II. Materialistic Idealism…

II. Materialistic Idealism

Idealism proper is that method of thought which regards all knowledge as conversant only with affections of the percipient mind.

Its element of truth is the fact that these affections of the percipient mind are the conditions of our knowledge. Its error is in denying that through these and in these we know that which exists independently of our consciousness.

The idealism of the present day is mainly a materialistic idealism. It defines matter and mind alike in terms of sensation, and regards both as opposite sides or successive manifestations of one underlying and unknowable force.

Modern subjective idealism is the development of a principle found as far back as Locke. Locke derived all our knowledge from sensation; the mind only combines ideas which sensation furnishes, but gives no material of its own. Berkeley held that externally we can be sure only of sensations,—cannot be sure that any external world exists apart from mind. Berkeley’s idealism, however, was objective; for he maintained that while things do not exist independently of consciousness, they do exist independently of our consciousness, namely, in the mind of God, who in a correct philosophy takes the place of a mindless external world as the cause of our ideas. Kant, in like manner, held to existences outside of our own minds, although he regarded these existences as unknown and unknowable. Over against these forms of objective idealism we must put the subjective idealism of Hume, who held that internally also we cannot be sure of anything but mental phenomena; we know thoughts, feelings and volitions, but we do not know mental substance within, any more than we know material substance without; our ideas are a string of beads, without any string; we need no cause for these ideas, in an external world, a soul, or God. Mill, Spencer, Bain and Tyndall are Humists, and it is their subjective idealism which we oppose.

All these regard the material atom as a mere centre of force, or a hypothetical cause of sensations. Matter is therefore a manifestation of force, as to the old materialism force was a property of matter. But if matter, mind and God are nothing but sensations, then the body itself is nothing but sensations. There is no body to have the sensations, and no spirit, either human or divine, to produce them. John Stuart Mill, in his Examination of Sir William Hamilton, 1:234-253, makes sensations the only original sources of knowledge. He defines matter as “a permanent possibility of sensation,” and mind as “a series of feelings aware of itself.” So Huxley calls matter “only a name for the unknown cause of the states of consciousness”; although he also declares: “If I am compelled to choose between the materialism of a man like Büchner and the idealism of Berkeley, I would have to agree with Berkeley.” He would hold to the priority of matter, and yet regard matter as wholly ideal. Since John Stuart Mill, of all the materialistic idealists, gives the most precise definitions of matter and of mind, we attempt to show the inadequacy of his treatment.

The most complete refutation of subjective idealism is that of Sir William Hamilton, in his Metaphysics, 348-372, and Theories of Sense-perception—the reply to Brown. See condensed statement of Hamilton’s view, with estimate and criticism, in Porter, Human Intellect, 236-240, and on Idealism, 129, 132. Porter holds that original perception gives us simply affections of our own sensorium; as cause of these, we gain knowledge of extended externality. So Sir William Hamilton: “Sensation proper has no object but a subject-object.” But both Porter and Hamilton hold that through these sensations we know that which exists independently of our sensations. Hamilton’s natural realism, however, was an exaggeration of the truth. Bowne, Introd. to Psych. Theory, 257, 258—“In Sir William Hamilton’s desire to have no go-betweens in perception, he was forced to maintain that every sensation is felt where it seems to be, and hence that the mind fills out the entire body. Likewise he had to affirm that the object in vision is not the thing, but the rays of light, and even the object itself had, at last, to be brought into consciousness. Thus he reached the absurdity that the true object in perception is something of which we are totally unconscious.” Surely we cannot be immediately conscious of what is outside of consciousness. James, Psychology, 1:11—“The terminal organs are telephones, and brain-cells are the receivers at which the mind listens.” Berkeley’s view is to be found in his Principles of Human Knowledge, § 18 sq. See also Presb. Rev., Apl. 1885:301-315; Journ. Spec. Philos., 1884:246-260, 383-399; Tulloch, Mod. Theories, 360, 361; Encyc. Britannica, art.: Berkeley.

There is, however, an idealism which is not open to Hamilton’s objections, and to which most recent philosophers give their adhesion. It is the objective idealism of Lotze. It argues that we know nothing of the extended world except through the forces which impress our nervous organism. These forces take the form of vibrations of air or ether, and we interpret them as sound, light, or motion, according as they affect our nerves of hearing, sight, or touch. But the only force which we immediately know is that of our own wills, and we can either not understand matter at all or we must understand it as the product of a will comparable to our own. Things are simply “concreted laws of action,” or divine ideas to which permanent reality has been given by divine will. What we perceive in the normal exercise of our faculties has existence not only for us but for all intelligent beings and for God himself: in other words, our idealism is not subjective, but objective. We have seen in the previous section that atoms cannot explain the universe,—they presuppose both ideas and force. We now see that this force presupposes will, and these ideas presuppose mind. But, as it still may be claimed that this mind is not self-conscious mind and that this will is not personal will, we pass in the next section to consider Idealistic Pantheism, of which these claims are characteristic. Materialistic Idealism, in truth, is but a half-way house between Materialism and Pantheism, in which no permanent lodging is to be found by the logical intelligence.

Lotze, Outlines of Metaphysics, 152—“The objectivity of our cognition consists therefore in this, that it is not a meaningless play of mere seeming; but it brings before us a world whose coherency is ordered in pursuance of the injunction of the sole Reality in the world, to wit, the Good. Our cognition thus possesses more of truth than if it copied exactly a world that has no value in itself. Although it does not comprehend in what manner all that is phenomenon is presented to the view, still it understands what is the meaning of it all; and is like to a spectator who comprehends the æsthetic significance of that which takes place on the stage of a theatre, and would gain nothing essential if he were to see besides the machinery by means of which the changes are effected on the stage.” Professor C. A. Strong: “Perception is a shadow thrown upon the mind by a thing-in-itself. The shadow is the symbol of the thing; and, as shadows are soulless and dead, physical objects may seem soulless and dead, while the reality symbolized is never so soulful and alive. Consciousness is reality. The only existence of which we can conceive is mental in its nature. All existence for consciousness is existence of consciousness. The horse’s shadow accompanies him, but it does not help him to draw the cart. The brain-event is simply the mental state itself regarded from the point of view of the perception.”

Aristotle: “Substance is in its nature prior to relation” = there can be no relation without things to be related. Fichte: “Knowledge, just because it is knowledge, is not reality,—it comes not first, but second.” Veitch, Knowing and Being, 216, 217, 292, 293—“Thought can do nothing, except as it is a synonym for Thinker.... Neither the finite nor the infinite consciousness, alone or together, can constitute an object external, or explain its existence. The existence of a thing logically precedes the perception of it. Perception is not creation. It is not the thinking that makes the ego, but the ego that makes the thinking.” Seth, Hegelianism and Personality: “Divine thoughts presuppose a divine Being. God’s thoughts do not constitute the real world. The real force does not lie in them,—it lies in the divine Being, as living, active Will.” Here was the fundamental error of Hegel, that he regarded the Universe as mere Idea, and gave little thought to the Love and the Will that constitute it. See John Fiske, Cosmic Philosophy, 1:75; 2:80; Contemp. Rev., Oct. 1872: art. on Huxley; Lowndes, Philos. Primary Beliefs, 115-143; Atwater (on Ferrier), in Princeton Rev., 1857:258, 280; Cousin, Hist. Philosophy, 2:239-343; Veitch’s Hamilton, (Blackwood’s Philos. Classics,) 176, 191; A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 58-74.

To this view we make the following objections:

1. Its definition of matter as a “permanent possibility of sensation” contradicts our intuitive judgment that, in knowing the phenomena of matter, we have direct knowledge of substance as underlying phenomena, as distinct from our sensations, and as external to the mind which experiences these sensations.

Bowne, Metaphysics, 432—“How the possibility of an odor and a flavor can be the cause of the yellow color of an orange is probably unknowable, except to a mind that can see that two and two may make five.” See Iverach’s Philosophy of Spencer Examined, in Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 29. Martineau, Study, 1:102-112—“If external impressions are telegraphed to the brain, intelligence must receive the message at the beginning as well as deliver it at the end.... It is the external object which gives the possibility, not the possibility which gives the external object. The mind cannot make both its cognita and its cognitio. It cannot dispense with standing-ground for its own feet, or with atmosphere for its own wings.” Professor Charles A. Strong: “Kant held to things-in-themselves back of physical phenomena, as well as to things-in-themselves back of mental phenomena; he thought things-in-themselves back of physical might be identical with things-in-themselves back of mental phenomena. And since mental phenomena, on this theory, are not specimens of reality, and reality manifests itself indifferently through them and through physical phenomena, he naturally concluded that we have no ground for supposing reality to be like either—that we must conceive of it as ‘weder Materie noch ein denkend Wesen’—‘neither matter nor a thinking being’—a theory of the Unknowable. Would that it had been also the Unthinkable and the Unmentionable!” Ralph Waldo Emerson was a subjective idealist; but, when called to inspect a farmer’s load of wood, he said to his company: “Excuse me a moment, my friends; we have to attend to these matters, just as if they were real.” See Mivart, On Truth, 71-141.

2. Its definition of mind as a “series of feelings aware of itself” contradicts our intuitive judgment that, in knowing the phenomena of mind, we have direct knowledge of a spiritual substance of which these phenomena are manifestations, which retains its identity independently of our consciousness, and which, in its knowing, instead of being the passive recipient of impressions from without, always acts from within by a power of its own.

James, Psychology, 1:226—“It seems as if the elementary psychic fact were not thought, or this thought, or that thought, but my thought, every thought being owned. The universal conscious fact is not ‘feelings and thoughts exist,’ but ‘I think,’ and ‘I feel.’ ” Professor James is compelled to say this, even though he begins his Psychology without insisting upon the existence of a soul. Hamilton’s Reid, 443—“Shall I think that thought can stand by itself? or that ideas can feel pleasure or pain?” R. T. Smith, Man’s Knowledge, 44—“We say ‘my notions and my passions,’ and when we use these phrases we imply that our central self is felt to be something different from the notions or passions which belong to it or characterize it for a time.” Lichtenberg: “We should say, ‘It thinks;’ just as we say, ‘It lightens,’ or ‘It rains.’ In saying ‘Cogito,’ the philosopher goes too far if he translates it, ‘I think.’ ” Are the faculties, then, an army without a general, or an engine without a driver? In that case we should not have sensations,—we should only be sensations.

Professor C. A. Strong: “I have knowledge of other minds. This non-empirical knowledge—transcendent knowledge of things-in-themselves, derived neither from experience nor reasoning, and assuming that like consequents (intelligent movements) must have like antecedents (thoughts and feelings), and also assuming instinctively that something exists outside of my own mind—this refutes the post-Kantian phenomenalism. Perception and memory also involve transcendence. In both I transcend the bounds of experience, as truly as in my knowledge of other minds. In memory I recognize a past, as distinguished from the present. In perception I cognize a possibility of other experiences like the present, and this alone gives the sense of permanence and reality. Perception and memory refute phenomenalism. Things-in-themselves must be assumed in order to fill the gaps between individual minds, and to give coherence and intelligibility to the universe, and so to avoid pluralism. If matter can influence and even extinguish our minds, it must have some force of its own, some existence in itself. If consciousness is an evolutionary product, it must have arisen from simpler mental facts. But these simpler mental facts are only another name for things-in-themselves. A deep prerational instinct compels us to recognize them, for they cannot be logically demonstrated. We must assume them in order to give continuity and intelligibility to our conceptions of the universe.” See, on Bain’s Cerebral Psychology, Martineau’s Essays, 1:265. On the physiological method of mental philosophy, see Talbot, in Bap. Quar., 1871:1; Bowen, in Princeton Rev., March, 1878:423-450; Murray, Psychology, 279-287.

3. In so far as this theory regards mind as the obverse side of matter, or as a later and higher development from matter, the mere reference of both mind and matter to an underlying force does not save the theory from any of the difficulties of pure materialism already mentioned; since in this case, equally with that, force is regarded as purely physical, and the priority of spirit is denied.

Herbert Spencer, Psychology, quoted by Fiske, Cosmic Philosophy, 2:80—“Mind and nervous action are the subjective and objective faces of the same thing. Yet we remain utterly incapable of seeing, or even of imagining, how the two are related. Mind still continues to us a something without kinship to other things.” Owen, Anatomy of Vertebrates, quoted by Talbot, Bap. Quar., Jan. 1871:5—“All that I know of matter and mind in themselves is that the former is an external centre of force, and the latter an internal centre of force.” New Englander, Sept. 1883:636—“If the atom be a mere centre of force and not a real thing in itself, then the atom is a supersensual essence, an immaterial being. To make immaterial matter the source of conscious mind is to make matter as wonderful as an immortal soul or a personal Creator.” See New Englander, July, 1875:532-535; Martineau, Study, 102-130, and Relig. and Mod. Materialism, 25—“If it takes mind to construe the universe, how can the negation of mind constitute it?”

