to 
 agree with me in the discussion that follows 
 to misunderstand me here. 
 
 George A. Gordon. 
 
 Old South Parsonage, Boston, 
 June 19, 1909. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. The Issue Defined 1 
 
 II. Belief in God and Miracle ... 46 
 
 III. Jesus Christ and Miracle . . . .83 
 
 IV. The Christian Life and Miracle . . 132 
 V. An Eternal Gospel 172 
 
BELIGION AND MIEACLE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE ISSUE DEFINED 
 I 
 
 MY first word must be one of thanks for 
 the honor done me by Yale University 
 in inviting me to lecture on the Nathaniel W. 
 Taylor Foundation. It is one of many similar 
 privileges and distinctions that I have received 
 during the last twenty years from the same 
 honored source. My association with Yale 
 University, while of little moment to her, has 
 been one of the highest satisfactions of my 
 life. I should take more pleasure in this new 
 honor if it did not bring me face to face with 
 a grave responsibility. He must be wanting 
 in moral sensibility who faces this lectureship 
 without serious misgiving. For it must be re- 
 membered that Dr. Taylor is a great historic 
 
 l 
 
J ;.:.< ^IiaiON AND MIRACLE 
 
 figure in the evolution of the New England 
 theology. Indeed, no small part of the felicity 
 of this Foundation is in doing something to 
 rescue a great and brilliant name from the 
 oblivion that lies in wait for all save the sub- 
 lime remnant of the servants of God. Too 
 readily does the generation in power consent 
 to this robbery of time ; too easily does it take 
 for granted the inevitableness of this erasure 
 of shining names from the memory of the liv- 
 ing. While there are a few names that the 
 world cannot forget, so deeply are they en- 
 graved on its heart, there are many whom 
 it behooves the world not to forget. Noble 
 men recognize as part of their duty to their 
 time this recollection of famous lives; to this 
 end they enter into a humane conspiracy to 
 defeat the second death to which every servant 
 of truth and righteousness is exposed. 
 
 It would be something of a reproach if we 
 who honor the great and difficult science of 
 theology should lightly cease to regard so 
 eminent a master of that science as Nathaniel 
 W. Taylor. Here was a man of capacious and 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 3 
 
 brilliant intellect, lifted by long and severe 
 discipline to the temper and efficiency of a 
 Damascus blade. Among worthy objects of 
 admiration, educated men will always give a 
 high place to the powerful and splendid intel- 
 lect. To be admitted to the study of a mind 
 of this order, to gain some sense of its range 
 and efficiency, to come under the fascination 
 of its movement and power, is one of the 
 greatest educational forces known to man. 
 There is no surer way of gaining in intellec- 
 tual strength and integrity than by joining 
 ourselves, in critical homage, to the great his- 
 toric masters of our particular discipline. Ad- 
 miration for Dr. Taylor is well founded, and 
 in the rushing extempore world into which we 
 have come, with its too frequent affluence of 
 words and its poverty of ideas, — and where 
 ideas do exist, their crudity and confusion, — 
 familiarity with the premeditation, plan, order, 
 precision, sequence, vigor, and rigor of this 
 master must issue in good and in good only 
 to the enthusiastic and wise student. 
 
 Nor must we overlook the greatness of 
 
4 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 Dr. Taylor's theological interest. His central 
 thought was the moral government of the 
 world. He does not conceive and shape his 
 subject as we should like him to do; his 
 method of treatment does not always com- 
 mend itself to the sense of science and his- 
 tory that to-day controls the scholar and 
 thinker ; his work in many ways is a disap- 
 pointment; yet when all this has been said, 
 and said with emphasis, it still remains clear 
 and incontestable that Dr. Taylor gave his 
 life to the service of one of the deepest and 
 most momentous interests of the human mind, 
 — the moral order of the world, the moral 
 character of the universe. 
 
 Here again, therefore, we recall his name 
 with honor, and under the inspiration of his 
 illustrious example we turn from the lighter 
 concerns of faith to the greater, from the 
 trivial to the eternal. In raising the issue as 
 to the relation of religion to miracle, I may 
 assuredly count upon the favor of his valiant 
 and free spirit; in declaring that religion 
 stands on its own feet, lives by its own might, 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 5 
 
 I may further count upon his sympathy ; in 
 asserting that religion is independent of mir- 
 acle, I may claim his eager and benign interest 
 if I cannot be sure of his consent. In any 
 event, my discussion is in the freedom of the 
 spirit which is our most precious inheritance 
 from all the greater masters of the New Eng- 
 land divinity. They were stern men, whose 
 hearts grew sick over every * mush of conces- 
 sions," who hated unreality under every dis- 
 guise, who reserved for the pretentious but 
 vacant mind a noble contempt, and who ex- 
 acted of the thinker in freedom nothing but 
 honest work done in the solemn sense of ac- 
 countability to God and man. 
 
 I may as well begin my discussion of re- 
 ligion and miracle by telling you the upshot 
 of it all. Many persons will not start seri- 
 ously to read a romance till they have glanced 
 through the final chapters and are sure that 
 the issues of the plot are satisfactory. John 
 Henry Newman, an adept in argument, used 
 to remark that one can convince men by logic 
 when one can shoot round corners ; and while 
 
6 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 this statement is a manifest exaggeration, it 
 nevertheless reveals the liquid prejudice in 
 which the minds of most men float. There is 
 apt to be a bias in the mind, and men with a 
 bias will dispute an axiom when it points the 
 wrong way, like the farmer who said he would 
 not admit that twice two are four till he saw 
 what use his antagonist intended to make of 
 the admission. A friend told me that he took 
 the greatest delight in reading over and over 
 again the account of certain battles whose 
 issue was completely satisfactory to him. The 
 battles of Marathon, Arbela, Cannse, Pharsalia, 
 Waterloo, and Gettysburg were a perpetual 
 treat to him because he knew what was com- 
 ing and liked it. I fear this is the mood in 
 which multitudes of men follow a course of 
 argument. If they know the issue and like it, 
 then the reasoning is a delight ; if they know 
 the conclusion and dislike it, the argument is 
 undone. 
 
 The issue of my argument is such as to com- 
 mend itself to all sensible and good men. I 
 am not concerned with the destruction of 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 7 
 
 belief in miracle ; my purpose is not to prove 
 or discuss the unreality of miracle. I do not 
 touch this vast wonder-world except inciden- 
 tally in a few preliminary observations. My 
 plea is not against miracle, but against the 
 identification of the fortune of religion with 
 the fortune of miracle. My contention is in 
 behalf of the Christian religion in its essence. 
 The Christian religion is the vision of the 
 Eternal moral order and the vision of the 
 Eternal grace in that order : these two visions 
 are living forces in Jesus Christ ; from him they 
 go forth to work through all human history, 
 to meet and overcome the vision of sin and 
 death. I maintain that the solution of all our 
 graver difficulties is through prof ounder living 
 in God. The genius of religion is forever re- 
 vealed in these sovereign words : — 
 
 The Eternal God is thy dwelling place, 
 And underneath are the everlasting arms. 
 
 More and more we return to the apostolic 
 declaration that in him we live and move and 
 have our being; above all, we seek in the 
 
8 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 school of Christ the moral sincerity that issues 
 in the vision of God. With this announce- 
 ment of purpose, and with this anticipation of 
 my conclusion, I ask you to " hear me for my 
 
 cause." 
 
 ii 
 
 Two things, and two things only, are abso- 
 lutely essential to religion in its highest form, 
 to the Christian religion, — the sense of the 
 fatherly love of God, and the answering sense 
 on man's part of filial love and obedience. 
 The Christian religion as it stands in the con- 
 sciousness of its Founder is his sense of the 
 perfect fatherly love of God and the answer to 
 this of the filial love and obedience of his own 
 soul. In the disciples of Jesus the same double 
 consciousness exists. There is the conscious- 
 ness of the infinite compassionate love of the 
 Father in heaven, and there is the answering 
 consciousness of the human spirit in its ideals, 
 purposes, and struggles. To this central con- 
 sciousness, with its Divine and human aspects, 
 Jesus remains the Way, the Truth, and the 
 life. He is the example of the way in which 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 9 
 
 men come to know God as Father and them- 
 selves as sons of God — the vision of the uni- 
 verse through what is highest in the soul, the 
 acceptance of the verdict of the spirit as to the 
 value of man's life. Jesus is the example of 
 the truth ; he is the union in perfect clearness 
 and peace of the consciousness of God as 
 Father and the consciousness of man as the 
 son of God. He is the example of the life ; he 
 is the life of victorious justice, purity, pity, 
 and sacrifice which flows from the truth. The 
 uniqueness of Jesus is here as Way, as Truth, 
 and as Life ; and this uniqueness in fact is pre- 
 sented for interpretation to the philosophic 
 mind. 
 
 From the personal sense of God and of the 
 soul as his child, made effectual and happy in 
 the presence of the great authentic Master, 
 the free mind ranges far and wide, seeking 
 intimations of the ultimate character of the 
 universe and the essential nature of man. 
 From the centre of light and peace it travels 
 to the far circumference where twilight and 
 night appear. The result is that the universe 
 
10 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 becomes the form of the Eternal. This formal 
 universe is two-fold, — cosmic and human, — 
 and the cosmos is the vast stage on which is 
 enacted the divine tragedy of human history. 
 
 This simple and self-sustaining conception of 
 religion relates itself necessarily to other human 
 interests. It embodies itself in an institution, 
 that is, it becomes a church ; it becomes a spe- 
 cial vocation, calling into existence the prophet 
 and his great ministry; it becomes a creed, 
 that is, it relates itself to the philosophy of 
 religion, and to the general philosophy of the 
 world. It relates itself to nature and raises the 
 question: In what way does nature become 
 the servant of religion, through portent, mir- 
 acle, signs, and wonders, or through a stead- 
 fast and inviolable order ? It is with this last 
 relation of religion that we are now concerned, 
 — its relation to nature and to nature under 
 the conception of miracle and under that of 
 law. 
 
 The reality of miracle has been under sus- 
 picion among educated minds in all ages. The 
 denial of the reality of miracle is nothing new 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 11 
 
 under the sun. For the Greek at his maturity 
 the universe was a cosmos, an invariable order, 
 the object of scientific study and confidence. 
 In the scientific activity of Aristotle we do 
 not meet with miracle. Portents may puzzle 
 and interrupt the thinker, but they in no way 
 disturb his confidence in the general order of 
 cause and effect. For Spinoza miracles have 
 no more worth than they possess for Hume. 
 These examples suggest an unbroken succes- 
 sion of thinkers from the earliest times to our 
 own day to whom miracle has been no part of 
 our historic world. If, therefore, the suspicion 
 of miracle that to-day works in so many minds 
 were nothing but a new version of an old 
 feeling, if it came from the same quarter from 
 which this feeling has come in every genera- 
 tion since men began to think, it would not 
 be of so much moment. For hitherto the 
 suspicion of the reality of miracle has come 
 largely from thinkers outside the pale of or- 
 ganized Christianity. Their conclusions were 
 part of their philosophy of the world ; as their 
 philosophy was foreign, so their conclusions 
 
12 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 respecting miracles were foreign, to the faith 
 of the Christian church. 
 
 The significance of the new question con- 
 cerning miracle is that it comes from pro- 
 foundly religious men, and from men living 
 and potent within the Christian church. It is 
 a new discussion that we face when the dis- 
 ciples of Jesus Christ in this twentieth century 
 ask, Is miracle essential to religion ? Is mira- 
 cle a genuine part of the authentic record of 
 any true religion? Is the essential truth of 
 Christianity dependent upon the reality of the 
 miracles embedded in the evangelical history ? 
 Is the message of Jesus Christ to man separa- 
 ble from the record of signs and wonders with 
 which it is accompanied ? Scientific men, in 
 so far as they are under the scientific spirit, 
 see no miracles, that is, they note no viola- 
 tions of the order of cause and effect ; they 
 expect to meet with no violations of this order ; 
 they believe in none. For them the miracles 
 of all the religions are the interesting pro- 
 ducts of human imagination ; they are a chap- 
 ter in the serious fiction of the world. May 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 13 
 
 a member of the Christian church, may a 
 preacher of the Christian gospel, in any de- 
 gree sympathize with the attitude of scientific 
 men toward miracle, and yet remain loyal to 
 his great Master ? These are questions work- 
 ing to-day in the religious mind wherever that 
 mind has obtained a modern education. These 
 questions finally reduce themselves to three : 
 Under what conception of the universe do edu- 
 cated freemen think to-day ? What is the lo- 
 gical value of this conception ? How far does 
 the principle of verification lead us in this dis- 
 cussion ? 
 
 HI 
 
 Our first question then is, Under what con- 
 ception of the universe do educated freemen 
 think in our day ? It is not enough to answer, 
 Under the conception of law. There has been 
 in the world from the earliest time the idea of 
 fate. It lives in some of the oldest of religions, 
 as in the Karma of Buddhism, transfigured, 
 indeed, by its ethical import. In Greek re- 
 ligion the Fates, Clotho, Lacheis, and Atropos, 
 were the daughters of Themis, the supreme 
 
14 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 Fate, upon which the throne of Zeus was 
 built. The idea of fate has been wrought into 
 a thousand poetic forms, from the Sophoclean 
 drama to the great poem of Lucretius, from 
 Omar Khayyam to the "City of Dreadful 
 Night." It has been the leading idea in many 
 imposing systems of thought in our modern 
 world ; it is the leading idea in the work of 
 Spinoza, Calvin, and Spencer. Indeed, it may 
 be said that whenever thinkers have come 
 under the exclusive sway of the idea of the 
 One, they have regarded the world of the many 
 as its fated expression. Both in religion and 
 in philosophy, from the earliest time, this has 
 taken place. When men become enamored of 
 the One, the Whole, the Eternal, they treat 
 without mercy the finite world of persons and 
 their acts, their character, their fortunes. 
 Here we have the conception of an invariable 
 order arrived at by speculation and then car- 
 ried down to the last detail of existence either 
 by the poetic imagination, as in the case of 
 Lucretius, or by the steps of deductive logic, 
 as in the ethics of Spinoza. In a sense Pro- 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 15 
 
 testants have been bred under this aspect of 
 the universe. Predestination is a governing 
 idea in Paul, and this apostle is the patron 
 thinker of the Reformers. Predestination in 
 Paul is turning out to be, under free study, a 
 doctrine of hope for the whole race ; still, as 
 set forth by John Calvin, his great disciple in 
 the sixteenth century, it had all the hardness 
 and horror of fate. For, according to Melanc- 
 thon, who was a good judge, Calvin and Zeno 
 teach the same doctrine. Life under this fatal- 
 istic idea of things has been a stern discipline. 
 It has prepared us to look any system of opin- 
 ion in the face without fear. The necessity 
 laid upon us was by no means benign ; it was 
 laid upon us by deductive thought and by the 
 poetic imagination. 
 
 The sense of order in nature was strong 
 among the science-loving Greeks. Their great- 
 est thinker united the capacity for the widest 
 generalizations with the keenest interest in the 
 concrete world of man. Aristotle speaks for 
 the higher mind of his race when he says : 
 " From the facts of the case, Nature does not 
 
16 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 appear to be incoherent like a badly planned 
 tragedy ! " l Here is the emergence of the scien- 
 tific conception of the invariable order of na- 
 ture. It may be in some respects very much 
 like the speculative conception, but it is unlike 
 it in two important particulars. It is arrived 
 at not by deduction, but by induction ; it is in 
 consequence a sure possession of the human 
 mind. Consider for a moment these two par- 
 ticulars. From exact experimental study in 
 chemistry, physics, botany, biology, physi- 
 ology, psychology, the natural, ethical, and 
 political history of man, the idea of order, 
 which is the presupposition of all science, has 
 risen up verified, attested. Here is a contrast 
 to the old method whereby the sense of fate 
 was fixed in human society. Predestination is 
 not proved by induction ; fate is a doctrine 
 that has not been established inductively. The 
 method of science is from facts and their ob- 
 served behavior to laws and their invariable 
 operation ; the method of predestination and 
 fatalism has been from the most general ideas 
 1 Meta. M. 4. 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 17 
 
 of the human mind down to the facts that are 
 crushed under those ideas, and that are not 
 allowed to tell their own story, Jesus noting 
 the fallen sparrow and thence traveling to the 
 Universal mind, and Newton seeing the fall- 
 ing apple and moving to the apprehension of 
 a universal law, illustrate in a supreme way, 
 in religion and in cosmic study, the scientific 
 spirit. The method is from fact to law, from 
 life to the Supreme life. If it be said that the 
 history of Jesus is the reverse of this method, 
 that in him we have a descent from the Eter- 
 nal to an individual life in the fields of time, 
 the reply is that this is indeed the history of 
 all reality, cosmic and human. Creation is the 
 movement of the Infinite forth from himself 
 into the particular worlds of space and time. 
 It is therefore true of all life, of all creation, 
 of all human beings, including Jesus Christ, 
 that the history of reality is from the eternal 
 to the temporal. But the history of the way 
 in which man traces the cosmos to its final 
 meaning, the history of the way in which man 
 moves to the knowledge of himself as of con- 
 
18 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 cern to the Infinite, is from fact to law, from 
 living soul to the living God. The descent of 
 Jesus Christ into time was availing only as it 
 became in his self-conscious soul an ascent 
 back to God. The fullness of his self-con- 
 sciousness at the Baptism would seem to mean 
 this. Over the path in which God had de- 
 scended into his soul he ascended into the 
 soul of God. If the method of creation be a 
 deduction from the Infinite life to the finite, 
 the method of sure human knowledge is the 
 reversal of that method. It is an induction 
 from fact to principle, from particular to uni- 
 versal, from man to God. 
 
 This contrast in method by which specula- 
 tion and scientific thought arrive at the idea 
 of a universal order issues in another contrast 
 of even greater moment. Of the old specula- 
 tive idea of fate it is possible to say that it is 
 a thing in the air; that it is in a region where 
 the human intellect is incompetent; that it is 
 a mere dream when set against the facts of 
 man's life. Professor Park used to recall to 
 his students the New England farmer who 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 19 
 
 got into a puzzle over his endeavor to outwit 
 the Infinite and to take that one of the two 
 roads home from the mill over which God had 
 not predestined him to go, and who took him- 
 self out of this puzzle by the wholesome con- 
 fession, " God decreed that I should be a 
 fool." The grip of an idea that rises up out 
 of fact cannot thus be undone. When an in- 
 variable order of sequence rises up out of the 
 exact research of mankind, when this order is 
 established by an induction as wide as that 
 covered by exact research, the conception at- 
 tained cannot be abandoned at will or over- 
 thrown by the agnostic sentiment. It abides 
 as part of the surest possessions of the human 
 mind. The idea of the fixed order of nature 
 is indeed an assumption ; it is an assumption 
 to which man is incapable of giving universal 
 and absolute verification; still, this assump- 
 tion receives verification and no contradiction 
 over the entire field of contemporary science. 
 So far it is as sure as anything human can 
 well be. 
 
 The conception of the fixedness of the natu- 
 
20 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 ral order is to-day dominant among freemen. 
 Where men think and think freely they are 
 inclined to rest in the universal and invariable 
 reign of law. In the heavens above, in the 
 earth beneath, and in the waters under the 
 earth cause and effect rule with absolute au- 
 thority. There are no effects without causes ; 
 like effects come from like causes. In the 
 realm of nature this order is constant and 
 inviolable. We can predict the coming of a 
 storm, but we cannot avert it. We can record 
 the advent of spring, but we can neither 
 hasten nor arrest that advent. This view of 
 the world which comes to us in a poetic way in 
 the order of sunrise and sunset, the succession 
 of day and night, the ebb and flow of the 
 tides, the procession of the seasons, the move- 
 ment of the planets, the coming and going of 
 the great familiar constellations, science has 
 extended through the entire domain of physi- 
 cal being, so far as that being is known. 
 
 Man's life as a physical being is under the 
 same law. Life comes from life ; man is born 
 of human parents. So fixed is this law that 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 21 
 
 any other mode of bringing human life into 
 the world does not even occur to a sane mind. 
 Further, cause and effect are seen in all physi- 
 cal disorders, in all normal waste and repair, 
 in the entire process of bodily life, and in 
 death. It is natural to be born, to grow, to 
 attain life's prime, to decrease in strength, to 
 fail and die. 
 
 The days of our years are threescore years and ten, 
 Or even by reason of strength fourscore years; 
 Yet is their pride but labor and sorrow ; 
 For it is soon gone, and we fly away. 
 
 What is this but the matchless poetic ex- 
 pression of the ageless and inviolable law that 
 reigns in our physical existence? We marvel 
 when Mr. Gladstone at the age of sixty-nine 
 conducts one of the greatest political cam- 
 paigns in the nineteenth century, dominating 
 the mind of the nation like a king ; we marvel 
 again when at the age of eighty-four he con- 
 tinues the efficient head of the British govern- 
 ment, but we do not expect him, on account 
 of these feats, to live forever. We are confi- 
 dent of the reverse. 
 
22 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 The mind and character of man are not ex- 
 empt from law. The mind is conditioned by 
 the general bodily health ; it is especially con- 
 ditioned by the brain. All this is common- 
 place, and the commonplace means the adjust- 
 ment of the habits of our thought to the reign 
 of law. We claim, indeed, the power of free 
 initiative of the will. We see in the depths 
 of the spirit genuine creative power, but the 
 boldest champion of the freedom of human 
 spirit must recognize that in the sphere of 
 character, "Whatsoever a man soweth, that 
 shall he also reap." Wherever science has 
 gone it has found that things come to pass in 
 a given way ; that they do not come to pass 
 in any other way. The scientific mind natu- 
 rally believes that if we knew all nature and 
 all history, we should behold all things coming 
 to pass in one way, and this one way invari- 
 able and inviolable. 
 
 This scientific view of the world is the ulti- 
 mate source of the discredit that has fallen 
 upon the miracles recorded in the Hebrew 
 and Christian Scriptures. Christian scholars 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 23 
 
 have never, in large numbers, at least in mod- 
 ern times, believed in the miracles recorded in 
 connection with other religions. They have 
 rejected these miracles on many grounds, but 
 chiefly because the order of the world is against 
 them. Within a generation of human life this 
 law of logic has been applied to the records 
 of our own faith over its entire field, and with 
 relentless vigor. Independent scholars, often 
 enough with little religion of any kind, and 
 frequently without discernible sympathy with 
 the Hebrew or the Christian religion, have 
 examined, in the scientific spirit, our Bible, 
 and at every step they have found the record 
 of miracles mythical or legendary, always in- 
 credible as fact. The point to be noted is that 
 these scholars go to their work of criticism 
 with a fixed conception of what can be and of 
 what cannot be. They believe that miracles do 
 not occur, that they never have occurred, that 
 they never will occur. They believe this in the 
 name of natural science ; they look, therefore, 
 from the first contact with them, upon all sto- 
 ries of the miraculous as incredible and impos- 
 
24 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 sible. In their hands, the fate of the miracu- 
 lous is a foregone conclusion ; the miraculous 
 goes as the landslide goes, it falls as the ava- 
 lanche falls ; in the order of nature it could not 
 be otherwise. 
 
 We see at once that this type of mind is 
 full of peril. We see at once that it begs the 
 question at issue. Judgment is set, and the 
 miraculous is ruled out of court. The ques- 
 tion is not discussed, it is assumed as settled. 
 A general phase of belief concerning nature, 
 resting indeed upon a wide induction of facts, 
 has been asserting itself for centuries. It has 
 been gaining ground ; it has won, or thinks it 
 has won, the day. Miracles have gone because 
 the fashion of the world's intellect is against 
 them. This fashion may be right, or it may 
 be wrong. Discussion alone can settle that 
 point, and for the present defense of the mi- 
 raculous is considered either an impertinence 
 or an amusement; it is further regarded as 
 the infallible sign of an uneducated intellect. 
 For this very reason the temper of the time is 
 unfortunate. 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 25 
 
 It is unfortunate for another reason. Hu- 
 man science is strictly contemporaneous. It 
 lives in verified conceptions ; and verification 
 is a process carried on by the living. Human 
 science is contemporaneous, and its field is 
 small at that. With all possible reverence for 
 the high method and the sure results of 
 science, one may doubt whether it is safe for 
 any man to decide beforehand what the events 
 of all history or any part of it must be, what 
 the possibilities and impossibilities are over 
 the entire domain of universal experience. 
 Laws of logic hold against men of faith ; they 
 hold also against men of science. If things 
 are believed that are more than doubtful, 
 things are denied where the denial cannot be 
 proved. There are ten thousand mysteries 
 above, beneath, and round about the clearest 
 and surest science. The fountains of being 
 are deep; many of them are so far past find- 
 ing out ; and a new face may be put upon an 
 ancient faith by some sudden disclosure of the 
 law of man's soul. There are more things in 
 heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our 
 
26 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 philosophy. And while it is true that one who 
 speaks in this way is but a voice crying in the 
 wilderness, it is right, if only on the princi- 
 ple that a persistent opposition, a Sanballat, 
 a Satan, is indispensable to all sure progress, 
 that the solitary voice should keep up the cry. 
 Intellectual integrity is the condition of the 
 integrity of knowledge ; and intellectual integ- 
 rity belongs, as matter of course, to no class 
 of thinkers. When the custom of thought is 
 all one way, there is safety only in the persist- 
 ent challenge of the custom. 
 
 IV 
 
 We ask, therefore, as our next question : 
 What is the logical value of the scientific con- 
 ception of nature ? And here the first thing 
 to be said is that antecedent to experience one 
 thing may as well be as another. The " Ara- 
 bian Nights " do not strike the minds of chil- 
 dren as impossible stories. Indeed, to such 
 minds they read like veritable history. The 
 magic feats of Aladdin's lamp meet with little 
 or no unbelief, because little or no authentic 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 27 
 
 experience is brought to the story. The im- 
 mature mind does not know what to expect; 
 one thing is therefore as credible as another, 
 provided it be told with equal vividness and 
 power ; a magical universe is as likely to be 
 the fact, to a vacant mind, as a universe 
 severe and steadfast in its ways of behavior. 
 If the cosmos be supposed to be the expres- 
 sion of mind, antecedent to experience, the 
 magical and the ordered cosmos do not indeed 
 stand upon the same level. Upon reflection 
 the cosmic mind is not so likely to be a wizard 
 as a logician, a lover of surprises as a lover of 
 order. The cosmic mind is likely to care for 
 something, and if so to observe certain rules 
 in guarding the interests of that something. 
 Order would seem to be essential to mind; to 
 the good mind it is without doubt essential. 
 If, therefore, the cosmic mind is a good mind, 
 it goes without saying that even antecedent 
 to experience order is more likely to be its 
 general method of expression. So much must 
 be said in qualification of the statement to 
 be made that before the determinations of 
 
28 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 experience order or disorder, law or magic, 
 method or madness, may be the fact. Experi- 
 ence comes in to help the mind in its expecta- 
 tions ; experience tells us what is, and upon 
 what is we infer what has been, we predict 
 what will be. We find that fire burns, that 
 water at a certain temperature becomes ice, 
 that in our latitude there are in the year an 
 equal number of days and nights of unequal 
 lengths, and from this experience we infer 
 that such has been the case always, we predict 
 that this order will remain to the end of time. 
 The uniformity of nature is an assumption 
 from partial experience for all experience 
 actual and possible. 
 
 The uniformity of nature is an assumption. 
 It is an assumption to which man is incapable 
 of giving complete verification. Verification, 
 it must be observed, is made by the living ; 
 when the verifications of preceding genera- 
 tions of men are taken, they are taken on au- 
 thority ; even when these verifications of men 
 in past ages are re-verified by the living, in 
 strict logic we are not able to say that former 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 29 
 
 generations were exact in their method and 
 result. Only the Infinite mind knows whether 
 or not the assumption of the uniformity of 
 nature is valid. The mind that would suffi- 
 ciently attest the idea of uniformity must 
 know absolutely the entire history of the cos- 
 mos in relation to man, must know, too, the 
 law that insures, for all time to come, an invio- 
 lable order. Scientific thinkers of eminence 
 recognize fully that the uniformity of nature 
 is an assumption to which man is incapable of 
 giving complete attestation. Dogmatic denial 
 of miracle on the ground of natural law can- 
 not, therefore, be justified by logic. No man 
 knows enough to be able to make good the 
 denial. No man knows enough to be warranted 
 in the statement that miracle has never oc- 
 curred in the history of man and the cosmos. 
 Therefore the dogmatic negative is excluded 
 from sure thinking and valid conclusions on 
 this subject. 
 
 Still it must be added that the uniformity 
 of nature is a reasonable assumption. It is rea- 
 sonable because ordinary experience justifies 
 
30 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 it, ordinary mortals find the ways of nature in- 
 variable and sure. We take a walk in the coun- 
 try and find essentially the same conditions 
 — a stable earth, air that may be breathed. 
 Mining, farming, navigation, all forms of in- 
 dustry depend upon order in nature, and they 
 find that order sure. The cultivation of the 
 farm is set in the great uniform method of 
 nature ; the heart of the earth opens its trea- 
 sure under the operation of law. The sea amid 
 all its wild changes serves the navigator with 
 a constant character. Ordinary experience is a 
 record of the uniform ways of the great world 
 in which we live, and upon these uniform 
 ways we build and rejoice. Science takes this 
 result of ordinary experience and verifies it by 
 observation and experiment over the entire 
 domain of exact knowledge ; so far as science 
 goes, it finds nature uniform in its behavior. 
 Since this conception of the uniformity of na- 
 ture is uncontradicted over the entire field of 
 experiment, both ordinary and scientific, it is 
 reasonable to believe that it is an uncontra- 
 dicted conception over the whole range of cos- 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 31 
 
 mic history in relation to man. This belief 
 about the uniformity of nature is reasonable, 
 but it is not certain. We are led by contem- 
 poraneous experience to believe in the invari- 
 able order of nature for all experience, but we 
 cannot prove that absolute, invariable order. 
 The antecedent improbability of miracle 
 reduces itself to the contest between general 
 experience and special experience. Quantity is 
 surely against miracle. Is the quality of expe- 
 rience likewise against miracle? Here men 
 will differ in their judgment. The testimony 
 of the eye-witness of the miracles recorded in 
 the Gospels will seem to some superior, to 
 other judges inferior, to the general testimony 
 of mankind. The persons who deem the testi- 
 mony of the apostles of Jesus superior to the 
 general verdict, or who hold that the testi- 
 mony is superior when taken in connection 
 with the character of the Prophet of whom it 
 bears witness, are usually men who believe in 
 the flexibility of nature. Usually they are per- 
 sons with a slight sense of natural law and a 
 high sense of the Supreme Being whose will is 
 
32 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 expressed in natural law. These persons allow 
 ideas to influence evidence; they hold that 
 nature may be moved by the will of God or 
 by the ambassador of God as the curtain is 
 swayed by the wind, that nature may be in- 
 clined this way or that as the sail is bent by 
 the breeze. Minds of this order are less in- 
 fluenced by the testimony of the New Testa- 
 ment record than by their own ideas. For them 
 the miraculous has an extreme fascination, a 
 weird and divine attraction. The miraculous 
 world is God's world ; he is the God of signs 
 and wonders ; religion itself is a portent, and 
 it is set in with portents, cosmic and psychic. 
 The essence of existence, the essence of his- 
 tory is surprise ; God himself is the supreme 
 surprise, and he is forever taking the world 
 by surprise. 
 
