But this, however at first sight it may seem very deep and true, is indeed most shallow and fallacious. There is quite enough in itself and in its purposes to distinguish that which we call by this name, from all with which it is thus sought to be confounded, and in which to be lost. The distinction indeed which is sometimes drawn, that in the miracle God is immediately working, and in other events is leaving it to the laws which He has established to work, cannot at all be allowed: for it rests on a dead mechanical view of the universe, altogether remote from the truth.

The clockmaker makes his clock, and leaves it; the ship-builder builds and launches his ship, which others navigate; but the world is no curious piece of mechanism which its Maker constructs, and then dismisses from his hands, only from time to time reviewing and repairing it; but, as our Lord says, 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work' (John v. 17); He 'upholdeth all things by the word of his power' (Heb. i. 3). And to speak of laws of God,' ' laws of nature,' may become to us a language altogether deceptive, and hiding the deeper reality from our eyes. Laws of God exist only for us. It is a will of God for Himself. That will indeed, being the will of highest wisdom and love, excludes all wilfulness; it is a will upon which we can securely count; from the past expressions of it we can presume its future, and so we rightfully call it a law. But still from moment to moment it is a will; each law, as we term it, of nature is only that which we have

....

1 Augustine: Sunt qui arbitrantur tantummodo mundum ipsum factum a Deo ; cetera jam fieri ab ipso mundo, sicut ille ordinavit et jussit, Deum autem ipsum nihil operari. Contra quos profertur illa sententia Domini, Pater meus usque adhuc operatur, et ego operor. . . . . Neque enim, sicut a structurâ ædium, cum fabricaverit quis, abscedit; atque illo cessante et absente stat opus ejus; ita mundus vel ictu oculi stare poterit, si ei Deus regimen suum subtraxerit. So Melanchthon (In loc. de Creatione): Infirmitas humana etiamsi cogitat Deum esse conditorem, tamen postea imaginatur, ut faber discedit a navi exstructâ et relinquit eam nautis; ita Deum discedere a suo opere, et relinqui creaturas tantum propriæ gubernationi; hæc imaginatio magnam caliginem offundit animis et parit dubitationes.

2 Augustine (De Civ. Dei, xxi. 8): Dei voluntas natura rerum est.

learned concerning this will in that particular region of its activity. To say then that there is more of the will of God in a miracle than in any other work of his, is insufficient.

Yet while we deny the conclusion, that since all is wonder, therefore the miracle, commonly so called, is only in the same way as the ordinary processes of nature a manifestation of the presence and power of God, we must not with this deny the truth which lies in this statement. All is wonder; to make a man is at least as great a marvel as to raise a man from the dead. The seed that multiplies in the furrow is as marvellous as the bread that multiplied in Christ's hands. The miracle is not a greater manifestation of God's power than those ordinary and ever-repeated processes; but it is a different manifestation. By those other God is speaking at all times and to all the world; they are a vast unbroken revelation of Him. The invisible things of Him are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead' (Rom. i. 20). Yet from the very circumstance that nature is thus speaking evermore to all, that this speaking is diffused over all time, addressed unto all men, that its sound is gone out into all lands, from the very constancy and universality of this language, it may fail to make itself heard. It cannot be said to stand in nearer relation to one man than to another, to confirm one man's word more than that of others, to address one man's con

science more than that of every other man. However it may sometimes have, it must often lack, a peculiar and personal significance. But in the miracle, wrought in the sight of some certain men, and claiming their special attention, there is a speaking to them in particular. There is then a voice in nature which addresses itself directly to them, a singling of

1 Augustine (Serm. ccxlii. 1): In homine carnali tota regula intelligendi est consuetudo cernendi. Quod solent videre credunt: quod non solent, non credunt. Majora quidem miracula sunt, tot quotidie homines nasci qui non erant, quam paucos resurrexisse qui erant; et tamen ista miracula non consideratione comprehensa sunt, sed assiduitate viluerunt. Cf. Gregory the Great, Moral. vi. 15.

them out from the multitude. It is plain that God has now a peculiar word which they are to give heed to, a message to which He is bidding them to listen.'

An extraordinary divine causality, and not that ordinary which we acknowledge everywhere and in everything, belongs, then, to the essence of the miracle; powers of God other than those which have always been working; such, indeed, as most seldom or never have been working before. The unresting activity of God, which at other times hides. and conceals itself behind the veil of what we term natural laws, does in the miracle unveil itself; it steps out from its concealment, and the hand which works is laid bare. Beside and beyond the ordinary operations of nature, higher powers (higher, not as coming from a higher source, but as bearing upon higher ends) intrude and make themselves felt even at the very springs and sources of her power.