David J. Hill, in his Genetic Philosophy, 200, 201, seems to deny that thought precedes force, or that force precedes thought: “Objects, or things in the external world, may be elements of a thought-process in a cosmic subject, without themselves being conscious.... A true analysis and a rational genesis require the equal recognition of both the objective and the subjective elements of experience, without priority in time, separation in space or disruption of being. So far as our minds can penetrate reality, as disclosed in the activities of thought, we are everywhere confronted with a Dynamic Reason.” In Dr. Hill’s account of the genesis of the universe, however, the unconscious comes first, and from it the conscious seems to be derived. Consciousness of the object is only the obverse side of the object of consciousness. This is, as Martineau, Study, 1:341, remarks, “to take the sea on board the boat.” We greatly prefer the view of Lotze, 2:641—“Things are acts of the Infinite wrought within minds alone, or states which the Infinite experiences nowhere but in minds.... Things and events are the sum of those actions which the highest Principle performs in all spirits so uniformly and coherently, that to these spirits there must seem to be a world of substantial and efficient things existing in space outside themselves.” The data from which we draw our inferences as to the nature of the external world being mental and spiritual, it is more rational to attribute to that world a spiritual reality than a kind of reality of which our experience knows nothing. See also Schurman, Belief in God, 208, 225.

4. In so far as this theory holds the underlying force of which matter and mind are manifestations to be in any sense intelligent or voluntary, it renders necessary the assumption that there is an intelligent and voluntary Being who exerts this force. Sensations and ideas, moreover, are explicable only as manifestations of Mind.

Many recent Christian thinkers, as Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 13-15, 29-36, 42-52, would define mind as a function of matter, matter as a function of force, force as a function of will, and therefore as the power of an omnipresent and personal God. All force, except that of man’s free will, is the will of God. So Herschel, Lectures, 460; Argyll, Reign of Law, 121-127; Wallace on Nat. Selection, 363-371; Martineau, Essays, 1:63, 121, 145, 265; Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 146-162. These writers are led to their conclusion in large part by the considerations that nothing dead can be a proper cause; that will is the only cause of which we have immediate knowledge; that the forces of nature are intelligible only when they are regarded as exertions of will. Matter, therefore, is simply centres of force—the regular and, as it were, automatic expression of God’s mind and will. Second causes in nature are only secondary activities of the great First Cause.

This view is held also by Bowne, in his Metaphysics. He regards only personality as real. Matter is phenomenal, although it is an activity of the divine will outside of us. Bowne’s phenomenalism is therefore an objective idealism, greatly preferable to that of Berkeley who held to God’s energizing indeed, but only within the soul. This idealism of Bowne is not pantheism, for it holds that, while there are no second causes in nature, man is a second cause, with a personality distinct from that of God, and lifted above nature by his powers of free will. Royce, however, in his Religious Aspect of Philosophy, and in his The World and the Individual, makes man’s consciousness a part or aspect of a universal consciousness, and so, instead of making God come to consciousness in man, makes man come to consciousness in God. While this scheme seems, in one view, to save God’s personality, it may be doubted whether it equally guarantees man’s personality or leaves room for man’s freedom, responsibility, sin and guilt. Bowne, Philos. Theism, 175—“ ‘Universal reason’ is a class-term which denotes no possible existence, and which has reality only in the specific existences from which it is abstracted.” Bowne claims that the impersonal finite has only such otherness as a thought or act has to its subject. There is no substantial existence except in persons. Seth, Hegelianism and Personality: “Neo-Kantianism erects into a God the mere form of self-consciousness in general, that is, confounds consciousness überhaupt with a universal consciousness.”

Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 318-343, esp. 328—“Is there anything in existence but myself? Yes. To escape solipsism I must admit at least other persons. Does the world of apparent objects exist for me only? No; it exists for others also, so that we live in a common world. Does this common world consist in anything more than a similarity of impressions in finite minds, so that the world apart from these is nothing? This view cannot be disproved, but it accords so ill with the impression of our total experience that it is practically impossible. Is then the world of things a continuous existence of some kind independent of finite thought and consciousness? This claim cannot be demonstrated, but it is the only view that does not involve insuperable difficulties. What is the nature and where is the place of this cosmic existence? That is the question between Realism and Idealism. Realism views things as existing in a real space, and as true ontological realities. Idealism views both them and the space in which they are supposed to be existing as existing only in and for a cosmic Intelligence, and apart from which they are absurd and contradictory. Things are independent of our thought, but not independent of all thought, in a lumpish materiality which is the antithesis and negation of consciousness.” See also Martineau, Study, 1:214-230, 341. For advocacy of the substantive existence of second causes, see Porter, Hum. Intellect, 582-588; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:596; Alden, Philosophy, 48-80; Hodgson, Time and Space, 149-218; A. J. Balfour, in Mind, Oct. 1893: 430.

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III. Idealistic Pantheism

Pantheism is that method of thought which conceives of the universe as the development of one intelligent and voluntary, yet impersonal, substance, which reaches consciousness only in man. It therefore identifies God, not with each individual object in the universe, but with the totality of things. The current Pantheism of our day is idealistic.

The elements of truth in Pantheism are the intelligence and voluntariness of God, and his immanence in the universe; its error lies in denying God’s personality and transcendence.

Pantheism denies the real existence of the finite, at the same time that it deprives the Infinite of self-consciousness and freedom. See Hunt, History of Pantheism; Manning, Half-truths and the Truth; Bayne, Christian Life, Social and Individual, 21-53; Hutton, on Popular Pantheism, in Essays, 1:55-76—“The pantheist’s ‘I believe in God’, is a contradiction. He says: ‘I perceive the external as different from myself; but on further reflection, I perceive that this external was itself the percipient agency.’ So the worshiped is really the worshiper after all.” Harris, Philosophical Basis of Theism, 173—“Man is a bottle of the ocean’s water, in the ocean, temporarily distinguishable by its limitation within the bottle, but lost again in the ocean, so soon as these fragile limits are broken.” Martineau, Types, 1:23—Mere immanency excludes Theism; transcendency leaves it still possible; 211-225—Pantheism declares that “there is nothing but God; he is not only sole cause but entire effect; he is all in all.” Spinoza has been falsely called “the God-intoxicated man.” “Spinoza, on the contrary, translated God into the universe; it was Malebranche who transfigured the universe into God.”

The later Brahmanism is pantheistic. Rowland Williams, Christianity and Hinduism, quoted in Mozley on Miracles, 284—“In the final state personality vanishes. You will not, says the Brahman, accept the term ‘void’ as an adequate description of the mysterious nature of the soul, but you will clearly apprehend soul, in the final state, to be unseen and ungrasped being, thought, knowledge, joy—no other than very God.” Flint, Theism, 69—“Where the will is without energy, and rest is longed for as the end of existence, as among the Hindus, there is marked inability to think of God as cause or will, and constant inveterate tendency to pantheism.”

Hegel denies God’s transcendence: “God is not a spirit beyond the stars; he is spirit in all spirit”; which means that God, the impersonal and unconscious Absolute, comes to consciousness only in man. If the eternal system of abstract thoughts were itself conscious, finite consciousness would disappear; hence the alternative is either no God, or no man. Stirling: “The Idea, so conceived, is a blind, dumb, invisible idol, and the theory is the most hopeless theory that has ever been presented to humanity.” It is practical autolatry, or self-deification. The world is reduced to a mere process of logic; thought thinks; there is thought without a thinker. To this doctrine of Hegel we may well oppose the remarks of Lotze: “We cannot make mind the equivalent of the infinitive to think,—we feel that it must be that which thinks; the essence of things cannot be either existence or activity,—it must be that which exists and that which acts. Thinking means nothing, if it is not the thinking of a thinker; acting and working mean nothing, if we leave out the conception of a subject distinguishable from them and from which they proceed.” To Hegel, Being is Thought; to Spinoza, Being has Thought + Extension; the truth seems to be that Being has Thought + Will, and may reveal itself in Extension and Evolution (Creation).

By other philosophers, however, Hegel is otherwise interpreted. Prof. H. Jones, in Mind, July, 1893: 289-306, claims that Hegel’s fundamental Idea is not Thought, but Thinking: “The universe to him was not a system of thoughts, but a thinking reality, manifested most fully in man.... The fundamental reality is the universal intelligence whose operation we should seek to detect in all things. All reality is ultimately explicable as Spirit, or Intelligence,—hence our ontology must be a Logic, and the laws of things must be laws of thinking.” Sterrett, in like manner, in his Studies in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, 17, quotes Hegel’s Logic, Wallace’s translation, 89, 91, 236: “Spinoza’s Substance is, as it were, a dark, shapeless abyss, which devours all definite content as utterly null, and produces from itself nothing that has positive subsistence in itself.... God is Substance,—he is, however, no less the Absolute Person.” This is essential to religion, but this, says Hegel, Spinoza never perceived: “Everything depends upon the Absolute Truth being perceived, not merely as Substance, but as Subject.” God is self-conscious and self-determining Spirit. Necessity is excluded. Man is free and immortal. Men are not mechanical parts of God, nor do they lose their identity, although they find themselves truly only in him. With this estimate of Hegel’s system, Caird, Erdmann and Mulford substantially agree. This is Tennyson’s “Higher Pantheism.”

Seth, Ethical Principles, 440—“Hegel conceived the superiority of his system to Spinozism to lie in the substitution of Subject for Substance. The true Absolute must contain, instead of abolishing, relations; the true Monism must include, instead of excluding, Pluralism. A One which, like Spinoza’s Substance, or the Hegelian Absolute, does not enable us to think the Many, cannot be the true One—the unity of the Manifold.... Since evil exists, Schopenhauer substituted for Hegel’s Panlogism, which asserted the identity of the rational and the real, a blind impulse of life,—for absolute Reason he substituted a reasonless Will”—a system of practical pessimism. Alexander, Theories of Will, 5—“Spinoza recognized no distinction between will and intellectual affirmation or denial.” John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:107—“As there is no reason in the conception of pure space why any figures or forms, lines, surfaces, solids, should arise in it, so there is no reason in the pure colorless abstraction of Infinite Substance why any world of finite things and beings should ever come into existence. It is the grave of all things, the productive source of nothing.” Hegel called Schelling’s Identity or Absolute “the infinite night in which all cows are black”—an allusion to Goethe’s Faust, part 2, act 1, where the words are added: “and cats are gray.” Although Hegel’s preference of the term Subject, instead of the term Substance, has led many to maintain that he believed in a personality of God distinct from that of man, his over-emphasis of the Idea, and his comparative ignoring of the elements of Love and Will, leave it still doubtful whether his Idea was anything more than unconscious and impersonal intelligence—less materialistic than that of Spinoza indeed, yet open to many of the same objections.

We object to this system as follows:

1. Its idea of God is self-contradictory, since it makes him infinite, yet consisting only of the finite; absolute, yet existing in necessary relation to the universe; supreme, yet shut up to a process of self-evolution and dependent for self-consciousness on man; without self-determination, yet the cause of all that is.

Saisset, Pantheism, 148—“An imperfect God, yet perfection arising from imperfection.” Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 1:13—“Pantheism applies to God a principle of growth and imperfection, which belongs only to the finite.” Calderwood, Moral Philos., 245—“Its first requisite is moment, or movement, which it assumes, but does not account for.” Caro’s sarcasm applies here: “Your God is not yet made—he is in process of manufacture.” See H. B. Smith, Faith and Philosophy, 25. Pantheism is practical atheism, for impersonal spirit is only blind and necessary force. Angelus Silesius: “Wir beten ‘Es gescheh, mein Herr und Gott, dein Wille’; Und sieh’, Er hat nicht Will’,—Er ist ein ew’ge Stille”—which Max Müller translates as follows: “We pray, ‘O Lord our God, Do thou thy holy Will’; and see! God has no will; He is at peace and still.” Angelus Silesius consistently makes God dependent for self-consciousness on man: “I know that God cannot live An instant without me; He must give up the ghost, If I should cease to be.” Seth, Hegelianism and Personality: “Hegelianism destroys both God and man. It reduces man to an object of the universal Thinker, and leaves this universal Thinker without any true personality.” Pantheism is a game of solitaire, in which God plays both sides.

2. Its assumed unity of substance is not only without proof, but it directly contradicts our intuitive judgments. These testify that we are not parts and particles of God, but distinct personal subsistences.

Martineau, Essays, 1:158—“Even for immanency, there must be something wherein to dwell, and for life, something whereon to act.” Many systems of monism contradict consciousness; they confound harmony between two with absorption in one. “In Scripture we never find the universe called τὸ πᾶν, for this suggests the idea of a self-contained unity: we have everywhere τὰ πάντα instead.” The Bible recognizes the element of truth in pantheism—God is “through all”; also the element of truth in mysticism—God is “in you all”; but it adds the element of transcendence which both these fail to recognize—God is “above all” (Eph. 4:6). See Fisher, Essays on Supernat. Orig. of Christianity, 539. G. D. B. Pepper: “He who is over all and in all is yet distinct from all. If one is over a thing, he is not that very thing which he is over. If one is in something, he must be distinct from that something. And so the universe, over which and in which God is, must be thought of as something distinct from God. The creation cannot be identical with God, or a mere form of God.” We add, however, that it may be a manifestation of God and dependent upon God, as our thoughts and acts are manifestations of our mind and will and dependent upon our mind and will, yet are not themselves our mind and will.

