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 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

1 1 Not, as we shall see the greatest theologians have always earnestly contended, contra naturam, but præter naturam and supra naturam.

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 evermore the scriptural language about them (Deut. iv. 34; 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 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

1 See Hengstenberg, Die Bücher Mose's und Aegypten, pp. 93–129. * 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 pass 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 of one set of marvels for another. If it be urged that this was not mere hazard, what manner of

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 to it. Nor let it be said that this distinction is an idle one; so far from being idle, Spinoza's whole

person then must we conclude Him to be, whom nature was always thus at such pains to serve and to seal?

1 It is impossible to accept the assistance which Perrone, the most inquential dogmatic writer in the modern Roman Catholic Church, offers us here. He, in a nominalism pushed to a most extravagant excess, denies that the miracle is or can be either against or above the laws of nature, seeing that in fact there are no such laws for it to violate or to transcend, no working of God in the external world according to any fixed and established rules (Prælect. Theol. vol. i. p. 47): Deus non regit genera vel species, quæ non sunt nisi ideæ abstractæ, sed regit individua, quæ sola realia sunt, neque regit legibus universalibus, quæ pariter non sunt nisi in conceptu nostro, sed regit voluntate peculiari individua singula. Extremes meet: he too, denying any law, has made the miracle as impossible as those who affirm the law to be absolutely immutable.

assault upon the miracles (not his real objections, for they lie much deeper, but his assault) turns, as we shall see, upon the advantage which he has known how to take of this faulty statement of the truth; and, when that has been rightly stated, becomes at once beside the mark. The miracle is not thus unnatural; nor could it be such; since the unnatural, the contrary to order, is of itself the ungodly, and can in no way therefore be affirmed of a divine work, such as that with which we have to do. The very idea of the world, as more than one name which it bears testifies, is that of an order; that, therefore, which comes in to enable it to realize this idea which it has lost, will scarcely itself be a disorder. So far from this, the true miracle is a higher and a purer nature, coming down out of the world of untroubled harmonies into this world of ours, which so many discords have jarred and disturbed, and bringing this back again, though it be but for one mysterious prophetic moment, into harmony with that higher. The healing of the sick can in no way be termed against nature, seeing that the sickness which was healed was against the true nature of man, that it is sickness which is abnormal, and not health. The healing is the restoration of the primitive order. We should see in the miracle not the infraction of a law, but the neutralizing of a lower law, the suspension of it for a time by a higher.

1 Tract. Theol. Pol. vi. De Miraculis.

2 Augustine (Con. Faust. lvi. 3): Contra naturam non incongrue dicimus aliquid Deum facere, quod facit contra id quod novimus in naturâ. Hanc enim etiam appellamus naturam, cognitum nobis cursum solitumque naturæ, contra quem cum Deus aliquid facit, magnalia vel mirabilia nominantur. Contra illam vero summam naturæ legem a notitiâ remotam sive impiorum sive adhuc infirmorum, tam Deus nullo modo facit quam contra seipsum non facit. Cf. xxvi. 3: Deus creator et conditor omnium naturarum nihil contra naturam facit, quia id est naturale cuique rei quod facit a quo est omnis modus, numerus, et ordo naturæ. Cf. xxix. 2; and De Civ. Dei, xxi. 8. The speculations of the great thinkers of the thirteenth century, on the subject of miracles, and especially on this part of the subject, are well brought together by Neander (Kirch. Gesch. vol. v. pp. 910-925).

Of this abundant analogous examples are everinore going forward before our eyes. Continually we behold in the world around us lower laws held in restraint by higher, mechanic by dynamic, chemical by vital, physical by moral; yet we do not say, when the lower thus gives place in favour of the higher, that there was any violation of law, or that anything contrary to nature came to pass;' rather we acknowledge the law of a greater freedom swallowing up the law of a lesser.

When Spinoza affirmed that nothing can happen in nature which opposes its universal laws, he acutely saw that even then he had not excluded the miracle, and therefore, to clench the exclusion, added-or which does not follow from the same laws.' But all which experience can teach us is, that these powers which are working in our world will not reach to these effects. Whence dare we to conclude, that because none which we know will bring them about, so none exist which will do so? They exceed the laws of our nature, but it does not therefore follow that they exceed the laws of all nature. If the animals were capable of a reflective act, man would appear a miracle to them, as the Angels do to us, and as the animals would themselves appear to a lower circle of organic life. The comet is a miracle as regards our solar system; that is, it does not own the laws of our system, neither do those laws explain it. Yet is there a higher and wider law of the heavens, whether fully discovered or not, in which its motions are included as surely as those of the planets which stand in immediate relation to our When I lift my arm, the law of gravitation is not, as far as my arm is concerned, denied or annihilated; it exists as much as ever, but is held in suspense by the higher law of my will. The chemical laws which would bring about decay in animal substances still subsist, even

sun.

See a very interesting discussion upon this subject in Augustine, De Gen. ad Lit. vi. 14-18.