 To minds of a sober cast all this seems 
 painfully unreal. It represents not the work 
 of serious judgment, but the riot of an irre- 
 sponsible imagination. To minds possessed 
 with a profound sense of natural law, who 
 look upon natural law as the steady and sure 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 33 
 
 declaration of the will of God, the miraculous 
 is an intrusion if not an impertinence. It is to 
 them the beginning of confusion. It is the ini- 
 tial endeavor toward the transformation of the 
 sublime and fixed world through which God 
 covenants with men into the world of magic. 
 Therefore the testimony of the disciples of 
 Jesus to the miracles recorded in the Gospels 
 meets, in such minds, a rooted antagonism. 
 To them no testimony can prevail against an 
 order that living men have never known to be 
 violated. The result to which we are thus 
 brought is that, while the denial of miracles 
 cannot be logically sustained, the reality of 
 miracles is unlikely. Miracles are logical pos- 
 sibilities and natural improbabilities. 
 
 This brings me to the third question: 
 What help may we expect from the principle 
 of verification in the endeavor to ascertain the 
 truth of our historic Christianity? Here it 
 must be said that our historic faith divides 
 itself into two great departments, — the verifi- 
 
34 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 able and the un verifiable. This broad distinc- 
 tion between that in our faith which is verifi- 
 able and that which is not open to verification 
 will be generally admitted as sound. We do not 
 put in the same category the statement that Je- 
 sus at the wedding in Cana of Galilee turned 
 water into wine and his great words, " I am the 
 light of the world : he that f olloweth me shall 
 not walk in the darkness, but shall have the 
 light of life." 1 The statement about the turn- 
 ing of the water into wine we cannot verify ; if 
 we believe it, we do so on the authority of the 
 Fourth Gospel. The statement that Jesus is 
 the light of the world, and that whoever follows 
 him shall not walk in darkness, but shall have 
 the light of life, is open to verification. Experi- 
 ence alone can determine whether the statement 
 is or is not true. There can be, therefore, no dif- 
 ference of opinion concerning the validity of 
 the distinction between the verifiable and the 
 unverifiable in our Christian faith ; there will 
 be some difference of opinion concerning what 
 should be placed in the one category and what 
 
 1 John viii, 12. 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 35 
 
 should be placed in the other. It may not be 
 always easy to determine what is and what is 
 not open to verification. 
 
 It does not follow that what is unverifiable 
 is therefore untrue. All that follows is simply 
 this, that where a belief is not open to verifi- 
 cation we cannot hope to gain any measure of 
 certainty about its truth. For example, let us 
 take this statement from the Fourth Gospel : f 
 u Jesus therefore, being wearied with his jour- 
 ney, sat thus by the well. ,, It seems to me quite 
 impossible from this statement to know how 
 Jesus sat or where he sat. The statement is 
 too indefinite for definite and sure belief ; then 
 again if it had been definite, we could have 
 arrived at no certainty regarding it, because it 
 is inaccessible to sure tests. It may be said that 
 it is of no consequence how or where he sat, his 
 conversation with the woman at the well is the 
 essential thing. I agree to this, but I must add 
 that precisely the same ground may be taken 
 with regard to all in the life of Jesus and all in 
 our historic faith that is not subject to verifica- 
 
 1 John iv, 6. 
 
36 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 tion. Still I repeat that because a belief is un- 
 verifiable it does not follow that it is untrue ; 
 it only follows that we cannot be sure about it. 
 It is not necessary that belief should be 
 limited to the verifiable. Luther thought that 
 Apollos wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews, and 
 others have entertained the same opinion. 
 There is no reason why a scholar should not 
 entertain this opinion if he sees fit. Still, if he 
 is a sane scholar, we expect him to admit that 
 his belief is among the things that cannot be 
 verified, that Origen is on safe ground when 
 he affirms that God alone knows who wrote 
 the Epistle in question. This line of reasoning 
 holds over the entire field of Biblical history. 
 The reconstruction of the history of Israel in 
 modern scholarship has so much to say for 
 itself that we accept it as probably true. It 
 is more likely to be true than the traditional 
 view ; and where the exact state of the case 
 can never be surely known, probabilities count. 
 In historical investigation probability is the 
 guide to life; and yet the result attained is 
 a belief founded indeed upon evidence, but 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 37 
 
 unverifiable in the nature of the case. It is 
 unlikely that Isaiah of Jerusalem wrote the 
 exilic prophecy contained in chapters forty to 
 sixty-six inclusive. It is far more likely that 
 another prophet wrote the larger part of these 
 prophetic words ; but again certainty is out 
 of the question. When it comes to Cheyne's 
 method of cutting up Isaiah into a pack of 
 cards, and coloring the cards according to the 
 periods in which they originated, scholarship 
 has foresworn science and taken up the trick 
 of the juggler. I admit that the juggler has 
 his rights so long as he admits the purely sub- 
 jective value of his feats. 
 
 The fact is, among all men, belief extends 
 far into the region of the unverifiable. No- 
 thing can be said against this extension even 
 in its wildest form so long as it is clearly un- 
 derstood to be what it is, a guess, a divination 
 with the world for or against it. Still less 
 should we object when the scholar works in 
 this vast region of the strictly unverifiable by 
 rigorous scientific method. Let him gather all 
 available facts ; let him sift and test his facts 
 
38 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 by every known scientific device ; let him rea- 
 son from them in logical order, and let him 
 state his conclusion with all the strength al- 
 lowed by the probabilities of the case, and we 
 shall thank him. He has not given us certainty 
 because in the nature of the case that is im- 
 possible. He has given us a likely, a probable, 
 and a fruitful result, and we are thankful for 
 so much. 
 
 While it does not follow that the unverifi- 
 able is untrue, or that belief should be limited 
 to the verifiable, it is clear that the un verifi- 
 able can never remain an essential part of a 
 reasonable faith. Therefore it is unreasonable 
 when men impose upon one another in one 
 un distinguishable mass both that which is 
 open to verification and that which is not. 
 Such a crude compound is the traditional or- 
 thodoxy of the world. What a man holds by 
 the dead strength of mere belief is as far as 
 the east is from the west from that which he 
 holds as verified in the life of his spirit. We 
 conclude, therefore, that all in the life of Je- 
 sus and his apostles that is open to verification 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 39 
 
 to-day stands in an entirely different category 
 from all in his career and in that of his apostles 
 which cannot be tested here and now in the 
 courses of experience. I contend that a rea- 
 sonable faith will note this distinction and 
 build upon it. I contend that a reasonable 
 faith will put small stress upon the unverifi- 
 able, and that it will stake its life upon the 
 verifiable and sure. 
 
 History has two sides, one factual, the other 
 ideal. In regard to these two sides of history 
 we ask two distinct and different questions. In 
 regard to facts we ask, Did they occur? In 
 regard to ideas we ask, Are they true? The 
 alleged facts of history are of two kinds 
 — natural and miraculous. Even where the 
 alleged facts are natural, scholars are often 
 unable to arrive at an affirmative conclusion 
 respecting them. Whether the migration of 
 Abraham is fact or legend, whether Abraham, 
 Isaac, and Jacob are historical or mythical 
 persons, are questions that many scholars find 
 themselves unable to answer. The number of 
 these alleged facts concerning which no de- 
 
40 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 cisive probability may be had that they are 
 real, is very great. History is but a poor rem- 
 nant of a vanished world-life. This remnant 
 divides itself into the more or less likely or 
 unlikely. Part even of this remnant must be 
 ruled out as probably unauthentic. Part is re- 
 tained whose authenticity is more or less open 
 to question. Still another part is accepted on 
 the ground of a strong probability in its favor; 
 the most authentic of mere historical facts 
 rests on nothing surer than high probability. 
 As examples, take the conquest of Palestine 
 under Joshua, the Peloponnesian war, the mili- 
 tary career of Hannibal, the strictly external 
 history of Jesus, the missionary journeys of 
 Paul. The alleged facts here are of four or- 
 ders : first incredible, second credible but 
 questionable, third probable, fourth of high 
 probability. 
 
 If this is the state of the case, why are we 
 so sure that Napoleon, Washington, Crom- 
 well, William of Orange, Frederick the Great, 
 Charlemagne, Caesar, and Pericles lived ? Be- 
 cause the facts were conjoined with ideas, 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 41 
 
 modified life, continued to do so for long pe- 
 riods of time, and because without these per- 
 sons no rational account can be given of the 
 civilization of their respective peoples. When 
 it comes to Socrates and to Paul, probability 
 becomes moral certainty. No sane mind ques- 
 tions the traditional view. Without the his- 
 toric Socrates, Greek philosophy is an enigma ; 
 without the historic Paul, imperial Christian- 
 ity is inexplicable. Facts conjoined with ideas 
 acquired such momentum in the life of the 
 world that their rejection becomes a mark of 
 insanity. So we judge the historic Jesus. On 
 the basis of mere historical fact he is open to 
 the question by which every alleged fact is 
 confronted. In him fact and idea unite and 
 change the course of the world's life, and to 
 doubt his historical reality is to-day simply in- 
 dication of a pathological state of mind. Still 
 it must be repeated that mere fact, even when 
 it is natural fact, can attest itself by nothing 
 stronger than probability. 
 
 When the alleged facts are miraculous, the 
 question, Did they occur? is a much harder 
 
42 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 one. Other questions come in, such as For 
 what end did thej take place ? By whom are 
 they attested ? Is the attestation that of an 
 eye-witness or tradition? How far were the 
 witnesses and reporters influenced by the gen- 
 eral belief in the miraculous? How does this ex- 
 ceptional and limited human experience stand 
 against the solemn general experience of man- 
 kind ? Such questions set before one the im- 
 possibility of attaining anything like certainty 
 in regard to miracle at its best, — miracle in 
 the evangelical record. It must therefore be 
 placed in the category of the unverifiable. It 
 is not on that account necessarily untrue, but 
 its truth is not open to attestation. 
 
 When we come to ideas, to the great ideas 
 of the Christian faith, the case is different. 
 We ask, Are they true ? But we do not go 
 two thousand years into history in order to 
 begin the answer to that question. These ideas 
 are both historic and contemporaneous. They 
 are historic, and yet they are independent of 
 history. They offer themselves to-day, as if it 
 were the first flush in the dawning morning 
 
THE ISSUE DEFINED 43 
 
 of time, to the lives of men to be tested there. 
 Our God is still a present help in time of 
 need ; our Lord is the living Lord moving in 
 the hearts of living men. The kingdom of 
 love is verified only in part, but it looms be- 
 fore men, inspiring them in the great process 
 of verification. Eternal life is human exist- 
 ence raised to excellence, and because of that 
 excellence full of the hope of immortality. 
 
 Even in the sphere of ideas, we must recall 
 Kant's distinction, while we decline to be 
 bound by his use of it. Certain ideas are in- 
 capable of verification because they are in a 
 region beyond all possible human experience. 
 How did God spend the eternity before the 
 creation of the cosmos and the advent of man? 
 What is the secret history of the Eternal mind? 
 How do the spirits of just men made perfect 
 live? How does the purely spiritual world 
 subsist? What becomes of this world of sense 
 for the disembodied spirit? These questions 
 are, for human beings, unanswerable. They 
 are unanswerable because they are in a region 
 in which, while we remain men, we can have 
 
44 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 no experience whatever. They relate to things 
 beyond all possible human experience, and one 
 judgment about them is as good as another, 
 because all judgments are worthless. We 
 may dream our dream upon such things, and 
 so long as we do not mistake our dream for a 
 verified idea, it will do us no harm and may do 
 us good. 
 
 Much in the theological tradition of the 
 Christian faith is unverifiable because as idea 
 it lies outside the sphere of all possible human 
 experience. That in Christian faith which is 
 sure and mighty is the verifiable. We may test 
 our Christian ideas of God, the grace of God, 
 the efficacy of prayer, the possible sover- 
 eignty of the spirit in man over the flesh, 
 the brotherhood of man, the kingdom of love, 
 the worth of Jesus Christ for the moral ideal- 
 ist of to-day. Out of this vast experimental 
 process Christianity is in each generation born 
 anew ; and it is this contemporaneous, attested, 
 sure Christianity to which belongs the empire 
 of the world. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 BELIEF IN GOD AND MIRACLE 
 
 MORE and more the view prevails among 
 educated people that miracles are no 
 part of genuine history. The opinion prevails 
 that at this point the Christian religion does 
 not differ from other religions. The miracu- 
 lous element, so it is more and more widely 
 held, is the constant and spurious accompani- 
 ment, in ancient times, of every great religious 
 movement. To-day, this element does not count; 
 it is widely rejected; it is still more widely 
 disregarded. Face to face with the movement 
 which threatens to sweep the miraculous from 
 the reasonable beliefs of mankind, it is perti- 
 nent to ask, How much will thus be lost to 
 faith ? How much will survive the storm and 
 abide? 
 
 If the mechanism of cause and effect is 
 
46 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 made to cover the entire field of human expe- 
 rience, if all human things and thoughts are 
 under the reign of fixed law, is there room for 
 spirit in the cosmos or in man ? The sovereign 
 interest of human life centres in the existence 
 and character of God. If there is no God, there 
 can be, in the full meaning of the word, no re- 
 ligion. If God exists, but exists without regard 
 to man, again religion, in the full and happy 
 sense of the term, is an impossibility. The be- 
 ing and character of God are thus the sovereign 
 object and interest of faith; and the being 
 and character of God are bound up with the 
 ways in which he reveals that being and char- 
 acter. Therefore we may say that God, and 
 God in the Christian vision of his attitude 
 toward man, are the citadel of our faith. What- 
 ever threatens these, threatens our religion ; 
 whatever leaves these entire and untroubled, 
 means little or nothing to enlightened men in 
 its otherwise destructive course. Our discus- 
 sion revolves about these three fundamental 
 questions : In what way is belief in God af- 
 fected by the denial of miracle ? How does it 
 
BELIEF IN GOD AND MIRACLE 47 
 
 fare with Jesus Christ if the miraculous in the 
 evangelical record is regarded as unreal ? Is 
 the Christian life harassed or injured seriously 
 by disregard for miracle? These questions 
 will be discussed in the order stated, and I 
 begin with the consideration of the relation of 
 belief in God to miracle. 
 
 H 
 
 God is the life and light and consolation of 
 the world, and it is clear that his existence is 
 independent of miracle. He is the indispens- 
 able antecedent of all miracle and of all mech- 
 anism. The miraculous means the contradic- 
 tion of the customary order of the world, as 
 when the axe is said to come from the bed 
 of the Jordan to its surface at the call of the 
 prophet. Mechanism means the customary 
 order of the world regarded as invariable and 
 inviolable, as in the statement, " Whatsoever 
 a man soweth, that shall he also reap" ; wheat 
 comes from wheat, barley from barley, tares 
 from tares. The miraculous is the extraordi- 
 nary and the mechanical the ordinary way of 
 
48 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 bringing things to pass. Both refer the mind 
 to an indispensable antecedent. The ante- 
 cedent of all life, of all change, of the entire 
 world in space and time is the Eternal God. 
 No matter what the mode of their production 
 may be, all events, all results, all finite beings 
 refer themselves to the one sovereign source : 
 " For every house is build ed by some one ; 
 but he that built all things is God." 
 
 If, therefore, there is any truth in miracle, it 
 is as the witness of God ; if there is any mean- 
 ing in mechanism, it is as the revelation of 
 his will. The Nile divides into two rivers at 
 the Delta, but whichever stream one takes, it 
 brings him to the same sea. If we choose to 
 regard the operation of the cosmos as dividing 
 into two methods, one the miraculous and the 
 other the mechanical, it must be added that 
 both conduct to the same goal ; the terminus 
 of all things is God. 
 
 If there is no such thing as miracle, it does 
 not follow that there is no such being as God. 
 God is not thus dependent upon miracle for 
 the declaration of his will. The extremest 
 
BELIEF IN GOD AND MIRACLE 49 
 
 champion of the miraculous would not claim 
 that if miracle is untrue, God is unreal. The 
 fading of miracle, therefore, from the field 
 of faith does not mean the vanishing of God 
 from the life of the world. 
 
 One might with some reason advance this 
 position of indifference. One might contend 
 that the cosmos, operated as an order invari- 
 able and inviolable, is the better witness for 
 God. Reasonable men do not work by hap- 
 hazard, they work by plan ; the expression of 
 mind in any sphere of human life is the ex- 
 pression of a plan; the highest work of art 
 means the completest expression of the best 
 design. If the physical organism of man is an 
 expression of indwelling mind, the expression 
 is completer and more impressive in proportion 
 to the invariable order disclosed. If the cos- 
 mos is the embodiment and expression of cos- 
 mic mind, the invariable order of the cosmos 
 would seem to be the higher evidence of the 
 reasonableness of the impelling mind. We 
 should be put to utter confusion if we could 
 not count upon the ebb and flow of the tide, 
 
50 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 the succession of day and night, the invariable 
 sequences of the seasons, the inviolable opera- 
 tion of cause and effect. In such a universe we 
 should never know what to expect. We should 
 be unable to adjust ourselves to the crazy 
 world. There could be no science in such a 
 world ; for the foundation of science is order. 
 There could be no prevision in life; for pre- 
 vision depends upon the uniform movement 
 in nature. Such a cosmos would be like an in- 
 sane asylum ; instead of one sovereign, steady, 
 trustworthy mind, we should have, at best or 
 at worst as one chooses to name it, a collec- 
 tion of conflicting minds, bound together by 
 the tie of madness. A miraculous universe, in 
 the sense of a universe uncontrolled by law, 
 would be, for a reasonable man aiming at true 
 vision and right behavior, the supreme calam- 
 ity. He would be at a loss to know what to 
 think or what to do ; indeed, in such a uni- 
 verse there could be neither truth nor right. 
 Eternal surprise would then seem to be the 
 essence of existence, and eternal suspense the 
 sorrow of man. Pandora's box open, with hope 
 
BELIEF IN GOD AND MIRACLE 61 
 
 gone, and infinite plagues afflicting men, 
 would be the only proper symbol for such a 
 chaos of things and beings. 
 
 We must not forget that the ancient word 
 cosmos, and the modern word universe, have 
 come to us through the observed order of ex- 
 istence. Facts have been unified in laws ; laws 
 of inferior range have been taken up into 
 those of higher range ; all things and all be- 
 ings have been regarded as forming one whole 
 because of the omnipresence of order; and 
 the universe has found its being and home in 
 the will of God. Existences as ordered, as an- 
 swerable to law, as forming one sublime whole, 
 as gathered into the boundless universe which 
 rests in the sovereign intelligent Will, become 
 the living, harmonious witnesses for him whose 
 mind constitutes them, and whose will supplies 
 them power. The story of the rainbow that 
 appeared to Noah after the flood is the Bib- 
 lical illustration of the relief that man finds 
 in escape from an uncertain world into one 
 sane and sure. The world of the flood is the 
 world of miracle ; and even to the surviving 
 
52 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 Patriarch and his family it was not a wholly 
 satisfactory place. The bow in the heavens 
 was God's covenant with Noah, that hereafter 
 order should prevail, that nature should no 
 more run wild, that seed-time and harvest, 
 summer and winter, should no more fail. As 
 often as man beheld that form of resplendent 
 loveliness spanning the heavens, — the triumph 
 of light in darkness and in tempest, — he was 
 to think of God's covenant with man in the 
 order of the world. That order, so universal, 
 so inviolable, so truly the condition of all 
 science and all reasonable conduct, so sure as 
 the platform of life, and so sublime as the 
 field of intellectual vision, deserves to be called 
 God's covenant with man. If we call it mech- 
 anism, we need not deny that it is pervaded 
 with mind; if we say that existence is a wheel, 
 we may assert that in the wheel is spirit. 
 Every wheel is dead until the power of move- 
 ment is given it from some living thing. The 
 wheels receive their power from the horse, the 
 horse is subject to the reins, the reins are in 
 the hands of a man, and therefore in the 
 
BELIEF IN GOD AND MIRACLE 53 
 
 wheels of his machine the spirit of the man 
 lives. That is the issue of a true conception of 
 mechanism. The universe of things is a vast 
 wheel. To whatever powers in the way of in- 
 termediate causes it is fastened, the final source 
 of movement is the Supreme Mind. If we fig- 
 ure the universe in its mechanical character 
 as an infinite sun-chariot, if we look to the 
 glorious steeds for power to turn the flaming 
 wheels, we must not pause there : we must 
 carry our vision onward through bit and rein 
 to the god who drives. A mechanical universe 
 thus turns out to be a divine universe ; a me- 
 chanical universe becomes an auroral universe, 
 with the Eternal Spirit in the wheels. 
 
 in 
 
 Let us look into the Bible and note what 
 may be learned there touching the relation of 
 belief in God and miracle. Limiting our view 
 in the first place to the Old Testament, we 
 shall, I think, be surprised to find how largely 
 independent of miracle is the consciousness 
 of God enshrined there. In the great poem of 
 
54 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 creation with which Genesis opens, there is 
 no miracle till we come to the making of man ; 
 all is order, consecutive order, from the prim- 
 itive darkness brooded by the Eternal Spirit 
 to the fully developed cosmos. Man is the 
 expression of a creative act, but his life is 
 normal after he arrives, and fits into a normal 
 world. The exquisite biographies in the Book 
 of Genesis were doubtless reduced to their 
 present form at a late period. The migration 
 of Abraham, the spiritual experiences of Jacob, 
 and the Divine favor that rested upon Joseph 
 are conceived, one might almost say, in the 
 modern spirit. In the Exodus we come upon 
 a field of miracles; yet even here it is diffi- 
 cult to say how much is meant to be taken as 
 history and how much as poetry. The Exodus 
 reads like an epic poem, the epic of the deliv- 
 erance of Israel from Egyptian bondage, and 
 their fortunes on the way to the land of prom- 
 ise. The vision of God attributed to Moses is 
 indeed here and there accompanied by signs 
 and wonders; but, again, one is never sure 
 that these are not the poetry into which inef- 
 
BELIEF IN GOD AND MIRACLE 55 
 
 fable experience gathered itself. It is clear 
 tbat the vision is separable from the miracle ; 
 for to him for whom all these stories of manna 
 and quails, dividing of the Red Sea, pillars 
 of cloud by day and pillars of fire by night, 
 are myths, legends, or symbols, the vision of 
 God abides. An ineffable experience shines 
 through all these stories, and survives in its 
 own strength when they are no longer credible. 
 When we come to the wisdom-literature of 
 Israel, we hear nothing of miracle. In Job 
 there is no miracle, if we except the epilogue ; 
 here there is nothing but the sublime reflection 
 of universal human experience in God's world. 
 In Proverbs and in Ecclesiastes there is no 
 miracle ; here again there is nothing but the 
 wisdom which man wins by work and sorrow. 
 We take the Book of Ruth as a work of ima- 
 gination founded upon fact ; we find it written 
 with deep and touching fidelity to the order 
 of life and death as we know that order. In 
 the story of Esther the same general remark 
 may be made: we see in the ancient forms and 
 incidents of the story our own ordered world* 
 
66 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 For the conception of one sovereign eternal 
 mind as the ground and ruler of the universe, 
 we are indebted to the Hebrew prophets. The 
 universe as a moral organism inhabited by the 
 moral Deity is the great bequest of Hebrew 
 seers. This idea is brought out by Amos, 
 Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the great pro- 
 phet of the Exile. It is hardly true to their 
 burning consciousness of God to call it an idea. 
 For these men God is eternal reality. In their 
 thoughts and feelings and lives he is the su- 
 preme presence and certainty. In the ancient 
 world there is nothing so impressive as the 
 triumphant consciousness of God which these 
 men bring into the life of their time. What 
 are miracles compared with this, — the tes- 
 timony of external wonders to this inward 
 divine wonder? As well might one put the 
 staging on an equality with the cathedral. 
 Take the staging down and put it away ; the 
 great building stands in its own right. Even 
 if true, miracles are external and mean, when 
 set in the presence of the blazing conscious- 
 ness of God in which these great souls live 
 
BELIEF IN GOD AND MIRACLE 57 
 
 and work. The origin of the whole higher 
 character and service of Isaiah is in his vision : 
 "In the year that king Uzziah died I saw 
 the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted 
 up, and his train filled the temple. Above him 
 stood the seraphim : each one had six wings ; 
 with twain he covered his face, and with twain 
 he covered his feet, and with twain he did 
 fly. And one cried unto another, and said, 
 Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts : the 
 whole earth is full of his glory." ' What is 
 this but the transcendent form of that which 
 comes to every soul that would find and ful- 
 fill the end of existence ? What is this but the 
 splendid poetic utterance of a man who has 
 seen God in the order of the world and above 
 and beyond it? What is this but a spiritual 
 revelation going forth in its native might, 
 working and resting in its own high inde- 
 pendence ? 
 
 Jeremiah is another impressive witness to 
 this immediateness and independence of the 
 things of the spirit. There came to him a call 
 
 Isaiah vi, 1-3. 
 
58 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 from God ; it rang in great tones through his 
 being; it overcame his weakness, his hesita- 
 tion, his despair. It filled him with awe, 
 ennobled him with a sense of responsibility, 
 turned him, timid as a child, into an heroic 
 witness for the kingdom of God. It left him 
 with no room to doubt God, and with no need 
 for the support of miracle. Indeed, this prophet 
 stands for the revelation that has been con- 
 fessed to be the inward and spiritual in a new 
 and prof ounder sense. "Behold, the days come, 
 saith the Lord, that I will make a new cove- 
 nant with the house of Israel, and with the 
 house of Judah : not according to the cove- 
 nant that I made with their fathers in the day 
 that I took them by the hand to bring them out 
 of the land of Egypt. . . . But this is the cove- 
 nant that I will make with the house of Israel 
 after those days, saith the Lord ; I will put my 
 law in their inward parts, and in their heart will 
 I write it ; and I will be their God, and they 
 shall be my people : and they shall teach no 
 more every man his neighbor, and every man 
 his brother, saying, Know the Lord : for they 
 
BELIEF IN GOD AND MIRACLE 59 
 
 shall all know me, from the least of them unto 
 the greatest of them, saith the Lord : for I 
 will forgive their iniquity, and their sin will 
 I remember no more." * These great words are 
 the herald of the gospel of Christ ; they lay 
 open to the heart the eternal nature of religion ; 
 they show it to be a vital and righteous life 
 in the full communion of the soul with God. 
 They show it to be wholly independent of mir- 
 acle, traveling in the greatness of its strength, 
 and mighty for the spirit and the society in 
 whom it truly lives. 
 
 If we look at Ezekiel, we find him with vi- 
 sions of God, among the captives, by the river 
 Chebar. The word of God was spoken to his 
 spirit; it became his burden, his message to 
 his people. Again the prophet is the man of 
 God, the seer with an original and vital vision 
 of the Eternal for his own people and time ; 
 and his address is to the souls of men in the 
 name and grace of the Infinite soul. 
 
 The prophet Amos is another great repre- 
 sentative of spiritual religion. Society in his 
 
 1 Jeremiah xxxi, 31-34. 
 
60 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 time was a wild welter of sin and shame; yet 
 in the tides of that terrible social life Amos 
 beheld and announced God. He saw that in 
 the moral retribution in society, in the courses 
 of retributive justice, the eternal conscience 
 comes to a tremendous apocalypse. Carlyle 
 said that his study of the French Revolution 
 convinced him of the presence of God in the 
 affairs of men and nations; from that lurid 
 drama he learned that no sinner and no society 
 of sinners shall go unpunished, that an eter- 
 nal nemesis waits upon injustice and inhuman- 
 ity, and that up from the wild whirlpools of 
 woe and death comes the vindication of the 
 moral order of the world. In the same spirit, 
 Amos, looking upon the black iniquities of his 
 time, discovers the avenging presence of the 
 Infinite justice : " Though they dig into hell, 
 thence shall mine hand take them ; and though 
 they climb up to heaven, thence will I bring 
 them down. And though they hide themselves 
 in the top of Carmel, I will search and take 
 them out thence; and though they be hid 
 from my sight in the bottom of the sea, thence 
 
BELIEF IN GOD AND MIRACLE 61 
 
 will I command the serpent, and tie shall bite 
 them." 1 
 
 On the other hand, we have in Hosea a rev- 
 elation of God through the merciful tides in 
 the human heart. Here is a unique book em- 
 bodying a unique and a gracious vision. There 
 are in society and in history not only courses 
 of retributive justice, but also tides of eternal 
 compassion and forgiveness. The moral order 
 is in the hands of the Infinite Father of men, 
 and the stern discipline through which the 
 sinful soul and nation are made to pass is all 
 in the interest of an ultimate repentance, for- 
 giveness, and redemption. Here again the char- 
 acter of God is read not out of miracle, but 
 out of the heart of the moral world in man. 
 
 In the second Isaiah this vision of God in 
 the courses of national woe and redemption is 
 wrought out with a richness of insight and 
 with a majesty of eloquence to which I think 
 there are few parallels in the literature of the 
 race. u Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, 
 saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to 
 
 1 Amos ix, 2, 3. 
 
62 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare 
 is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned ; 
 that she hath received of the Lord's hand 
 double for all her sins." ' This majestic call 
 from the heights of God's love to the depths 
 of national sin and despair is repeated on into 
 the final words of the great message. National 
 religion has become a religion of life, a religion 
 of the living God; and his prophet looks for 
 him, not in signs and wonders, but in the 
 whole body of individual and social experience. 
 Every force in life, every phase in human ex- 
 perience, now has found a tongue; and from 
 the heights of man's soul in vicarious suffering 
 and service there goes up the response to the 
 suffering and vicarious love of God. The fifty- 
 third chapter of Isaiah gives us at his best the 
 individual servant of Jehovah and the national 
 servant of Jehovah ; it also records at its high- 
 est in the literature of the Old Testament the 
 vision of the God and Kedeemer of men. To 
 introduce the idea of miracle here would bring 
 not light, but confusion ; it would be to bring 
 
 1 Isaiah xl, 1, 2. 
 
BELIEF IN GOD AND MIRACLE 63 
 
 the mature spirit from the clear and sure con- 
 sciousness of God gained in the fiery courses 
 of experience, back to the nursery with its 
 toys, symbols, and plays. The clear and earnest 
 intellect protests, in the name of religion, 
 against that return and reduction. 
 
 What shall we say of the Psalms, the in- 
 comparable Psalms? They are incomparable as 
 poetry, because they are the unapproachable 
 lyric expression of the spiritual life of great 
 souls. The life presented in these songs is the 
 life in God: — 
 
 Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place 
 In all generations. 
 
 Before the mountains were brought forth, 
 Or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, 
 Even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art 
 God. 
 
 That faith is born not of miracle, but of life 
 and vision. I might go on to recall these high 
 words : — 
 
 The Lord is my light and my salvation. 
 God is our refuge and strength. 
 