Pope wrote: “All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is and God the soul.” But Case, Physical Realism, 193, replies: “Not so. Nature is to God as works are to a man; and as man’s works are not his body, so neither is nature the body of God.” Matthew Arnold, On Heine’s Grave: “What are we all but a mood, A single mood of the life Of the Being in whom we exist, Who alone is all things in one?” Hovey, Studies, 51—“Scripture recognizes the element of truth in pantheism, but it also teaches the existence of a world of things, animate and inanimate, in distinction from God. It represents men as prone to worship the creature more than the Creator. It describes them as sinners worthy of death ... moral agents.... It no more thinks of men as being literally parts of God, than it thinks of children as being parts of their parents, or subjects as being parts of their king.” A. J. F. Behrends: “The true doctrine lies between the two extremes of a crass dualism which makes God and the world two self-contained entities, and a substantial monism in which the universe has only a phenomenal existence. There is no identity of substance nor division of the divine substance. The universe is eternally dependent, the product of the divine Word, not simply manufactured. Creation is primarily a spiritual act.” Prof. George M. Forbes: “Matter exists in subordinate dependence upon God; spirit in coördinate dependence upon God. The body of Christ was Christ externalized, made manifest to sense-perception. In apprehending matter, I am apprehending the mind and will of God. This is the highest sort of reality. Neither matter nor finite spirits, then, are mere phenomena.”

3. It assigns no sufficient cause for that fact of the universe which is highest in rank, and therefore most needs explanation, namely, the existence of personal intelligences. A substance which is itself unconscious, and under the law of necessity, cannot produce beings who are self-conscious and free.

Gess, Foundations of our Faith, 36—“Animal instinct, and the spirit of a nation working out its language, might furnish analogies, if they produced personalities as their result, but not otherwise. Nor were these tendencies self-originated, but received from an external source.” McCosh, Intuitions, 215, 393, and Christianity and Positivism, 180. Seth, Freedom as an Ethical Postulate, 47—“If man is an ‘imperium in imperio,’ not a person, but only an aspect or expression of the universe or God, then he cannot be free. Man may be depersonalized either into nature or into God. Through the conception of our own personality we reach that of God. To resolve our personality into that of God would be to negate the divine greatness itself by invalidating the conception through which it was reached.” Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 551, is more ambiguous: “The positive relation of every appearance as an adjective to Reality; and the presence of Reality among its appearances in different degrees and with diverse values; this double truth we have found to be the centre of philosophy.” He protests against both “an empty transcendence” and “a shallow pantheism.” Hegelian immanence and knowledge, he asserts, identified God and man. But God is more than man or man’s thought. He is spirit and life—best understood from the human self, with its thoughts, feelings, volitions. Immanence needs to be qualified by transcendence. “God is not God till he has become all-in-all, and a God which is all-in-all is not the God of religion. God is an aspect, and that must mean but an appearance of the Absolute.” Bradley’s Absolute, therefore, is not so much personal as super-personal; to which we reply with Jackson, James Martineau, 416—“Higher than personality is lower; beyond it is regression from its height. From the equator we may travel northward, gaining ever higher and higher latitudes; but, if ever the pole is reached, pressing on from thence will be descending into lower latitudes, not gaining higher.... Do I say, I am a pantheist? Then, ipso facto, I deny pantheism; for, in the very assertion of the Ego, I imply all else as objective to me.”

4. It therefore contradicts the affirmations of our moral and religious natures by denying man’s freedom and responsibility; by making God to include in himself all evil as well as all good; and by precluding all prayer, worship, and hope of immortality.

Conscience is the eternal witness against pantheism. Conscience witnesses to our freedom and responsibility, and declares that moral distinctions are not illusory. Renouf, Hibbert Lect., 234—“It is only out of condescension to popular language that pantheistic systems can recognize the notions of right and wrong, of iniquity and sin. If everything really emanates from God, there can be no such thing as sin. And the ablest philosophers who have been led to pantheistic views have vainly endeavored to harmonize these views with what we understand by the notion of sin or moral evil. The great systematic work of Spinoza is entitled ’Ethica’; but for real ethics we might as profitably consult the Elements of Euclid.” Hodge, System. Theology, 1:299-330—“Pantheism is fatalistic. On this theory, duty = pleasure; right = might; sin = good in the making. Satan, as well as Gabriel, is a self-development of God. The practical effects of pantheism upon popular morals and life, wherever it has prevailed, as in Buddhist India and China, demonstrate its falsehood.” See also Dove, Logic of the Christian Faith, 118; Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 202; Bib. Sac., Oct. 1867:603-615; Dix, Pantheism, Introd., 12. On the fact of sin as refuting the pantheistic theory, see Bushnell, Nature and the Supernat., 140-164.

Wordsworth: “Look up to heaven! the industrious sun Already half his course hath run; He cannot halt or go astray; But our immortal spirits may.” President John H. Harris; “You never ask a cyclone’s opinion of the ten commandments.” Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 245—“Pantheism makes man an automaton. But how can an automaton have duties?” Principles of Ethics, 18—“Ethics is defined as the science of conduct, and the conventions of language are relied upon to cover up the fact that there is no ‘conduct’ in the case. If man be a proper automaton, we might as well speak of the conduct of the winds as of human conduct; and a treatise on planetary motions is as truly the ethics of the solar system as a treatise on human movements is the ethics of man.” For lack of a clear recognition of personality, either human or divine, Hegel’s Ethics is devoid of all spiritual nourishment,—his “Rechtsphilosophie” has been called “a repast of bran.” Yet Professor Jones, in Mind, July, 1893:304, tells us that Hegel’s task was “to discover what conception of the single principle or fundamental unity which alone is, is adequate to the differences which it carries within it. ‘Being,’ he found, leaves no room for differences,—it is overpowered by them.... He found that the Reality can exist only as absolute Self-consciousness, as a Spirit, who is universal, and who knows himself in all things. In all this he is dealing, not simply with thoughts, but with Reality.” Prof. Jones’s vindication of Hegel, however, still leaves it undecided whether that philosopher regarded the divine self-consciousness as distinct from that of finite beings, or as simply inclusive of theirs. See John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:109.

5. Our intuitive conviction of the existence of a God of absolute perfection compels us to conceive of God as possessed of every highest quality and attribute of men, and therefore, especially, of that which constitutes the chief dignity of the human spirit, its personality.

Diman, Theistic Argument, 328—“We have no right to represent the supreme Cause as inferior to ourselves, yet we do this when we describe it under phrases derived from physical causation.” Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 351—“We cannot conceive of anything as impersonal, yet of higher nature than our own,—any being that has not knowledge and will must be indefinitely inferior to one who has them.” Lotze holds truly, not that God is supra-personal, but that man is infra-personal, seeing that in the infinite Being alone is self-subsistence, and therefore perfect personality. Knight, Essays in Philosophy, 224—“The radical feature of personality is the survival of a permanent self, under all the fleeting or deciduous phases of experience; in other words, the personal identity that is involved in the assertion ‘I am.’... Is limitation a necessary adjunct of that notion?” Seth, Hegelianism: “As in us there is more for ourselves than for others, so in God there is more of thought for himself than he manifests to us. Hegel’s doctrine is that of immanence without transcendence.” Heinrich Heine was a pupil and intimate friend of Hegel. He says: “I was young and proud, and it pleased my vain-glory when I learned from Hegel that the true God was not, as my grandmother believed, the God who lived in heaven, but was rather myself upon the earth.” John Fiske, Idea of God, xvi—“Since our notion of force is purely a generalization from our subjective sensations of overcoming resistance, there is scarcely less anthropomorphism in the phrase ‘Infinite Power’ than in the phrase ‘Infinite Person.’ We must symbolize Deity in some form that has meaning to us; we cannot symbolize it as physical; we are bound to symbolize it as psychical. Hence we may say, God is Spirit. This implies God’s personality.”

6. Its objection to the divine personality, that over against the Infinite there can be in eternity past no non-ego to call forth self-consciousness, is refuted by considering that even man’s cognition of the non-ego logically presupposes knowledge of the ego, from which the non-ego is distinguished; that, in an absolute mind, self-consciousness cannot be conditioned, as in the case of finite mind, upon contact with a not-self; and that, if the distinguishing of self from a not-self were an essential condition of divine self-consciousness, the eternal personal distinctions in the divine nature or the eternal states of the divine mind might furnish such a condition.

Pfleiderer, Die Religion, 1:163, 190 sq.—“Personal self-consciousness is not primarily a distinguishing of the ego from the non-ego, but rather a distinguishing of itself from itself, i. e., of the unity of the self from the plurality of its contents.... Before the soul distinguishes self from the not-self, it must know self—else it could not see the distinction. Its development is connected with the knowledge of the non-ego, but this is due, not to the fact of personality, but to the fact of finite personality. The mature man can live for a long time upon his own resources. God needs no other, to stir him up to mental activity. Finiteness is a hindrance to the development of our personality. Infiniteness is necessary to the highest personality.” Lotze, Microcosmos, vol. 3, chapter 4; transl. in N. Eng., March, 1881:191-200—“Finite spirit, not having conditions of existence in itself, can know the ego only upon occasion of knowing the non-ego. The Infinite is not so limited. He alone has an independent existence, neither introduced nor developed through anything not himself, but, in an inward activity without beginning or end, maintains himself in himself.” See also Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 55-69; H. N. Gardiner on Lotze, in Presb. Rev., 1885:669-673; Webb, in Jour. Theol. Studies, 2:49-61.

Dorner, Glaubenslehre: “Absolute Personality = perfect consciousness of self, and perfect power over self. We need something external to waken our consciousness—yet self-consciousness comes [logically] before consciousness of the world. It is the soul’s act. Only after it has distinguished self from self, can it consciously distinguish self from another.” British Quarterly, Jan. 1874:32, note; July, 1884:108—“The ego is thinkable only in relation to the non-ego; but the ego is liveable long before any such relation.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:185, 186—In the pantheistic scheme, “God distinguishes himself from the world, and thereby finds the object required by the subject; ... in the Christian scheme, God distinguishes himself from himself, not from something that is not himself.” See Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:122-126; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 161-190; Hanne, Idee der absoluten Persönlichkeit; Eichhorn, Die Persönlichkeit Gottes; Seth, Hegelianism and Personality; Knight, on Personality and the Infinite, in Studies in Philos. and Lit., 70-118.

On the whole subject of Pantheism, see Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:141-194, esp. 192—“The personality of God consists in his voluntary agency as free cause in an unpledged sphere, that is, a sphere transcending that of immanent law. But precisely this also it is that constitutes his infinity, extending his sway, after it has filled the actual, over all the possible, and giving command over indefinite alternatives. Though you might deny his infinity without prejudice to his personality, you cannot deny his personality without sacrificing his infinitude: for there is a mode of action—the preferential, the very mode which distinguishes rational beings—from which you exclude him”; 341—“The metaphysicians who, in their impatience of distinction, insist on taking the sea on board the boat, swamp not only it but the thought it holds, and leave an infinitude which, as it can look into no eye and whisper into no ear, they contradict in the very act of affirming.” Jean Paul Richter’s “Dream”: “I wandered to the farthest verge of Creation, and there I saw a Socket, where an Eye should have been, and I heard the shriek of a Fatherless World” (quoted in David Brown’s Memoir of John Duncan, 49-70). Shelley, Beatrice Cenci: “Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be No God, no Heaven, no Earth, in the void world—The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!”

For the opposite view, see Biedermann, Dogmatik, 638-647—“Only man, as finite spirit, is personal; God, as absolute spirit, is not personal. Yet in religion the mutual relations of intercourse and communion are always personal.... Personality is the only adequate term by which we can represent the theistic conception of God.” Bruce, Providential Order, 76—“Schopenhauer does not level up cosmic force to the human, but levels down human will-force to the cosmic. Spinoza held intellect in God to be no more like man’s than the dog-star is like a dog. Hartmann added intellect to Schopenhauer’s will, but the intellect is unconscious and knows no moral distinctions.” See also Bruce, Apologetics, 71-90; Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 128-134, 171-186; J. M. Whiton, Am. Jour. Theol., Apl. 1901:306—Pantheism = God consists in all things; Theism = All things consist in God, their ground, not their sum. Spirit in man shows that the infinite Spirit must be personal and transcendent Mind and Will.

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IV. Ethical Monism

Ethical Monism is that method of thought which holds to a single substance, ground, or principle of being, namely, God, but which also holds to the ethical facts of God’s transcendence as well as his immanence, and of God’s personality as distinct from, and as guaranteeing, the personality of man.

Although we do not here assume the authority of the Bible, reserving our proof of this to the next following division on The Scriptures a Revelation from God, we may yet cite passages which show that our doctrine is not inconsistent with the teachings of holy Writ. The immanence of God is implied in all statements of his omnipresence, as for example: Ps. 139:7 sq.—“Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” Jer. 23:23, 24—“Am I a God at hand, saith Jehovah, and not a God afar off?... Do not I fill heaven and earth?” Acts 17:27, 28—“he is not far from each one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being.” The transcendence of God is implied in such passages as: 1 Kings 8:27—“the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee”; Ps. 113:5—“that hath his seat on high”; Is. 57:15—“the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.”