While it is of the very essence of the miracle that it should be thus a new thing,' it is not with this denied that the natural itself may become miraculous to us by the way in which it is timed, by the ends which it is made to serve. It is indeed true that aught which is perfectly explicable from the course of nature and history, is assuredly no miracle in the most proper sense of the word. At the same time the finger of God may be so plainly discernible in it, there may

1 All this is brought out in a very instructive discussion on the miracle, which finds place in Augustine's great dogmatic work, De Trinit. iii. 5, and extends to the chapters upon either side, being the largest statement of his views upon the subject which anywhere finds place in his works: Quis attrahit humorem per radicem vitis ad botrum et vinum facit, nisi Deus, qui et homine plantante et rigante incrementum dat? Sed cum ad nutum Domini aqua in vinum inusitatâ celeritate conversa est, etiam stultis fatentibus, vis divina declarata est. Quis arbusta fronde et flore vestit solemniter, nisi Deus? Verum cum floruit virga sacerdotis Aaron, collocuta est quodam modo cum dubitante humanitate divinitas. . . Cum fiunt illa continuato quasi quodam fluvio labentium manantiumque rerum, et ex occulto in promptum, atque ex prompto in occultum, usitato itinere transeuntium, naturalia dicuntur: cum vero admonendis hominibus inusitatâ mutabilitate ingeruntur, magnalia nominantur.

2 Not, as we shall see the greatest theologians have always earnestly contended, contra naturam, but præter naturam and supra naturam.

be in it so remarkable a convergence of many unconnected causes to a single end, it may so meet a crisis in the lives of men, or in the onward march of the kingdom of God, may stand in such noticeable relation with God's great work of redemption, that even while it is plainly explicable by natural causes, while there were such, perfectly adequate to produce the effects, we yet may be entirely justified in terming it a miracle, a providential, although not an absolute, miracle. Absolute it cannot be called, since there were known causes perfectly capable of bringing it about, and, these existing, it would be superstition to betake ourselves to others, or to seek to disconnect it from these. Yet the natural may in a manner lift itself up into the miraculous, by the moment at which it falls out, by the purposes which it is made to fulfil. It is a subjective wonder, a wonder for us, though not an objective, not a wonder in itself.

Thus many of the plagues of Egypt were the natural plagues of the land,'—these, it is true, raised and quickened into far direr than their usual activity. In itself it was nothing miraculous that grievous swarms of flies should infest the houses of the Egyptians, or that flights of locusts should spoil their fields, or that a murrain should destroy their cattle. None of these visitations were, or are, unknown in that land; but the intensity of all these plagues, the dread succession in which they followed on one another, their connexion with the word of Moses which went before, with Pharaoh's trial which was proceeding, with Israel's deliverance which they helped onward, the order of their coming and going, all these entirely justify us in calling them the signs and wonders of Egypt,' even as such is the scriptural language about them (Ps. lxxviii. 43; Acts vii. 36). It is no absolute miracle that a coin should be found in a fish's mouth (Matt. xvii. 27), or that a lion should meet a man and slay him (1 Kin. xiii. 24), or that a thunderstorm should happen at an

1 See Hengstenberg, Die Bücher Mose's und Ägypten, pp. 93–129.

unusual period of the year (1 Sam. xii. 16-19); and yet these circumstances may be so timed for strengthening faith, for punishing disobedience, for awakening repentance, they may serve such high purposes in God's moral government, that we at once range them in the catalogue of miracles, without seeking to make an anxious discrimination between the miracle absolute and providential.' Especially have they a right to their place among these, when (as in each of the instances alluded to above) the final event is a sealing of a foregoing word from the Lord; for so, as prophecy, as miracles of his foreknowledge, they claim that place, even if not as miracles of his power. It is true, of course, of these even more than of any other, that they exist only for the religious mind, for the man who believes that God rules, and not merely in power, but in wisdom, in righteousness, and in love; for him they will be eminently signs, signs of a present working God. In the case of the more absolute miracle it will be sometimes possible to extort from the ungodly, as of old from the magicians of Egypt, the unwilling confession, "This is the finger of God' (Exod. viii. 19); but in the case of these this will be well nigh impossible; since there is always the natural solution in which they may take refuge, beyond which they will refuse, and beyond which it will be impossible to compel them, to proceed.

But while the miracle is not thus nature, so neither is it against nature. That language, however common, is wholly unsatisfactory, which speaks of these wonderful works of God as violations of a natural law. Beyond nature, beyond and above the nature which we know, they are, but not contrary

1 The attempt to exhaust the history of our Lord's life of miracles by the assumption of wonderful fortuitous coincidences is singularly selfdefeating. These might do for once or twice; but that such happy chances should on every occasion recur, what is this for one who knows even but a little of the theory of probabilities? not the delivering the history of its marvellous element, but the exchanging one set of marvels for another. If it be said that this was not mere hazard, what manner of person then must we conclude Him to be, whom nature was always thus at such pains to serve and to seal?