64 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 For thy lovingkindness is better than life. 
 
 For thou hast been my help, 
 
 And in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice. 
 
 The greater Psalms are woven out of the 
 deepest and sweetest experiences, and the 
 blazing design in the fabric is the image of 
 God. Here miracle is not denied; it is left 
 at an infinite depth below this elevation of 
 the soul in God. The pain of life, its burden, 
 disappointment, defeat, loss, and sorrow, its 
 whole dark tragedy, is lifted into the being of 
 God and his beauty is made the soul of it all. 
 Nothing outside the words of Jesus can match 
 the spiritual depth of these Psalms, their fidel- 
 ity to the profoundest sorrow and the loftiest 
 joy, their accents of sweet assurance of God, 
 and their sense of him as life's last refuge and 
 hope. When, therefore, we are troubled over 
 the modern disregard of miracle, let us recall 
 the fact that the greatest things in the Hebrew 
 Scriptures are in sublime isolation from mira- 
 cle. Listen again to the prophetic call from 
 the testimony without to the witness within: 
 
BELIEF IN GOD AND MIRACLE 65 
 
 " The sun shall be no more thy light by day ; 
 neither for brightness shall the moon give light 
 unto thee: but the Lord shall be unto thee 
 an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory." 
 
 IV 
 
 So much I have said in general about the 
 relative independence of miracle of the faith 
 in God in the Old Testament. I now wish to 
 show in detail how the vision of God is held 
 both in the Old and New Testaments. As a 
 preliminary remark, in accordance with the 
 whole higher spirit of the Bible, it may be 
 said that there are two affronts to the mind of 
 man : first, to affirm that God cannot be known ; 
 second, to affirm that he can be known directly. 
 The first affirmation confines vision to the 
 temporal ; the second gives the vision of the 
 Eternal apart from the temporal. Both posi- 
 tions are not in accord with the fact. We are 
 not confined to the temporal, and we cannot 
 see God beyond the temporal. We know God 
 in and through the temporal, and in and 
 through the character which the temporal is 
 
66 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 made to bear. There is a vision of God, but 
 the vision is indirect. 
 
 The Biblical consciousness of God may be 
 reduced to four forms. There is the conscious- 
 ness of God expressed in the words : " I have 
 seen God face to face, and my life is pre- 
 served." Taking this statement as it stands, 
 what does it mean? It conceives God in bod- 
 ily form, it looks upon the face of God as we 
 look upon the face of man, it takes the face 
 of God as the symbol of the divine soul as 
 we take the face of man as the symbol of the 
 human soul ; and it reads the supreme mind in 
 the supreme face as we read character in the 
 countenance of a friend. The vision of God is 
 indirect ; it is intense ; it is confident ; it is vic- 
 torious ; but it is through an intervening face. 
 
 Paul says in his great lyric on love : " For 
 now we see in a mirror, darkly." The mirror 
 of which he writes is the bronze mirror of 
 his time. It might be dull, or it might be bur- 
 nished ; it might be in a poor or in an excellent 
 condition ; it might be susceptible of indefi- 
 nite improvement as a mirror. Still, it could 
 
BELIEF IN GOD AND MIRACLE 67 
 
 be nothing more than a mirror ; it could give 
 only the image, the reflection of the object. 
 Here is Paul's consciousness of God laid open 
 to us. Whether it referred itself to Christ or 
 to the wondrous changes wrought in his own 
 character, it was a consciousness of God as 
 reflected in his Lord or in his own soul. The 
 vision was again indirect ; it was given in an 
 order of life, the Lord's, his own, the world's. 
 
 In the Fourth Gospel we are told that no 
 man hath seen God at any time; the only 
 begotten Son who is in the bosom of the 
 Father, he hath declared him. Here the vision 
 of Jesus becomes the vision of God. Here is 
 a thinker, a sympathizer, a sufferer, a doer, a 
 victor, in whom as in a living mirror we may 
 behold the character of God as Eternal thinker, 
 lover, doer, and victor. The vision of Jesus is 
 the vision of God through the Divine man. 
 
 Once more we learn, and this time from the 
 lips of Jesus, that the pure in heart shall see 
 God. Tested by experience, this must mean 
 that God becomes visible to the pure mind in 
 the intention of man's life, in its fidelity, its 
 
68 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 happiness and hope. Just as in the spirit level 
 of the mason when it finds a level wall the eye 
 looks back into his, so the plan of the soul, 
 the plan of human life, becomes strikingly 
 visible when the mind is a pure, a disinterested 
 mind ; and in the plan of our humanity there 
 is the presentation of God. When this plan is 
 operated in a righteous life, in a fellowship of 
 righteous lives, in the new creation of right- 
 eous lives of which Paul speaks, the presen- 
 tation of God is great and impressive. There 
 is the vision of God, but again it is through 
 an order of the human spirit, an order made 
 active and potent in life. 
 
 This Biblical idea of the vision of God in the 
 order and life of man is variously and richly 
 set forth. In one Psalm we read, " In Judah 
 is God known " ; in another, " God is known 
 in her palaces " ; ' in the first, God is reflected 
 in the life of his people ; in the second, he is 
 seen in their prosperity and splendor. Again, 
 we read that this poor man cried unto the Lord, 
 and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of 
 
 1 Psalm lxxvi, 1 ; xlviii, 3. 
 
BELIEF IN GOD AND MIRACLE 69 
 
 all his troubles. Here the exigencies of exist- 
 ence covered with prayer lead to the vision 
 of God in the terrible trial. We are elsewhere 
 admonished to grow in grace and in the 
 knowledge of God; here God is known as 
 the Maker of the spiritual life. " Return to 
 thy rest, my soul/' is another cry from the 
 depths. God is known as man's refuge and 
 rest in a wild world. In the days preceding 
 Pentecost we are told that the disciples were 
 of one accord, and that they continued to- 
 gether in prayer. Thus the new society of 
 Christian men and women became a new wit- 
 ness for the God of love. The words of Jesus, 
 "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," 
 are the supreme instance of this approach to 
 God ; that approach is first through the Divine 
 man, and then through the divine in all men. 
 There is one great book in the New Testa- 
 ment which I find seldom meets the apprecia- 
 tion that it merits, I mean the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews. It was written to Hebrews who had 
 become Christians after Jerusalem had been 
 destroyed, the temple desecrated and reduced 
 
70 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 to a heap of stones ; when Israel had no longer 
 a place or name among the nations of the earth ; 
 when the facts of life were in bitter and mock- 
 ing contradiction of the glorious hopes of 
 prophet and seer ; when Christians were poor, 
 scattered, without power, suffering and dying 
 in an empire sinking under the weight of its 
 own corruption ; when the promised return of 
 the Lord Christ had been so long delayed as to 
 fail any longer to inspire courage and hope. 
 In this forlorn condition into which the Chris- 
 tian community had come, in this consciousness 
 to which it had been slowly and inevitably 
 brought by the iron mechanism of the tempo- 
 ral order in which it stood, a nameless writer 
 of the highest insight and character set him- 
 self the task of translating the religion of his 
 race from the letter into the spirit, from de- 
 pendence upon events in time to trust in the 
 coming and power of the Eternal Spirit. The 
 whole Old Testament dispensation became a 
 symbol through which he discovered the char- 
 acter of the final spiritual religion. Time itself 
 became a symbol, a form of sense, a poetic em- 
 
BELIEF IN GOD AND MIRACLE 71 
 
 blem for the revelation of the invisible God and 
 his kingdom of love. Would that religious men 
 and teachers of religion would read this mon- 
 umental book and gain from it the sure vision 
 of that kingdom which cannot be shaken ! 
 Here was a man who went through the disci- 
 pline that now is upon us, and who came forth 
 with the eternal gospel delivered from the 
 beggarly elements of the world, holding its 
 place in human society by its divine right, 
 doing the greatest things that can be done 
 for men, — giving them the certain vision of 
 the Eternal God, strength to serve him, and 
 power to trust the world to his infinite good 
 will in Christ Jesus our Lord. 
 
 In this brief study of the consciousness of 
 God among the people of Israel, we find it 
 resting, not upon portent or wonder, but upon 
 the divine order of man's life. This mighty 
 consciousness of God both in the Old Testa- 
 ment and in the New is absolutely independent 
 of miracle. It is not even in the region where 
 miracles are supposed to take place; it is in 
 the sphere of the spirit. In that sphere Prophet, 
 
72 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 seer, Psalmist, man of God, met the Eternal 
 spirit. Through the constitution of the soul, 
 individual and social, and through its operation 
 in the vision and service of the moral ideal, 
 these men of sovereign religious genius beheld 
 God. They attained thus to the vision of God ; 
 they were able to breathe something of the 
 Ineffable into their words, and those words, 
 because they enshrine the supreme conscious- 
 ness of God, become the Bible for mankind. 
 
 If now we consider the grounds upon which 
 reasonable men in all ages have believed in 
 God, we shall see that miracle in the sense 
 of the suspension or violation of natural law 
 does not count. These grounds have been 
 some striking personal experience of a spirit- 
 ual nature, supported by a general process of 
 reasoning. Socrates lived and acted under a 
 sense of a special intimation of the Divine will. 
 In the restraining influence of his demon, the 
 belief in God of the pious Greeks of his time 
 was made personal and commanding. The 
 
BELIEF IN GOD AND MIRACLE 73 
 
 tradition of faith thus became real to Socrates, 
 as the tradition of Christian belief becomes 
 real to many in our time through what is 
 called conversion. In behalf of this intense 
 subjective interest, Socrates presents his argu- 
 ment for the existence and goodness of God 
 against the little atheist Aristodemus ! * It is 
 founded upon the evidence of design in man's 
 body and intellect. It is, as Macaulay remarks, 
 as exact a statement of the argument from 
 design as that presented by Paley. It is no 
 less impressive than Paley's, although far less 
 elaborate. What concerns us here is neither 
 the validity nor the invalidity of this theistic 
 inference, but the fact that it is an example 
 of a great theological tradition wherein belief 
 in God is justified, not by an appeal to miracle, 
 but by the evidence of rational order. 
 
 The historic arguments in which belief in 
 God has found vindication are the ideal, the 
 cosmological, the arguments from design and 
 from the moral nature of man. From the idea 
 of the absolutely perfect being, Anselm, Des- 
 
 1 Xenophon, Memorabilia, B. 1, 4. 
 
74 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 cartes, and others inferred the existence of the 
 supremely perfect mind. From the universe 
 as an event, a phenomenon, other thinkers 
 have inferred a cause, a noumenal ground 
 adequate to the production and to the contin- 
 uance in being of all created worlds. From 
 the marks of design in the cosmos, in the 
 world of animals, in the body and mind of 
 man, it has been inferred that the Creator and 
 Preserver of all is a being of boundless intelli- 
 gence ; and from the moral structure of the 
 human soul and from the spiritual experience 
 of men, it has been argued that God is good. 
 I must repeat that we are not now concerned 
 with either the soundness or the unsoundness 
 of these famous forms of argument, but with 
 the fact that they are one and all exclusive of 
 miracle. 
 
 Two forms of the theistic argument merit 
 special attention. Upon this question Berkeley 
 and Kant stand at the farthest extreme each 
 from the other. For Berkeley the whole sen- 
 sible world is the language in which the Eter- 
 nal Spirit instructs and educates the human 
 
BELIEF IN GOD AND MIRACLE 75 
 
 spirit ; for this great thinker the sensible world 
 finds its meaning and support in the mind of 
 God. Whether one agrees with Berkeley or 
 not, there is something impressive and search- 
 ing in the consciousness that in the continu- 
 ous flow of ordered sensation, in the visual, 
 auditory, and tactual images that perpetually 
 crowd the mind, men are the partakers of a 
 sacrament that sets forth in all the richness of 
 color, in all the power of music, and in all the 
 reality of touch, the veritable presence and 
 life of God. Again, the argument not only 
 does not rest in miracle, it excludes it ; for 
 the inviolable order immanent in the flow of 
 sensations is the essential thing in this mighty 
 sacrament. 
 
 Kant had no confidence in arguments for 
 the Divine existence drawn from the cosmos. 
 As an event it is finite, as an ordered event it 
 is finite, and what we seek is the Infinite God. 
 Kant's critique of the historic forms of the 
 theistic argument is not sympathetic. He does 
 not bear in mind the fact that all man's 
 thoughts are imperfect, both in substance and 
 
76 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 in form ; nor does he allow to the arguments 
 which he discredits the right to live in their 
 imperfection. That mercy I to others show, 
 that mercy show to me, is a good rule in philo- 
 sophy. If we refuse to consider the imperfect 
 thought of an opponent from the inside and 
 in a sympathetic spirit, we have no right to 
 expect that men in general will deal from the 
 inside and in generous sympathy with our im- 
 perfect thoughts. Kant's critique of the his- 
 toric forms of the theistic argument has been 
 applied ruthlessly to his own. Let us not fol- 
 low his critics here ; let us regard with open 
 mind his great imperfect thought. For Kant, 
 God is essential to complete the moral mean- 
 ing of human existence. The central thing in 
 man's life is duty ; the duty calls for the con- 
 ditions essential to its fulfillment ; these are 
 freedom, that the dutiful act may have worth ; 
 immortality, that the perfectly dutiful life 
 may be attained; God, that the moral world 
 of man may be intelligible and sure. Here is 
 depth and grandeur of insight, final trust in 
 the moral order of the world, wonder in the 
 
BELIEF IN GOD AND MIRACLE 77 
 
 presence of the highest phase of ultimate real- 
 ity, but no miracle, and no room for it. 
 
 In this apostolic succession of thinkers about 
 God, Spinoza represents another tradition. It 
 is easy to see that his profoundly religious 
 soul is carried away by the idea of the Infinite. 
 An inward experience of comfort and peace 
 in God awakens the acute and daring intellect; 
 and that intellect builds an impressive and 
 enduring structure of thought to prove that 
 man is a self-conscious mode of the Eternal 
 substance. The point to be noted is the ab- 
 sence of miracle, the overwhelming realization 
 and the close and vivid articulation of God in 
 the thought and argument of the philosopher. 
 
 Spinoza's theistic successor is Schleierma- 
 cher, who finds God in feeling, especially in 
 the feelings of dependence and moral obliga- 
 tion. Here a new chapter is begun in men's 
 belief in God. Whether we agree with Schlei- 
 ermacher or not, we must note the depth of 
 his consciousness of God and the further fact 
 that it has nothing to do with miracle ; indeed, 
 the thing for which religious men of to-day 
 
78 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 are most indebted to this German thinker is 
 that he recognizes so profoundly that religion 
 concerns the spirit of man in immediate rela- 
 tion to the Infinite Spirit. According to Schlei- 
 ermacher, religion is an indestructible human 
 interest ; it is the highest and mightiest of all 
 our interests; and it rests on nothing for- 
 eign to itself, it rests on the abiding nature 
 of man's soul in immediate and indissoluble 
 relation to God. 
 
 If now we turn to the custom of Christian 
 men, we shall be confirmed in our conclusion 
 that miracle is of small concern to the true 
 believer in God. We receive our belief in God 
 from the pious community in which we live. 
 We are first of all believers in God on the 
 strength of tradition, and mere traditionalists 
 we remain till some crisis in the soul overtakes 
 us. Some morning when we face the ideal, 
 when we stand under the frown of the ideal 
 that we have disregarded or denied, when we 
 would give the whole world to be on terms of 
 self-respect in the presence of that ideal, when 
 through one sorrow and another we rise into 
 
BELIEF IN GOD AND MIRACLE 79 
 
 peace and resolve henceforth to live as the 
 servant of the ideal, our faith in God becomes 
 bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. Out 
 of such a mood Fichte wrote his "Vocation 
 of Man"; out of such an experience Carlyle 
 wrote the three most powerful chapters in 
 the prose of the nineteenth century, — " The 
 Everlasting Nay/' "The Point of Indiffer- 
 ence," " The Everlasting Yea." 
 
 It may be said that God is found in three 
 great spheres of our human existence. In the 
 sphere of thought, there is the vision of the 
 Supreme Being, in whom all life and all reality 
 terminate; in the sphere of thought, God be- 
 comes vision. In the sphere of action, moral 
 action, God is known as the ultimate source 
 of impulse, inspiration, victorious will ; in the 
 sphere of moral action, God is known as power. 
 In the sphere of character, the character which 
 is the issue of thought and action combined, 
 God is known as indwelling spirit; he is 
 known in this sphere as possessor and pos- 
 sessed, as possessor of our soul through habit, 
 as possessed by the soul through habit, tend- 
 
80 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 ency, the steady current of desire and hope. 
 In this great sense it may be said: — 
 
 The Lord is thy keeper : 
 The Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. 
 The sun shall not smite thee by day, 
 Nor the moon by night. 
 The Lord will keep thee from all evil ; 
 He will keep thy soul. 
 
 The Lord will keep thy going out and thy com- 
 ing in, 
 From this time forth and for evermore. 1 
 
 In all this there is no word of miracle; 
 there is nothing but the glory of living in 
 God now, thinking his world in him, serving 
 his kingdom in him, and in the fixed and yet 
 growing habit of the soul possessing him and 
 possessed by him. Read again Augustine's 
 account of the last days of his beautiful 
 mother, and in that connection read once 
 more Matthew Arnold's sonnet on " Monica's 
 Last Prayer," as a witness to the ways of the 
 spirit in bringing us to the full consciousness 
 of God. 
 
 1 Psalm cxxi, 5-8. 
 
BELIEF IN GOD AND MIRACLE 81 
 
 " Ah, could thy grave at home, at Carthage, be ! " 
 " Care not for that, and lay me where I fall. 
 
 Everywhere heard will be the judgment-call ; 
 
 But at God's altar, oh ! remember me.' 
 
 Thus Monica, and died in Italy. 
 Yet fervent had her longing been, through all 
 Her course, for home at last, and burial 
 With her own husband, by the Libyan sea. 
 
 Had been ! but at the end, to her pure soul 
 All tie with all beside seem'd vain and cheap, 
 And union before God the only care. 
 
 Creeds pass, rites change, no altar standeth whole. 
 Yet we her memory, as she pray'd, will keep, 
 Keep by this : il Life in God, and union there ! " 
 
 This leads me to recall here the commun- 
 ion of saints with God. The literature of 
 this communion is very great in extent and in 
 worth. The Fourth Gospel catches and per- 
 petuates notes in the life of Jesus that his 
 disciples will forever cherish, his sense so 
 perfect and so sure that the Eternal is an open 
 secret in time, his consciousness radiant, all- 
 triumphant in the light and might of God. 
 The Epistles of John mark the persistence of 
 
82 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 this mode of thought ; the discovery that God 
 is love, that God is light in whom there is no 
 darkness at all, is a discovery through the 
 courses of the life of the soul. The " Confes- 
 sions" of Augustine, the "Theologia Ger- 
 manica," the a Ecclesiastica Musiea," the en- 
 tire witness of the Mystics, and the inner light 
 of the Quakers bring us into a world of spirit 
 to which miracle is foreign, and where infer- 
 ence is but a single step. In the presence of 
 all these ways by which the consciousness of 
 God is kept in the world, and made availing 
 over the tides of human interest and passion, 
 it becomes clear that, whatever may be the 
 fortune awaiting miracle, our faith in God is 
 not involved in that fortune; that faith is 
 original, independent, and sure. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 
 
 FT miracle is a myth, will not the significance 
 -*? of Jesus Christ be greatly reduced? If 
 Jesus and his gospel are wholly confined within 
 the natural order, like the motion in the wheel, 
 like the physical life of ordinary men, will 
 not the loss to faith be very great? In the 
 evangelical record, is not miracle the constant 
 accompaniment of his career from beginning 
 to end ? And how can this large element be 
 eliminated without reducing the dignity and 
 freedom of his recorded career ? 
 
 Perhaps it may prepare the way for the 
 happy surprise in which our discussion must 
 issue to reflect that we can imagine a career 
 as full of miracle as the life of Jesus is believed 
 to be, and yet without worth. The miraculous i 
 does not impart to our Lord his worth. We 1 
 
84 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 can imagine one born without a human father, 
 able to still storms and to walk on the tem- 
 pestuous waves, to feed multitudes on food 
 ordinarily sufficient only for a few persons, 
 cleansing lepers, opening blind eyes, unstop- 
 ping deaf ears, raising the dead, and finally 
 himself reappearing after death ; we can im- 
 agine a career like this full of portent and 
 wonder from beginning to end, and yet abso- 
 lutely destitute of those supreme qualities 
 that have given to Jesus the moral leadership 
 of the world. It is possible to conceive this 
 miraculous career as entirely devoid of moral 
 worth. If Satan has the power to transform 
 himself into an angel of light, we can imagine 
 this miraculous person moving through his 
 wonder-working career not only destitute of 
 high qualities, but also with a malign aim. 
 Plato's story of the ring of Gyges is an illus- 
 tration of this possibility. The wearer of this 
 ring becomes invisible. He moves in an order 
 of miracle ; for him natural law does not exist. 
 Yet his power to do with nature as he pleases 
 may mean boundless opportunity to defraud 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 85 
 
 and outrage human life undetected. And if 
 this wizard becomes a beneficent wizard, who 
 knows that he is not devising new forms of 
 deception and plunder ? It is plainly possible, 
 therefore, that we might have the miracles of 
 Jesus without Jesus himself ; that we might 
 possess the wonderful works without possessing 
 the Divine man. 
 
 If this is possible, something follows of 
 great consequence. If we might possess the 
 miracles of our Lord without possessing the 
 Lord himself, does it not follow that we might 
 lose the miracles of our Lord and still retain 
 him ajf all the miracles were gone, the vision 
 of Jesus would remain! There is no mention 
 of miracle in the Lord's Prayer, none in the 
 great discourse in which that prayer stands, 
 none in the wonderful parabolic teaching of 
 our Master, none in the wisdom with which 
 he filled jhejwcTld. There are three things ctf I 
 immortal value in the teaching of Jesus. There 
 is his vision of God as infinite compassionate 
 love, the Maker and Father of men. There is 
 his vision of man as the child of the Eternal, 
 
86 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 fitted in this temporal existence to reproduce 
 in his human relations the dear and just love 
 of God. There is the vision which Jesus has 
 of himself as the person in whom these two 
 visions are verified. He has his personal vision 
 of God; he lives out in conduct his vision of 
 his sonhood to God; and he becomes thereby 
 the living witness for the God who is the uni- 
 versal Father and for a sonhood wide as the 
 race of man. These three visions are absolutely 
 independent of miracle, they are the direct 
 insight of his mind into the heart of things. 
 His insights have power in them to control 
 the thinking and to renew the character of 
 all who are willing to move in their light. 
 
 I have summed up the teaching of Jesus 
 in these three visions, but any such summary 
 is utterly inadequate. The wisdom of Jesus 
 comes up through the relations and circum- 
 stances of man as the life of nature comes in 
 spring and summer. The hard and barren 
 surface rests back upon life ; it is broken at a 
 thousand points into the path of life; it is 
 transformed by the tender beauty and the 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 87 
 
 abounding fruitfulness of life; it becomes a 
 new world, a new humanity. Never man so 
 spake. His words are meat and drink to the 
 soul ; they are spirit and life. And when we 
 recall the fact that man cannot live by bread 
 alone, that he needs the word of God, the 
 word of supreme wisdom and cheer, we begin 
 to see what the infinite wealth of the wise 
 teaching of Jesus means. When he says that 
 God makes his sun to shine upon the evil 
 and the good and sends his rain upon the 
 just and the unjust, his vision enables him to 
 discover in this order a hint of the infinite 
 magnanimity of the Eternal. Lessons come 
 through law ; law operating in apparent indif- 
 ference to the worth or worthlessness of men 
 is lifted into a symbol of a moral perfection 
 in God hitherto unimagined, and the careless 
 God becomes the eternal magnanimity. Such 
 is the universal result of the teaching of Jesus. 
 It is almost traduced in our summaries. It 
 meets life at a thousand points, and leaves 
 the particular trial shining in a flood of light. 
 This wisdom and the divining spirit in which 
 
88 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 it issues are entirely independent of miracle. 
 No miracle could increase the depth, the 
 pathos, the fidelity to life, or the reach of sug- 
 gestion concerning the attitude of God to 
 men of the Parable of the Lost Son. The ab- 
 sence of miracle could in no way lessen the 
 wisdom and benignity of such teaching. The 
 natural order cannot forbid the mother and 
 child from recognizing each the other, from 
 responding each to the other's love. Within 
 the fixed bounds of nature this insight, this 
 freedom and joy, are possible. The natural 
 order cannot prohibit or in any way limit or 
 mar the wisdom of Jesus ; the vision of Jesus 
 is unconditioned ; his freedom is not in the 
 keeping of any force other than his own mind. 
 It is equally clear that his character is in- 
 dependent. It has the twofold significance 
 that we discern in all great character, it is 
 a product and it is an achievement. It is a 
 product of the Infinite to whom he is in 
 a constant self-surrender. In that constant 
 self-surrender his will is taking its shape from 
 the Eternal will, his mind is receiving form 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 89 
 
 from the Eternal mind, his heart is under 
 the culture of the Eternal heart. Jesus moves 
 in the transcendent sense of God, and from 
 God comes the product of his perfect charac- 
 ter. It is an issue from the Infinite soul, to 
 whom his soul goes up in honor and self- 
 surrender. This process is within the bounds 
 of nature, and yet nature has nothing to do 
 with it. It is a process in the freedom of the 
 spirit. Wherever Jesus might be, he had but 
 to think and God would know it ; he had 
 but to think and he would know God perfect- 
 ing his being. Wherever he might be, he had 
 only to lift his spirit and there was the Eter- 
 nal, he had only to open his soul and God 
 was within him. To speak here of miracle, 
 wonder, portent, is a kind of blasphemy. 
 Shall we introduce into this supreme sanctu- 
 ary of humanity the vulgar appeal to sense, 
 the tricks and feats of the wizard? Nature 
 at her best, miracle at its highest, is at an 
 infinite depth below the elevation on which 
 the soul of God and the soul of Jesus stand 
 in a communion ineffable. 
 
90 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 The character of Jesus viewed as an 
 achievement precludes miracle ; it is not only 
 independent of miracle, it is inconsistent with 
 miracle. Here the great temptation is illu- 
 minating. Under trial, stones must not be 
 turned into bread ; nor must the Highest 
 throw himself from the pinnacle of the tem- 
 ple. Character is not thus won. It is won 
 under the heat and burden of the day, in 
 service and in suffering within the terms of 
 the natural life. Jesus stood in human rela- 
 tions with human ideals and under human 
 obligations. He stood under these obliga- 
 tions in a world of trouble and contradiction. 
 To provide for him a miraculous escape from 
 this order of trial and contradiction would be 
 to deny him the opportunity that God has 
 given to every man, and to withhold from 
 him the eternal gladness which God has made 
 possible for every soul. In Nazareth, by the 
 Jordan, in the wilderness of Judea, by the 
 Sea of Galilee, in all the towns and cities of 
 his country, among his disciples and among 
 the multitudes that came to hear him, with 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 91 
 
 those who loved him and with those who tried 
 to defeat him, Jesus found the opportunity 
 of his existence. Through this natural order, 
 with human lives set in it, Jesus won his 
 character out of the grace of the Eternal. 
 Through this order of trial and service came 
 the strength and benignity of his soul. In 
 one sense he thought seldom of himself and 
 often and much of the needy world. "The 
 Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, 
 but to minister, and to give his life a ransom 
 for many." He lived out of the heart of the 
 paradox, " he that saves his life shall lose it, 
 and he that loses his life shall save it." But 
 after all, this was but the method of his life. 
 He lost it in loving thought and service to 
 find it in yet richer perfection ; he departed 
 from himself in devotion to the good of others 
 to return to himself in a sublimer self-con- 
 sciousness. And we must think of him who 
 in so many ways is the great consecration of 
 the beauty of our world as the Divine artist. 
 He had the artist's vision of the completed 
 human character ; and he had the artist's 
 
92 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 knowledge of the ways and means of artistic 
 creation and the patience, the infinite loving 
 patience. Thus Jesus won his soul. He walked 
 the weary way of the world. He did its poor 
 work. He spent his strength in lowly service. 
 He met and overcame the evils of life, small 
 and great. He bore his trouble with benignity. 
 He accepted supreme disappointment not only 
 with no trace of bitterness, but also with in- 
 finite compassion. He transfigured the mean 
 circumstances of existence by the eternal ro- 
 mance of the dutiful spirit. Like the flower 
 in the swamp, he lifted above the vile flood of 
 things the stainless purity and perfect beauty 
 of his soul, and up through the mire and dirt 
 of the earth he drew from God the perfecting 
 grace. 
 
 I have said that the temptation of Jesus 
 would lose its whole meaning if miracle were 
 introduced into it. The same remark must be 
 made of the scene in Gethsemane. What is 
 there in the records of the world to compare 
 with this ? Here is the supremely faithful and 
 loving soul face to face with utter temporal 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 93 
 
 defeat; here is the highest service about to 
 receive as reward infamy, torture, and death. 
 The whole tragedy of existence is here opened 
 to the heart — the reversal of just expectation, 
 the contradiction of just hope. Here in infi- 
 nite night Jesus suffers alone ; here he speaks 
 in the thick darkness his inmost thought to 
 God ; here he lays bare the horror in his heart 
 over what he has done and what he is about 
 to receive; here he offers the prayer whose 
 initial cry is that the cup of death may pass 
 from him, and whose final words are the 
 greatest ever spoken in this world : " Neverthe- 
 less not my will, but thine, be done." If this 
 experience is not great, nothing known to man 
 is great. How far away from the poor show 
 of miracle it is. How sublime it is as the 
 triumph of a soul in the Eternal soul. How 
 precious it is as an attestation of the reality 
 of the human spirit and the Divine. How 
 great it is with illumination and peace for the 
 brave in all the generations as they suffer in 
 the night, as they appeal to God in the depths. 
 What an infinite order it throws open, where 
 
94 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 souls caught in the tragic order of the world 
 are upon the stairs that slope through dark- 
 ness up to God. How vast, terrible, beautiful, 
 and near to the Eternal peace it shows our 
 human world to stand. Let no miracle pro- 
 fane its sanctity, let no thought of miracle 
 degrade or diminish its hallowed and infinite 
 import. 
 