This is the faith of Augustine: “O God, thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless till it find rest in thee.... I could not be, O my God, could not be at all, wert thou not in me; rather, were not I in thee, of whom are all things, by whom are all things, in whom are all things.” And Anselm, in his Proslogion, says of the divine nature: “It is the essence of the being, the principle of the existence, of all things.... Without parts, without differences, without accidents, without changes, it might be said in a certain sense alone to exist, for in respect to it the other things which appear to be have no existence. The unchangeable Spirit is all that is, and it is this without limit, simply, interminably. It is the perfect and absolute Existence. The rest has come from non-entity, and thither returns if not supported by God. It does not exist by itself. In this sense the Creator alone exists; created things do not.”

1. While Ethical Monism embraces the one element of truth contained in Pantheism—the truth that God is in all things and that all things are in God—it regards this scientific unity as entirely consistent with the facts of ethics—man’s freedom, responsibility, sin, and guilt; in other words, Metaphysical Monism, or the doctrine of one substance, ground, or principle of being, is qualified by Psychological Dualism, or the doctrine that the soul is personally distinct from matter on the one hand, and from God on the other.

Ethical Monism is a monism which holds to the ethical facts of the freedom of man and the transcendence and personality of God; it is the monism of free-will, in which personality, both human and divine, sin and righteousness, God and the world, remain—two in one, and one in two—in their moral antithesis as well as their natural unity. Ladd, Introd. to Philosophy: “Dualism is yielding, in history and in the judgment-halls of reason, to a monistic philosophy.... Some form of philosophical monism is indicated by the researches of psycho-physics, and by that philosophy of mind which builds upon the principles ascertained by these researches. Realities correlated as are the body and the mind must have, as it were, a common ground.... They have their reality in the ultimate one Reality; they have their interrelated lives as expressions of the one Life which is immanent in the two.... Only some form of monism that shall satisfy the facts and truths to which both realism and idealism appeal can occupy the place of the true and final philosophy.... Monism must so construct its tenets as to preserve, or at least as not to contradict and destroy, the truths implicated in the distinction between the me and the not-me, ... between the morally good and the morally evil. No form of monism can persistently maintain itself which erects its system upon the ruins of fundamentally ethical principles and ideals.”... Philosophy of Mind, 411—“Dualism must be dissolved in some ultimate monistic solution. The Being of the world, of which all particular beings are but parts, must be so conceived of as that in it can be found the one ground of all interrelated existences and activities.... This one Principle is an Other and an Absolute Mind.”

Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person of Christ, II, 3:101, 231—“The unity of essence in God and man is the great discovery of the present age.... The characteristic feature of all recent Christologies is the endeavor to point out the essential unity of the divine and human. To the theology of the present day, the divine and human are not mutually exclusive, but are connected magnitudes.... Yet faith postulates a difference between the world and God, between whom religion seeks an union. Faith does not wish to be a relation merely to itself, or to its own representations and thoughts; that would be a monologue,—faith desires a dialogue. Therefore it does not consort with a monism which recognizes only God, or only the world; it opposes such a monism as this. Duality is, in fact, a condition of true and vital unity. But duality is not dualism. It has no desire to oppose the rational demand for unity.” Professor Small of Chicago: “With rare exceptions on each side, all philosophy to-day is monistic in its ontological presumptions; it is dualistic in its methodological procedures.” A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 71—“Men and God are the same in substance, though not identical as individuals.” The theology of fifty years ago was merely individualistic, and ignored the complementary truth of solidarity. Similarly we think of the continents and islands of our globe as disjoined from one another. The dissociable sea is regarded as an absolute barrier between them. But if the ocean could be dried, we should see that all the while there had been submarine connections, and the hidden unity of all lands would appear. So the individuality of human beings, real as it is, is not the only reality. There is the profounder fact of a common life. Even the great mountain-peaks of personality are superficial distinctions, compared with the organic oneness in which they are rooted, into which they all dip down, and from which they all, like volcanoes, receive at times quick and overflowing impulses of insight, emotion and energy; see A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation and Ethical Monism, 189, 190.

2. In contrast then with the two errors of Pantheism—the denial of God’s transcendence and the denial of God’s personality—Ethical Monism holds that the universe, instead of being one with God and conterminous with God, is but a finite, partial and progressive manifestation of the divine Life: Matter being God’s self-limitation under the law of Necessity; Humanity being God’s self-limitation under the law of Freedom; Incarnation and Atonement being God’s self-limitations under the law of Grace.

The universe is related to God as my thoughts are related to me, the thinker. I am greater than my thoughts, and my thoughts vary in moral value. Ethical Monism traces the universe back to a beginning, while Pantheism regards the universe as coëternal with God. Ethical Monism asserts God’s transcendence, while Pantheism regards God as imprisoned in the universe. Ethical Monism asserts that the heaven of heavens cannot contain him, but that contrariwise the whole universe taken together, with its elements and forces, its suns and systems, is but a light breath from his mouth, or a drop of dew upon the fringe of his garment. Upton, Hibbert Lectures: “The Eternal is present in every finite thing, and is felt and known to be present in every rational soul; but still is not broken up into individualities, but ever remains one and the same eternal substance, one and the same unifying principle, immanently and indivisibly present in every one of that countless plurality of finite individuals into which man’s analyzing understanding dissects the Cosmos.” James Martineau, in 19th Century, Apl. 1895:559—“What is Nature but the province of God’s pledged and habitual causality? And what is Spirit, but the province of his free causality, responding to the needs and affections of his children?... God is not a retired architect, who may now and then be called in for repairs. Nature is not self-active, and God’s agency is not intrusive.” Calvin: Pie hoc potest dici, Deum esse Naturam.

With this doctrine many poets show their sympathy. “Every fresh and new creation, A divine improvisation, From the heart of God proceeds.” Robert Browning asserts God’s immanence; Hohenstiel-Schwangau: “This is the glory that, in all conceived Or felt, or known, I recognize a Mind—Not mine, but like mine—for the double joy, Making all things for me, and me for him”; Ring and Book, Pope: “O thou, as represented to me here In such conception as my soul allows—Under thy measureless, my atom-width! Man’s mind, what is it but a convex glass, Wherein are gathered all the scattered points Picked out of the immensity of sky, To reunite there, be our heaven for earth, Our Known Unknown, our God revealed to man?” But Browning also asserts God’s transcendence: in Death in the Desert, we read: “Man is not God, but hath God’s end to serve, A Master to obey, a Cause to take, Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become”; in Christmas Eve, the poet derides “The important stumble Of adding, he, the sage and humble, Was also one with the Creator”; he tells us that it was God’s plan to make man in his image: “To create man, and then leave him Able, his own word saith, to grieve him; But able to glorify him too, As a mere machine could never do That prayed or praised, all unaware Of its fitness for aught but praise or prayer, Made perfect as a thing of course.... God, whose pleasure brought Man into being, stands away, As it were, a hand-breadth off, to give Room for the newly made to live And look at him from a place apart And use his gifts of brain and heart”; “Life’s business being just the terrible choice.”

So Tennyson’s Higher Pantheism: “The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills, and the plains, Are not these, O soul, the vision of Him who reigns? Dark is the world to thee; thou thyself art the reason why; For is not He all but thou, that hast power to feel ‘I am I’? Speak to him, thou, for he hears, and spirit with spirit can meet; Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet. And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see; But if we could see and hear, this vision—were it not He?” Also Tennyson’s Ancient Sage: “But that one ripple on the boundless deep Feels that the deep is boundless, and itself Forever changing form, but evermore One with the boundless motion of the deep”; and In Memoriam: “One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event, Toward which the whole creation moves.” Emerson: “The day of days, the greatest day in the feast of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to the unity of things”; “In the mud and scum of things Something always, always sings.” Mrs. Browning: “Earth is crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees takes off his shoes.” So manhood is itself potentially a divine thing. All life, in all its vast variety, can have but one Source. It is either one God, above all, through all, and in all, or it is no God at all. E. M. Poteat, On Chesapeake Bay: “Night’s radiant glory overhead, A softer glory there below, Deep answered unto deep, and said: A kindred fire in us doth glow. For life is one—of sea and stars, Of God and man, of earth and heaven—And by no theologic bars Shall my scant life from God’s be riven.” See Professor Henry Jones, Robert Browning.

3. The immanence of God, as the one substance, ground and principle of being, does not destroy, but rather guarantees, the individuality and rights of each portion of the universe, so that there is variety of rank and endowment. In the case of moral beings, worth is determined by the degree of their voluntary recognition and appropriation of the divine. While God is all, he is also in all; so making the universe a graded and progressive manifestation of himself, both in his love for righteousness and his opposition to moral evil.

It has been charged that the doctrine of monism necessarily involves moral indifference; that the divine presence in all things breaks down all distinctions of rank and makes each thing equal to every other; that the evil as well as the good is legitimated and consecrated. Of pantheistic monism all this is true,—it is not true of ethical monism; for ethical monism is the monism that recognizes the ethical fact of personal intelligence and will in both God and man, and with these God’s purpose in making the universe a varied manifestation of himself. The worship of cats and bulls and crocodiles in ancient Egypt, and the deification of lust in the Brahmanic temples of India, were expressions of a non-ethical monism, which saw in God no moral attributes, and which identified God with his manifestations. As an illustration of the mistakes into which the critics of monism may fall for lack of discrimination between monism that is pantheistic and monism that is ethical, we quote from Emma Marie Caillard: “Integral parts of God are, on monistic premises, liars, sensualists, murderers, evil livers and evil thinkers of every description. Their crimes and their passions enter intrinsically into the divine experience. The infinite Individual in his wholeness may reject them indeed, but none the less are these evil finite individuals constituent parts of him, even as the twigs of a tree, though they are not the tree, and though the tree transcends any or all of them, are yet constituent parts of it. Can he whose universal consciousness includes and defines all finite consciousnesses be other than responsible for all finite actions and motives?”

To this indictment we may reply in the words of Bowne, The Divine Immanence, 130-133—“Some weak heads have been so heated by the new wine of immanence as to put all things on the same level, and make men and mice of equal value. But there is nothing in the dependence of all things on God to remove their distinctions of value. One confused talker of this type was led to say that he had no trouble with the notion of a divine man, as he believed in a divine oyster. Others have used the doctrine to cancel moral differences; for if God be in all things, and if all things represent his will, then whatever is is right. But this too is hasty. Of course even the evil will is not independent of God, but lives and moves and has its being in and through the divine. But through its mysterious power of selfhood and self-determination the evil will is able to assume an attitude of hostility to the divine law, which forthwith vindicates itself by appropriate reactions.

“These reactions are not divine in the highest or ideal sense. They represent nothing which God desires or in which he delights; but they are divine in the sense that they are things to be done under the circumstances. The divine reaction in the case of the good is distinct from the divine reaction against evil. Both are divine as representing God’s action, but only the former is divine in the sense of representing God’s approval and sympathy. All things serve, said Spinoza. The good serve, and are furthered by their service. The bad also serve and are used up in the serving. According to Jonathan Edwards, the wicked are useful ‘in being acted upon and disposed of.’ As ‘vessels of dishonor’ they may reveal the majesty of God. There is nothing therefore in the divine immanence, in its only tenable form, to cancel moral distinctions or to minify retribution. The divine reaction against iniquity is even more solemn in this doctrine. The besetting God is the eternal and unescapable environment; and only as we are in harmony with him can there be any peace.... What God thinks of sin, and what his will is concerning it can be plainly seen in the natural consequences which attend it.... In law itself we are face to face with God; and natural consequences have a supernatural meaning.”

4. Since Christ is the Logos of God, the immanent God, God revealed in Nature, in Humanity, in Redemption, Ethical Monism recognizes the universe as created, upheld, and governed by the same Being who in the course of history was manifest in human form and who made atonement for human sin by his death on Calvary. The secret of the universe and the key to its mysteries are to be found in the Cross.

John 1:1-4 (marg.), 14, 18—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him; and without him was not any thing made. That which hath been made was life in him; and the life was the light of men.... And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.... No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” Col. 1:16, 17—“for in him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through him and unto him; and he is before all things, and in him all things consist.” Heb. 1:2, 3—“his Son ... through whom also he made the worlds ... upholding all things by the word of his power”; Eph. 1:22, 23—“the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all” = fills all things with all that they contain of truth, beauty, and goodness; Col. 2:2, 3, 9—“the mystery of God, even Christ, in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden ... for in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.”

This view of the relation of the universe to God lays the foundation for a Christian application of recent philosophical doctrine. Matter is no longer blind and dead, but is spiritual in its nature, not in the sense that it is spirit, but in the sense that it is the continual manifestation of spirit, just as my thoughts are a living and continual manifestation of myself. Yet matter does not consist simply in ideas, for ideas, deprived of an external object and of an internal subject, are left suspended in the air. Ideas are the product of Mind. But matter is known only as the operation of force, and force is the product of Will. Since this force works in rational ways, it can be the product only of Spirit. The system of forces which we call the universe is the immediate product of the mind and will of God; and, since Christ is the mind and will of God in exercise, Christ is the Creator and Upholder of the universe. Nature is the omnipresent Christ, manifesting God to creatures.

Christ is the principle of cohesion, attraction, interaction, not only in the physical universe, but in the intellectual and moral universe as well. In all our knowing, the knower and known are “connected by some Being who is their reality,” and this being is Christ, “the Light which lighteth every man” (John 1:9). We know in Christ, just as “in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). As the attraction of gravitation and the principle of evolution are only other names for Christ, so he is the basis of inductive reasoning and the ground of moral unity in the creation. I am bound to love my neighbor as myself because he has in him the same life that is in me, the life of God in Christ. The Christ in whom all humanity is created, and in whom all humanity consists, holds together the moral universe, drawing all men to himself and so drawing them to God. Through him God “reconciles all things unto himself ... whether things upon the earth, or things in the heavens” (Col. 1:20).

As Pantheism = exclusive immanence = God imprisoned, so Deism = exclusive transcendence = God banished. Ethical Monism holds to the truth contained in each of these systems, while avoiding their respective errors. It furnishes the basis for a new interpretation of many theological as well as of many philosophical doctrines. It helps our understanding of the Trinity. If within the bounds of God’s being there can exist multitudinous finite personalities, it becomes easier to comprehend how within those same bounds there can be three eternal and infinite personalities,—indeed, the integration of plural consciousnesses in an all-embracing divine consciousness may find a valid analogy in the integration of subordinate consciousnesses in the unit-personality of man; see Baldwin, Handbook of Psychology, Feeling and Will, 53, 54.

Ethical Monism, since it is ethical, leaves room for human wills and for their freedom. While man could never break the natural bond which united him to God, he could break the spiritual bond and introduce into creation a principle of discord and evil. Tie a cord tightly about your finger; you partially isolate the finger, diminish its nutrition, bring about atrophy and disease. So there has been given to each intelligent and moral agent the power, spiritually to isolate himself from God while yet he is naturally joined to God. As humanity is created in Christ and lives only in Christ, man’s self-isolation is his moral separation from Christ. Simon, Redemption of Man, 339—“Rejecting Christ is not so much refusal to become one with Christ as it is refusal to remain one with him, refusal to let him be our life.” All men are naturally one with Christ by physical birth, before they become morally one with him by spiritual birth. They may set themselves against him and may oppose him forever. This our Lord intimates, when he tells us that there are natural branches of Christ, which do not “abide in the vine” or “bear fruit,” and so are “cast forth,” “withered,” and “burned” (John 15:4-6).

Ethical Monism, however, since it is Monism, enables us to understand the principle of the Atonement. Though God’s holiness binds him to punish sin, the Christ who has joined himself to the sinner must share the sinner’s punishment. He who is the life of humanity must take upon his own heart the burden of shame and penalty that belongs to his members. Tie the cord about your finger; not only the finger suffers pain, but also the heart; the life of the whole system rouses itself to put away the evil, to untie the cord, to free the diseased and suffering member. Humanity is bound to Christ, as the finger to the body. Since human nature is one of the “all things” that “consist” or hold together in Christ (Col 1:17), and man’s sin is a self-perversion of a part of Christ’s own body, the whole must be injured by the self-inflicted injury of the part, and “it must needs be that Christ should suffer” (Acts 17:3). Simon, Redemption of Man, 321—“If the Logos is the Mediator of the divine immanence in creation, especially in man; if men are differentiations of the effluent divine energy; and if the Logos is the immanent controlling principle of all differentiation—i. e., the principle of all form—must not the self-perversion of these human differentiations react on him who is their constitutive principle?” A more full explanation of the relations of Ethical Monism to other doctrines must be reserved to our separate treatment of the Trinity, Creation, Sin, Atonement, Regeneration. Portions of the subject are treated by Upton, Hibbert Lectures; Le Conte, in Royce’s Conception of God, 43-50; Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 297-301, 311-317, and Immanence of God, 5-32, 116-153; Ladd, Philos. of Knowledge, 574-590, and Theory of Reality, 525-529; Edward Caird, Evolution of Religion, 2:48; Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, 2:258-283; Göschel, quoted in Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person of Christ, 5:170. An attempt has been made to treat the whole subject by A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation and Ethical Monism, 1-86, 141-162, 166-180, 186-208.

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I. Preliminary Considerations

I. Reasons a priori for expecting a Revelation from God.

1. Needs of man’s nature. Man’s intellectual and moral nature requires, in order to preserve it from constant deterioration, and to ensure its moral growth and progress, an authoritative and helpful revelation of religious truth, of a higher and completer sort than any to which, in its present state of sin, it can attain by the use of its unaided powers. The proof of this proposition is partly psychological, and partly historical.

A. Psychological proof.—(a) Neither reason nor intuition throws light upon certain questions whose solution is of the utmost importance to us; for example, Trinity, atonement, pardon, method of worship, personal existence after death. (b) Even the truth to which we arrive by our natural powers needs divine confirmation and authority when it addresses minds and wills perverted by sin. (c) To break this power of sin, and to furnish encouragement to moral effort, we need a special revelation of the merciful and helpful aspect of the divine nature.

(a) Bremen Lectures, 72, 73; Plato, Second Alcibiades, 22, 23; Phædo, 85—λόγου θείου τινός. Iamblicus, περὶ τοῦ Πυθαγορικοῦ βίου, chap. 28. Æschylus, in his Agamemnon, shows how completely reason and intuition failed to supply the knowledge of God which man needs: “Renown is loud,” he says, “and not to lose one’s senses is God’s greatest gift.... The being praised outrageously Is grave; for at the eyes of such a one Is launched, from Zeus, the thunder-stone. Therefore do I decide For so much and no more prosperity Than of his envy passes unespied.” Though the gods might have favorites, they did not love men as men, but rather, envied and hated them. William James, Is Life Worth Living? in Internat. Jour. Ethics, Oct. 1895:10—“All we know of good and beauty proceeds from nature, but none the less all we know of evil.... To such a harlot we owe no moral allegiance.... If there be a divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there is no Spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and, as all the higher religions have assumed, what we call visible nature, or this world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen or other world.”

(b) Versus Socrates: Men will do right, if they only know the right. Pfleiderer, Philos. Relig., 1:219—“In opposition to the opinion of Socrates that badness rests upon ignorance, Aristotle already called the fact to mind that the doing of the good is not always combined with the knowing of it, seeing that it depends also on the passions. If badness consisted only in the want of knowledge, then those who are theoretically most cultivated must also be morally the best, which no one will venture to assert.” W. S. Lilly, On Shibboleths: “Ignorance is often held to be the root of all evil. But mere knowledge cannot transform character. It cannot minister to a mind diseased. It cannot convert the will from bad to good. It may turn crime into different channels, and render it less easy to detect. It does not change man’s natural propensities or his disposition to gratify them at the expense of others. Knowledge makes the good man more powerful for good, the bad man more powerful for evil. And that is all it can do.” Gore, Incarnation, 174—“We must not depreciate the method of argument, for Jesus and Paul occasionally used it in a Socratic fashion, but we must recognize that it is not the basis of the Christian system nor the primary method of Christianity.” Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, 1:331, 531, and Types, 1:112—“Plato dissolved the idea of the right into that of the good, and this again was indistinguishably mingled with that of the true and the beautiful.” See also Flint, Theism, 305.

(c) Versus Thomas Paine: “Natural religion teaches us, without the possibility of being mistaken, all that is necessary or proper to be known.” Plato, Laws, 9:854, c, for substance: “Be good; but, if you cannot, then kill yourself.” Farrar, Darkness and Dawn, 75—“Plato says that man will never know God until God has revealed himself in the guise of suffering man, and that, when all is on the verge of destruction, God sees the distress of the universe, and, placing himself at the rudder, restores it to order.” Prometheus, the type of humanity, can never be delivered “until some god descends for him into the black depths of Tartarus.” Seneca in like manner teaches that man cannot save himself. He says: “Do you wonder that men go to the gods? God comes to men, yes, into men.” We are sinful, and God’s thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor his ways as our ways. Therefore he must make known his thoughts to us, teach us what we are, what true love is, and what will please him. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 227—“The inculcation of moral truths can be successfully effected only in the personal way; ... it demands the influence of personality; ... the weight of the impression depends upon the voice and the eye of a teacher.” In other words, we need not only the exercise of authority, but also the manifestation of love.

B. Historical proof.—(a) The knowledge of moral and religious truth possessed by nations and ages in which special revelation is unknown is grossly and increasingly imperfect. (b) Man’s actual condition in ante-Christian times, and in modern heathen lands, is that of extreme moral depravity. (c) With this depravity is found a general conviction of helplessness, and on the part of some nobler natures, a longing after, and hope of, aid from above.

Pythagoras: “It is not easy to know [duties], except men were taught them by God himself, or by some person who had received them from God, or obtained the knowledge of them through some divine means.” Socrates: “Wait with patience, till we know with certainty how we ought to behave ourselves toward God and man.” Plato: “We will wait for one, be he a God or an inspired man, to instruct us in our duties and to take away the darkness from our eyes.” Disciple of Plato: “Make probability our raft, while we sail through life, unless we could have a more sure and safe conveyance, such as some divine communication would be.” Plato thanked God for three things: first, that he was born a rational soul; secondly, that he was born a Greek; and, thirdly, that he lived in the days of Socrates. Yet, with all these advantages, he had only probability for a raft, on which to navigate strange seas of thought far beyond his depth, and he longed for “a more sure word of prophecy” (2 Pet. 1:19). See references and quotations in Peabody, Christianity the Religion of Nature, 35, and in Luthardt, Fundamental Truths, 156-172, 335-338; Farrar, Seekers after God; Garbett, Dogmatic Faith, 187.

2. Presumption of supply. What we know of God, by nature, affords ground for hope that these wants of our intellectual and moral being will be met by a corresponding supply, in the shape of a special divine revelation. We argue this:

(a) From our necessary conviction of God’s wisdom. Having made man a spiritual being, for spiritual ends, it may be hoped that he will furnish the means needed to secure these ends. (b) From the actual, though incomplete, revelation already given in nature. Since God has actually undertaken to make himself known to men, we may hope that he will finish the work he has begun. (c) From the general connection of want and supply. The higher our needs, the more intricate and ingenious are, in general, the contrivances for meeting them. We may therefore hope that the highest want will be all the more surely met. (d) From analogies of nature and history. Signs of reparative goodness in nature and of forbearance in providential dealings lead us to hope that, while justice is executed, God may still make known some way of restoration for sinners.

(a) There were two stages in Dr. John Duncan’s escape from pantheism: 1. when he came first to believe in the existence of God, and “danced for joy upon the brig o’ Dee”; and 2. when, under Malan’s influence, he came also to believe that “God meant that we should know him.” In the story in the old Village Reader, the mother broke completely down when she found that her son was likely to grow up stupid, but her tears conquered him and made him intelligent. Laura Bridgman was blind, deaf and dumb, and had but small sense of taste or smell. When her mother, after long separation, went to her in Boston, the mother’s heart was in distress lest the daughter should not recognize her. When at last, by some peculiar mother’s sign, she pierced the veil of insensibility, it was a glad time for both. So God, our Father, tries to reveal himself to our blind, deaf and dumb souls. The agony of the Cross is the sign of God’s distress over the insensibility of humanity which sin has caused. If he is the Maker of man’s being, he will surely seek to fit it for that communion with himself for which it was designed.

(b) Gore, Incarnation, 52, 53—“Nature is a first volume, in itself incomplete, and demanding a second volume, which is Christ.” (c) R. T. Smith, Man’s Knowledge of Man and of God, 228—“Mendicants do not ply their calling for years in a desert where there are no givers. Enough of supply has been received to keep the sense of want alive.” (d) In the natural arrangements for the healing of bruises in plants and for the mending of broken bones in the animal creation, in the provision of remedial agents for the cure of human diseases, and especially in the delay to inflict punishment upon the transgressor and the space given him for repentance, we have some indications, which, if uncontradicted by other evidence, might lead us to regard the God of nature as a God of forbearance and mercy. Plutarch’s treatise “De Sera Numinis Vindicta” is proof that this thought had occurred to the heathen. It may be doubted, indeed, whether a heathen religion could even continue to exist, without embracing in it some element of hope. Yet this very delay in the execution of the divine judgments gave its own occasion for doubting the existence of a God who was both good and just. “Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,” is a scandal to the divine government which only the sacrifice of Christ can fully remove.

The problem presents itself also in the Old Testament. In Job 21, and in Psalms, 17, 37, 49, 73, there are partial answers; see Job 21:7—“Wherefore do the wicked live, Become old, yea, wax mighty in power?” 24:1—“Why are not judgment times determined by the Almighty? And they that know him, why see they not his days?” The New Testament intimates the existence of a witness to God’s goodness among the heathen, while at the same time it declares that the full knowledge of forgiveness and salvation is brought only by Christ. Compare Acts 14:17—“And yet he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness”; 17:25-27—“he himself giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and he made of one every nation of men ... that they should seek God, if haply they might feel after him and find him”; Rom. 2:4—“the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance”; 3:25—“the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God”; Eph. 3:9—“to make all men see what is the dispensation of the mystery which for ages hath been hid in God”; 2 Tim. 1:10—“our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and incorruption to light through the gospel.” See Hackett’s edition of the treatise of Plutarch, as also Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 462-487; Diman, Theistic Argument, 371.