 A sect of some significance arose in the 
 early church claiming that Jesus did not die, 
 that he only appeared to die. This sect thought 
 it inconsistent with the dignity of our Lord 
 that he should die. This folly was fittingly 
 met with expulsion from the body of normal 
 Christian faith. The death of Jesus was real ; 
 it was true that he saved others, but himself 
 he could not save. His devotion to his cause 
 must be unto the uttermost. And whatever 
 may be our philosophy of the event, the 
 death of Jesus has been recognized by all 
 believers in him as an element of power, in his 
 religion, of transcendent value. We recall that 
 death in our worship at stated intervals: the 
 sacrament of the Lord's Supper is the sacra- 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 95 
 
 ment of his death. As an expression, as an 
 attestation of love, the whole church through- 
 out the world kneels in its presence. Our chief 
 objection to transubstantiation and con sub- 
 stantiation is not that they are absurdities, 
 but that they obscure with the quackery of 
 miracle the utmost splendor in the bright do- 
 main of love. While we worship in this sanc- 
 tuary we cry, Take these things hence; my 
 Father's house shall be called a house of 
 prayer, but ye have made it a den of jug- 
 glers. When Jesus said, "It is finished," 
 and added, "Father, into thy hands I com- 
 mend my spirit," he consummated his earthly 
 career in a character that is spiritual, and as 
 such is the sovereign light and comfort of men. 
 
 ii 
 
 Taken as a whole, and as a service to the 
 religious life, will not the career of Jesus 
 suffer great reduction in value, if the miracu- 
 lous is entirely eliminated from it ? In answer 
 to this question, let us take the two instances 
 of the miraculous that are oftenest before our 
 
96 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 minds to-day : the birth of Jesus and his bodily- 
 resurrection. In these two fundamental in- 
 stances the whole question may be considered. 
 Among reasonable Christians of all types 
 of belief it is, I think, generally felt that it is 
 immaterial how Jesus began, or how he came 
 into the world. They feel that they are con- 
 cerned not with the process, but with the re- 
 sult. And it may here be added that about the 
 origin of the life of Jesus knowledge is un- 
 attainable ; the life itself is before the world. 
 If that life in its solitary perfection is the 
 supreme mystery, let it so stand. One mystery 
 is not explained by resolving it into another. 
 No denial concerning the manner of the be- 
 ginning of the life of our Lord can touch the 
 fair and sovereign result ; that is fact ; that is 
 open to the judgment of the world. The 
 theory that Jesus had no human father can- 
 not make him more Divine ; the denial of that 
 theory cannot in any way interfere with his 
 supremacy. Whichever way he began to be, 
 Jesus is what he is. He is independent of the 
 question how he came into our world. 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 97 
 
 There are many to whom the tradition that 
 Jesus had no human father is precious. As 
 no one can prove that he had a human father, 
 their sentiment on this subject is unassailable. 
 There are many, and these among the best 
 and soundest of the disciples of Jesus, to 
 whom this tradition is unwelcome. They recall 
 the fact that neither in the Gospel by Mark 
 nor in the Gospel by John is the subject 
 mentioned; that in all the New Testament 
 writings outside of the stories in Matthew and 
 Luke, there is not a word in favor of it. In- 
 deed, scholars whose orthodoxy has never been 
 disputed have contended that Paul's view is 
 opposed to the traditional view. Paul uses 
 these words of his Master : " Who was born of 
 the seed of David according to the flesh, who 
 was declared to be the Son of God with power, 
 according to the spirit of holiness, by the res- 
 urrection of the dead." For the view that Jesus 
 had no human father, the evidence in the New 
 Testament is at best slight. If the belief was 
 current in the apostolic church, it was consid- 
 ered of little moment. What Paul and Peter 
 
98 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 and John considered immaterial, we may con- 
 sider immaterial; what the Second and the 
 Fourth Gospels disregard, we may disregard ; 
 what in the entire New Testament is relegated 
 to two stories in the beginning of the First 
 and Third Gospels, we may relegate to a place 
 of similar subordination. 
 
 Supported by Scripture in so slight a way 
 as this tradition is, one must look elsewhere 
 for explanation of its hold upon Christian 
 feeling. A theory of human nature lies back 
 of it. This theory is that human nature is de- 
 praved, and that its natural issue is necessarily 
 depraved. In men and women there is nothing 
 good. When they become husband and wife, 
 father and mother, that which is born of them 
 partakes of their depravity. From human 
 parents there cannot come by ordinary gen- 
 eration a perfect child. Jesus was a perfect 
 child ; therefore he could not have come into 
 the world by ordinary generation. 
 
 This argument has been strengthened 
 through many generations of Christian history 
 by ascetic feeling. Men and women have been 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 99 
 
 ashamed of their humanity, they have looked 
 upon their natural impulses as a humiliation, 
 they have regarded family life as a concession 
 to the animal in their nature ; they have con- 
 sidered the unmarried state as higher than 
 the married, as indeed the only condition com- 
 patible with moral purity. A celibate priest- 
 hood has set the example to this way of think- 
 ing. An inveterate prejudice has thus arisen 
 against the honor of wedded love and natural 
 human parenthood. 
 
 Against both these positions it is impossible 
 too strongly to protest. Human nature is not 
 a depraved thing ; it has been outraged ; it is 
 outraged ; but in spite of outrage it remains 
 higher than all else that we know except its 
 own ideals. It is our witness for God, our 
 chief witness, and the less we see of its in- 
 herent honor, the less we see of him. Human 
 beings are capable of love, and wherever love 
 exists, character is cleansed and elevated. The 
 love of a man for a woman and the love of a 
 woman for a man, under the sanction of law, 
 and in the form of marriage, is the heart of 
 
100 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 all that is best in the life of the race. It is 
 true that human nature does not answer to 
 its own ideals. That simply shows another as- 
 pect of its greatness. It is dissatisfied with 
 itself because God troubles it with his presence. 
 It longs for the new heaven and the new earth 
 because the impulse of the Perfect is alive in 
 its heart. It cannot rest until it rest in God be- 
 cause he has made it for himself. The failure to 
 do justice to human nature is less strange than 
 the failure to see the dignity of natural human 
 parenthood. While it is true that some of the 
 best men and women who have ever lived 
 have voluntarily remained outside wedded life, 
 while it is true that many may be justified in 
 this attitude to-day, it must still be said that 
 the ideal state for every man and every woman 
 is marriage as the sacrament of love. The 
 single life may be accepted as a sacrifice ; it 
 is always less than the best. The best thing 
 in the happiest human existence is family love, 
 and the best thing in family love is parenthood. 
 The man and the woman who have not had 
 their first-born laid under the protection of their 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 101 
 
 tenderness and truth cannot know how near 
 to the human heart the Lord and Giver of life 
 may come. The sanctuaries of the world are 
 not its churches, mosques, and temples ; they 
 are the places where children are born of 
 men and women in honorable wedlock. There 
 in the awe and mystery of the natural life 
 God shows his face as he does nowhere else 
 in all the universe. The utmost sanctity of 
 our world lies in its worthy paternity and 
 maternity. And only God knows how the 
 worth of this wicked world is renewed through 
 the process of natural human parenthood. So 
 long as men love women worthily and women 
 love men worthily, so long as these lovers be- 
 come husbands and wives under the sanction 
 of law, the process of natural parenthood will 
 keep in our world chivalry, honor, tenderness, 
 fidelity, faith, and the certain sense of the 
 dear Eternal God. Take out of our race mar- 
 riage and productive human love, and all the 
 great things in human character will disappear. 
 It is immensely interesting to find the Greek 
 Aristotle and the American Edwards at one 
 
102 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 here. The Greek philosopher saw that the 
 animal impulse in man and woman takes on a 
 moral character when touched by love ; and 
 the American theologian saw the same law of 
 life/ an insight indeed common to all good 
 men. Love lives in natural impulses and pro- 
 cesses, and changes their character. Thus it is 
 that children in worthy human homes are born 
 of the Spirit. By the strength of the Holy 
 Ghost they began to be ; by his strength they 
 were brought into the world. In this sense it 
 is forever true that Jesus was conceived of the 
 Holy Ghost while born of his mother and her 
 honorable husband. 
 
 The miracle at the beginning of the life 
 of Jesus does not, therefore, fall in with the 
 thoughts and experiences of reasonable Chris- 
 tian people to-day. The nearer to Christ that 
 men and women in their homes come, the less 
 acceptable becomes that miracle, the less com- 
 patible with their own life and hope. Besides, 
 it strikes them as an awkward miracle. The 
 
 1 Ethics, Book IX, 12, 25 ; The Nature of Virtue, chapter 
 vii. 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 103 
 
 influence of the father upon the child is slight 
 compared with the influence of the mother. 
 The child is literally bone of her bone, and 
 flesh of her flesh; indeed, all the world ac- 
 knowledges the predominance, the sovereignty 
 of the mother. If, therefore, the Creative Spirit 
 is unable to neutralize the influence of the 
 father in so far as it is malign, how can he 
 overcome the infinitely greater influence of 
 the mother in so far as it is unfortunate ? It 
 is this view of the subject that gives to the 
 miracle in question the appearance of awk- 
 wardness and futility. 
 
 Three possibilities are here set before us. 
 In the first possibility we are driven back in 
 an endless regress of miracle. We are driven 
 back from the immaculate child to the im- 
 maculate mother, from the immaculate mother 
 to the immaculate grandmother, back to the 
 immaculate first mother. In the second possi- 
 bility we must claim with Edward Irving that 
 Jesus derived from his mother a taint in the 
 flesh which he overcame in the spirit. In the 
 third possibility we hold that in bringing his 
 
104 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 Son into the world the Lord and Giver of life 
 lived in the process of natural parenthood, 
 controlled its issues, and brought forth the 
 perfect, the Divine child. 
 
 Whether he came with miracle or without 
 it, Jesus is the same; whether his life came by 
 the path of nature or by the path of miracle, 
 it is from God. Of so much we are sure. And 
 in our present leanings toward the natural, 
 here we appear to have found certain gains. 
 We do not like to think that human nature is 
 essentially bad, that under God it is incapable 
 of the greatest things. We have little patience 
 with the preference of the celibate over the 
 wedded life. We know how great is the do- 
 mestic life of good men and women, and we 
 long for the adequate vision of what we believe 
 to be the best thing in our human world. The 
 elimination of miracle here seems, therefore, 
 to be gain. In one case we have a divine re- 
 sult through a miraculous process with the 
 infelicity of an implied slur upon parenthood ; 
 in the other we have a divine result through a 
 natural process with the happiness of having 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 105 
 
 found a new standard and immortal honor for 
 the parenthood of the world. 
 
 For myself, as I stand among the wise 
 men by the manger in Bethlehem, I forget to 
 raise the question, even in thought, how this 
 child came to be ; with the wise men, I can 
 only open my heart in homage and gifts. If 
 at any less inspired time and place I pass in 
 thought this scene of tender and transcend- 
 ent loveliness back into its utmost beginnings, 
 I am sure that I behold nothing but all- 
 hallowing, all-transforming love, and in the 
 presence of a mystery too full of God for 
 mortal vision to pierce, I desire, like the 
 prophet of old, to wrap my mantle about my 
 face, and answer the Eternal honor that lives 
 here, and that lives in the process of natural 
 parenthood in all worthy men and women, in 
 silent awe and thankful trust. 
 
 When we come to the resurrection of 
 Jesus, we come to that which is central in the 
 gospel; apostolic faith and service begin 
 here. There is only one mind at this point 
 among the teachers and leaders in the apos- 
 
106 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 tolic community. Peter and James and John 
 and Paul had seen the Lord ; they believed in 
 a risen Lord ; they served a risen Lord. Paul 
 recites the fact that after his death Jesus " ap- 
 peared to Cephas ; then to the twelve ; then 
 he appeared to above five hundred brethren 
 at once, of whom the greater part remain until 
 now, but some are fallen asleep ; then he ap- 
 peared unto James ; then to all the apostles ; 
 and last of all, as to one born out of due 
 time, he appeared to me also. . . . Whether 
 then it be I or they, so we preach, and so ye 
 believed." ' Here is absolute unanimity of faith 
 in the risen Christ. Nothing can be clearer, 
 nothing simpler, than this fact; apostolic life, 
 labor, joy, and hope rose out of faith in the 
 risen Lord. About this belief among the 
 apostles there is no doubt, no uncertainty, 
 no shadow of any kind. Our Christian faith 
 began with those who were sure that they had 
 seen the Lord after his passion ; it began with 
 those who were disciples and servants not of 
 a dead, but of a living and reigning Christ. 
 
 1 1 Corinthians xv, 6-11. 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 107 
 
 Is the bodily resurrection of Jesus essential 
 to this faith ? If the physical resurrection is 
 denied in the name of natural law, does it 
 follow that the spiritual resurrection must be 
 unreal? The Gospels seem to describe "ITl 
 physical rising from the dead ; Paul's vision 
 of Jesus was spiritual. Which form of resur- 
 rection is the surer and the mightier, that to 
 which the Gospels bear testimony, or that of 
 which Paul is the witness ? 
 
 The essential thing here is the assurance 
 of a risen Lord ; we are not supremely con- 
 cerned about the manner of the resurrec- 
 tion ; what we desire is assurance of the fact. 
 We desire to know if, after his crucifixion, 
 Jesus was able to convince his disciples that 
 he was still alive, that he was still with them, 
 the source of their life and wisdom and hope. 
 It seems to me that if we can be sure that we 
 have a living and reigning Lord, we shall not 
 be greatly troubled over the manner of his 
 resurrection. Did Jesus survive death? Did 
 he appear to his disciples after death? Did 
 he convince them that he was still alive? 
 
108 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 Did lie continue to convince them that he 
 was always with them on to the end of their 
 lives ? Of this there can be no doubt. 
 
 They had seen the Lord ; they knew him 
 in these appearances as the Lord ; they con- 
 tinued to receive his word ; they became con- 
 scious that his life in them was more emphatic 
 than their own. He was in them the hope 
 of glory. Their entire service and character 
 was the attestation of the clearness and the 
 honesty of their minds upon this fundamental 
 question ; they knew him and the power of his 
 resurrection. 
 
 What was the ground of their assurance ? 
 If we deny the bodily appearance of Jesus 
 after death, is not the faith of the apostles 
 an illusion? This leads to another question. 
 What is the proof of existence? Is it not 
 influence over our lives ? Why do we believe 
 in the existence of the external world? We 
 do not see it, we do not hear it ; it is not that 
 which any sense reports it to be. One sense 
 says it is glorious with color, another that it 
 is colorless; one sense reports music in it, 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 109 
 
 another reports eternal silence ; one tells us 
 it is hard and cold, another that it is soft 
 and hot. These reports make of the external 
 world the consummate contradiction. Is it 
 anything ? If it is real, how do we know it ? 
 Because of its influence over us ; in it we live 
 and move and have our physical being. Our 
 minds are kept in constant motion by its ap- 
 peal. We cannot flee from its presence, we 
 cannot escape its power. It is with us when 
 awake and when asleep, in childhood, in youth, 
 in manhood, and in old age. We awoke at 
 birth to feel its breath upon our brow ; we 
 sink into the sleep of death drawing upon its 
 life with our last breath. Because of its cease- 
 less power over us we believe in the reality of 
 the external world. 
 
 Why do we believe in the existence of a 
 friend ? We have not seen his mind, his soul, 
 we know not that he is or what he is by direct 
 vision. We believe in him because of his power 
 over us. He has molded our intelligence ; he 
 has purified and enriched our heart ; he has 
 built up into inward strength a great purpose ; 
 
110 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 he has been a soul of gladness in our exist- 
 ence, and because of his power over us we 
 believe that he lives. And because that dead 
 body heeds not, hears not our call, in no way 
 affects us, in no way wields power over us, we 
 believe that it is lifeless. Real being is power : 
 whatever has power over us is alive ; whatever 
 is without power over us is dead. Can we 
 frame a better test of real existence than that ? 
 Why do we believe in God ? No man hath 
 seen God at any time, the senses do not give 
 us God. We have been made by life other 
 than our own, and we think of him as the 
 Lord and Giver of life; we are touched in 
 ten thousand ways, and we think of God as 
 the aboriginal impulse under whatever affects 
 our beings. We are moved in the pursuit of 
 truth, we are lifted in the love of it, we are 
 drawn upward into obedience to it, our exist- 
 ence is made to take on moral strength and 
 value, and our hearts are filled with a thou- 
 sand high desires. We believe that the ulti- 
 mate source of the grace that thus sweetens 
 and shapes our existence is God. He is known 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 111 
 
 by us because of his power over us ; he is 
 known as the strength of our heart and our 
 portion forever by the availing grace of his 
 presence. If God should do nothing for us, if 
 he should wield no power over us, if he should 
 send us no calls to repentance, no contritions 
 of heart, no renewing grace, no abiding in- 
 spirations, no lasting solace and hope, we 
 should have no evidence of his existence. God 
 is not known to sense ; he is not known by 
 sense ; he is known to the soul that is renewed 
 out of his eternal grace. 
 
 If this test of the living and the real is true, 
 we may well compose ourselves concerning the 
 manner of the resurrection. Take Peter as an 
 example of the believer in the bodily resur- 
 rection of Jesus. Which is the greater witness 
 to Peter that his Lord is alive and at the right 
 hand of God, the fact that on several mys- 
 terious occasions he saw Jesus after his pas- 
 sion with the eye of flesh, or the fact that 
 Jesus has given him out of the unseen a new 
 mind, a new heart, a new character, a life in 
 which the grace of the Lord is the prevailing 
 
112 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 power? Which is the greater witness to the 
 reality of the risen Lord, the sense of Peter, 
 or the soul of Peter made like the soul of 
 his Master? 
 
 in 
 
 This leads us to Paul, the great witness for 
 the risen Christ. The relation of Paul to Jesus 
 Christ is one of the greatest things in the New 
 Testament. With Paul stand all believers in 
 Jesus who did not know him, and all who 
 could not know him in his earthly life. This 
 apostle is the representative of the believing 
 world after Jesus had disappeared from the 
 earth. He is not only the apostle to the na- 
 tions, he is also the apostle to the world that can 
 never know Jesus as a human being in time. 
 
 The other apostles were the disciples and 
 personal friends of Jesus during his public 
 ministry. They were with him in the fields of 
 Galilee, by the Sea of Tiberias, in the wide 
 expanses beyond the Jordan, in Samaria, in 
 the wild solitudes and the crowded villages 
 and the cities of Judea. The earth, the sky, 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 113 
 
 and the sea, the wild flowers and the singing 
 birds, the great sun as he ran his daily course, 
 and the solemn stars were hallowed for those 
 disciples by the presence of their Master. So, 
 too, the sick, the bereaved, the sinful, the 
 proud, all sorts and conditions of human 
 beings, — mothers and their children, masters 
 and beloved servants, publicans and sinners, 
 despairing penitents and complacent rascals, — 
 were another framework for the life of Jesus. 
 Yet again, these disciples had heard him 
 speak. They had been taught by him ; they 
 had witnessed his works of healing and the 
 perpetual outflow of his efficacious sympa- 
 thies. They had heard him speak to God, and 
 in his prayer he had carried them to the gate 
 of heaven. They had seen the tenderness and 
 the majesty of his character. For them the 
 life of God looked forth through the life of 
 their Lord. This was their unique experience. 
 They had a privilege from which the succeed- 
 ing world was forever barred. 
 
 When their Master was crucified, when he 
 had risen from the dead, they were unable to 
 
114 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 think of the heavenly Lord without thinking 
 at the same time of the earthly Master. Thus 
 the Gospels came to be written, because the 
 apostles wanted to preserve the precious, the 
 divine memorials of the temporal life of their 
 risen Lord. They continued to think of Jesus 
 in the heavens as they had seen him in time. 
 Even the Fourth Gospel, while a philosophy 
 of the career of Jesus, while dating his being 
 from the bosom of the Father and conduct- 
 ing it after death back into the heart of the 
 Eternal, while showing the earthly life of 
 Jesus as an interlude between the eternal 
 harmonies antecedent and consequent to that 
 life, still touches and colors that sublime 
 revelation of God with the rich and tender 
 humanities in the temporal existence of the 
 Lord. Look where you will in the record of 
 the twelve apostles, you find emphasis upon 
 the teaching, the character, the spirit, and the 
 temporal life of Jesus. All this was hallowed 
 by his death, all was transfigured by his resur- 
 rection, but in substance it abides as the 
 gospel of the early apostles. 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 115 
 
 To the original disciples of Jesus his resur- 
 rection changed the entire aspect of the world. 
 Henceforth it lay as in an everlasting sunset, 
 traveling in the glow and fire of his sublime 
 memory. Nature was transfigured through 
 her association with him ; Galilee and Judea, 
 Samaria and the uttermost parts of the earth, 
 were touched with endless pathos and mo- 
 ment. Human beings in all the sin and woe 
 and tragedy of their lives were hallowed out 
 of the divine sanctity of that life. A mystery 
 of loveliness had vanished from the world, 
 but the memory of it remained to illumine 
 and chasten mankind. Never again could the 
 disciples look upon the world as it had ap- 
 peared to them before they knew Jesus ; never 
 again could they see a Christless humanity ; 
 they lived, suffered, achieved, and died in 
 the divine dream into which Jesus had lifted 
 mankind; they beheld the world eternally 
 transfigured in his risen and victorious life. 
 
 We can faintly follow them here. Occasion- 
 ally a sublime spirit comes into our sphere of 
 being ; once or twice in a lifetime it may 
 
116 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 have been our privilege to behold the work 
 and bearing of some indubitable son of God. 
 We looked upon his face as if it had been the 
 face of an angel ; we felt the Divine presence 
 in his total personality; we were moved to 
 a hidden wonder and love as we drew near in 
 friendship to him. Then perhaps came the 
 sudden end. When we recovered our self- 
 possession, we knew that he was indeed gone, 
 but that for us he had left the world still in 
 his everlasting evening glow. Such experi- 
 ences enable us in a faint way to gain some 
 idea of the light and peace in which the van- 
 ished Christ forever left the world for the 
 original apostles who had known and loved 
 him in the days of his flesh. 
 
 The temporal note is absent from Paul's 
 experience. He never had any kind of con- 
 tact with Jesus in life ; he never saw, he did 
 not know Jesus while on the earth. His first 
 contact with Jesus is as the risen Lord, as the 
 invisible Christ. His vision was never of the 
 earthly Jesus ; it was always and only of the 
 heavenly Jesus. Paul's contact with Jesus is 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 117 
 
 identical with the contact that men to-day 
 may have. He is, as I have said, the great 
 representative of the privilege of the world 
 after Christ had left the earth; he is our 
 representative believer in Christ and, espe- 
 cially, in the risen Lord. 
 
 Paul asserts that he had seen Jesus, the 
 Lord; his great challenge is, Have I not 
 seen Jesus, our Lord ? The story was known 
 to all the churches which he had planted ; it 
 was known wherever he was known. He told 
 it as often as opportunity offered, and in 
 words of burning conviction and unforgettable 
 power. In his great address before Agrippa 
 he said : " Whereupon as I journeyed to Da- 
 mascus with the authority and commission of 
 the chief priests, at midday, king, I saw 
 on the way a light from heaven, above the 
 brightness of the sun, shining round about 
 me and them that journeyed with me. And 
 when we were all fallen to the earth, I heard 
 a voice saying unto me in the Hebrew lan- 
 guage, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me ? 
 it is hard for thee to kick against the goad. 
 
118 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 And I said, Who art thou. Lord ? And the 
 Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest." 
 There were doubtless many similar experi- 
 ences in the career of Paul. This is initial 
 and fundamental. Upon this experience he 
 issued his challenge, " Have I not seen Jesus, 
 our Lord ? " 
 
 Observe, first of all, that this man had first- 
 hand contact only with the risen Lord; he 
 had only second-hand contact with the earthly 
 Lord ; he was therefore surer of the heavenly 
 Jesus than he could be of the earthly Jesus. 
 In the reality of the earthly Jesus he believed 
 on testimony ; in the reality of the heavenly 
 Jesus he believed on experience. He was as 
 much surer of the heavenly Jesus than he 
 was of the earthly Jesus as experience is surer 
 than testimony. He appears to have been free 
 from doubt as to the reality of the risen 
 Christ. And the fact that Christ was alive 
 after death made him confident as the servant 
 of Christ that he and all his brethren would 
 survive death and live together with the Lord 
 in the heavenly world. 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 119 
 
 Now, so far as we have any contact at all 
 with Jesus, it must be in this way. We have 
 the record of his life and teaching, the record 
 of what he said, of what he did, of what he 
 suffered, of what he was. But the record is 
 simply a symbol, a sublime memory. If we 
 have contact with Jesus only through the 
 record, we have contact only with the precious 
 memorials of Jesus; we are still far away from 
 him. We stand at this record of his life as 
 the disciples stood at the empty tomb ; to us 
 as to them the salutation comes : " He is not 
 here ; for he is risen." If we are to have con- 
 tact with the living Christ, it can be only 
 after the manner of Paul. We must be met 
 by him on our way through the world ; we 
 must hear his voice out of the invisible ; we 
 must get into dialogue with him in the Eter- 
 nal; we must be arrested by an immediate 
 question from him, "Why persecutest thou 
 me?" We must question him in return, — 
 "Who art thou, Lord?" We must hear his 
 reply, " I am Jesus whom thou persecutest." 
 This vision, under whatever form, is the only 
 
120 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 first-hand contact that we can have with the 
 living soul of Jesus Christ. And where this 
 vision answers to Paul's in depth, in intensity, 
 in power, men to-day may be as sure as he 
 was of the heavenly Lord. 
 
 Notice next how Paul was able to believe 
 in the reality of his vision. He knew that the 
 world was full of dreams and delusions. He 
 could not doubt the reality of his vision, and 
 yet he must often ask himself his reason for 
 continuing to believe in it. What account 
 would he be likely to give to himself of this 
 vision ? 
 
 He would doubtless say that this vision had 
 revolutionized his whole mind upon the sub- 
 ject of Jesus and his religion. He had been 
 an enemy ; he was turned into a friend. He 
 had been a bitter and violent persecutor ; he 
 became a preacher and defender of that of 
 which he had formerly made havoc. That 
 vision changed his career. 
 
 He would doubtless add that this vision had 
 changed his entire manner of thinking about 
 God, his people, himself, the nations of man- 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 121 
 
 kind. That vision was the germ for him of a 
 new philosophy of man's life and God's char- 
 acter. That vision took possession of him as 
 a seed takes possession of the earth. It was 
 alive in his mind, it grew there, it drew up 
 into itself all his thoughts about God and 
 man, about the past and the future. It became 
 a mighty tree, a living organism of truth, a 
 philosophy of our human world. The vision 
 that had changed his career wrought this new, 
 richer, and mightier mind within the man. 
 
 He would further say that it had changed 
 his character. He had always loved righteous- 
 ness ; but before that vision came he had been 
 mistaken often ; he had been in great straits 
 between the command of conscience and the 
 clamor of passion ; he had been brought in 
 his struggle after the ideal life to the edge of 
 despair ; he had summed up the sad endeavor 
 in the cry, " wretched man that I am, who 
 shall deliver me from the body of this death ? " 
 Mistaken, outward and formal in his idea of 
 righteousness, defeated and broken-hearted in 
 his struggle after it, he had been before that 
 
122 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 vision came; after its visitation he had be- 
 come clear and sound in his thoughts, deep as 
 the nature of the soul in his insights, and in 
 his pursuit of his goal, a conqueror and more 
 than a conqueror through Jesus Christ. The 
 fruits of the Spirit now abounded, — love, joy, 
 patience, hope, sympathy with sinful and suf- 
 fering men, above all, kindness and forbear- 
 ance with stupidity and folly. That is nearly 
 the supreme grace in a mighty nature, and 
 that grace became regnant in Paul. 
 
 He would add still further the character of 
 his services and sufferings. He had gone over 
 a large part of the Roman Empire several 
 times because of that vision. He had preached 
 the gospel of Reconciliation through Jesus 
 Christ from Damascus and Jerusalem, from 
 Asia Minor through Europe as far as Spain. 
 He had shaken from their pedestals the gods 
 of Greece and Rome, he had established Chris- 
 tian faith in a new continent; and he had 
 done it under the sense of obligation to that 
 vision and because of his delight in its tran- 
 scendent reality. 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 123 
 
 His sufferings in this service cannot be de- 
 scribed, nor the sublime spirit in which they 
 were borne. They are part of the world's 
 highest canticle of love and woe, part of the 
 supreme litany of supreme races, part of the 
 deepest and rarest possession of mankind. 
 Look in upon this great spirit through the 
 words, " In labors more abundantly, in prisons 
 more abundantly, in stripes above measure, in 
 deaths oft. Of the Jews five times received I 
 forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten 
 with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered 
 shipwreck, a night and a day have I been in 
 the deep ; in journeyings often, in perils of 
 rivers, in perils of robbers, in perils of my 
 countrymen, in perils from the Gentiles, in 
 perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, 
 in perils in the sea, in perils among false 
 brethren ; in labor and travail, in watchings 
 often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, 
 in cold and nakedness. Beside those things 
 that are without, there is that which presseth 
 upon me daily, anxiety for all the churches." 
 There is a window into a hero's soul ; but for 
 
124 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 his enemies, he never would have set this win- 
 dow there. He begins the story of his suffer- 
 ings with the confession that in speaking of 
 himself he is speaking as a fool, being com- 
 pelled to this folly by foolish men. This career 
 of triumphant gladness in a world of contra- 
 diction and sorrow came out of that vision. 
 
 The highest wonder has yet to be named. 
 This man Paul was one of the great original 
 personalities of the world. His nature was 
 great in every way ; it was distinctly original. 
 In its force it has effected more in the civil- 
 ization of Europe than any other that can be 
 named. Never did so great a personality sail 
 the Mediterranean Sea or cover the surround- 
 ing shores with its journeys. And yet this 
 mighty personality lived out of the superior 
 and supernal personality given in that vision. 
 He came to say that he lived, yet not he but 
 Christ lived in him, that Christ was within 
 him the hope of glory ; so complete, so con- 
 tinuous, so full of steadiness and rapt feeling, 
 was this surrender of the soul of Paul in time 
 to the soul of Jesus in eternity. 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 125 
 
 This is the outline of Paul's reason for his 
 faith in the risen Lord. The Lord Jesus had 
 changed him from a persecutor to a preacher 
 of the gospel; he had changed the entire 
 organism of his thinking; he had changed 
 his experience from despair to triumph as a 
 servant of the moral ideal ; he had sent him 
 over an empire as a prophet of the Eternal 
 love ; he had enabled him to endure nameless 
 sufferings and glory in them that he might 
 thereby show forth the power of his Master. 
 Paul's life came out of his faith in the risen 
 Lord. With such a life as issue, could he 
 reasonably doubt the Divine reality of the 
 cause? Not till something can come from 
 nothing, not till wholesome living can come 
 from delusions, not till it can be shown that 
 all that is deepest and divinest in the life of 
 man comes from lies, shall we dare to say 
 that Paul's faith in the reality of his vision 
 of the risen Lord is vain. 
 
 The question comes, Is this assurance of 
 the risen Lord open to us? In reading his 
 words, in dwelling upon the stories of his 
 
126 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 resurrection, in pondering what he has been 
 to his disciples in all these centuries, there 
 has come upon us a vision of Jesus as alive 
 and at the right hand of God. We now ask 
 this question : How can we be sure that Jesus 
 is alive, that he is the risen Lord? 
 