We conclude this section upon the reasons a priori for expecting a revelation from God with the acknowledgment that the facts warrant that degree of expectation which we call hope, rather than that larger degree of expectation which we call assurance; and this, for the reason that, while conscience gives proof that God is a God of holiness, we have not, from the light of nature, equal evidence that God is a God of love. Reason teaches man that, as a sinner, he merits condemnation; but he cannot, from reason alone, know that God will have mercy upon him and provide salvation. His doubts can be removed only by God’s own voice, assuring him of “redemption ... the forgiveness of ... trespasses” (Eph. 1:7) and revealing to him the way in which that forgiveness has been rendered possible.

Conscience knows no pardon, and no Savior. Hovey, Manual of Christian Theology, 9, seems to us to go too far when he says: “Even natural affection and conscience afford some clue to the goodness and holiness of God, though much more is needed by one who undertakes the study of Christian theology.” We grant that natural affection gives some clue to God’s goodness, but we regard conscience as reflecting only God’s holiness and his hatred of sin. We agree with Alexander McLaren: “Does God’s love need to be proved? Yes, as all paganism shows. Gods vicious, gods careless, gods cruel, gods beautiful, there are in abundance; but where is there a god who loves?”

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II. Marks of the Revelation man may expect

1. As to its substance. We may expect this later revelation not to contradict, but to confirm and enlarge, the knowledge of God which we derive from nature, while it remedies the defects of natural religion and throws light upon its problems.

Isaiah’s appeal is to God’s previous communications of truth: Is. 8:20—“To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them.” And Malachi follows the example of Isaiah; Mal. 4:4—“Remember ye the law of Moses my servant.” Our Lord himself based his claims upon the former utterances of God: Luke 24:27—“beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.”

2. As to its method. We may expect it to follow God’s methods of procedure in other communications of truth.

Bishop Butler (Analogy, part ii, chap. iii) has denied that there is any possibility of judging a priori how a divine revelation will be given. “We are in no sort judges beforehand,” he says, “by what methods, or in what proportion, it were to be expected that this supernatural light and instruction would be afforded us.” But Bishop Butler somewhat later in his great work (part ii, chap. iv) shows that God’s progressive plan in revelation has its analogy in the slow, successive steps by which God accomplishes his ends in nature. We maintain that the revelation in nature affords certain presumptions with regard to the revelation of grace, such for example as those mentioned below.

Leslie Stephen, in Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1891:180—“Butler answered the argument of the deists, that the God of Christianity was unjust, by arguing that the God of nature was equally unjust. James Mill, admitting the analogy, refused to believe in either God. Dr. Martineau has said, for similar reasons, that Butler ‘wrote one of the most terrible persuasives to atheism ever produced.’ So J. H. Newman’s ‘kill or cure’ argument is essentially that God has either revealed nothing, or has made revelations in some other places than in the Bible. His argument, like Butler’s, may be as good a persuasive to scepticism as to belief.” To this indictment by Leslie Stephen we reply that it has cogency only so long as we ignore the fact of human sin. Granting this fact, our world becomes a world of discipline, probation and redemption, and both the God of nature and the God of Christianity are cleared from all suspicion of injustice. The analogy between God’s methods in the Christian system and his methods in nature becomes an argument in favor of the former.

(a) That of continuous historical development,—that it will be given in germ to early ages, and will be more fully unfolded as the race is prepared to receive it.

Instances of continuous development in God’s impartations are found in geological history; in the growth of the sciences; in the progressive education of the individual and of the race. No other religion but Christianity shows “a steady historical progress of the vision of one infinite Character unfolding itself to man through a period of many centuries.” See sermon by Dr. Temple, on the Education of the World, in Essays and Reviews; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 374-384; Walker, Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation. On the gradualness of revelation, see Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 46-86; Arthur H. Hallam, in John Brown’s Rab and his Friends, 282—“Revelation is a gradual approximation of the infinite Being to the ways and thoughts of finite humanity.” A little fire can kindle a city or a world; but ten times the heat of that little fire, if widely diffused, would not kindle anything.

(b) That of original delivery to a single nation, and to single persons in that nation, that it may through them be communicated to mankind.

Each nation represents an idea. As the Greek had a genius for liberty and beauty, and the Roman a genius for organization and law, so the Hebrew nation had a “genius for religion” (Renan); this last, however, would have been useless without special divine aid and superintendence, as witness other productions of this same Semitic race, such as Bel and the Dragon, in the Old Testament Apocrypha; the gospels of the Apocryphal New Testament; and later still, the Talmud and the Koran.

The O. T. Apocrypha relates that, when Daniel was thrown a second time into the lions’ den, an angel seized Habakkuk in Judea by the hair of his head and carried him with a bowl of pottage to give to Daniel for his dinner. There were seven lions, and Daniel was among them seven days and nights. Tobias starts from his father’s house to secure his inheritance, and his little dog goes with him. On the banks of the great river a great fish threatens to devour him, but he captures and despoils the fish. He finally returns successful to his father’s house, and his little dog goes in with him. In the Apocryphal Gospels, Jesus carries water in his mantle when his pitcher is broken; makes clay birds on the Sabbath, and, when rebuked, causes them to fly; strikes a youthful companion with death, and then curses his accusers with blindness; mocks his teachers, and resents control. Later Moslem legends declare that Mohammed caused darkness at noon; whereupon the moon flew to him, went seven times around the Kaāba, bowed, entered his right sleeve, split into two halves after slipping out at the left, and the two halves, after retiring to the extreme east and west, were reunited. These products of the Semitic race show that neither the influence of environment nor a native genius for religion furnishes an adequate explanation of our Scriptures. As the flame on Elijah’s altar was caused, not by the dead sticks, but by the fire from heaven, so only the inspiration of the Almighty can explain the unique revelation of the Old and New Testaments.

The Hebrews saw God in conscience. For the most genuine expression of their life we “must look beneath the surface, in the soul, where worship and aspiration and prophetic faith come face to face with God” (Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, 28). But the Hebrew religion needed to be supplemented by the sight of God in reason, and in the beauty of the world. The Greeks had the love of knowledge, and the æsthetic sense. Butcher, Aspects of the Greek Genius, 34—“The Phœnicians taught the Greeks how to write, but it was the Greeks who wrote.” Aristotle was the beginner of science, and outside the Aryan race none but the Saracens ever felt the scientific impulse. But the Greek made his problem clear by striking all the unknown quantities out of it. Greek thought would never have gained universal currency and permanence if it had not been for Roman jurisprudence and imperialism. England has contributed her constitutional government, and America her manhood suffrage and her religious freedom. So a definite thought of God is incorporated in each nation, and each nation has a message to every other. Acts 17:26—God “made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”; Rom. 3:12—“What advantage then hath the Jew?... first of all, that they were entrusted with the oracles of God.” God’s choice of the Hebrew nation, as the repository and communicator of religious truth, is analogous to his choice of other nations, as the repositories and communicators of æsthetic, scientific, governmental truth.

Hegel: “No nation that has played a weighty and active part in the world’s history has ever issued from the simple development of a single race along the unmodified lines of blood-relationship. There must be differences, conflicts, a composition of opposed forces.” The conscience of the Hebrew, the thought of the Greek, the organization of the Latin, the personal loyalty of the Teuton, must all be united to form a perfect whole. “While the Greek church was orthodox, the Latin church was Catholic; while the Greek treated of the two wills in Christ, the Latin treated of the harmony of our wills with God; while the Latin saved through a corporation, the Teuton saved through personal faith.” Brereton, in Educational Review, Nov. 1901:339—“The problem of France is that of the religious orders; that of Germany, the construction of society; that of America, capital and labor.” Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:183, 184—“Great ideas never come from the masses, but from marked individuals. These ideas, when propounded, however, awaken an echo in the masses, which shows that the ideas had been slumbering unconsciously in the souls of others.” The hour strikes, and a Newton appears, who interprets God’s will in nature. So the hour strikes, and a Moses or a Paul appears, who interprets God’s will in morals and religion. The few grains of wheat found in the clasped hand of the Egyptian mummy would have been utterly lost if one grain had been sown in Europe, a second in Asia, a third in Africa, and a fourth in America; all being planted together in a flower-pot, and their product in a garden-bed, and the still later fruit in a farmer’s field, there came at last to be a sufficient crop of new Mediterranean wheat to distribute to all the world. So God followed his ordinary method in giving religious truth first to a single nation and to chosen individuals in that nation, that through them it might be given to all mankind. See British Quarterly, Jan. 1874: art.: Inductive Theology.

(c) That of preservation in written and accessible documents, handed down from those to whom the revelation is first communicated.

Alphabets, writing, books, are our chief dependence for the history of the past; all the great religions of the world are book-religions; the Karens expected their teachers in the new religion to bring to them a book. But notice that false religions have scriptures, but not Scripture; their sacred books lack the principle of unity which is furnished by divine inspiration. H. P. Smith, Biblical Scholarship and Inspiration, 68—“Mohammed discovered that the Scriptures of the Jews were the source of their religion. He called them a ‘book-people,’ and endeavored to construct a similar code for his disciples. In it God is the only speaker; all its contents are made known to the prophet by direct revelation; its Arabic style is perfect; its text is incorruptible; it is absolute authority in law, science and history.” The Koran is a grotesque human parody of the Bible; its exaggerated pretensions of divinity, indeed, are the best proof that it is of purely human origin. Scripture, on the other hand, makes no such claims for itself, but points to Christ as the sole and final authority. In this sense we may say with Clarke, Christian Theology, 20—“Christianity is not a book-religion, but a life-religion. The Bible does not give us Christ, but Christ gives us the Bible.” Still it is true that for our knowledge of Christ we are almost wholly dependent upon Scripture. In giving his revelation to the world, God has followed his ordinary method of communicating and preserving truth by means of written documents. Recent investigations, however, now render it probable that the Karen expectation of a book was the survival of the teaching of the Nestorian missionaries, who as early as the eighth century penetrated the remotest parts of Asia, and left in the wall of the city of Singwadu in Northwestern China a tablet as a monument of their labors. On book-revelation, see Rogers, Eclipse of Faith, 73-96, 281-304.

3. As to its attestation. We may expect that this revelation will be accompanied by evidence that its author is the same being whom we have previously recognized as God of nature. This evidence must constitute (a) a manifestation of God himself; (b) in the outward as well as the inward world; (c) such as only God’s power or knowledge can make; and (d) such as cannot be counterfeited by the evil, or mistaken by the candid, soul. In short, we may expect God to attest by miracles and by prophecy, the divine mission and authority of those to whom he communicates a revelation. Some such outward sign would seem to be necessary, not only to assure the original recipient that the supposed revelation is not a vagary of his own imagination, but also to render the revelation received by a single individual authoritative to all (compare Judges 6:17, 36-40—Gideon asks a sign, for himself; 1 K. 18:36-38—Elijah asks a sign, for others). But in order that our positive proof of a divine revelation may not be embarrassed by the suspicion that the miraculous and prophetic elements in the Scripture history create a presumption against its credibility, it will be desirable to take up at this point the general subject of miracles and prophecy.

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III. Miracles, as attesting a Divine Revelation

1. Definition of Miracle.

A. Preliminary Definition.—A miracle is an event palpable to the senses, produced for a religious purpose by the immediate agency of God; an event therefore which, though not contravening any law of nature, the laws of nature, if fully known, would not without this agency of God be competent to explain.

This definition corrects several erroneous conceptions of the miracle:—(a) A miracle is not a suspension or violation of natural law; since natural law is in operation at the time of the miracle just as much as before. (b) A miracle is not a sudden product of natural agencies—a product merely foreseen, by him who appears to work it; it is the effect of a will outside of nature. (c) A miracle is not an event without a cause; since it has for its cause a direct volition of God. (d) A miracle is not an irrational or capricious act of God; but an act of wisdom, performed in accordance with the immutable laws of his being, so that in the same circumstances the same course would be again pursued. (e) A miracle is not contrary to experience; since it is not contrary to experience for a new cause to be followed by a new effect. (f) A miracle is not a matter of internal experience, like regeneration or illumination; but is an event palpable to the senses, which may serve as an objective proof to all that the worker of it is divinely commissioned as a religious teacher.

For various definitions of miracles, see Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 302. On the whole subject, see Mozley, Miracles; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 285-339; Fisher, in Princeton Rev., Nov. 1880, and Jan. 1881; A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 129-147, and in Baptist Review, April, 1879. The definition given above is intended simply as a definition of the miracles of the Bible, or, in other words, of the events which profess to attest a divine revelation in the Scriptures. The New Testament designates these events in a two-fold way, viewing them either subjectively, as producing effects upon men, or objectively, as revealing the power and wisdom of God. In the former aspect they are called τέρατα, “wonders,” and σημεῖα, “signs,” (John 4:48; Acts 2:22). In the latter aspect they are called δυνάμεις, “powers,” and ἔργα, “works,” (Mat 7:22; John 14:11). See H. B. Smith, Lect. on Apologetics, 90-116, esp. 94—“σημεῖον, sign, marking the purpose or object, the moral end, placing the event in connection with revelation.” The Bible Union Version uniformly and properly renders τέρας by “wonder,” δυνάμις by “miracle,” ἔργον by “work,” and σημεῖον by “sign.” Goethe, Faust: “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichniss: Das Unzulängliche wird hier Ereigniss”—“Everything transitory is but a parable; The unattainable appears as solid fact.” So the miracles of the New Testament are acted parables,—Christ opens the eyes of the blind to show that he is the Light of the world, multiplies the loaves to show that he is the Bread of Life, and raises the dead to show that he lifts men up from the death of trespasses and sins. See Broadus on Matthew, 175.

A modification of this definition of the miracle, however, is demanded by a large class of Christian physicists, in the supposed interest of natural law. Such a modification is proposed by Babbage, in the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, chap. viii. Babbage illustrates the miracle by the action of his calculating machine, which would present to the observer in regular succession the series of units from one to ten million, but which would then make a leap and show, not ten million and one, but a hundred million; Ephraim Peabody illustrates the miracle from the cathedral clock which strikes only once in a hundred years; yet both these results are due simply to the original construction of the respective machines. Bonnet held this view; see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:591, 592; Eng. translation, 2:155, 156; so Matthew Arnold, quoted in Bruce, Miraculous Element in Gospels, 52; see also A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 129-147. Babbage and Peabody would deny that the miracle is due to the direct and immediate agency of God, and would regard it as belonging to a higher order of nature. God is the author of the miracle only in the sense that he instituted the laws of nature at the beginning and provided that at the appropriate time miracle should be their outcome. In favor of this view it has been claimed that it does not dispense with the divine working, but only puts it further back at the origination of the system, while it still holds God’s work to be essential, not only to the upholding of the system, but also to the inspiring of the religious teacher or leader with the knowledge needed to predict the unusual working of the system. The wonder is confined to the prophecy, which may equally attest a divine revelation. See Matheson, in Christianity and Evolution, 1-26.

But it is plain that a miracle of this sort lacks to a large degree the element of “signality” which is needed, if it is to accomplish its purpose. It surrenders the great advantage which miracle, as first defined, possessed over special providence, as an attestation of revelation—the advantage, namely, that while special providence affords some warrant that this revelation comes from God, miracle gives full warrant that it comes from God. Since man may by natural means possess himself of the knowledge of physical laws, the true miracle which God works, and the pretended miracle which only man works, are upon this theory far less easy to distinguish from each other: Cortez, for example, could deceive Montezuma by predicting an eclipse of the sun. Certain typical miracles, like the resurrection of Lazarus, refuse to be classed as events within the realm of nature, in the sense in which the term nature is ordinarily used. Our Lord, moreover, seems clearly to exclude such a theory as this, when he says: “If I by the finger of God cast out demons” (Luke 11:20); Mark 1:41—“I will; be thou made clean.” The view of Babbage is inadequate, not only because it fails to recognize any immediate exercise of will in the miracle, but because it regards nature as a mere machine which can operate apart from God—a purely deistic method of conception. On this view, many of the products of mere natural law might be called miracles. The miracle would be only the occasional manifestation of a higher order of nature, like the comet occasionally invading the solar system. William Elder, Ideas from Nature: “The century-plant which we have seen growing from our childhood may not unfold its blossoms until our old age comes upon us, but the sudden wonder is natural notwithstanding.” If, however, we interpret nature dynamically, rather than mechanically, and regard it as the regular working of the divine will instead of the automatic operation of a machine, there is much in this view which we may adopt. Miracle may be both natural and supernatural. We may hold, with Babbage, that it has natural antecedents, while at the same time we hold that it is produced by the immediate agency of God. We proceed therefore to an alternative and preferable definition, which in our judgment combines the merits of both that have been mentioned. On miracles as already defined, see Mozley, Miracles, preface, ix-xxvi, 7, 143-166; Bushnell, Nature and Supernatural, 333-336; Smith’s and Hastings’ Dict. of Bible, art.: Miracles; Abp. Temple, Bampton Lectures for 1884:193-221; Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:541, 542.

B. Alternative and Preferable Definition.—A miracle is an event in nature, so extraordinary in itself and so coinciding with the prophecy or command of a religious teacher or leader, as fully to warrant the conviction, on the part of those who witness it, that God has wrought it with the design of certifying that this teacher or leader has been commissioned by him.

This definition has certain marked advantages as compared with the preliminary definition given above:—(a) It recognizes the immanence of God and his immediate agency in nature, instead of assuming an antithesis between the laws of nature and the will of God. (b) It regards the miracle as simply an extraordinary act of that same God who is already present in all natural operations and who in them is revealing his general plan. (c) It holds that natural law, as the method of God’s regular activity, in no way precludes unique exertions of his power when these will best secure his purpose in creation. (d) It leaves it possible that all miracles may have their natural explanations and may hereafter be traced to natural causes, while both miracles and their natural causes may be only names for the one and self-same will of God. (e) It reconciles the claims of both science and religion: of science, by permitting any possible or probable physical antecedents of the miracle; of religion, by maintaining that these very antecedents together with the miracle itself are to be interpreted as signs of God’s special commission to him under whose teaching or leadership the miracle is wrought.

Augustine, who declares that “Dei voluntas rerum natura est,” defines the miracle in De Civitate Dei, 21:8—“Portentum ergo fit non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura.” He says also that a birth is more miraculous than a resurrection, because it is more wonderful that something that never was should begin to be, than that something that was and ceased to be should begin again. E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 104—“The natural is God’s work. He originated it. There is no separation between the natural and the supernatural. The natural is supernatural. God works in everything. Every end, even though attained by mechanical means, is God’s end as truly as if he wrought by miracle.” Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 141, regards miracle as something exceptional, yet under the control of natural law; the latent in nature suddenly manifesting itself; the revolution resulting from the slow accumulation of natural forces. In the Windsor Hotel fire, the heated and charred woodwork suddenly burst into flame. Flame is very different from mere heat, but it may be the result of a regularly rising temperature. Nature may be God’s regular action, miracle its unique result. God’s regular action may be entirely free, and yet its extraordinary result may be entirely natural. With these qualifications and explanations, we may adopt the statement of Biedermann, Dogmatik, 581-591—“Everything is miracle,—therefore faith sees God everywhere; Nothing is miracle,—therefore science sees God nowhere.”

Miracles are never considered by the Scripture writers as infractions of law. Bp. Southampton, Place of Miracles, 18—“The Hebrew historian or prophet regarded miracles as only the emergence into sensible experience of that divine force which was all along, though invisibly, controlling the course of nature.” Hastings, Bible Dictionary, 4:117—“The force of a miracle to us, arising from our notion of law, would not be felt by a Hebrew, because he had no notion of natural law.” Ps. 77:19, 20—“Thy way was in the sea, And thy paths in the great waters, And thy footsteps were not known”—They knew not, and we know not, by what precise means the deliverance was wrought, or by what precise track the passage through the Red Sea was effected; all we know is that “Thou leddest thy people like a flock, By the hand of Moses and Aaron.” J. M. Whiton, Miracles and Supernatural Religion: “The supernatural is in nature itself, at its very heart, at its very life; ... not an outside power interfering with the course of nature, but an inside power vitalizing nature and operating through it.” Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 35—“Miracle, instead of spelling ‘monster’, as Emerson said, simply bears witness to some otherwise unknown or unrecognized aspect of the divine character.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:533—“To cause the sun to rise and to cause Lazarus to rise, both demand omnipotence; but the manner in which omnipotence works in one instance is unlike the manner in the other.”

Miracle is an immediate operation of God; but, since all natural processes are also immediate operations of God, we do not need to deny the use of these natural processes, so far as they will go, in miracle. Such wonders of the Old Testament as the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, the partings of the Red Sea and of the Jordan, the calling down of fire from heaven by Elijah and the destruction of the army of Sennacherib, are none the less works of God when regarded as wrought by the use of natural means. In the New Testament Christ took water to make wine, and took the five loaves to make bread, just as in ten thousand vineyards to-day he is turning the moisture of the earth into the juice of the grape, and in ten thousand fields is turning carbon into corn. The virgin-birth of Christ may be an extreme instance of parthenogenesis, which Professor Loeb of Chicago has just demonstrated to take place in other than the lowest forms of life and which he believes to be possible in all. Christ’s resurrection may be an illustration of the power of the normal and perfect human spirit to take to itself a proper body, and so may be the type and prophecy of that great change when we too shall lay down our life and take it again. The scientist may yet find that his disbelief is not only disbelief in Christ, but also disbelief in science. All miracle may have its natural side, though we now are not able to discern it; and, if this were true, the Christian argument would not one whit be weakened, for still miracle would evidence the extraordinary working of the immanent God, and the impartation of his knowledge to the prophet or apostle who was his instrument.

This view of the miracle renders entirely unnecessary and irrational the treatment accorded to the Scripture narratives by some modern theologians. There is a credulity of scepticism, which minimizes the miraculous element in the Bible and treats it as mythical or legendary, in spite of clear evidence that it belongs to the realm of actual history. Pfleiderer, Philos. Relig., 1:295—“Miraculous legends arise in two ways, partly out of the idealizing of the real, and partly out of the realizing of the ideal.... Every occurrence may obtain for the religious judgment the significance of a sign or proof of the world-governing power, wisdom, justice or goodness of God.... Miraculous histories are a poetic realizing of religious ideas.” Pfleiderer quotes Goethe’s apothegm: “Miracle is faith’s dearest child.” Foster, Finality of the Christian Religion, 128-138—“We most honor biblical miraculous narratives when we seek to understand them as poesies.” Ritschl defines miracles as “those striking natural occurrences with which the experience of God’s special help is connected.” He leaves doubtful the bodily resurrection of Christ, and many of his school deny it; see Mead, Ritschl’s Place in the History of Doctrine, 11. We do not need to interpret Christ’s resurrection as a mere appearance of his spirit to the disciples. Gladden, Seven Puzzling Books, 202—“In the hands of perfect and spiritual man, the forces of nature are pliant and tractable as they are not in ours. The resurrection of Christ is only a sign of the superiority of the life of the perfect spirit over external conditions. It may be perfectly in accordance with nature.” Myers, Human Personality, 2:288—“I predict that, in consequence of the new evidence, all reasonable men, a century hence, will believe the resurrection of Christ.” We may add that Jesus himself intimates that the working of miracles is hereafter to be a common and natural manifestation of the new life which he imparts: John 14:12—“He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do, because I go unto the Father.”

We append a number of opinions, ancient and modern, with regard to miracles, all tending to show the need of so defining them as not to conflict with the just claims of science. Aristotle: “Nature is not full of episodes, like a bad tragedy.” Shakespeare, All’s Well that Ends Well, 2:3:1—“They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconsing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.” Keats, Lamia: “There was an awful rainbow once in heaven; We know her woof, her texture: she is given In the dull catalogue of common things.” Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 334—“Biological and psychological science unite in affirming that every event, organic or psychic, is to be explained in the terms of its immediate antecedents, and that it can be so explained. There is therefore no necessity, there is even no room, for interference. If the existence of a Deity depends upon the evidence of intervention and supernatural agency, faith in the divine seems to be destroyed in the scientific mind.” Theodore Parker: “No whim in God,—therefore no miracle in nature.” Armour, Atonement and Law, 15-33—“The miracle of redemption, like all miracles, is by intervention of adequate power, not by suspension of law. Redemption is not ‘the great exception.’ It is the fullest revelation and vindication of law.” Gore, in Lux Mundi, 320—“Redemption is not natural but supernatural—supernatural, that is, in view of the false nature which man made for himself by excluding God. Otherwise, the work of redemption is only the reconstitution of the nature which God had designed.” Abp. Trench: “The world of nature is throughout a witness for the world of spirit, proceeding from the same hand, growing out of the same root, and being constituted for this very end. The characters of nature which everywhere meet the eye are not a common but a sacred writing,—they are the hieroglyphics of God.” Pascal: “Nature is the image of grace.” President Mark Hopkins: “Christianity and perfect Reason are identical.” See Mead, Supernatural Revelation, 97-123; art.: Miracle, by Bernard, in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible. The modern and improved view of the miracle is perhaps best presented by T. H. Wright, The Finger of God; and by W. N. Rice, Christian Faith in an Age of Science, 336.

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2. Possibility of Miracle

An event in nature may be caused by an agent in nature yet above nature. This is evident from the following considerations:

(a) Lower forces and laws in nature are frequently counteracted and transcended by the higher (as mechanical forces and laws by chemical, and chemical by vital), while yet the lower forces and laws are not suspended or annihilated, but are merged in the higher, and made to assist in accomplishing purposes to which they are altogether unequal when left to themselves.