 If we have met him on our way to an evil 
 goal, if his spirit has risen out of his words 
 and stood across the path of our evil progress, 
 if he has arrested us in shameful thoughts 
 or intentions, if he has blinded us with excess 
 of light on some secret sin, or some duty that 
 we have scorned, if he by his moral illumina- 
 tion and appeal has made it impossible for us 
 to go on in our wickedness, if he has turned 
 us from wild infatuation with error and 
 wrong to duty and to God, there is one tre- 
 mendous witness to the reality of our risen 
 Lord. He has risen up like a new watershed 
 in our existence; he has turned our whole 
 being in a new direction; he has made it 
 impossible that we should again flow where 
 we have flowed, that we should again seek 
 that old and evil goal. 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 127 
 
 Have we gone on from this initial experi- 
 ence as Paul did ? Have we come to read the 
 meaning of the soul, the family, the nation, 
 the history of man, the total of our human 
 existence, and the character of the Eternal 
 through the eyes of Jesus? Have we come 
 into a body of ideas of which he is the teacher 
 and inspirer ? Have we found under his in- 
 fluence duty a delight, obligation a privilege, 
 service a song? Is there in progress within 
 us a vast alienation from the selfish, the 
 brutal life, a vast reconciliation to the will 
 of God ? If this or anything like this is true, 
 there is a second witness to the reality of the 
 risen Lord. 
 
 Have we ever done anything for his sake ? 
 Have we confessed his name before men, stood 
 forth before the world in the solemn privilege 
 of membership in his kingdom, given a cup 
 of cold water because we saw in the needy 
 one his brother, clothed the destitute, visited 
 the sick, remembered the forgotten, gone on 
 our way doing good following in his footsteps, 
 holding forth through a just and tender char- 
 
128 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 acter his word of life, joining with all who 
 truly love him in the service of the souls of 
 men, as poor yet making many rich, as sorrow- 
 ful yet always rejoicing, as having nothing 
 yet possessing all things ? If this is the char- 
 acter of our life, or anything the least like 
 this, we have still another witness to the 
 reality of the Lord in heaven. 
 
 The strength of the entire New Testament 
 is the assurance that Jesus is alive. The assur- 
 ance came to the twelve through what they 
 believed to be physical appearances. The 
 assurance came to Paul through a vision, 
 through an experience in his mind and soul. 
 The assurance is the supreme thing, and con- 
 cerning this all the apostles are at one. The 
 assurance of Paul is mightier to-day because 
 we may gain it for ourselves. We cannot see 
 the empty grave, we cannot walk with Jesus 
 from Jerusalem to Emmaus ; we cannot hear 
 him speak to us from the shore of the sea, 
 calling us to dine. The form of assurance 
 peculiar to the original apostles is inaccessible 
 to us. If their faith becomes our faith, it is 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 129 
 
 through our faith in them. With the form 
 of assurance for which Paul stands it is differ- 
 ent. His whole new being was the witness of 
 the truth of his faith; he had no eye-sight, 
 no outward material evidence; it was all a 
 transaction in his intellect and character. 
 When we have his experience or something 
 like it, we shall have his assurance. For those 
 who do not think, the outward witness, the 
 eye-sight of the apostles is easy ; it is a wit- 
 ness that may be accepted by selfish and god- 
 less men. For men who think, who wonder 
 how these things can be, the bodily resur- 
 rection of Jesus is a puzzle, and the peace 
 longed for does not come. The inward 
 witness from all the apostles, and especially 
 from Paul, is nothing to the unspiritual 
 man ; it can be gained only through personal 
 experience, only through renewal in Christ, 
 only through service under him, only by the 
 path of a great soul. To this our Lord is 
 bringing us. If we will not rise into new- 
 ness of life with Christ, we can never know 
 him. When with him we stand at our being's 
 
130 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 height, we shall know that our Redeemer 
 liveth ; life comes from life, — the life of the 
 body from the life of the body, the life of the 
 soul from the life of the soul. If we live in 
 Christ, if we live by him, when we look up 
 we shall see him, according to his word, on 
 the clouds of heaven, we shall see him as 
 Stephen beheld him at the right hand of God. 
 I conclude, therefore, that the fate of Jesus 
 and his gospel is in no way bound up with 
 the fate of miracle. It is evident, even if 
 naturalism is to control men's views of all 
 history, that the really great things in Christ 
 and his gospel abide. His teaching abides, his 
 character is safe, his spiritual leadership is 
 unquestioned. He is still our Prophet, Priest, 
 and King. His risen and glorified life in God 
 remains attested by the witness of life. Only 
 the fringe of his evangelical career is torn 
 away. We lose the stilling of the storm, the 
 walking on the sea, the feeding of the mul- 
 titudes, the raising of the widow's only son 
 and the dead Lazarus. We lose something, 
 no doubt, and the loss, if it should become 
 
JESUS CHRIST AND MIRACLE 131 
 
 inevitable, will be painful to many. But even 
 here there is evidence of the greatness of our 
 Lord. That he wrought wonders upon the 
 physical life of men is beyond dispute. That 
 he gained access to the souls of the plain 
 people by his marvelous power as the healer 
 of physical distress is not open to question. 
 That he took the imagination of the people 
 captive is attested by the tradition of wonders 
 that came to invest his career. To all seri- 
 ous minds, part of the evidence of the power 
 of Jesus Christ will always be the epic of mira- 
 cle embedded in his career. How great that 
 epic is, it would be difficult to say ; of what 
 divine things it is the reflection, men may one 
 day become noble enough to discover. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 
 
 "T XTHAT are the essential things in the 
 f " faith, in the ideals, in the experience 
 and hope of a disciple of Jesus Christ to-day ? 
 It may be said that the disciple of to-day 
 tries to take his place in the school of Christ. 
 Somehow the Master becomes to him a liv- 
 ing presence; the recorded remark, sermon, 
 and parable are heard as if from the lips of 
 the Divine speaker ; the time, the scene, and 
 the events of the evangelical record yield the 
 vision of the great Teacher. Other disciples 
 surround the Lord, and among them the 
 honest and devout disciple of to-day. 
 
 In the school of Christ, recovered by the 
 religious imagination working upon the Gos- 
 pels, the disciple of to-day tries to read 
 the meaning of the universe and the purpose 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 133 
 
 and scope of human life through the mind of 
 Jesus. He looks at the Infinite through the 
 soul of Jesus and says with him, " Our Father 
 who art in heaven"; he looks upon his fellow 
 men through that same Divine soul, and he 
 sees that they are his brothers, bone of his 
 bone and flesh of his flesh ; he looks again, 
 and this time the vision of Jesus leads him to 
 unite in one vast family the Father in heaven 
 and his children in the earth. He is further 
 led by his Teacher to see that the total good 
 of man is conveyed in the great prayer, " Thy 
 kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth as 
 it is in heaven." Thus the disciple of to-day 
 tries to gain the vision of Jesus, to form his 
 intellect in that vision, to make it the sub- 
 stance and spirit of his philosophy of human 
 existence and of the universe in which that ex- 
 istence finds itself. 
 
 There is now a question of the moral nature 
 to be considered, a relation of f eeling and will 
 to the vision of Jesus. The disciple of to-day 
 who tries to think of God and man more and 
 more as Christ thought of them sees that this 
 
134 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 ideal involves two others. It sets before him 
 the ideal of the heart and of the active spirit. 
 He must more and more feel toward God and 
 man as Jesus felt; he must more and more 
 behave as Jesus behaved. He must aim to 
 reproduce in himself the most perfect trust in 
 the righteous will of God and take into his 
 being out of the being of the Highest his 
 eternal magnanimity. He must consider the 
 world of men as on the whole a noble but 
 awful tragedy ; he must regard it with patience, 
 sympathy, compassion ; his heart must aim at 
 becoming more and more the heart of Christ. 
 To this he must add the force of a Christian 
 will. He entertains his Master's vision of the 
 kingdom of God, and toward the progressive 
 realization of that kingdom in the face of the 
 selfishness and brutality of the world he con- 
 secrates himself. This is the great test, as it 
 is the chief privilege, of his discipleship. He 
 sees that finally all the worth of the intellect 
 and the heart come to the test of action. 
 Religion is only a potentiality while it remains 
 vision and passion ; only as vision and passion 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 135 
 
 press for expression in action do they become 
 real. The Christian religion is ultimately a 
 vision and a passion that declare themselves 
 as true through the floodgates of the trium- 
 phant good will. Good will is the last and 
 highest beatitude of God; good will is the 
 final grace of the Lord Jesus; good will is 
 the ultimate and sure test of Christian disci- 
 pleship yesterday, to-day, and forever. 
 
 In addition to faith and ideals the disciple 
 of Jesus has hopes. His greatest hope for 
 himself is that some day he shall answer in 
 moral integrity and purity to the soul of his 
 Master. His greatest hope for human society 
 is the advent of the new heaven and the new 
 earth wherein shall dwell righteousness. Out 
 of these sovereign moral hopes comes the hope 
 of life everlasting, the conservation of all 
 genuine love, the renewal of earth's essential 
 relationships in the eternal world, the redemp- 
 tion of man, and the society of man redeemed 
 in the heavenly sphere. 
 
 In this account of the faith, the ideals, 
 and the hopes of the disciple of Christ to- 
 
136 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 day, I have said nothing about miracle. Is 
 this an oversight, or is it natural or right ? 
 The question may now be raised upon what do 
 Christian men and women live to-day? Do 
 we live upon miracle or upon the Spirit? 
 Do we depend upon the revelation of Spirit 
 through the miraculous or through the nat- 
 ural ? Such a question brings one back to the 
 method of God in dealing with human beings 
 to-day. Miracles do not occur in our genera- 
 tion. Mortal sickness is not healed, our dead 
 are not brought back to life, there is no voice 
 that stills the tempests on our seas, no one 
 can bid us walk upon the waters and save us 
 when we fail through want of faith, no gra- 
 cious hand to-day multiplies the meagre food- 
 supply in starving homes. 
 
 The interest of suffering men and women 
 to-day in these miracles of our Lord must be a 
 pathetic interest. The cry must come up from 
 bereaved parents, " He restored to life the little 
 girl of Jairus, why does he not restore our 
 child? " " He raised from the bier in Nain the 
 widow's only son, why does he not give me 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 137 
 
 back my strong staff and beautiful rod ?" cries 
 another solitary mourner. He had compas- 
 sion upon the bereaved sisters in Bethany and 
 raised their brother from death, and has he 
 no pity upon similar sorrow now? The lame, 
 the halt, the blind, and the leper are still with 
 us, but there is no helper. What avails it 
 for our sufferers to read of the deliverance 
 wrought for a few of the multitudes that suf- 
 fered in that ancient time ? For that ancient 
 world the relief was meagre when measured 
 against the immeasurable need and agony. 
 And when one surveys the world to-day, even 
 that mitigation is nowhere to be found ; 
 among sane minds it is nowhere expected. 
 The natural order is supreme ; and we do not 
 dream that God will work miracles in our 
 behalf, or in behalf of any man. When our 
 children are taken out of our arms, we do not 
 look for their return. We say with a great 
 sorrowing father three thousand years ago, 
 " I shall go to him, but he shall not return to 
 me." There is no discharge in this war ; there 
 is none, and we expect none. We in our gen- 
 
138 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 eration are beset behind and before and on 
 either side by a natural order fixed as fate. 
 
 This sense of law determines the spiritual 
 life of reasonable men. Whether we accept or 
 deny the miracles of Jesus, we pass them by, 
 or we treat them as symbols of spiritual truth. 
 We do not live upon the wonders of the 
 Lord ; we live upon his words, his thoughts, 
 his prayers, his spirit. We commune with him 
 on the way. The secret of life is to know 
 him, to share his vision, to become partakers 
 of his passion, to rise with him to newness of 
 life. We support ourselves by his great utter- 
 ances : " He that believeth on me shall not 
 see death. Because I live, ye shall live also. 
 Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end 
 of the world." The experience of Paul sets 
 the ideal for all disciples: "Nevertheless I 
 live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." Here 
 we are out of the region of miracle ; we are 
 in a far higher world, we are in the world of 
 soul and love and triumphant life. 
 
 I have spoken of Paul as the most impress- 
 ive witness for the faith in the risen Lord. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 139 
 
 I now say that the chief significance of this 
 faith for Paul was in the moral assurance it 
 brought in his fight for righteousness. He 
 had indeed seen Jesus ; he knew that his Lord 
 was risen and reigning, but beyond this, the 
 chief moment of Jesus to Paul was as the re- 
 vealer and mediator of the Infinite righteous- 
 ness. Dearly had Paul loved righteousness 
 from his earliest years, and sorely had he 
 failed to gain it. The vision of Jesus became 
 for him a new conception of righteousness, a 
 new power of achievement and a new hope. 
 It is therefore not an exaggeration to say that 
 the significance of Jesus to Paul was signifi- 
 cance for the spirit. His great words are, 
 "Even though we have known Christ after 
 the flesh, yet now we know him so no more." 
 In the writings ascribed to the Apostle 
 John great emphasis is laid upon the fact 
 that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. The 
 historical life of Jesus is inexpressibly dear 
 and important to this apostle. It is dear and 
 important as the expression of the sovereign 
 soul of his Master, as the revelation of the 
 
140 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 eternal love of God. His greatest words are : 
 God is light, and in him is no darkness at 
 all " ; and to this corresponds the self-charac- 
 terization of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, for 
 which we are plainly indebted to the same 
 writer : "I am the light of the world : he 
 that followeth me shall not walk in the dark- 
 ness, but shall have the light of life." The 
 other words of this apostle, which some will 
 consider even greater than those just quoted, 
 are: " God is love." And of this eternal love 
 Jesus Christ is the one adequate assurance. 
 Here again the whole higher character of 
 Christianity is in the realm of the spirit. 
 
 If we look into the minds of the greater 
 witnesses of our faith in Christian history, we 
 shall find the same general result. For Clement 
 of Alexandria and Origen Jesus was revealer 
 and life-giver. The experience of Augustine 
 is a new version of the experience of Paul ; 
 the gospel was a message to his sinful soul, a 
 message that became a deliverance. Augus- 
 tine's greatest book is his " Confessions " ; it 
 contains the heart of his Christian faith, and 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 141 
 
 into its words he has poured the fullness of 
 his mind and spirit. It is a book that can 
 never grow old; it is full of God, full of 
 Christ, full of the soul to whom God in Christ 
 had become perpetual vision and eternal solace. 
 Luther goes back through Augustine to Paul, 
 and righteousness by faith is the cry with 
 which he awakened Europe. Calvin dwells 
 not upon miracle, but upon the sovereign God. 
 Indeed, wherever one looks among the really 
 great souls, one finds them building either 
 upon ideas, or upon the gracious experience 
 into which these ideas are translated by the 
 Holy Spirit. Cardinal Newman writes an 
 acute and sophistical essay on ecclesiastical 
 miracles, and good men pass it by in pity. 
 He writes of the visitations of God to the 
 souls of men, and the world still reads what 
 is written. Newman, the consummate special 
 pleader for incredible dogmas, is the subject 
 of compassion ; Newman, the religious genius, 
 is dear to the whole Christian church. In his 
 greatest book Bushnell writes a chapter on 
 miracles, in which to-day no one has any real 
 
142 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 interest; he writes sermons for the human 
 spirit that will be a possession for many gener- 
 ations. Edwards is more and more engaging 
 profound minds, not so much on account of 
 his scheme of doctrine, as on account of the 
 depth and splendor of his religious experience. 
 The greatest influence on Christian faith in 
 the nineteenth century came from Schleier- 
 macher and Maurice ; and in both these think- 
 ers the chief excellence is range of spiritual 
 vision and depth of life. 
 
 If I am right in these remarks, religious men 
 are men of the spirit, Christian men are men of 
 the spirit, and the sphere in which they live is 
 not the world of miracle, but the world of Di- 
 vine life. For them law is the speech of God ? 
 and as our own tongue in its order of moods 
 and tenses, in its living and beautiful idioms, is 
 the best possible instrument for the expression 
 of the thought and love and character of friend 
 or parent or child, as we should be put to 
 confusion if the human soul in its regard for 
 us should depart from the law of reasonable 
 speech, so modern religious men think of God. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 143 
 
 The order of nature is his speech; its laws 
 are the idioms of his tongue ; its fixed ways 
 are the steadfast manner of his language; 
 and in and through this instrument he dis- 
 covers to the religious soul his mind and heart. 
 The natural order is thus crowded with ideas ; 
 through it ideas break as from human speech ; 
 from it they work their power as from the 
 countenance of man. Here indeed we have 
 our chief example of the union of mechanism 
 and spirit. Human life is a mechanism of 
 cause and effect, it is life under law — ana- 
 tomical, physiological, economical, terrestrial. 
 It is an organism in strict subjection to law; 
 birth, growth, maturity, decline, and death 
 are events in a living organism under law; 
 but as Aristotle said long ago, the truth or 
 meaning of this organism is spirit. Death is 
 organism minus the spirit that gives it truth 
 and meaning. The infant becomes to its 
 mother, when only a few months old, a mind 
 and heart. The charm of its manner is the 
 charm of a soul learning to express itself 
 through the law-bound organism in which it 
 
144 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 lives. The smile of an infant is a fact in phys- 
 iology; it is an event under physiological 
 law ; and at the same time it is a radiant dis- 
 closure of spirit. Again and again the mother 
 will work and wait for the contraction of those 
 muscles, as men were wont to wait till the 
 descent of an angel troubled the pool, that 
 the soul of her child may become radiantly 
 visible. Through life the same law holds. 
 Looks of infinite tenderness are the supreme 
 signs between those who love ; these looks at 
 meeting and parting, at all the crises and 
 surprises of existence, in life and in death, 
 are events of physiology ; they take place in 
 a purely natural way; they are the orderly 
 phases of the physical organism, and think of 
 the worlds of meaning, high, solemn, beau- 
 tiful, that they bear and utter. The body 
 of a friend is the noble and dear mechanism 
 through which the soul declares its invio- 
 lable order of truth, love, character. When 
 Ruth revealed her soul to Naomi, she did 
 it through word, voice, accent, attitude, man- 
 ner, look. These were all regular phases of 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 145 
 
 her physical existence ; and how the interior 
 world of honor stood in them, and how great 
 they became as the servants of that world: 
 " Intreat me not to leave thee, and to return 
 from following after thee: for whither thou 
 goest, I will go ; and where thou lodgest, I 
 will lodge : thy people shall be my people, 
 and thy God my God : where thou diest, will 
 I die, and there will I be buried : the Lord do 
 so to me, and more also, if aught but death 
 part thee and me." There in human life is 
 mechanism in the service of spirit, and the 
 mechanism is hallowed by the burden that it 
 is made to bear. When the blind (Edipus 
 hears the voice of Antigone and is led forth 
 by her, when Lear, bound upon a wheel of 
 fire, looks up into the face of Cordelia, does 
 not the mechanism of the human body declare 
 a world of soul? In our human life mechanism 
 and spirit meet ; here this mechanism is not 
 in the way of spirit ; it is an essential servant, 
 and as such it stands in honor. 
 
 This is the simplest path to the world 
 of the Eternal Spirit. In the cosmos and in 
 
146 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 human society he dwells and utters himself. 
 We construe the universe in the light of our 
 own life; we are mechanism and spirit; in 
 our existence mechanism is the indispensable 
 servant of spirit; and so we dare to think 
 of God. His laws in nature are his ways of 
 revealing the content of his mind there ; his 
 ways with man are the fixed order through 
 which he utters his regard for him. When 
 man becomes a religious soul, when love flows 
 between the finite soul and the Infinite, the 
 order of life and death, the mechanism of 
 nature in which our being is set, is trans- 
 figured. In that order there is felt the pressure 
 of God's hand, the fullness of God's smile, 
 the infinite meaning in the wild tragedy of 
 existence, the depth of God's good will. 
 
 Look now at the career of Jesus from this 
 point of view. His body is the mechanism 
 that bears the burden of his great soul. His 
 soul is an order of thoughts and feelings and 
 purposes that bears in itself the consciousness 
 of God and his thoughts and feelings and 
 purposes toward man. The life of Jesus serves 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 147 
 
 a double end: it expresses his soul; it also 
 expresses the soul of God as God lives in him. 
 All this is independent of miracle ; it does 
 not even suggest miracle. Mechanism of body 
 is the basis of this expression of Jesus as he 
 lives in God. The word was made flesh ; the 
 organism of the body became the revealer of 
 the spirit. At every step forward in his career 
 this is the central truth in the life of Jesus. 
 He spoke, he lived a human life under law : 
 and at every turn his speech, his life, bore the 
 burden of a divine meaning. His infancy in 
 Bethlehem, his boyhood and youth in Naza- 
 reth, his public ministry of teaching and heal- 
 ing, the phases of his organic existence, were 
 the instruments of his spirit, and of God as 
 God lived in his spirit. Thus through the 
 temporal life of Jesus in part and in whole 
 the Eternal was uttered. The effect upon the 
 religious soul of the natural order of the life of 
 Jesus as the bearer and revealer of the life 
 of God may find its symbol in the effect upon 
 the penitent thief of these words : " To-day 
 shalt thou be with me in Paradise." Here is 
 
148 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 the mechanism of the human voice. Could 
 any miracle equal the sweetness and the power 
 of that mechanism ? Could any wonder bear 
 to a soul in darkness the assurance of the 
 Eternal conveyed by that mechanism? As 
 was the voice of Jesus then, such was his 
 whole life, an order of nature revealing the 
 eternal kingdom of the spirit. 
 
 n 
 
 The final cause of the discipline in doubt 
 to which Christian men are subjected in our 
 time would seem to be that they may be 
 brought back to the world of the spirit that 
 fills and transfigures the natural order of the 
 cosmos and of human life. The great condi- 
 tion of this mighty return to the immediate 
 world of the spirit is freedom. For the first 
 time since the apostolic age, the Christian re- 
 ligion is held and studied in our day in the 
 atmosphere of freedom. For Protestantism, 
 all religion is the subject of study in the world 
 of freedom ; and for Catholicism, religion is 
 engaged in a determined struggle to regard 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 149 
 
 itself in the light of the free intellect. This 
 is something new under the sun. Never has 
 freedom of mind so reigned in the things of 
 the spirit as it reigns to-day. Indeed, compul- 
 sion has reigned so long in the sphere of faith 
 that great souls have been again and again 
 tormented with the question whether they 
 were believers on authority, or on insight into 
 the essential nature of their belief. Never till 
 this day has faith had the opportunity that 
 now confronts it, the opportunity to declare 
 through complete intellectual freedom what 
 is incidental in its own life and what is essen- 
 tial and permanent. For Christian faith this 
 inexpressible privilege has been long in com- 
 ing, and now that it is here we hail it as 
 a vast hope. This hope may be to many a 
 terrible visitation of fear. Even then it can- 
 not be denied that freedom has arrived. What 
 Kant said of his age is much more true of our 
 age : " This may be best characterized as the 
 age of criticism — a criticism to which every- 
 thing must submit." A new mood has arisen 
 in the sphere of religion ; it fills the educated 
 
150 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 world; it reaches the entire intelligence of 
 the time. Is this new mood for better, or for 
 worse? What of the future of our faith at 
 its hands ? What of the future of those be- 
 liefs that have hitherto been the perennial 
 fountain, or at least the indispensable chan- 
 nel, of our greatest inspirations ? Are we per- 
 mitted now to work and to feel as of old? 
 Are we forbidden to think as of old? How 
 long can work and feeling go forward when 
 thought has lost its hold upon the Eternal ? 
 Does the change in thought mean only a 
 vaster thought and thus a profounder feeling, 
 and a mightier activity for Christian right- 
 eousness ? In the new mood of the age, are 
 we confronted, like ancient Israel, by a pos- 
 sible blessing and a possible curse? In our 
 hope and in our fear is there balm in Gilead ? 
 Is there a physician there? The intellectual 
 world, the spiritual world, the Christian world 
 is in movement. Whither is it bound ? Who 
 is its leader and Lord ? When the sea breaks 
 its immemorial bounds, is there any law or 
 force upon which one may look for the con- 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 151 
 
 trol of the fearful flood? When Christian 
 scholars, teachers, preachers, disciples of the 
 Lord have, in one degree or another, aban- 
 doned immemorial traditions, is there any 
 Guide on whom "we may rely for the conser- 
 vation of the best in history, and for the con- 
 trol and happy issue of the whole daring 
 movement of man's spirit? 
 
 There is indeed much confusion to-day in 
 the field of belief, and much need of patience. 
 Parents have dedicated to the ministry of 
 Christ the son whose entire existence has been 
 covered by their prayers. They have sent him 
 to college, and there he has stood in the heart 
 of the world's great debate between theism 
 and atheism, a knowable God and an unknow- 
 able, history as an optimism and history as 
 the interminable desert of despair. In college 
 he has been trained to think, to question every 
 affirmation, to try the spirits that he might 
 know their worth. Is it strange that, under 
 this discipline, — and there is no other disci- 
 pline that is intellectually decent, — their son 
 should come forth with a high spirit, a vigor- 
 
152 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 ous understanding, and a somewhat attenu- 
 ated body of belief? They send this son to 
 the divinity school. The mood of the age is 
 still with him. In the modern seminary he 
 stands in the heart of the great debate about 
 the Bible. How came the Old Testament to 
 be what it is ? How came the New Testament 
 to be what it is ? How much is authentic his- 
 tory ? How much, if any, is myth or legend 
 or the accretion of the creative imagination 
 of after-times ? In answer to these questions 
 their son hears a multitude of conflicting 
 tongues, and Babel itself seems peaceful and 
 beautiful order compared with this unsilence- 
 able and endless uproar. Again, is it strange 
 that their son, when he presents himself for 
 ordination as a minister of Jesus Christ, 
 should be somewhat uncertain, and perhaps 
 unsatisfactory, in his statement of faith ? 
 They cannot blame him; they know the 
 honor of his soul, the integrity of his intel- 
 lect, the deep and tender veneration of his 
 heart for his Master; they know that he 
 stands ready to confess him in service and in 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 153 
 
 sacrifice and unto tears and blood. They can- 
 not blame him ; why should they blame his 
 teachers, why should they blame any one? 
 The mood of the age is upon us all ; whither 
 shall we go from its spirit, or whither shall 
 we flee from its presence? If we take the 
 wings of the morning and dwell in the utter- 
 most parts of the sea, even there shall the 
 mood of the time confront us. If we ascend 
 up into heaven, it is there; if we make our 
 bed in hell, it is there ; it is with us in the 
 darkness and in the light ; it is the shadow 
 of God in the mind of educated man ; as the 
 shadow of God we must behold it, we must 
 implore its meaning, we must beg for its 
 name. 
 
 The profoundest meaning of the vast and 
 restless mood that is upon us, I believe to be 
 the Divine intention to throw us back upon 
 God, the Holy Ghost. If natural law seems to 
 be inviolable, if there appears to be no longer 
 any room left for miracle, it is that the whole 
 creation may appear miraculous, the garment 
 that God is weaving for himself on the roar- 
 
154 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 ing looms of time, under the eyes of the liv- 
 ing. For a few miracles hard to grasp, we are 
 bidden behold a miraculous universe, where 
 all things depend upon, where all things re- 
 veal, the mystery of the Infinite will. No man 
 is intellectually justified in denying the pos- 
 sibility of the miracles of Jesus; he does 
 not know enough to deny. No man has a 
 right to make the glory of Christianity de- 
 pend upon the miracle. Does the Fourth 
 Gospel mean nothing in setting the life of 
 Jesus into the life of the world, and back 
 into the life of the universe, and up into the 
 life of the Eternal God, without the aid of 
 miracle ? Consider which is the grander, the 
 story of the incarnation according to Luke, or 
 the same story according to John. 
 
 If the Bible appears to be no longer an 
 infallible book, it is that men may come to 
 know the Divine inspirer of it. The Bible 
 seems to me to have gained immeasurably in 
 the process of scientific examination. The 
 humanity of the Bible is monumental; and 
 this monumental humanity enables us to lay 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 155 
 
 hold with new assurance upon the Eternal 
 humanity. " The burdens of the Bible old " 
 are still out of the Infinite. In the lyric and 
 epic utterance of supreme souls one still hears 
 the accent of the Holy Ghost. In the oracle 
 of the prophet, in the epistle of the apostle, 
 and in the eternal wisdom and tenderness of 
 the teaching of Jesus, we still rise as on wings 
 into the presence of the Most High. Theories 
 about the Bible are born and die like the 
 swarms of insects in summer ; but the Bible 
 in its really great books remains what it has 
 always been — the monumental witness to 
 the presence in man of the Holy Ghost. If 
 we live in God, we shall see that the Bible 
 lives in God; if God lives in us, we shall 
 know that God lives in the Bible. 
 
 Even the uncertainty about the person of 
 Jesus Christ, which I deplore, seems to me to 
 be, in a way, providential. " It is expedient 
 for you that I go away " ; so spoke the Lord. 
 The religion of Jesus Christ is, after all, 
 the religion of the Holy Ghost. The church 
 is the church of the risen Lord ; the church 
 
156 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 began in the consciousness of the risen and 
 reigning Christ. It can never be, without out- 
 rage upon history, without revolt from Chris- 
 tian reason, the church of the dead Christ. 
 With this fountain of organized Christianity 
 sure, with this consciousness rising and termi- 
 nating in the Lord who abolished death, we 
 have nothing to fear. Behind that, below 
 that, sane criticism cannot go. And with this 
 consciousness as channel, there comes in upon 
 us, if we will but open the gates, the floods 
 of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit thus be- 
 comes the hope of the church. If we have the 
 Holy Spirit, he will guide us into all truth; 
 he will recover to faith and life the truth 
 that the church may from time to time lose. 
 Thinking, believing, doing, living in the 
 strength of the Holy Ghost — there is no 
 hope save in that experience; and for the 
 soul and for the church in that experience, 
 there is nothing but hope. What if all the 
 criticism and uncertainty of the age shall 
 prove a Divine discipline toward this issue? 
 What is the final beatitude for man but that 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 157 
 
 he shall live and move and have his being 
 full of love and awe, in God? For what do 
 we hope when we pray that the tabernacle of 
 God may be with men ? For what do we long 
 when, in the language of the Apocalypse, we 
 behold the holy city, the New Jerusalem, with 
 no temple therein, save the soul of God om- 
 nipresent and omnipotent, in the social life 
 of the race ? 
 
 The outgoing mariner leaves much behind. 
 The dear shores fade from his sight; the 
 beloved land sinks deeper and deeper under 
 the horizon ; but these shores and that land 
 do not cease to be; they remain part of the 
 order of the world, and the buoyant and 
 benign sea goes with him, floating him on 
 its joyous floods, and fanning him with its 
 strong winds, till he anchors in the harbor 
 whither he is bound. The recorded gospel, 
 the recorded Christ, we leave behind as the 
 swift years roll, as the great centuries pass. 
 That Divine life in Galilee and in Judea 
 is far away from our time. We may weep 
 that it is forever receding from the successive 
 
158 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 generations of men ; but we must not forget 
 that it is part of the history of the race, that 
 it is the abiding and the supreme human 
 memorial, and the glorious deep of the Holy 
 Ghost goes forward with us ; it is under the 
 keel of the church. Its currents are all toward 
 good. Its winds are the prevailing forces 
 in all progress ; and with this element under 
 us, and with these inspirations behind us, fill- 
 ing the sails of faith, and blowing into white 
 heat the great furnaces of love, we have every- 
 thing to hope and nothing to fear. 
 
 The secret of existence for the individual 
 Christian and for the whole body of Christians 
 is in a life in the life of God ; in a life that can- 
 not be plucked out of his hand, that cannot be 
 torn from fellowship with him. The Christ of 
 yesterday and the Christ of to-morrow are in 
 the keeping of the Christ of to-day. The divine 
 past and the divine future are safe, utterly 
 safe, when held in the divine present. God 
 is our refuge, a present help in time of trouble. 
 Therefore will not we fear, though the earth 
 be removed and the sea roar and be troubled. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 159 
 
 The planet goes forever forward, but it takes 
 with it its atmosphere, and when the storms 
 are still, it looks through that atmosphere, as 
 through a vast window, upon the numberless 
 shining worlds among which it rolls. Let the 
 moving church take with it the faith, the 
 experience, the protection, the infinite gift of 
 the Holy Ghost. Let it roll forward in the 
 heart of this mystery of encasing deity ; let 
 it view all worlds of science and art and phi- 
 losophy and government, all the shining moods 
 of human culture, and all the blasted survivals 
 of departed glory, through the infinite trans- 
 parency and peace of the Eternal Spirit. 
 
 in 
 
 If now we raise the question, How are we 
 to create belief in Christ and his gospel to- 
 day, I know of no better approach to the 
 final answer to that question than by a sym- 
 pathetic study of Arnold's poem, "Rugby 
 Chapel." We recall at once the vision of the 
 dead father in the gloom of the autumn even- 
 ing:— 
 
160 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 Coldly, sadly descends 
 
 The autumn evening. The field 
 
 Strewn with its dank yellow drifts 
 
 Of wither'd leaves, and the elms, 
 
 Fade into dimness apace, 
 
 Silent ; — hardly a shout 
 
 From a few boys late at their play ! 
 
 The lights come out in the street, 
 
 In the school-room windows ; — but cold, 
 
 Solemn, unlighted, austere, 
 
 Through the gathering darkness, arise 
 
 The chapel-walls, in whose bound 
 
 Thou, my father ! art laid. 
 
 We recall, too, the poet's recoil from the 
 gloom of the scene as he thinks of the radi- 
 ant vigor and the buoyant cheerfulness of his 
 father: — 
 
 Such thou wast ! and I stand 
 
 In the autumn evening, and think 
 
 Of bygone autumn with thee. 
 
 Fifteen years have gone round 
 Since thou arosest to tread, 
 In the summer-morning, the road 
 Of death, at a call unforeseen, 
 Sudden. For fifteen years, 
 We who till then in thy shade 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 161 
 
 Rested as under the boughs 
 Of a mighty oak, have endured 
 Sunshine and rain as we might, 
 Bare, unshaded, alone, 
 Lacking the shelter of thee ! 
 
 From this vision there flows faith in the 
 persistence of that soul, faith that some- 
 where, — 
 
 Still thou performest the word 
 
 Of the Spirit in whom thou dost live — 
 
 Prompt, unwearied, as here ! 
 
 Then the poet turns to consider the course of 
 the life of mortal men on the earth. There is, 
 first, the aimless, unmeaning life that lives in 
 vanity and dies unregarded. There is, second, 
 the life of the valiant, victorious individualist 
 who breaks away from his companions, leaves 
 them to perish in the storm, and who alone 
 comes to his goal. There is, third, the Chris- 
 tian hero ; let us listen to the poet again : — 
 
 But thou wouldst not alone 
 Be saved, my father ! alone 
 Conquer and come to thy goal, 
 Leaving the rest in the wild. 
 
162 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 We were weary, and we 
 Fearful, and we in our march 
 Fain to drop down and to die. 
 Still thou turnedst, and still 
 Beckonedst the trembler, and still 
 Gavest the weary thy hand ! 
 
 If, in the paths of the world, 
 Stones might have wounded thy feet, 
 Toil or dejection have tried 
 Thy spirit, of that we saw 
 Nothing — to us thou wast still 
 Cheerful, and helpful, and firm ! 
 Therefore to thee it was given 
 Many to save with thyself ; 
 And, at the end of thy day, 
 O faithful shepherd ! to come, 
 Bringing thy sheep in thy hand. 
 
 Here is the human life as leader, inspirer, 
 saviour of other human lives; here is the 
 way of faith. The hero whom we have 
 known, the man of God, the lover of his 
 kind, the helper of the weak, enables us to 
 renew the vision of the servants of God and 
 man in the past, enables us, through all the 
 precious memorials of their lives, to behold 
 and believe in the mighty succession of the 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 163 
 
 witnesses for the Eternal, lifts us to the con- 
 sciousness of Jesus and his kingdom, to the 
 consciousness of God and his divine regard 
 for man. The greatest miracle that might be 
 wrought would appear impotent in the pre- 
 sence of the living, reasonable witness for the 
 things of the spirit, for the things of Christ, 
 of a great and good man. What we need to 
 renew our faith in the Highest in the uni- 
 verse, in Jesus the highest in time, is not 
 conversion to faith in the miraculous, but the 
 privilege of seeing again God in Christ work- 
 ing in the thought and feeling and action of 
 men of our own day. The contemporary Chris- 
 tian is the best guide to the historic Master ; 
 the contemporary communicant of the Eternal 
 is the highest witness for the reality of the 
 reigning Christ and his kingdom of love. 
 Arnold was spare in his positive beliefs, but 
 here he lays in clear light and peace the way 
 of the soul to the richest faith. 
 
 And through thee I believe 
 
 In the noble and great who are gone ; 
 
164 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 Yes ! I believe that there lived 
 Others like thee in the past, 
 Not like the men of the crowd 
 Who all round me to-day 
 Bluster or cringe, and make life 
 Hideous, and arid, and vile ; 
 But souls temper'd with fire, 
 Fervent, heroic, and good, 
 Helpers and friends of mankind. 
 
 Ye alight in our van ! at your voice, 
 Panic, despair, flee away. 
 Ye move through the ranks, recall 
 The stragglers, refresh the outworn, 
 Praise, re-inspire the brave ! 
 Order, courage, return ; 
 Eyes rekindling, and prayers, 
 Follow your steps as ye go. 
 Ye fill up the gaps in our files, 
 Strengthen the wavering line, 
 Stablish, continue our march, 
 On, to the bound of the waste, 
 On, to the City of God ! 
 
 Two great principles underlie this whole 
 discussion of miracle and religion. These are 
 the scientific conception of law and the reli- 
 gious conception of the immanence of God 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 165 
 
 in the cosmos and in man. The scientific con- 
 ception of law as a generalization from a wide 
 induction of facts was presented in the early 
 part of this discussion. The religious concep- 
 tion of the immanence of God in the cosmos 
 and in man has been basal in our consideration 
 of miracle and the belief in God, in our exam- 
 ination of miracle in relation to Jesus and his 
 gospel, and in our remarks upon the world in 
 which religious men live to-day. The imma- 
 nence of God in the cosmos and in man does 
 not make miracle an impossibility. There may 
 be more than one version of the active will of 
 the Most High. It leaves miracle in the cate- 
 gory of the logically possible, where it is left 
 by the scientific conception of law. But just 
 as the scientific conception of law tends more 
 and more to reduce miracle to a bare logical 
 possibility, so the religious conception of the 
 immanence of God in his universe tends more 
 and more to make miracle superfluous. Since 
 God is in every mode of action in the cosmos 
 and in man ; since even now he is closer than 
 breathing, nearer than hands or feet; since 
 
166 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 his intelligent will is the ground of the cosmos 
 and all its phases; since his conscience is in 
 the conscience of man, what room is there 
 for miracle, or what need? Miracle is the 
 natural sequence of the transcendental con- 
 ception of God. The transcendent God makes 
 the cosmos and man, fits them up with 
 power so that they run of themselves ; he is 
 not in them, he is a God living beyond them. 
 They have no immediate value for the soul 
 that would find God, they have only a repre- 
 sentative value, and as they are degenerate, 
 that representative value is sadly impaired. If 
 God is to be known at first-hand, according 
 to this idea, it must be through miracle. Thus 
 Jesus must come into the world in a miraculous 
 way; thus his career as teacher, doer, and 
 sufferer must be embedded in miracle. The 
 natural order in the cosmos and in man is an 
 order devoid of God;" the return of God and 
 his immediate presentation to man is not and 
 cannot be without miracle. In a word, this I 
 understand to be the philosophy that makes 
 miracle a necessity of faith. Now that the 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 167 
 
 philosophy is no longer recognized as true, 
 the inference as to the need of miracle is no 
 longer seen to be valid. 
 
 I have conducted my discussion in accom- 
 modation to the fears of many good men whom 
 I deeply respect. I have been concerned to 
 show that the Christian religion is essentially 
 independent of miracle. In this attempt I 
 have taken the ground assigned by the 
 thinkers who do not believe in miracle. So 
 far as need be, I have indicated my own posi- 
 tion. While I hold the scientific conception 
 of law and the religious conception of the 
 immanence of God in his universe, I do not 
 admit that these ideas render miracle an im- 
 possibility. They leave it in the category of 
 the logically possible, with the further impres- 
 sion that it is naturally and religiously im- 
 probable. I am still further free to confess 
 that miracle is no part of my working philoso- 
 phy of life, not because I deny its reality, but 
 because I cannot be sure of its reality, and 
 I wish to live as far as possible among the 
 things that are sure, and among the things 
 
168 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 about which sureness is a reasonable hope. 
 That I may see for myself, that I may help 
 others to see, that religion is independent 
 of miracle, I accept in a provisional way the 
 denial of miracle as the basis of debate. Mir- 
 acle is myth; so it is said by a multitude 
 of scholars and thinkers; and we allow this 
 contention to stand. These thinkers assert 
 that natural law rules over all ; and we accept 
 the assertion as true. On this ground it has 
 been shown that mechanism is the vehicle 
 of Spirit; the world as natural law carries 
 within it the Eternal God. The flying wheels 
 of being have their motion and life in him ; it 
 is still true that he makes the outgoings of 
 the morning and the evening to rejoice; it 
 is still true that seed-time and harvest, sum- 
 mer and winter, are from him. The order of 
 life and death is the expression of his Will ; 
 unalterable as that order is, it cannot keep 
 God from the soul, or the soul from God. 
 Within the iron circle of natural law it is pos- 
 sible to-day, as it was three thousand years 
 ago, to sing : — 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 169 
 
 The Lord is my shepherd ; I shall not want. 
 
 He rnaketh me to lie down in green pastures : 
 
 He leadeth me beside the still waters. 
 
 He restoreth my soul : 
 
 He guideth me in the paths of righteousness for 
 
 his name's sake. 
 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the 
 
 shadow of death, 
 I will fear no evil ; for thou art with me : 
 Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. 
 
 This is the triumphant insight of the reli- 
 gious soul. The parable is the natural life of 
 the sheep and the shepherd. The spiritual 
 experience behind the parable is man in the 
 natural order of the world guided, tended, 
 comforted, and kept by the Eternal lover and 
 possessor of man's soul. In this parable of 
 the possibilities of the soul under the natural 
 order, alive and aflame with God as it is, the 
 whole higher spirit of the Old Testament sur- 
 vives as an abiding and precious possession. 
 
 If it be doubted whether this can be true 
 of the New Testament, let those who doubt 
 stand again under the cross. Let them look 
 
170 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 upon the Supreme sufferer, oblivious of his 
 own agony, going forth to the penitent thief 
 in the great assurance : " Verily I say unto 
 thee, To-day shalt thou be with me in Para- 
 dise." Let them look again and behold him 
 going forth in the fullness of pity to the bru- 
 tal men who nail him to the cross : " Father, 
 forgive them ; for they know not what they 
 do." Let them look still again, and this time 
 let them watch his spirit, still regardless of 
 its own woe, entering the heart of his suf- 
 fering mother, whom he thus intrusts to the 
 care of the disciple whom he loved: " Woman, 
 behold, thy son ! Son, behold, thy mother ! " 
 Let them listen with bowed head and in pro- 
 f oundest awe to the final words : " It is 
 finished." "Father, into thy hands I com- 
 mend my spirit." Here is the process of natural 
 law at its blackest ; here is the reign of mech- 
 anism as a reign of terror; and yet, in all 
 history, is there any disclosure of the Eternal 
 love and pity so clear, so dear, so great as 
 this? 
 
 When the night of death is past ; when the 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE 171 
 
 true light of Christian discipleship is once 
 more shining ; when the scattered and appalled 
 apostles are recalled and reassured ; when in 
 their lives the promise is fulfilled, " I will not 
 leave you comfortless, I will come to you"; 
 when in the depth and wonder of their ex- 
 perience and in the might of their service the 
 words unfold their truth : " Lo, I am with 
 you alway, even to the end of the world," 
 we see again through the natural order the 
 sovereign soul of the risen Lord. In life and 
 in death the Lord is with us ; in life and in 
 death we are the Lord's, and the gospel 
 that we still preach is the old eternal gospel, 
 Immanuel, God in the world and the world 
 in God. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 
 
 OUR age has been concerned to an amaz- 
 ing extent with the local and temporal 
 side of religion. Religion is an historic phe- 
 nomenon; as such it has expressed itself in 
 institutions, rites, beliefs, literature. This ex- 
 pression of religion may be called its tempo- 
 ral side; its institutions belong among the 
 social forms of human life, its rites are a part 
 of the general custom of the world, its beliefs 
 are a phase of the philosophy of existence and 
 the universe, its books have their place in the 
 literature of the race. To this temporal aspect 
 of religious faith probably more scientific at- 
 tention has been devoted during the last fifty 
 years than in any similar period in the history 
 of mankind. The scientific scholar has ap- 
 peared, and his special concern has been with 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 173 
 
 the literature of religion, its texts, documents, 
 compositions, and with the history of these 
 and the ideas embodied in them. The method 
 of this investigation has been that common to 
 all men of modern education, first-hand ascer- 
 tainment of fact, and inference in accord with 
 the fact. The presupposition underlying the 
 scholar's work and giving general character 
 to it has been a naturalistic conception of the 
 cosmos. 
 
 What, now, is the justification for the sub- 
 jection of the temporal side of religion to this 
 new and searching examination ? In reply it 
 may be said that there are two justifications, 
 one scientific, and the other religious. The 
 scientific desire to know the truth, the whole 
 truth, and nothing but the truth, is of itself 
 a sufficient reason for the investigation. The 
 scholar's work is here seen to be part of the 
 scientific activity of the world ; it has behind 
 it the impulse of all true science, love of truth 
 and the quenchless desire to know it. Whether 
 that truth shall be favorable to human interests 
 or not, does not here enter into the question. 
 
174 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 What are the facts, and what do they mean 
 in the historic process? For the scientific in- 
 tellect these are the main questions, and in 
 the attempt to meet them an amazing world 
 of activity has been called into being. 
 
 In addition to this scientific consideration 
 there is another. There is the religious belief 
 that things eternal are seen through things 
 temporal, that space and time in all their rich 
 variety, color, and movement are servants of 
 the Highest. This belief leads to the expec- 
 tation that a correct version of the temporal, 
 in respect to any religion, would prepare the 
 way for a new and a more influential concep- 
 tion of the Eternal. Here is a new fountain 
 of enthusiasm for the devout scholar. In his 
 textual criticism, his analysis and rearrange- 
 ment of documents, his assignment of books 
 to their proper place in the process of human 
 development, he is preparing the way for a 
 closer vision of the coming of the kingdom 
 of God. It is the hope of serving this ulti- 
 mate end that turns the detail and drudgery 
 of his work into poetry ; that end shines 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 175 
 
 through the entire world in which he works, 
 — a world of confusion, sorrow, and contra- 
 diction, — and that, like the sun, fills it with 
 splendor and life. 
 
 While all this is true, it must be added 
 that little has been done in our age toward 
 the profounder vision of the Eternal in reli- 
 gion. It is humiliating that here we can do 
 no more than prepare the way of the Lord ; 
 that we are fit for criticism, but not for in- 
 sight, able to consider in scientific order what 
 others have created, but unable to bring forth 
 ourselves ; that we are greater than the men 
 of old in research, but immeasurably beneath 
 them in the richness and reality of religion. 
 The role of the prophet in the cleft of the 
 rock, witnessing, so far as mortal man may, 
 the pageant of the Eternal goodness, is not 
 for us ; we are content to investigate the tra- 
 dition of this high experience, to call atten- 
 tion to the cleft in the rock and the rubbish- 
 heap at either end. Religion as a life and as 
 a literature has its greatest exemplars and 
 masterpieces in the past ; to-day the soul is 
 
176 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 not alive as it has been, and too often the 
 creative spirit is lost in a world of confused 
 detail. 
 
 It must not be forgotten that in great re- 
 ligions the human spirit is creative in all the 
 spheres of life, in thought, in feeling, and in 
 character. Religion is primarily an affair of 
 being, exalted and greatened being, with the 
 pulse of creative power beating at its heart. 
 As in some great mountain one notes a unique 
 relation to the infinite sky and a capacity out 
 of that sky to renew its splendor, so in a 
 soul sublime in its religious consciousness we 
 observe a sovereign sense of the Eternal and 
 an unmeasured capacity to re-create life, on a 
 nobler plan and on a vaster scale, from the 
 Eternal. " There is a spirit in man, and the 
 breath of the Almighty giveth them under- 
 standing." Man's nature as a religious being 
 would seem to be a system of capacities in 
 the favoring presence of the Eternal; capa- 
 cities for mistake, suffering, entanglement in 
 the tragedy of time ; capacities for escape, 
 reconciliation with the moral ideal, achieve- 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 177 
 
 ment, growth, and hope ; and religion at its 
 best is the victorious consciousness of this 
 order of capacities in man as man lives in 
 God. It is this great soul of religion that is 
 in danger to-day, the movement of the spirit 
 of man in the Eternal, the movement of the 
 Eternal in the spirit of man. 
 
 Much in the custom of religion tends to ] 
 deaden men to its essential spirit. The monu- ^ 
 mental expressions of religion in other ages 
 become substitutes for present vision, passion, 
 and character ; the Bible that should edu- 
 cate, inspire, set free in original relations to 
 God absolves the soul from experimentation, 
 insight, and discovery. We repeat the prayers 
 of the saints, but we do not covet their crea- 
 tive heart; we adopt liturgies because they 
 lessen the burden of the ministers of the gos- 
 pel, and we fail to see that in so doing we 
 rob them of their highest privilege. How 
 the world looks from the mountain-tops of 
 genuine, ardent prayer, they know who have 
 been there; we encourage our preachers to 
 dispense with this toil and the supreme ex- 
 
178 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 perience to which it leads, and to adopt and 
 repeat the reports of other men's experience. 
 We build creeds to aid faith, and thereby deny 
 to faith the infinite and intellectual freedom 
 and hope there. We enrich our service with 
 ritual and ceremony till in the pomp and cir- 
 cumstance of worship the God who is spirit 
 and truth is forgotten. We lament the loss of 
 belief in angels and seek to revive the doctrine 
 of familiar spirits ; we speak of the pathos of 
 these vanished worlds of faith, and do not per- 
 ceive the gain to man and the grandeur of this 
 abolition of all intermediaries. To-day man 
 leans upon the Eternal strength; to-day he 
 stands face to face with God, and this issue to 
 which the Holy One is leading us we confuse 
 with the custom of religion in our poor hands. 
 Even the legitimate and essential labors of 
 the scholar are apt to become an impediment. 
 His vocation is research into fact, and while 
 it is true that every fact has its ideal side, 
 like the eagle's egg in the nest, only awaiting 
 the brooding intellect to become a living 
 thought, yet the vocation of the scholar in 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 179 
 
 our time, especially in the sphere of religion, 
 is not quick to kindle the brooding mind. 
 Learning and insight should go together, but 
 they frequently part company. Never in the 
 history of religion has this separation been 
 more painfully frequent than now. The ways 
 of the Spirit of God with the spirit of man 
 are not in the vision of many who yet write 
 learned books whose whole value depends on 
 the previous question. The earth and the 
 soul have their orbits ; poor is the geologist 
 who forgets the wide and wild path on which 
 his planet runs, and poor is the scholar who 
 becomes oblivious of man's inherent and inces- 
 sant relation to the Eternal. The frivolous 
 custom of religion is aided by the scholar as 
 he falls a victim to detail, as he fails to con- 
 ceive history in terms of the ideal that strug- 
 gles within it, a living but imprisoned force, 
 as he forgets to think of religion in time sub 
 specie aeternitatis. 
 
 It has been said that modern religion is 
 an imitation and an echo. In science, in lit- 
 erature, in music, in political and industrial 
 
 t/ 
 
180 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 organization the modern man of the West 
 is original ; in religion he is not original. I 
 think the modern man is superficial and imita- 
 tive here because his faith has become formal 
 and trivial. The work of the scholar in the 
 history of religion should be of the greatest 
 consequence ; we have seen why it so often 
 falls below its possibility. The formal and 
 closed nature of religion, as we conceive it, is 
 another aspect of the same distress. The mod- 
 ern man is not doing himself justice in this 
 supreme sphere. He is here a poor tradition- 
 alist, a pale Protestant, a literal Christian 
 minus the central idea of the Christian faith, 
 the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The adoption 
 into intellect and life of the doctrine of the 
 Holy Spirit would bring back into faith cre- 
 ative power, and the modern mind, free and 
 great in so many spheres of human interest, 
 would appear in the sphere of religion in an- 
 swering greatness. 
 
 An immense amount of good work is done 
 by all branches of the Christian church. Edu- 
 cation, public service, works of mercy, all the 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 181 
 
 higher interests of the nation, have in the 
 Christian churches their best friends. The 
 strongest defenders of humanity and the 
 mightiest foes of inhumanity are in these 
 churches. Practical idealism burns there with 
 a steady and powerful light; Christian vi- 
 sions for society and Christian pity and hope 
 abound. Yet it must be said that these pre- 
 cious things are confined to the few. The 
 effective force in the churches is still a Gid- 
 eon's army, a resolute but meagre remnant of 
 the total enrolled membership. The cry for 
 a revival of religion is natural ; but the reli- 
 gion to be revived is not the right kind, nor 
 is the revival sought of sufficient depth. The 
 pervasion of man's whole being by the Eternal 
 is what we need ; minds renewed in the image 
 of the Perfect mind, hearts under the perpet- 
 ual spell of the things that are excellent, wills 
 steady, and sure in the service of the Chris- 
 tian end of existence, God's kingdom and 
 righteousness ; these are our needs. The pop- 
 ular mind is debased by the evil custom of 
 the world; the popular heart is wanting in 
 
182 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 reverence, and in the morality that reverence 
 alone can create and sustain ; the popular will 
 is without character ; society as it lies open 
 before us cries out for a revival of religion, 
 but the religion needed is not the form of 
 sound words, or the pious devices and subter- 
 fuges of professional revivalism, but man's 
 soul made alive in the enduring sense of the 
 living and Eternal God. For this end profes- 
 sional revivalism with its organizations, its 
 staff of reporters who make the figures suit 
 the hopes of good men, the system of adver- 
 tisements, and the exclusion or suppression 
 of all sound critical comment, the appeals to 
 emotion and the use of means which have no 
 visible connection with grace, and cannot by 
 any possibility lead to glory, is utterly inade- 
 quate. The world awaits the vision, the pas- 
 sion, the simplicity, and the stern truthfulness 
 of the Hebrew prophet ; it awaits the imperial 
 breadth and moral energy of the Christian 
 apostle to the nations ; it awaits the teacher 
 who, like Christ, shall carry his doctrine in 
 a great mind and in a great character. 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 183 
 
 I have spoken of the few elect souls, men 
 and women, in our churches who are worthy 
 to stand among the best of the Christian 
 ages. What about the mass of church people ? 
 Are they not as fond of the polluted book, 
 the play with its appeal to sensual passion, as 
 their pagan neighbors ? Who hears of their 
 refusing to buy a cheap and repulsive sheet 
 that costs a penny, that they may give sup- 
 port to a great but two-penny paper? Who 
 ever heard them object to the poor dancing- 
 girl on the stage, dancing her soul away 
 to please low tastes? Who can report any 
 revolt on their part over the shame of the city 
 and the tradition of infamy that carries on its 
 black tide thousands of youths to the pit? 
 Do they not know every cheap and question- 
 able book, every slimy play, every audacious 
 device of the person who caters for pagans, 
 every social function far removed from sanc- 
 tity, every avenue of exclusiveness and pride, 
 every black art of gossip, every twist and turn 
 of the ropes of inhumanity, and do they not 
 attend church and look for the coming of the 
 
184 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 kingdom of God ? What kind of revival will 
 meet this case ? Hysteria will not do, nor the 
 devoutness of Lent, nor a turn at psychic 
 healing, whether as patient or patron. What 
 is demanded here is the axe laid at the root 
 of the tree; the new heaven and the new 
 earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness; the 
 renunciation of the devil and all his works, 
 and the profound and sincere appeal to the 
 Eternal God. 
 
 There are the professional architects of 
 unity, and what a sad battalion they are ! 
 They seek to unify, in this sect or that, all 
 the rival sects; they devise, cloud the issue, 
 and sugar-coat the pill, hoping by diplomacy to 
 make sure the coming of the kingdom of love. 
 The unity that each sect seeks is the unity of 
 the lamb inside the lion ; and this is not the 
 most pitiable aspect of the subject. The bases 
 of unity are the supreme disgrace. They are 
 the acknowledgment of this or that ancient 
 creed which has become, in part at least, 
 questionable, perhaps incredible; the accept- 
 ance of this or that ecclesiastical usage which 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 185 
 
 any congregation of rogues might agree to ; 
 submission to some external authority, papal 
 or episcopal, and the meek reception at their 
 poor hands of one's birthright as a free child 
 of God. Religion, the only thing worth 
 uniting for, religion, a man's share, his grow- 
 ing share in the life of the Eternal, is seldom 
 alluded to ; it is taken for granted, much in 
 the same way as a bankrupt person might 
 assume that he was a millionaire. Never since 
 God's world of men began to run have ec- 
 clesiastics gathered men into unity ; what they 
 have done has been to make the spiritual 
 prison larger and pack it with a greater multi- 
 tude. Never till the day of doom will true 
 unity come except by the prophet of the 
 Eternal beseeching all disciples of Jesus to 
 retreat from their untenable assumptions, their 
 foolish presumptions, their snobbery and 
 quackery, their worldliness and inhumanity, 
 back upon the life of God. Never till religion 
 shall become profound and mighty, never till 
 it shall become our chief joy, shall we unite 
 in larger and larger groups ; never while 
 
186 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 eccentricity is our chief gospel, pretense our 
 chief delight, and worldliness our main pur- 
 suit, shall we be unified on any other ground 
 than falsehood, or with any other sect than 
 that of fools. 
 
 In the presence of infinitely deeper con- 
 cerns, how slight appears to be our concern 
 with miracle. When our anxiety is about the 
 interior life and majesty of religion, we shall 
 not trouble ourselves over the record of signs 
 and wonders in which history discovers it. 
 The enchantments of sense are not to be com- 
 pared with the achievements of the soul of 
 man as it lives in God. Outward things are 
 shallow, one and all, till they become inward 
 things; thought alone discovers depth and 
 permanence. Science itself is shallow till it 
 gives us, as in physics, a transformed cosmos, 
 — a cosmos taken from the senses and given 
 back, a less garish but an infinitely greater 
 wonder, through the understanding. The re- 
 ligion of miracle, it must be confessed, is out- 
 ward and shallow; religion becomes great 
 only as it becomes an affair of the soul, con- 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 187 
 
 ceived and brought forth in the strength of 
 the Eternal. The central debates, difficulties, 
 interests, and hopes of religion are elsewhere 
 than in miracle, and to a few of the more 
 important of these I must now call attention 
 in order and explicitness. 
 
 n 
 
 The teacher of religion has on hand a real 
 and not a mere academic contest. He is called 
 not to undertake the defense of any historic 
 system of theology such as that of Augustine, 
 Calvin, or Edwards ; nor is it the preacher's 
 business to protest against the attested results 
 of modern Biblical scholarship ; nor is it his 
 vocation to fight science on its own ground 
 and in the service of its legitimate ends ; nor 
 to give an unwarrantable significance to the 
 debate over miracle ; it is his far greater task 
 to meet current philosophic denials of his gos- 
 pel, to do battle against the tremendous vital 
 contradictions of his message, to deal with the 
 fanaticism that turns sanity in faith out of 
 doors, and to take into account the woes that 
 
188 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 afflict organized Christianity to-day. Here are 
 living foes, all the more formidable because 
 sincere and sustained by reputable and sin- 
 cere men. A rapid glance at the sad heart of 
 our time, in its philosophic, vital, fanatical, 
 and ecclesiastical contradictions of an eternal 
 gospel, is now in order. 
 
 To-day the battle is raging round three 
 distinct and opposite views of our human 
 world. These views come mailed and pan- 
 oplied in august philosophic idiom and tech- 
 nique; they are known as Pure Phenome- 
 nalism, Abstract or Transcendental Idealism, 
 and Concrete Idealism, formidable names that 
 cover ideas that are simple and easy of ap- 
 prehension when translated into common 
 language. 
 
 The first view, that of Pure Phenomenalism, 
 regards our human world as a vagrant; it 
 wanders lonely as a cloud with hardly a patch 
 of light upon its back or a sunbeam thrust 
 against its poor old ribs ; it is detached, iso- 
 lated, a dream, a delusion. The old empiri- 
 cism issued in this conclusion inevitably, the 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 189 
 
 empiricism of Spencer, the Mills, Bentham, 
 and the great perf ecter of the old empiricism, 
 David Hume. The new empirical idealism, an 
 idealism of sentiment and imagination such as 
 that set forth with so much charm of manner 
 by Professor George Santayana, 1 arrives at 
 the same goal. While built upon the crudest 
 materialistic foundation, this philosophy of 
 the literary man absolves our human world 
 from all connection with permanence. That 
 world exists for men ; and beyond men it has 
 no meaning. Science, Art, and Religion are 
 but the several phases of man's life ; infinite 
 mystery is beneath and above and round about 
 our world ; what it is for that Infinite, while 
 logically beyond all computation, practically 
 amounts to nothing. Here is a form of ideal- 
 ism that, while it labors in its own sentimental 
 way to keep and to enjoy the world of human 
 values, yet frankly confesses, now with pathos 
 and again with disdain, that the world of man 
 is fugitive and worthless. This form of ideal- 
 ism has not thus far been expressed with 
 
 1 In his interesting book, The Life of Reason. 
 
190 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 strength and thoroughness enough to make it 
 formidable ; but as it stands in current litera- 
 ture, it leads toward serious issues. It takes 
 no uncommon insight to see how strong this 
 foe of the worth of man's world might be- 
 come. It involves belief in the primacy and 
 the sovereignty of the material basis of exist- 
 ence ; and of course belief in the incidental 
 and evanescent character of the world of 
 mind. It is a form of thought at variance 
 with faith in the dignity of man and the pre- 
 sence in man of the Universal spirit. It is 
 alien to the Christian philosophy of existence ; 
 all the more must it be watched because it 
 recognizes sincerely an ideal humanity in the 
 heart of the cosmos whose worth for the uni- 
 verse is nevertheless nothing. It is the pret- 
 tiest, daintiest, and in its implications the 
 deadliest, current form of materialism. 
 
 The second view, that of abstract and 
 transcendental Idealism, has its strongest ex- 
 pression in Bradley's great book, "Appear- 
 ance and Keality." This book is, however^ 
 only one of many attempts to find the uni- 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 191 
 
 verse through man ; attempts which find no 
 consistent or permanent meaning in man's 
 world. Here Bradley is but a nineteenth cen- 
 tury Spinoza ; his book is a new version of an 
 old philosophic tradition. We have nothing 
 here to do with the process by which he and 
 his followers attain their goal ; we take the 
 result to which they come, and we protest 
 against it in the name of our human world. 
 When we hear that world described as an" 
 appearance of some grand abysmal reality, a 
 messenger from some inaccessible, inscrutable, 
 eternal sphinx, a bubble blown by something, 
 no one knows what, floating in the path of 
 time, gay, gorgeous, yet doomed to swift col- 
 lapse, and when the collapse comes, leaving 
 no trace of itself and its values anywhere, we 
 protest. Our human world is our surest, as it 
 is our most precious, possession ; and we can- 
 not consent to the legitimacy of the process 
 by which it is sublimated out of being into 
 a form of existence that remains, and must 
 forever remain to the unsophisticated intellect, 
 a blank. Against the pure phenomenon and 
 
192 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 the transcendental reality, against the world 
 as a vagrant and the Absolute as a man-eater, 
 genuine religion must always protest ; and in 
 these two current philosophic traditions, the 
 Christian religion as the religion of the infi- 
 nite worth of human beings must recognize 
 the contradiction of its essential gospel. Nat- 
 uralism is no foe to Christianity unless it is 
 naturalism minus the presence of an ideal. 
 The life of Christianity is in the ideal, and 
 the realization of the ideal may well be exclu- 
 sively in and through the natural order. Ideal- 
 ism is the friend of Christianity unless it 
 becomes idealism minus the essential worth 
 of man. Humanism is the profound friend of 
 the gospel of Jesus unless it denies itself, cuts 
 itself off from the Infinite, and sees the world 
 of man as an unattached and incidental phe- 
 nomenon in the heart of a cosmos inferior to 
 itself. 
 
 The current movements in philosophy meet 
 in one sad confession, the loss of faith in the 
 permanent worth of man's world. Naturalism 
 when it excludes the ideal and when it makes 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 193 
 
 the ideal dependent upon the process of 
 nature ; idealism when it seeks reality beyond 
 the order of human existence; humanism when 
 it fails to see any organic relation between man 
 and the Eternal, chant the same dirge as to- 
 gether they dig the grave of all human things. 
 The prof oundest loss is here. Any number of 
 writers and thinkers are sure in the vision and 
 swift in the service of the higher humanities 
 as such ; but when it comes to the universal 
 and permanent significance of these higher 
 humanities, these prophets fail. For them 
 humanity at its best is an alien in the universe ; 
 it has somehow forced its way into this show 
 of time; but it lives by the consent of its 
 brute inferiors, and beyond its dependent 
 existence there is nowhere any Supreme soul 
 to whom its excellence might make a prevail- 
 ing appeal, and who might save it with an 
 everlasting salvation. 
 
 In the presence of this denial the ques- 
 tion of miracle is childish. Such a question is 
 at best on the circumference of the circle of 
 faith ; the question of the permanent worth of 
 
194 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 man is the centre of that circle. It is at this 
 centre that the voice of the prophet should 
 be heard to-day. In the perspective of diffi- 
 culty he should stand here. The armies of the 
 alien are massed at this point ; they know the 
 citadel of Christian faith, even if preachers 
 of the Christian gospel do not know it. The 
 universal loss of faith in the Infinite worth, 
 he worth of God, of man and man's world, 
 should mean the extinction of the essential 
 joul of the gospel of Christ. With this con- 
 viction as to the perspective of the values of 
 faith, it is only right that one should recall 
 Christian men from the interests that are 
 secondary to those that are deep as life. Fid- 
 dling while Rome is burning is an edifying 
 occupation to none save to those who wish to 
 see the Eternal City in ashes. 
 
 When we leave these interests of the intel- 
 lect and enter the domain of the practical, the 
 chief concerns take us into another and a far 
 profounder world than that of miracle. There 
 is the horror of moral defeat facing individuals 
 and nations as a constant possibility, in many 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 195 
 
 cases as a fact. Here the moral life of man, 
 the moral life in civilized communities, is at 
 stake. Individuals are every day breaking 
 down under the burden of sensual oppressions. 
 Our morality seems to be so widely a question 
 of etiquette and diplomacy; we appear to be 
 on the borders of a vast inundation of vice. 
 Moral despair is creeping into the heart of 
 the few brave idealists; they are asking if it 
 is worth their while to resist the devil at their 
 gate when the other gates of the city are not 
 only open, but festooned with welcome to his 
 Satanic majesty. The daily press gives the 
 obituaries of the natural man ; the death of 
 the soul, of multitudes of souls, is not listed. 
 The idle talk about orthodoxies and hetero- 
 doxies becomes a mean blasphemy in the pre- 
 sence of this death of the ideal, this surrender 
 to the brute that is daily going on among 
 living and suffering men. 
 
 When we look out upon the business world, 
 we see again the world of Ishmael. The hand 
 of man is against man ; in capital we have the 
 conscienceless corporation atoning for its out- 
 
196 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 rages upon humanity by its gifts to education 
 and religion ; in labor we see brute fury 
 violating law, denying the freedom of work- 
 men, organizing a tyranny more terrible than 
 modern society has ever known, excusing 
 itself on the ground that there is no other 
 way to gain its rights and to contribute to 
 the well-being of the people. Where in this 
 dismal outlook is there any sign of brother- 
 hood, any hint of victorious moral life ? While 
 one's sympathies must go with labor, because 
 of its nameless sufferings in the past, and be- 
 cause of its hard lot under any possible com- 
 bination of circumstances ; while one must 
 look with concern upon the associated wealth 
 of the land because it is so often pitiless as it 
 runs the vast treadmill in which human beings 
 pass their sorrowful years, yet the inclusive 
 outlook leaves the impression that between 
 associated capital and associated labor there 
 is little to choose. The old economy rules in 
 both camps; the separation of morality and 
 business, though the devil himself could not 
 make it complete, is still tragically widespread. 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 197 
 
 The chief concern of the business world as 
 one looks at it truly, both in its association of 
 capital and of labor, is not character, is notj 
 human worth, is not the kingdom of love, bu< 
 money. Here is an approximation to the brute 
 struggle for existence of appalling magnitude ; 
 here is practical materialism on a scale and 
 with a passionate intensity that in comparison 
 turns the philosophic article into moonshine. 
 The leading nations of the earth in no way 
 relieve the gloom of this outlook; they add to 
 it a darkness all their own. Here are Christian 
 Britain and Christian Germany in deadly feud, 
 each intrinsically afraid of the other, yet each 
 waiting for a chance to spring at the throat 
 of the other. For what cause ? Because Brit- 
 ain has the sovereignty of the sea and fears 
 she may lose it, because Germany wants that 
 sovereignty and hopes some day to win it. 
 The whole feud is an economic feud ; it has its 
 source in the brute life of both nations ; it is 
 the most ruthless exposure of the hollowness 
 of the moral life among both peoples. No single 
 human goal, no distinctly human interest, no 
 
198 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 conceivable end of morality or religion, justi- 
 fies this irrational and savage hostility. 
 
 But the vision must be extended so as to 
 include the sin, the ignorance, the capacity 
 to believe a lie, the incapacity to profit by ex- 
 perience, in short, the moral tragedy of man- 
 kind. The vision of sin and death still rises 
 out of the world's heart ; and the preacher of 
 religion who averts his sight from this woe for 
 the sake of some idle debate of a purely aca- 
 demic nature would seem sadly mistaken in his 
 conception of man's supreme need and God's 
 answer in Christ to that need. 
 
 Mention must next be made of another 
 subtle foe of sound religion, the new belief 
 in religion as magic, as a therapeutic agent of 
 miraculous power. This new cult assumes many 
 forms. In one form it calls upon us to deny 
 the existence of evil, to ignore disease and 
 pain, to believe that thought has the power of 
 absolution. Here, of course, there is no regard 
 for the fixed conditions of mortal life, no sense 
 of the determinations of the Eternal thought 
 in which men are held, no concern for facts, 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 199 
 
 no sense of law, nothing but the riot of fancy, 
 the play of childish self-will, the lunacy of ir- 
 rational ecstasy. Religion as a value in itself 
 is here lost. It is a means to an end ; it exists 
 chiefly as the servant of the body ; it is good 
 because it issues in freedom from disease and 
 pain, because it imparts comfort and efficiency 
 to the physical organism. Doubtless these ends 
 are good, but they do not rise into the sphere 
 of true religion. Hitherto the chief business 
 of religion has been with the character, the 
 state of the heart, the soul; and in the great 
 days of religion, men living in its power have 
 been concerned mainly with the moral and 
 spiritual conditions of the community. When 
 religion and rationality part company, religion 
 sinks to an agent in the service of the physi- 
 cal organism. A generation of this way of 
 regarding religion would go far to reduce it 
 to an incidental place among the interests of 
 normal human beings. 
 
 The healing cult that is annexing itself to 
 the office of the preacher has its peril here. 
 Its evil tendency is evident in two ways : it 
 
200 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 looks at human beings from the wrong side, 
 and it turns the commonplaces of psychic power 
 over the body into magic. The human person 
 should continue to be, at least for the preacher 
 of Christianity, essentially a spiritual being, 
 one whose most serious concerns are those of 
 character. The claims put forward in behalf 
 of psychic healing are in favor of an inferior 
 interest, and they are in general wild exagger- 
 ations. When one sees whole bodies of appar- 
 ently sensible human beings carried away by 
 the Christian Science craze or the psychic heal- 
 ing infatuation, one wonders if religion and 
 soul, religion and sanity, religion and the sov- 
 ereignty of moral ends, have forever parted 
 company. 
 
 The philosophy underlying these crude and 
 sad movements may seem at first glance to be 
 the sovereignty of spirit. A longer and deeper 
 gaze forbids this complimentary conclusion. 
 For what is spirit ? Is it not moral will, true 
 thought done into life through will ? Is not 
 spirit defined by its ends ? Is not its deepest 
 trait worth ? Mere immateriality is not a sufli- 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 201 
 
 cient account of spirit ; God as a spirit is not 
 properly described as an incorporeal being, but 
 as Infinite love. Now in the two forms of magic 
 to which I have referred, the life of the body is 
 the main interest. The soul has its chief value 
 as the servant of the body ; the worth of the 
 higher life is the comfort it can bestow on the 
 lower. And here one wonders whether, if this 
 had been primitive Christianity, there would 
 have been a cross at its heart, whether the 
 Divine youth with whom it originated would 
 have thrown his life away, whether his chief 
 apostle would have carried the Christian mes- 
 sage through an empire in spite of his thorn 
 in the flesh, whether Christianity would have 
 bred men and women who counted not their 
 temporal life dear to them, that they might 
 do the will of God ? So far as there is any 
 philosophy underlying these pathetic move- 
 ments, it would seem to be the sovereignty of 
 the body and the subordination of the soul. 
 
 The deepest aspect of these frantic uses of 
 religion is the malady they reveal ; they are 
 a symptom of unbelief in spirit. Essential 
 
202 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 materialism and incidental spiritual existence 
 would seem to express their inner meaning. 
 And it is here that they become signs of the 
 times. Materialism is dead as a theory of the 
 universe, because there is for science no such 
 thing as matter according to the older concep- 
 tion of it. But materialism as a condition of 
 human life is universally recognized ; physio- 
 logical science has made this condition clear 
 and impressive ; the physical organism, espe- 
 cially the brain, has assumed a new importance 
 in the life of man. So much attention has been 
 devoted to the physical side of human exist- 
 ence that it has gradually assumed the place of 
 chief concern. Materialism, practical and vital, 
 is in the air ; old beliefs are falling away in 
 consequence; and spirit itself has become 
 dependent and incidental. The old compari- 
 son of the soul in its relation to the body as 
 bhe harmony to the harp gave better results, 
 'hough dependent upon the harp, though 
 existence after the harp was destroyed was im- 
 possible, yet the harmony while it lasted was 
 a value in itself, and testified to a whole world 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 203 
 
 of super-material values. Here we are brought 
 face to face with another sign of the times. 
 Religion as such seems to have few friends ; 
 few have anything to say for the soul as a 
 value in itself, and for God as the object, the 
 life and joy of the human spirit. 
 
 To these adversaries of faith in an eternal 
 gospel, by which I mean good tidings for this 
 world and all worlds and good tidings chiefly 
 for the ethical person, there must be added 
 the warfare of the sects. The Roman Church 
 will recognize no other ; religion in the pro- 
 found and saving sense is still in the keeping 
 of its priesthood ; Christ has but one authen- 
 tic representative in this world, and that repre- 
 sentative is the head of the Roman Catholic 
 Church. Here comes in the Episcopal Church, 
 Anglican and American, claiming to be the 
 church, chiefly regarding the Roman commun- 
 ion as given over to superstition, and emphatic- 
 ally setting at naught other organizations of 
 Christian men and women. The Methodist ap- 
 pears, democratic and zealous as ever, but sadly 
 entangled in obsolete ideas and ecclesiastical 
 
204 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 jobbery ; the Baptist cannot surrender a mere 
 form even for the sake of the Eternal Spirit ; 
 the Presbyterian and the Congregationalist 
 still contend for one phase of the world's 
 thought as the whole and the final truth, and 
 outlaw one another on this basis. Here is the 
 solemn and crying disgrace of the Christian 
 faith : its interests are trivial, its spirit is in- 
 human ; the methods of its warfare are carnal ; 
 its snobbery, bigotry, and barbarism are a sad 
 sight. In the presence of this exhibit, is there 
 any wonder that the churches should have so 
 slight a hold upon the people of the land ? As 
 they stand, they have no right to empire ; they 
 are not clear and earnest enough in intellect, 
 nor are they high enough in character, to de- 
 serve empire. It is a calamity when inferior 
 persons exercise authority ; and this calamity 
 is not reduced when these inferior persons are 
 labeled religious. If the churches of America 
 would exercise power over the national life, 
 they must first rise in intellect and in character ; 
 serious, informed intellect and high charac- 
 ter are the ultimate sources of power ; and our 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 205 
 
 Christian religion is a Divine tradition, but a 
 tradition only till it operates in a clear and 
 sound mind and declares its spirit in a great 
 character. Only so much Christian truth as 
 is lodged in character is quick capital in the 
 sphere of moral service. 
 
 Authority and influence are in general very 
 different things; authority is mainly in the 
 office, in the institution, and in the law of the 
 institution, whereas influence is in the man, in 
 his intellect and character. It is true that we 
 speak of the authority of the specialist, the 
 decisive and final word of the man who knows, 
 and this usage is not now called in question. 
 The point here made is that authority does 
 not always imply worth ; it is usually, in the 
 sphere of faith, a term of compulsion, a word 
 signifying the application of force, a power to 
 silence and to drive. The Protestant churches 
 have entirely lost whatever of this undesirable 
 inheritance they may at one time have pos- 
 sessed. Their hope is in influence, intellectual 
 and moral ; and nothing can give them this 
 influence but great minds and true hearts. Ed- 
 
206 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 ucated and free communities are not to be 
 moulded in the highest things by the incom- 
 petent intellect, even when warmed by the good 
 heart ; nor will they follow the godless and 
 heartless thinker who deals with religion ; they 
 demand the superior mind and the superior 
 human being, and in him alone they confess 
 the sovereignty of influence. 
 
 in 
 
 In the final book of the New Testament we 
 read of an angel flying in mid-heaven proclaim- 
 ing an eternal gospel to them that dwell on 
 the earth, and to every nation and tribe and 
 tongue and people. That eternal gospel con- 
 tained these things : God and the glory that 
 is his due as the Infinite excellence ; God's 
 judgment in this world ; the worship of God 
 as the Lord and Giver of life, and as the most 
 worthy Judge Eternal. 
 
 Is there any chance for this angel to fly in 
 mid-heaven to-day, and if he may fly, will he 
 still have an eternal gospel to declare ? We 
 may not be altogether satisfied with his former 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 207 
 
 exposition of his eternal gospel ; we may be- 
 lieve that in his first flight he was in too great 
 haste to lay open to the heart his announce- 
 ment of abiding good tidings; we may hope 
 that in his second flight his account of his 
 message may be richer and closer to the need 
 of our troubled age. There can be no doubt 
 that this messenger and his message touch our 
 life in its profoundest need ; there can be no 
 question that when he speaks again and speaks 
 in the idiom of our time, he must be richer in 
 detail and more explicit than he was of old. 
 
 When troubled over the changing aspects 
 of our historic Christian faith, it is good to 
 strip that faith bare and to look at it in its 
 naked majesty. Our whole human world is 
 summed up in persons ; souls in the presence 
 and life of the Infinite soul ; that is the ulti- 
 mate reality of our universe. Our faith is the 
 vision of Jesus concerning the meaning of 
 this universe, his insight set in the authority 
 of his character, and filled with the glory of 
 his passion. This is the permanent centre of 
 our Christian faith; this is our Christianity 
 
208 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 as we shall hold it in the invisible world. In 
 that invisible world the Bible, our dearest 
 treasure here, will be absent ; there will be no 
 church there, no temporal ritual, sect, creed ; 
 no sacrament like Baptism and the Lord's 
 Supper ; no miracle, no division of life into 
 sacred and secular. " The sun shall be no more 
 thy light by day ; neither for brightness shall 
 the moon give light unto thee : but the Lord 
 shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and 
 thy God thy glory." l The temporal world is 
 for a temporal end ; when that end is served, 
 that order has done its work ; when the indi- 
 vidual ceases to exist in that order, it ceases 
 to have further meaning for him. The serious 
 question concerns not the temporal order, 
 but the Eternal Spirit who meets man in it, 
 and who educates man through it ; the pro- 
 foundest interest centres not in what is bound 
 to pass away, but in that which cannot pass 
 away. Our Christian faith, considered sub spe- 
 cie aeternitatis, sums itself up in these great 
 simplicities : the object of faith, — God ; the 
 
 1 Isaiah lx, 19. 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 209 
 
 monumental teacher of this faith, — Jesus 
 Christ; the fellowship of it, — the souls 
 of believers ; the service which it inspires, — 
 obedience in any one of countless forms, in 
 countless diverse situations, to the Eternal 
 good will ; the endless worth of personal being, 
 of personal being as love in action, as love in 
 possibility. 
 
 It goes without saying that a religion for 
 eternity is not necessarily suited, in all re- 
 spects, to a being in time. We need elements 
 of faith in this temporal order not needed in 
 that eternal order. Thus church, creed, ritual, 
 sacrament, and the great Bible come back, as 
 elements of power and necessity in our pre- 
 sent distress. Still the clear sense of the tem- 
 poral nature of these elements of our faith 
 liberates the spirit from too much depend- 
 ence upon them, imparts steadiness amid the 
 changes that inevitably go with them, and leads 
 to a wise and happy perspective of values. In 
 our faith we find two sets of values, the tem- 
 poral and the eternal; therefore that cannot be 
 of supreme concern which dies with time ; that 
 
210 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 must be our sovereign interest which lasts 
 forever. 
 
 An acute and learned writer has recently 
 published a book with this attractive title, 
 "The Eternal Values. ,,1 If this book shall 
 keep to the heart the promise that it makes to 
 the ear, here surely men will find rest to their 
 minds. But just here is our difficulty with this 
 elaborate and interesting production. While 
 it contains an admirable account of the values 
 of perception, logical connection, our fellow- 
 world, and the world of art, it brings no 
 authentic tidings of eternal values for man. 
 There is in the final pages of the book the 
 dim emergence of an Absolute for whom our 
 human values may have an eternal value, but 
 for that Absolute we men as such are of only 
 temporal value. 
 
 The author of this book is fond of titles 
 that imply the dignity of the higher aspects 
 of our human world ; it is a grief to be obliged 
 to add that, as he employs them, that dig- 
 nity is vain. Eternal ideals, eternal values, 
 
 1 Professor Munsterberg. 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 211 
 
 what do these fine words mean ? Ideals are the 
 visualized expectations, the images that em- 
 body desire and hope, the desire and hope of 
 persons. These images may be of economic 
 good, scientific, artistic, political, philosophic, 
 religious; whatever the ends may be which 
 these visions represent, their length of days 
 is strictly dependent on the length of days of 
 the persons, or the race of persons, that en- 
 tertain them. An eternal ideal as the vision 
 or product of a temporal race is eternal non- 
 sense. The same is true of values. Values are 
 such to rational beings ; they may be as nu- 
 merous as are the interests of man; they may 
 be sensuous, conceptual, domestic, national, 
 racial, universal ; but whatever their worth may 
 be, that worth ceases when the persons or the 
 races of persons for whom they have worth 
 become extinct. Eternal ideals and eternal 
 values as the possession or production of a 
 temporal race are manifest impossibilities. It 
 is almost needless to say that eternal ideals 
 and values belong only to spiritual beings who 
 last forever ; and if the Absolute alone lasts 
 
212 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 forever, he alone is in possession of eternal 
 ideals and values. With all due respect to 
 this Absolute for whom everything exists that 
 does exist, and in whose presence nothing 
 that lives is of any account for itself, the chief 
 concern of human beings is with human ideals 
 and values. To call us to the study of Eternal 
 Ideals and Eternal Values and then to tell 
 us in our high-raised expectations that these 
 ideals and values are not for us, is to give us 
 a scorpion for an egg, to keep the promise of 
 infinite good to the ear and to break it to the 
 mind. If man's world is wholly temporal, let 
 it be so described ; if man ceases to be as a 
 person at death, again let us hear our sentence 
 in plain words. In the presence of fate we 
 shall resolve with Nicias and his army, " We 
 shall do what men may and bear what men 
 must." But on no account let us juggle with 
 words; let us not dream that we discover 
 eternal ideals and values for men when the 
 race of men is a mere incident in the endless 
 (evolutions of the cosmos. And if we think 
 that men should be willing to be damned for 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 213 
 
 the glory of the Absolute, let us beware lest 
 our Absolute, in making this requisition upon 
 moral beings, turn out to be not the Infinite 
 Perfection, but the Infinite Cannibal, not the 
 God and Father whose tender mercies are over 
 all his works, but the devil that is the slan- 
 derer, the enemy of man. 
 
 An eternal gospel identifies the being of man 
 as spirit and the being of God. In such a gos- 
 pel we do not have two sets of ideals and two 
 sets of values ; we have one order for God and 
 man, with this difference, that while this order 
 of ideals and values in the case of God is 
 immediate and complete, it dawns upon man 
 through the atmosphere of the temporal world, 
 and lives among its fires and storms. The 
 essential kinship of God and man is the heart 
 of the Christian faith; without this essential 
 and endless kinship, eternal good tidings for 
 man there can be none. With this f undamen; 
 tal assurance that in virtue of thought, moral 
 accountability, and responsible action, there is 
 essential identity of being between God and 
 man, we have still eternal good tidings to pro- 
 
214 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 claim to mankind. For then the whole contrast 
 of the Infinite to the finite, the Perfect to the 
 imperfect, the Universal Spirit to the individ- 
 ual human being, is but the contrast of the 
 Eternal Father to his child in time; the contrast 
 is all in our interest. Because his thoughts are 
 not our thoughts, because his ways are not our 
 ways, because as the heavens are higher than 
 the earth, so are his thoughts and ways higher 
 than ours, therefore we are the more able to be- 
 lieve the call, " Let the wicked forsake his way, 
 and the unrighteous man his thoughts : and 
 let him return unto the Lord, and he will have 
 mercy upon him ; and to our God, for he will 
 abundantly pardon." * When we pray, "Our 
 Father who art in heaven," we claim kinship 
 with the Eternal Spirit, we set that kinship 
 in the heart of infinite contrast; yet this con- 
 trast is all in our favor. It is of the Lord's 
 mercy that we are not consumed ; because his 
 compassions fail not; they are new every 
 morning and fresh every evening. The iden- 
 tity of man with God is supported by an infi- 
 
 1 Isaiah lv, 7. 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 215 
 
 nite contrast of wisdom and power and com- 
 passion. 
 
 Our human world is our supreme concern; 
 life in that world is either a permanent possible 
 or a permanent actual value. The quality pos- 
 sessed by the finest spirits is a value for all 
 moral beings in all worlds. The conceptions in 
 which the philosophy of Socrates consisted have 
 long ago been transcended; they were tran- 
 scended by Plato, his chief disciple, and still 
 further by Plato's great disciple ; but Socrates 
 confronting death with the cup of hemlock in 
 his hand, as depicted in the closing chapter of 
 the "Phsedo," has never been transcended and 
 never will be. The history of his people and the 
 philosophy of that history given by Stephen, 
 his insight into the genius of the new religion 
 and his apology for it, have been transcended; 
 but the spirit that went up to God through the 
 shower of stones that ended his life — "Lord, 
 lay not this sin to their charge" — has never 
 been transcended, and again, it will never be. 
 Fortitude, moral serenity, magnanimity, and 
 devotion to the highest, when they appear in a 
 
216 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 human person, are seen at once to be values 
 for all men in all time, and for the universe, 
 if it is noble enough to care for such things. 
 These values in the highest spirits become 
 ideals for the rest; values and ideals alike are 
 both human and eternal, if man and God care 
 for the best things. 
 
 With this insight into life gained from su- 
 preme spirits we note at once that human re- 
 lationships are moral to the core. The animal 
 ends are to be held in control by ends of jus- 
 tice and mercy; the forms in which human 
 beings associate, economic, domestic, political, 
 scientific, artistic, philosophic, are in their final 
 meaning ethical; they have their deepest sig- 
 nificance as an organism for the development 
 and expression of eternal moral values. 
 
 This brings us to our accountability to God; 
 and here we see the ground of a living and 
 potent religion, a living and potent humanity. 
 Religion lives in the vision of God; man lives 
 in the religion that is the vision and service of 
 God, the God with whom he is at heart one, 
 in whose spirit his spirit is to be cleansed and 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 217 
 
 perfected. The Christian religion is the vision 
 of God in Jesus Christ, the vision of man as 
 the child of God in the same Teacher; the rev- 
 elation through him that the meaning of exist- 
 ence is moral ; that goodness in human beings 
 and the possibility of it are values for the uni- 
 verse; that the life of our kind follows an 
 order of ideals and values identical with that 
 followed by the Eternal Spirit, because at heart 
 he and we are one. 
 
 IV 
 
 Several times I have said in this discussion 
 that our chief difficulties in religion are to be 
 solved by prof ounder living in God. Questions 
 of scholarship are important and at the same 
 time secondary; questions in the philosophy 
 of religion go much deeper, yet there is a depth 
 below them; for the philosophy of religion 
 is the rational account of religion as fact, as 
 life and power. In religion itself there is a 
 synthesis of the highest powers in man, insight, 
 feeling, will ; this synthesis generates a special 
 experience, and this special experience is the 
 
218 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 sovereign thing in the history of the race. To- 
 day one meets the denial of the moral ideal ; 
 and the question comes, How shall that denial 
 be met? It may be met by argument and by 
 life, but life alone is the conclusive answer. 
 We may point to Socrates, Luther, Lincoln, 
 to the great as they have given a new turn to 
 human history ; or we may look into the moral 
 life of good men in all history. We find men 
 living in a system of relationships; out of 
 these relationships have come ideals. There is 
 no fact better attested in the history of man 
 than the presence of the ideal in morally 
 awakened human beings. And this ideal is the 
 sign of the complete human existence as that 
 is understood by each idealist. Whether the 
 lower animals form and entertain ideals, we do 
 not know; whether there is in them anything 
 higher than images of gratified appetite, we 
 may not be prepared to say ; but in men, when 
 morally awakened, there is the hunger for the 
 perfect life in God, the need that expresses 
 itself in the old words, " I shall be satisfied 
 when I awake in thy likeness. " 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 219 
 
 The moral ideal is admitted, but it is said 
 that it is without influence. Biology is not 
 amenable to thought; organic processes are 
 inevitable, and go their way careless of the 
 moral ideal. Hunger, thirst, the reproductive 
 instinct, the circulation of the blood, the 
 changes in the nerve centres and in the brain, 
 in fact, all the main processes of physiology 
 and biology, are independent of thought, and 
 moral ideals and resolves are powerless in their 
 presence. This is the deepest denial in our 
 time, the frankest and the most audacious con- 
 fession of the sovereignty of the lower in man 
 and in the universe over the higher. At the 
 same time it is, for the morally unawakened, 
 the hardest foe to meet and vanquish. For them 
 there is little or none of that great special ex- 
 perience to which such a denial is idle chatter. 
 
 This deepest and saddest denial of our time 
 must be met by argument, and yet more by 
 the witness of experience. Hunger and thirst 
 are organic processes ; no man by thought can 
 arrest or diminish these desires ; but all decent 
 human beings control them through civilized 
 
220 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 thought. The denial is perhaps leveled more 
 directly at the sex instinct than at any other 
 organic force in human nature. Here let ap- 
 peal be taken to chaste youth, and the power 
 of thought over biological processes will be- 
 come evident. Every morally awakened young 
 man who has faced his animal inheritance in 
 the strength of his rational possessions, who 
 has looked upon his passions growing into a 
 group of wild beasts, and who has resolved to 
 tame these beasts, can refute the denial in ques- 
 tion. He knows that as a man thinketh in his 
 heart, so is he ; he knows with the Greek Aris- 
 totle that desire originates through thought; 1 
 that physical discomfort in the organism can- 
 not become definite and inflamed desire till 
 taken up and shaped by thought; that upon 
 the reproductive instinct adverse thought has 
 an immediate influence; that this style of 
 thought maintained penetrates to the inmost 
 processes of the organism and fixes there a 
 real and wholesome dominion. And when this 
 thought adverse to the sovereignty of the sex 
 
 1 Meta. B. 11, 7. 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 221 
 
 instinct expresses itself in games, in a variety 
 of intellectual interests, in any one of a large 
 number of possible ambitions, economic, artis- 
 tic, scientific, philanthropic; above all, when it 
 utters itself in definite moral service, it attains 
 to a substantial mastery of the soul. Indeed, 
 in the presence of the force that oftener runs 
 wild than any other in human nature, it should 
 be said that no instinct in man is more sus- 
 ceptible of transformation and right direction. 
 That human beings so often fail here marks 
 weakness, but not incapacity for strength ; and 
 on the other hand, the jubilant moral life of 
 youth redeemed through thought brings in 
 the overwhelming answer to the pathetic denial 
 of ideal power. 
 
 So much is certainly sound in the mental 
 healing craze, that right thinking has a decided 
 influence upon the functions of the body. 
 There is perhaps hardly an organ in the body 
 whose condition and operation are not subject 
 to the power of the mind ; and till degeneration 
 becomes decided, the intelligence is a co-effi- 
 cient in the production of health. Even in dis- 
 
222 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 ease, the mind is capable of abstraction; it is 
 able in no small measure to ignore and tran- 
 scend the reports and agitations that pour in 
 from the distressed physical organism; it is 
 strong enough, as in the case of the late Pro- 
 fessor Mulf ord, or W. Robertson Smith, ' to 
 discuss the sentence of death by an incurable 
 disease, then to dismiss it and turn to the old 
 paths of thought. 
 
 The denial of the influence of the moral 
 ideal over conduct, and still more over the 
 currents of the soul, has a pathetic genesis. It 
 finds its primary suggestion, perhaps, in the 
 study of nervous pathology ; this suggestion is 
 forced into the mind of the student by the 
 observed influence of the body upon the in- 
 telligence ; here is apt to follow the hasty gen- 
 eralization that all thought is the mere inci- 
 dence of organic processes in the brain, a 
 world created by material conditions, shunted 
 off by itself for a while, possessing splendors 
 and glooms of its own, but always the creature, 
 and finally the victim, of brute matter. 
 
 1 J. Bryce, Studies in Contemporary Biography, p. 325. 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 223 
 
 This state of mind is further confirmed, in 
 many cases, by the absence of full opportu- 
 nity for action. By itself the intellectual life is 
 not enough ; it leads astray when left to itself. 
 Fichte delivered himself from the dominion 
 of physical necessity by the power of thought; 
 he delivered himself from the impotence of 
 thought by the moral will. Action is the final 
 revelation of reality; and lives spent exclu- 
 sively in thought inevitably fall into despair 
 over its worth. Amiel is optimist and pessimist, 
 agnostic, atheist, theist; Catholic, Protestant, 
 Buddhist ; in short, he is everything by turns, 
 because he is so little at home in the world 
 of moral service. When one's inmost thought 
 is this : " I must work the works of him that 
 sent me while it is day ; the night cometh in 
 which no man can work," his thought is put to 
 the test, and in the moral test attains to moral 
 reality. 
 
 Still further, the pathetic denial of the in- 
 fluence of the ideal comes from the confusion 
 of the ideal with a mere sentimental dream. 
 It is from sentimental writers that we hear 
 
224 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 most about the ideal ; serious ethical writers 
 have adopted their fine word, but it must never 
 be forgotten that different meanings are at- 
 tached to it by the two classes of thinkers. 
 For the sentimentalist the ideal is a mental 
 picture and no more ; for the ethical thinker 
 it is the voice of conscience in the imagina- 
 tion. To one man the ideal is only an image, 
 beautiful but impotent, like the dream of a 
 love-sick youth over the girl who has chosen 
 another than himself ; to the other the ideal is 
 duty rising in splendor through the atmosphere 
 of the imagination. Mere sentiment is surely 
 the nearest to impotence of any of the expe- 
 riences of mortal men, and for any person who 
 tries to meet the stern and tremendous forces 
 of the lower life with nothing stronger than 
 the weapons of the sentimentalist, there can be 
 but one issue. The appeal is, after all, to life. 
 Every man has the chance to answer for him- 
 self the statement that the ideal is impotent. 
 He may meet that statement in the awe and 
 joy of a manhood controlled out of the ideal, 
 standing in the great process of moral trans- 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 225 
 
 formation, sure of growth, sure of the forces 
 that have brought it and that promise more. 
 And this personal experience of victory over 
 passion in the strength of the ideal he will 
 broaden into the great tradition of the supreme 
 moral idealists. He will recall Jesus and his 
 sovereign idealism ; he will not forget the ideal- 
 ism of the Hebrew prophets ; of Paul, Augus- 
 tine, and Luther ; of the company that no man 
 can number, who out of weakness were made 
 strong, who came out of the great tribulation, 
 and washed their robes and made them white 
 in the power of the ideal. He will conclude 
 that the denial of religion is never so easy of 
 refutation as when it contests the reality of 
 the life of man in God. 
 
 It is said that religion is a tangle of errors 
 and superstitions ; therefore it is for the un- 
 educated. This charge must be laid to heart. 
 But so far as it is true, the same may be said 
 of every human interest. There is no single 
 human interest in an ideal condition. Even 
 science runs wild, and on the pin-point of ev- 
 idence tries to balance the universe of truth. 
 
226 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 Art is beset behind and before with fads and 
 superstitions. Philosophy is sane only now and 
 then ; and among its devotees wisdom and the 
 love of it are often sadly left out of the ac- 
 count. Politics as a science and still more as 
 an art is in dire confusion ; the domestic life 
 of man, his deepest life as a creature of time, 
 is in wild disorder. What is to be done ? Are 
 we to abandon all the interests of the scholar, 
 the scientist, the artist, the man of the world, 
 and the man of speculation, because confusion 
 reigns everywhere ? By no means ; these inter- 
 ests are the life of our human world, and we 
 will work together to put them in better order. 
 Some day, a thousand years hence, perhaps, 
 our effort to improve things will be represented 
 in an approximation to the ideal condition on 
 the part of all these interests. 
 
 Precisely so we reason about religion. Truth 
 and error are sadly mixed in it; reality and 
 unreality, substance and superstition, are too 
 often rolled into one mass, and we are invited 
 to accept this total as from the Highest. Still 
 further, there is often little perspective of val- 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 227 
 
 ues in modern religion. What then ? Shall we 
 abandon this sovereign human interest to the 
 inferior intellect and the incompetent ? By no 
 means ; we will struggle together to separate 
 the wheat from the chaff, the substance from 
 the ugly superstition that clings to it ; we will 
 strive to bequeath to our children the purer 
 and the greater religion, hoping that finally, 
 when the temple of God in man is complete, 
 our poor endeavor will be represented and 
 honored there. 
 
 It is said that man is not made in the im- 
 age of God; that God is made in the image 
 of man. Here it is true that we make God 
 in our image; we can understand God only 
 through the forms of human intelligence. But 
 this is no reason for the denial that man is 
 made in the image of God. Surely man owes 
 his being to the universe ; he has been made 
 a person, a thinker, and a responsible doer in 
 this world ; since nowhere within sight is there 
 any pattern according to which his being has 
 been shaped, is it unreasonable to infer that 
 the archetype of the moral being of man is the 
 
228 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 moral being of God ? An antecedent man must 
 have, an antecedent adequate to account for 
 him ; and is there any better hypothesis here 
 than the statement of religious faith that the 
 highest in this world is made in the image of 
 the Highest in the universe? We confess at 
 once that we make God in the image of man, 
 and we contend that we are able to do this 
 because God made man in the image of himself 
 as the supreme thinker and doer, the archety- 
 pal moral being. 
 
 But here again the answer of thought should 
 be supplemented by the answer of life. That 
 God is a mere idealization imposed upon the 
 universe by man is refuted in the great trial 
 of the soul. "I saw the Lord," said Isaiah ; "I 
 have seen God face to face," said another. 
 Moral life is in the strength of the ideal, and 
 the ideal leads to him who is the sum of all 
 our ideals and infinitely more. In the process 
 of moral life the soul meets God as its light 
 and salvation ; here it grasps the Infinite other 
 of itself ; and when distress is at its deepest, 
 its cry is, " Though he slay me, yet will I trust 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 229 
 
 in him." When the cup is the cup of woe and 
 death, it is here chosen because it is his will. 
 In the great process of the moral life God is 
 the immediate and sure possession of the soul. 
 The religious man, whose religion has become 
 a profound and victorious life, cries, " I know 
 how to be abased, and I know how to abound ; 
 I can do all things through him that strength- 
 ened me." Whether it be Paul that utters that 
 cry, or Cromwell weeping over the son dead 
 in battle, or any soul anywhere, high or hum- 
 ble, the fact is the same. In the utmost life 
 of man God stands revealed as man's Deliverer 
 and Father. 
 
 The confidence of reason is great ; the con- 
 fidence of personal experience in the moral 
 process of existence is greater. Our thoughts 
 are imperfect ; in the possessions of the heart 
 and in the perpetually renewed service of the 
 ideal we find our chief peace. There is such 
 a thing in the world to-day as the secret of the 
 Lord, and it is with them who in awe and love 
 wait upon him. Covenants with God are still 
 made, and when made in tears and blood, they 
 
230 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 stand fast. The profounder life in God turns 
 either into agents of intellectual discipline or 
 things childish, current denials of the realities 
 of faith. Religious men are moved by them 
 only as shallow seas are by winds; religious 
 men are ineffective in meeting these denials 
 because their life in God is wanting in depth 
 and peace. 
 
 Books on the philosophy of religion multi- 
 ply, and many of them are serious contribu- 
 tions to thought : still, it must be said of the 
 greater number of them that what one misses 
 in them is a profound religious consciousness. 
 The greater number of these books seem to be 
 a philosophy of other men's religion, imper- 
 fectly appreciated, and by writers who have 
 little or no religion themselves. Aristotle is 
 to be admired on many counts; he is to be 
 admired especially because, having no religion 
 himself, he did not treat of the philosophy of 
 religion. This great master of thought con- 
 fined himself to those departments of human 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 231 
 
 experience in which he had a profound share. 
 He knew well that without the rich and unus- 
 ual experience there cannot come into exist- 
 ence the mature and adequate philosophy. 
 The indictment to be brought against much 
 that calls itself a philosophy of religion is that it 
 is without first-hand and profound knowledge 
 of religion ; that it is mainly an endeavor, and 
 it must be added a poor endeavor, to account 
 for the religion of other people. 
 
 Before we can advance wisely in this dis- 
 cipline, we need a prof ounder religious con- 
 sciousness. Indeed, the religious consciousness 
 carries with it its philosophy ; the Eternal is 
 its dwelling-place ; it has only to make explicit 
 what is already implicit and part of its life. 
 In the interest of thought, still more in the 
 interest of man, the call must be to a new and 
 a deeper life in God. Men must cease to play 
 with the moral ideal ; they must boast about 
 it no longer as the high possession of the soul ; 
 they must break up the habit of gossip con- 
 cerning its subjectivity ; they must translate it 
 into duty with the sanction of the Eternal in it. 
 
232 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 Religion takes its own way in the service of 
 the soul. It goes out in a great order of ex- 
 perimentation. It takes this current dogma of 
 the subjectivity of all our thoughts and it puts 
 it to the test of life. There it breaks down ; 
 there the objectivity of thought finds its vin- 
 dication. In and through the process of moral 
 life men find that their best thoughts are valid 
 for all moods, for all days and years, and that 
 when sincerely adopted they bring a similar 
 freedom and peace to all men. The universal 
 and the permanent is the true objective; what 
 holds good for all men all the time may well 
 be held as carrying in it the sanction of God. 
 The religious man is driven to this conclusion. 
 He takes his best thoughts, lifts them to God; 
 there he sees them filled with God's sanction 
 and sent back from him invested with the au- 
 thority of his truth. For the believer in God 
 there must be an order of God for human life ; 
 this order is to be found through the severest 
 experimentation; when from this experimen- 
 tation the valid thoughts emerge, they stand 
 forth as the will of God for man. In one way 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 233 
 
 or another the religious man must escape from 
 the circle of mere subjectivity. That circle is 
 a circle of death ; it is the spiritual whirlpool 
 of serious and thoughtful men to-day. Here, 
 as I have said, is one way of escape : the way 
 of the spirit is experimentation ; the univer- 
 sally and permanently valid for the best life 
 of the moral person is the objective; in that 
 objective the soul rests in the Divine will. 
 
 The sense of sin must return. To-day it 
 lives chiefly in ancient hymns and liturgies. 
 The reason of all this lies in the shallowness 
 of the moral and religious sense. The moral 
 ideal is a sublime picture, and as such it is 
 to be admired and talked about; so much the 
 devil of mere subjectivity enjoins. The moral 
 ideal appears in the wintry atmosphere of lives 
 conformed to the evil custom of the world, 
 appears there pale and feeble, and a word of 
 thankfulness for its relieving glow seems to 
 be all that is demanded by the situation. 
 When the moral ideal appears as the face and 
 eyes of God, reading the secret shame of man's 
 heart, sending home the conviction of his mis- 
 
234 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 taken and perverse ways, revealing the utter 
 falsehood and hollowness of his life, bringing 
 him into the presence of the Eternal honor 
 and keeping him there in moral torture, like 
 one of old he will cry, "Woe is me! for I am 
 undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, 
 and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean 
 lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the 
 Lord of hosts." 1 Religion cannot long endure 
 when conscience has been dismissed; the recall 
 and reinvestment of conscience is an essential 
 condition of the return of profound and true 
 religion. Of old, the secret of the Lord was 
 with them that feared him; to-day, it has gone 
 with the Pharisee and the impenitent thief. 
 It was otherwise in times when religion was 
 great : — 
 
 The path of the righteous is as the shining light, 
 That shineth more and more unto the perfect day. 2 
 
 It was otherwise when religion began in a 
 great moral revolution: God, be merciful to 
 me a sinner; I was not disobedient to the 
 
 1 Isaiah vi, 5. 2 Proverbs iv, 18. 
 
AN ETERNAL GOSPEL 235 
 
 heavenly vision ; behold, the half of my goods 
 I give to the poor, and if I have taken any- 
 thing from any man by extortion, I restore 
 him fourfold; except your righteousness shall 
 exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and 
 Pharisees, ye shall not enter into the kingdom 
 of heaven. 
 
 On the basis of the moral ideal as the image 
 of the moral will of God for man, in awe and 
 tears, religion begins and goes on in the power 
 of a new lif e. Vision, prayer, fellowship, service, 
 struggle, and victory are the great notes of 
 that new existence. It is this new existence in 
 individuals, in churches, in vast bodies of men, 
 that is to-day our deepest need. The chemist 
 without food dies like his ignorant brother, 
 and the philosopher of religion is an even more 
 pitiable sight than the multitude for whom 
 there is no open vision. The more and more 
 adequate account of religion is the work of 
 gifted minds in the long succession of the 
 ages ; meanwhile we are here to-day and to- 
 morrow we are gone. Is there nothing for us on 
 our swift race through time, nothing but the 
 
236 RELIGION AND MIRACLE 
 
 accounts of religion which men give who have 
 at best only a pathetic share in its wondrous 
 life and power? Is there for us no Eternal God 
 in whom to put our whole trust as we stand at 
 the task of moral persons, and in the labor 
 and sorrow of time? Are the vision, the self- 
 abasement, the self -surrender, and the rapture 
 of religion forbidden to us, and the service 
 that in its might becomes a song? Religious 
 men know that it is otherwise ; they have sat 
 at the feet of the great; they have entered 
 forever the school of Christ as disciples there ; 
 they are in the conduct of a solemn personal 
 experimentation in the things of the soul ; they 
 know that their Redeemer liveth ; their God 
 is their glory. 
 
INDEX 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abraham, the migration of, 39. 
 Accountability to God, 216. 
 Amiel, 223. 
 Amos, a great representative of 
 
 spiritual religion, 59, 60. 
 Angel, the, of the eternal gospel, 
 
 206, 207. 
 Antigone and CEdipus, 145. 
 Apollos, 36. 
 Apostles, the, with Jesus, 112, 
 
 113 ; effect of his resurrection 
 
 on, 114, 115. 
 Arabian Nights, real to children, 
 
 26. 
 Argument, weakened by bias, 
 
 5,6. 
 Aristodemus, the little atheist, 
 
 73. 
 Aristotle, 11,143; on nature, 15, 
 
 16 ; on parenthood, 101, 102 ; 
 
 to be admired because he did 
 
 not treat of the philosophy of 
 
 religion, 230. 
 Arnold, Matthew, " Monica's 
 
 Last Prayer " quoted, 80, 81 ; 
 
 "Rugby Chapel," 159-164. 
 Augustine, St., " Confessions," 
 
 80, 82, 140. 
 Authority and influence, 205. 
 
 Belief, not limited to the verifi- 
 able, 36, 37 ; confusion in the 
 field of, 151. 
 
 Berkeley, George, theistic argu- 
 ment of, 74, 75. 
 
 Bible, the, modern study of, 23 
 the vision of God in, 65-72 
 the great debate about, 152 
 and the Holy Ghost, 155. 
 
 Bradley, Francis Herbert, his 
 "Appearance and Reality," 
 190, 191. 
 
 Bryce, James, 222. 
 
 Bushnell, Horace, 141. 
 
 Business world, the, 195, 196; 
 money its chief concern, 197. 
 
 Calvin, John, 14, 15, 141. 
 
 Capital and labor, 196. 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, his study of 
 the French Revolution, 60 ; 
 " The Everlasting Yea," 79. 
 
 Cause and effect, 12, 20, 21. 
 
 Character, a product and an 
 achievement, 88. 
 
 Cheyne, T. K., his method of 
 cutting up Isaiah, 37. 
 
 Christian church, good work 
 done by, 180, 181 ; the mass 
 of its members, 183. 
 
 Christian faith, see Faith. 
 
 Christian (religion, the, 7; only 
 two things absolutely essential 
 to, 8; like other religions in 
 point of miracles, 45 ; see also 
 Religion. 
 
 Christian Science, 198, 200. 
 
 Clement of Alexandria, 140. 
 
 Conscience, religion cannot en- 
 dure without, 234. 
 
240 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Consubstantiation, chief objec- 
 tion to, 95. 
 
 Cordelia and Lear, 145. 
 
 Cosmic mind, the, 27, 49. 
 
 Creation, 17. 
 
 Creeds, 178. 
 
 Criticism, the present an age of, 
 149. 
 
 Disciple of to-day, the, 132, 133 ; 
 
 his hopes, 135. 
 Discipleship, the great test of, 
 
 134. 
 Divinity school, the modern, 
 
 152. 
 Doubt, discipline in, 148. 
 
 " Eeclesiastica Musioa," 82. 
 Edwards, Jonathan, 101, 102, 
 
 142. 
 Eternal values and eternal ideals, 
 
 210, 211. 
 Existence, the proof of, 108- 
 
 111. 
 Exodus, epic of the deliverance 
 
 of Israel, 54. 
 Experience, tells us what is, 28, 
 
 30 ; general and special, 31. 
 Eye-witness, testimony of, 31. 
 Ezekiel, 59. 
 
 Fourth Gospel, the, 114, 140. 
 Freedom of mind, 148, 149. 
 
 Gethsemane, 92, 93. 
 Gladstone, W. E., 21. 
 God, living in, 7, 158 ; sense of the 
 fatherly love of, 8, 9; being 
 and character of, the sovereign 
 object of faith, 46 ; his exist- 
 ence independent of miracle, 
 47 ; the terminus of all things, 
 48; present in the affairs of 
 men and nations, 60 ; the vi- 
 sion of, in the Bible, 65-72 ; 
 historic arguments for belief 
 in, 72-78 ; found in three great 
 spheres of human existence, 
 79 ; faith in, not dependent on 
 miracle, 82 ; grounds of belief 
 in, 110, 111 ; natural law his 
 speech, 142, 143, 146 ; the im- 
 manence of, 164-166 ; kinship 
 of man with, 213, 214; our 
 accountability to, 216. 
 
 Gospel, an eternal, 172-236. 
 
 Gospels, the, why written, 114. 
 
 Great Britain and Germany, 197. 
 
 Gyges, the ring of, 84. 
 
 Faith, Christian, the sovereign 
 object of, 46 ; the present op- 
 portunity of, 149 ; the way of, 
 162-164 ; what it is, 207, 208 ; 
 two sets of values in, 209 ; the 
 heart of, 213. 
 
 Fate, the idea of, 13; in poetry, 
 14 ; not inductive, 16. 
 
 Fates, the Greek, 13. 
 
 Fichte, J. G., 223 ; his " Vocation 
 of Man, "79. 
 
 Healing cult, the, 198-201, 221. 
 
 Hebrews, Epistle to the, author- 
 ship of, 36, 70 ; seldom fully 
 appreciated, 69-71. 
 
 History, the two sides of, 39 ; 
 but a poor remnant of a van- 
 ished world-life, 40. 
 
 Holy Ghost, the, and the Bible, 
 153, 154 ; the hope of the 
 church, 156 ; the doctrine of, 
 180. 
 
 Hosea, prophecy of, a unique 
 book, 01. 
 
INDEX 
 
 241 
 
 Human nature not a depraved 
 
 thing, 98-101. 
 Human relationships, 216. 
 Humanism, 192, 193. 
 Hume, David, 11 ; the great per- 
 
 fecter of the old empiricism, 
 
 189. 
 
 Ideal, different meanings of the 
 
 word, 224. 
 Idealism, 189 ; abstract and 
 
 transcendental, 190. 
 Immanence of God, the, 164- 
 
 166. 
 Infant, an, smile of, 144. 
 Influence, intellectual and 
 
 moral, 205. 
 Intellectual integrity, 26. 
 Irving, Edward, 103. 
 Isaiah, 37 ; vision of, 57 ; the 
 
 second, 61, 62. 
 
 Jeremiah, prophecy of, 57-59. 
 
 Jesus Christ, the example of the 
 way, the truth, and the life, 
 8, 9 ; his descent into time, 
 18 ; the historic, 41 ; and mir- 
 acle, 83-131 ; the teaching 
 of, 85-88 ; twofold signifi- 
 cance of his character, 88-92 ; 
 the temptation, 90, 92 ; in 
 Gethsemane, 92-94 ; birth of, 
 96-105 ; resurrection of, 105- 
 112; with the apostles, 112, 
 113 ; Paul our representative 
 believer in, 112, 117 ; Paul's 
 vision of, 117-122 ; our assur- 
 ance that he is the risen Lord, 
 126-129; his fate not bound 
 up with that of miracle, 130 ; 
 the one adequate assurance of 
 eternal love, 140 : his life 
 
 serves a double end, 146, 147 ; 
 of yesterday, to-day, and to- 
 morrow, 158. 
 
 Kant, Immanuel, 149; theistic 
 
 argument of, 75, 76. 
 Karma, 13. 
 
 Law, the scientific conception 
 of, 13, 20, 164, 165 ; the speech 
 of God, 142, 146. 
 
 Lear and Cordelia, 145. 
 
 Life comes from life, 20. 
 
 Liturgies, 177. 
 
 Living in God, the solution of 
 our graver difficulties, 7 ; the 
 secret of existence for the 
 Christian, 158. 
 
 Logic, validity of laws of, 25 ; 
 and dogmatic denial of mira- 
 cle, 29. 
 
 Lord's Prayer, the, does not 
 mention miracle, 85. 
 
 Lucretius, 14. 
 
 Luther, Martin, 36, 141. 
 
 Macaulay, T. B., 73. 
 
 Man, mind and character of, not 
 exempt from law, 22 ; the 
 modern, 180; his world, 191, 
 192, 215 ; permanent worth 
 of, 193, 194 ; kinship with 
 God, 213, 214. 
 
 Marriage, the ideal state, 99- 
 101. 
 
 Materialism, 202. 
 
 Maurice, Frederick Denison, 142. 
 
 Mechanism and spirit, the union 
 of, 143-148. 
 
 Mental healing, 198-201, 221. 
 
 Mind, not exempt from law, 22 ; 
 freedom of, 148, 149. 
 
242 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Ministry, the Christian, 151-153. 
 
 Miracle, not essential to religion, 
 4, 5 ; its fortune not identical 
 with that of religion, 7; reality 
 of, always under suspicion, 10, 
 11 ; now questioned by pro- 
 foundly religious men, 12, 22, 
 23 ; attitude of scientific men 
 toward, 12, 13 ; the fashion of 
 the world's intellect against, 
 24; antecedent improbability 
 of, 31 ; logically possible, but 
 improbable, 33, 165; in the 
 category of the un verifiable, 
 42; no part of genuine his- 
 tory, 45 ; existence of God in- 
 dependent of, 47 ; in the Old 
 Testament, 53-64 ; conscious- 
 ness of God, in the Bible, 
 independent of, 71 ; historic 
 arguments for belief in God 
 exclude, 73, 74 ; of small con- 
 cern to the true believer in 
 God, 78 ; fortune of, does not 
 involve our faith in God, 82 ; 
 and Jesus Christ, 83-131 ; no 
 mention of, in the Lord's 
 Prayer, 85; fate of, does not 
 involve that of Jesus, 130 ; and 
 the Christian life, 132-171; 
 does not belong to our gen- 
 eration, 135 ; the natural se- 
 quence of the transcendental 
 conception of God, 166. 
 
 Miraculous, the, and the me- 
 chanical, 47, 48. 
 
 Miraculous universe, a, 153, 154. 
 
 Money, the chief concern of the 
 business world, 197. 
 
 Moral government of the 
 world, 4. 
 
 Moral ideal, the, denial of, 218- 
 
 230; genesis of the denial, 
 
 222 ; in man's life, 233, 234. 
 Morality, too much a question of 
 
 etiquette and diplomacy, 195. 
 Mulf ord, Elisha, 222. 
 Miinsterberg, Hugo, on the 
 
 Eternal Values, 210. 
 Mystics, the, 82. 
 
 Natural law, slight or profound 
 sense of, 31, 32 ; the speech of 
 God, 142, 143, 146. 
 
 Naturalism, 192. 
 
 Nature, and religion, 10 ; inva- 
 riable order in, 14, 15; idea 
 of fixed order in, an assump- 
 tion, 19 ; value of the scientific 
 conception of, 26 ; uniformity 
 of, a reasonable assumption, 
 28, 29, 31 ; belief in the flexi- 
 bility of, 31, 32 ; order of, the 
 speech of God, 142. 
 
 New Testament, strength of, the 
 assurance that Jesus is alive, 
 128. 
 
 Newi 
 5, 
 
 Newton, Sir Isaac, 17. 
 
 Nicias, high resolve of, 212. 
 
 izs. ^ 
 
 wmav 
 
 John Henry, cited, 
 
 Objectivity of thought, 232. 
 GMipus and Antigone, 145. 
 Old Testament, the, greatest 
 
 things in, are isolated from 
 
 miracle, 53-64. 
 Omar Khayyam, 14. 
 Order, invariable, in nature, 14, 
 
 15 ; scientific conception of, 16 ; 
 
 idea of, an assumption, 19; 
 
 essential to mind, 27, 49 ; the 
 
 foundation of science, 50 ; of 
 
 nature, the speech of God, 143. 
 
INDEX 
 
 243 
 
 Origen, 140; on the authorship 
 of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
 36. 
 
 Orthodoxy, the traditional, 38. 
 
 Paley, William, 73. 
 
 Parenthood, sanctity of, 100-102. 
 
 Park, Edwards A., cited, 18, 19. 
 
 Paul, the apostle, and predes- 
 tination, 15; and imperial 
 Christianity, 41 ; his con- 
 sciousness of God, 66, 67 ; the 
 great witness for the risen 
 Christ, 112, 117 ; the temporal 
 note absent from his expe- 
 rience, 116; address before 
 Agrippa, 117, 118; his vision 
 of Jesus, 117-120; influence 
 of the vision, 121, 122, 125; 
 his sufferings, 123; his per- 
 sonality, 124; chief signifi- 
 cance of his faith, 139. 
 
 Peter, and the resurrection of 
 Jesus, 111, 112. 
 
 Phenomenalism, pure, 188. 
 
 Plato, story of the ring of Gyges, 
 84 ; the closing chapter of his 
 " Phaedo," 215. 
 
 Prayer, 177. 
 
 Preacher, task of the, 187 ; and 
 the healing cult, 199. 
 
 Predestination, 15 ; not proved 
 by induction, 16. 
 
 Probability, the guide to life in 
 historical investigation, 36. 
 
 Progress, persistent opposition 
 essential to, 26. 
 
 Prophets, the Hebrew, 56-62. 
 
 Psalms, the, 63, 64. 
 
 Quakers, the inner light of the, 
 
 82. 
 
 Rainbow, the, God's covenant of 
 order in nature, 51, 52. 
 
 Religion, independent of mira- 
 cle, 4, 5, 167 ; its fortune not 
 identified with that of miracle, 
 7 ; the genius of, 7 ; relation 
 to other human interests and 
 to nature, 10; none without 
 God, 46 ; an historic phenome- 
 non, 172 ; its greatest exem- 
 plars and masterpieces in the 
 past, 175 ; primarily an affair of 
 exalted being, 176 ; the custom 
 of, 177, 178 ; the modern man 
 not original in, 180; revival 
 of, 181 ; the teacher of, 187 ; 
 as a therapeutic agent, 198- 
 201; warfare of sects, 203, 
 204; the philosophy of, 217, 
 230 ; called a tangle of errors 
 and superstitions, 225, 226; 
 its order of experimentation, 
 232, 233 ; cannot endure with- 
 out conscience, 234. 
 
 Resurrection, the, 105-112. 
 
 Revival of religion, naturally 
 desired, 181. 
 
 Revivalism, professional, 182. 
 
 Ruth and Naomi, 144, 145. 
 
 Santayana, George, his " Life of 
 Reason " cited, 189. 
 
 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 142; 
 our debt to, 77, 78. 
 
 Scholar, the, work of, 173, 174, 
 178, 180. 
 
 Science, the method of, 16, 17; 
 human, strictly contempora- 
 neous, 25. 
 
 Sects, warfare of, 203, 204. 
 
 Sex instinct, the, 220, 221. 
 
 Sin, the sense of, 233. 
 
244 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Smile, the, of an infant, 144. 
 
 Smith, W. Robertson, 222. 
 
 Socrates, Greek philosophy an 
 enigma without, 41 ; his argu- 
 ment for the existence of God, 
 72, 73 ; confronting death, 215. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 14. 
 
 Spinoza, Baruch, 11, 14, 77. 
 
 Spirit, union of mechanism and, 
 143-148 ; what is, 200, 201. 
 
 Stephen, the martyr, 215. 
 
 Subjectivity of thought, 232. 
 
 Taylor, Nathaniel W., a great 
 figure in New England theo- 
 logy, 1-5. 
 
 Temporal, the, 65. 
 
 " Theologia Germanica," 82. 
 
 Theology, a great and difficult 
 science, 2. 
 
 Thomson, James, his " City of 
 Dreadful Night," 14. 
 
 Thought, objective and subject- 
 ive, 232. 
 
 Transubstantiation, chief objec- 
 tion to, 95. 
 
 Uniformity of nature, the, a rea- 
 sonable assumption, 28, 29, 31. 
 
 Unity, professional architects 
 of, 184. 
 
 Universe, the, modern concep- 
 tion of, 13 ; a miraculous, 153, 
 154. 
 
 Unverifiable, the, not necessarily 
 untrue, 35 ; belief extends far 
 into the region of, 37 ; not an 
 essential part of a reasonable 
 faith, 38; miracle belongs in 
 category of, 42. 
 
 Verifiable, the, belief not limited 
 to, 36, 37 ; includes what is 
 sure and mighty in Christian 
 faith, 44. 
 
 Verification, made by the living, 
 28 ; some things not open to, 
 34, 43, 44. 
 
 Virgin birth, the, 96-105. 
 
 Wisdom-literature of Israel, 
 
 without miracle, 55. 
 World, the external, reality of, 
 
 108, 109. 
 
 Yale University, 1. 
 Zeno and Calvin, 15. 
 
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