By nature we mean nature in the proper sense—not “everything that is not God,” but “everything that is not God or made in the image of God”; see Hopkins, Outline Study of Man, 258, 259. Man’s will does not belong to nature, but is above nature. On the transcending of lower forces by higher, see Murphy, Habit and Intelligence, 1:88. James Robertson, Early Religion of Israel, 23—“Is it impossible that there should be unique things in the world? Is it scientific to assert that there are not?” Ladd, Philosophy of Knowledge, 406—“Why does not the projecting part of the coping-stone fall, in obedience to the law of gravitation, from the top of yonder building? Because, as physics declares, the forces of cohesion, acting under quite different laws, thwart and oppose for the time being the law of gravitation.... But now, after a frosty night, the coping-stone actually breaks off and tumbles to the ground; for that unique law which makes water forcibly expand at 32° Fahrenheit has contradicted the laws of cohesion and has restored to the law of gravitation its temporarily suspended rights over this mass of matter.” Gore, Incarnation, 48—“Evolution views nature as a progressive order in which there are new departures, fresh levels won, phenomena unknown before. When organic life appeared, the future did not resemble the past. So when man came. Christ is a new nature—the creative Word made flesh. It is to be expected that, as new nature, he will exhibit new phenomena. New vital energy will radiate from him, controlling the material forces. Miracles are the proper accompaniments of his person.” We may add that, as Christ is the immanent God, he is present in nature while at the same time he is above nature, and he whose steady will is the essence of all natural law can transcend all past exertions of that will. The infinite One is not a being of endless monotony. William Elder, Ideas from Nature, 156—“God is not bound hopelessly to his process, like Ixion to his wheel.”

(b) The human will acts upon its physical organism, and so upon nature, and produces results which nature left to herself never could accomplish, while yet no law of nature is suspended or violated. Gravitation still operates upon the axe, even while man holds it at the surface of the water—for the axe still has weight (cf. 2 K. 6:5-7).

Versus Hume, Philos. Works, 4:130—“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature.” Christian apologists have too often needlessly embarrassed their argument by accepting Hume’s definition. The stigma is entirely undeserved. If man can support the axe at the surface of the water while gravitation still acts upon it, God can certainly, at the prophet’s word, make the iron to swim, while gravitation still acts upon it. But this last is miracle. See Mansel, Essay on Miracles, in Aids to Faith, 26, 27: After the greatest wave of the season has landed its pebble high up on the beach, I can move the pebble a foot further without altering the force of wind or wave or climate in a distant continent. Fisher, Supernat. Origin of Christianity, 471; Hamilton, Autology, 685-690; Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 445; Row, Bampton Lectures on Christian Evidences, 54-74; A. A. Hodge: Pulling out a new stop of the organ does not suspend the working or destroy the harmony of the other stops. The pump does not suspend the law of gravitation, nor does our throwing a ball into the air. If gravitation did not act, the upward velocity of the ball would not diminish and the ball would never return. “Gravitation draws iron down. But the magnet overcomes that attraction and draws the iron up. Yet here is no suspension or violation of law, but rather a harmonious working of two laws, each in its sphere. Death and not life is the order of nature. But men live notwithstanding. Life is supernatural. Only as a force additional to mere nature works against nature does life exist. So spiritual life uses and transcends the laws of nature” (Sunday School Times). Gladden, What Is Left? 60—“Wherever you find thought, choice, love, you find something that is not under the dominion of fixed law. These are the attributes of a free personality.” William James: “We need to substitute the personal view of life for the impersonal and mechanical view. Mechanical rationalism is narrowness and partial induction of facts,—it is not science.”

(c) In all free causation, there is an acting without means. Man acts upon external nature through his physical organism, but, in moving his physical organism, he acts directly upon matter. In other words, the human will can use means, only because it has the power of acting initially without means.

See Hopkins, on Prayer-gauge, 10, and in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:188. A. J. Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 311—“Not Divinity alone intervenes in the world of things. Each living soul, in its measure and degree, does the same.” Each soul that acts in any way on its surroundings does so on the principle of the miracle. Phillips Brooks, Life, 2:350—“The making of all events miraculous is no more an abolition of miracle than the flooding of the world with sunshine is an extinction of the sun.” George Adam Smith, on Is. 33:14—“devouring fire ... everlasting burnings”: “If we look at a conflagration through smoked glass, we see buildings collapsing, but we see no fire. So science sees results, but not the power which produces them; sees cause and effect, but does not see God.” P. S. Henson: “The current in an electric wire is invisible so long as it circulates uniformly. But cut the wire and insert a piece of carbon between the two broken ends, and at once you have an arc-light that drives away the darkness. So miracle is only the momentary interruption in the operation of uniform laws, which thus gives light to the ages,”—or, let us say rather, the momentary change in the method of their operation whereby the will of God takes a new form of manifestation. Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 100—“Spinoza leugnete ihre metaphysische Möglichkeit, Hume ihre geschichtliche Erkennbarkeit, Kant ihre practische Brauchbarkeit, Schleiermacher ihre religiöse Bedeutsamkeit, Hegel ihre geistige Beweiskraft, Fichte ihre wahre Christlichkeit, und die kritische Theologie ihre wahre Geschichtlichkeit.”

(d) What the human will, considered as a supernatural force, and what the chemical and vital forces of nature itself, are demonstrably able to accomplish, cannot be regarded as beyond the power of God, so long as God dwells in and controls the universe. If man’s will can act directly upon matter in his own physical organism, God’s will can work immediately upon the system which he has created and which he sustains. In other words, if there be a God, and if he be a personal being, miracles are possible. The impossibility of miracles can be maintained only upon principles of atheism or pantheism.

See Westcott, Gospel of the Resurrection, 19; Cox, Miracles, an Argument and a Challenge: “Anthropomorphism is preferable to hylomorphism.” Newman Smyth, Old Faiths in a New Light, ch. 1—“A miracle is not a sudden blow struck in the face of nature, but a use of nature, according to its inherent capacities, by higher powers.” See also Gloatz, Wunder und Naturgesetz, in Studien und Kritiken, 1886:403-546; Gunsaulus, Transfiguration of Christ, 18, 19, 26; Andover Review, on “Robert Elsmere,” 1888:303; W. E. Gladstone, in Nineteenth Century, 1888:766-788; Dubois, on Science and Miracle, in New Englander, July, 1889:1-32—Three postulates: (1) Every particle attracts every other in the universe; (2) Man’s will is free; (3) Every volition is accompanied by corresponding brain-action. Hence every volition of ours causes changes throughout the whole universe; also, in Century Magazine, Dec. 1894:229—Conditions are never twice the same in nature; all things are the results of will, since we know that the least thought of ours shakes the universe; miracle is simply the action of will in unique conditions; the beginning of life, the origin of consciousness, these are miracles, yet they are strictly natural; prayer and the mind that frames it are conditions which the Mind in nature cannot ignore. _Cf.__ Ps. 115:3—_“our God is in the heavens: He hath done whatsoever he pleased” = his almighty power and freedom do away with all a priori objections to miracles. If God is not a mere force, but a person, then miracles are possible.

(e) This possibility of miracles becomes doubly sure to those who see in Christ none other than the immanent God manifested to creatures. The Logos or divine Reason who is the principle of all growth and evolution can make God known only by means of successive new impartations of his energy. Since all progress implies increment, and Christ is the only source of life, the whole history of creation is a witness to the possibility of miracle.

See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 163-166—“This conception of evolution is that of Lotze. That great philosopher, whose influence is more potent than any other in present thought, does not regard the universe as a plenum to which nothing can be added in the way of force. He looks upon the universe rather as a plastic organism to which new impulses can be imparted from him of whose thought and will it is an expression. These impulses, once imparted, abide in the organism and are thereafter subject to its law. Though these impulses come from within, they come not from the finite mechanism but from the immanent God. Robert Browning’s phrase, ‘All’s love, but all’s law,’ must be interpreted as meaning that the very movements of the planets and all the operations of nature are revelations of a personal and present God, but it must not be interpreted as meaning that God runs in a rut, that he is confined to mechanism, that he is incapable of unique and startling manifestations of power.

“The idea that gives to evolution its hold upon thinking minds is the idea of continuity. But absolute continuity is inconsistent with progress. If the future is not simply a reproduction of the past, there must be some new cause of change. In order to progress there must be either a new force, or a new combination of forces, and the new combination of forces can be explained only by some new force that causes the combination. This new force, moreover, must be intelligent force, if the evolution is to be toward the better instead of toward the worse. The continuity must be continuity not of forces but of plan. The forces may increase, nay, they must increase, unless the new is to be a mere repetition of the old. There must be additional energy imparted, the new combination brought about, and all this implies purpose and will. But through all there runs one continuous plan, and upon this plan the rationality of evolution depends.

“A man builds a house. In laying the foundation he uses stone and mortar, but he makes the walls of wood and the roof of tin. In the superstructure he brings into play different laws from those which apply to the foundation. There is continuity, not of material, but of plan. Progress from cellar to garret requires breaks here and there, and the bringing in of new forces; in fact, without the bringing in of these new forces the evolution of the house would be impossible. Now substitute for the foundation and superstructure living things like the chrysalis and the butterfly; imagine the power to work from within and not from without; and you see that true continuity does not exclude but involves new beginnings.

“Evolution, then, depends on increments of force plus continuity of plan. New creations are possible because the immanent God has not exhausted himself. Miracle is possible because God is not far away, but is at hand to do whatever the needs of his moral universe may require. Regeneration and answers to prayer are possible for the very reason that these are the objects for which the universe was built. If we were deists, believing in a distant God and a mechanical universe, evolution and Christianity would be irreconcilable. But since we believe in a dynamical universe, of which the personal and living God is the inner source of energy, evolution is but the basis, foundation and background of Christianity, the silent and regular working of him who, in the fulness of time, utters his voice in Christ and the Cross.”

Lotze’s own statement of his position may be found in his Microcosmos, 2:479 sq. Professor James Ten Broeke has interpreted him as follows: “He makes the possibility of the miracle depend upon the close and intimate action and reaction between the world and the personal Absolute, in consequence of which the movements of the natural world are carried on only through the Absolute, with the possibility of a variation in the general course of things, according to existing facts and the purpose of the divine Governor.”

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3. Probability of Miracles

A. We acknowledge that, so long as we confine our attention to nature, there is a presumption against miracles. Experience testifies to the uniformity of natural law. A general uniformity is needful, in order to make possible a rational calculation of the future, and a proper ordering of life.

See Butler, Analogy, part ii, chap. ii; F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 3-45; Modern Scepticism, 1:179-227; Chalmers, Christian Revelation, 1:47. G. D. B. Pepper: “Where there is no law, no settled order, there can be no miracle. The miracle presupposes the law, and the importance assigned to miracles is the recognition of the reign of law. But the making and launching of a ship may be governed by law, no less than the sailing of the ship after it is launched. So the introduction of a higher spiritual order into a merely natural order constitutes a new and unique event.” Some Christian apologists have erred in affirming that the miracle was antecedently as probable as any other event, whereas only its antecedent improbability gives it value as a proof of revelation. Horace: “Nec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus Inciderit.”

B. But we deny that this uniformity of nature is absolute and universal. (a) It is not a truth of reason that can have no exceptions, like the axiom that a whole is greater than its parts. (b) Experience could not warrant a belief in absolute and universal uniformity, unless experience were identical with absolute and universal knowledge. (c) We know, on the contrary, from geology, that there have been breaks in this uniformity, such as the introduction of vegetable, animal and human life, which cannot be accounted for, except by the manifestation in nature of a supernatural power.

(a) Compare the probability that the sun will rise to-morrow morning with the certainty that two and two make four. Huxley, Lay Sermons, 158, indignantly denies that there is any “must” about the uniformity of nature: “No one is entitled to say a priori that any given so-called miraculous event is impossible.” Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, 1:84—“There is no evidence for the statement that the mass of the universe is a definite and unchangeable quantity”; 108, 109—“Why so confidently assume that a rigid and monotonous uniformity is the only, or the highest, indication of order, the order of an ever living Spirit, above all? How is it that we depreciate machine-made articles, and prefer those in which the artistic impulse, or the fitness of the individual case, is free to shape and to make what is literally manufactured, hand-made?... Dangerous as teleological arguments in general may be, we may at least safely say the world was not designed to make science easy.... To call the verses of a poet, the politics of a statesman, or the award of a judge mechanical, implies, as Lotze has pointed out, marked disparagement, although it implies, too, precisely those characteristics—exactness and invariability—in which Maxwell would have us see a token of the divine.” Surely then we must not insist that divine wisdom must always run in a rut, must ever repeat itself, must never exhibit itself in unique acts like incarnation and resurrection. See Edward Hitchcock, in Bib. Sac., 20:489-561, on “The Law of Nature’s Constancy Subordinate to the Higher Law of Change”; Jevons, Principles of Science, 2:430-438; Mozley, Miracles, 26.

(b) S. T. Coleridge, Table Talk, 18 December, 1831—“The light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern of the ship, which shines only on the waves behind us.” Hobbes: “Experience concludeth nothing universally.” Brooks, Foundations of Zoölogy, 131—“Evidence can tell us only what has happened, and it can never assure us that the future must be like the past; 132—Proof that all nature is mechanical would not be inconsistent with the belief that everything in nature is immediately sustained by Providence, and that my volition counts for something in determining the course of events.” Royce, World and Individual, 2:204—“Uniformity is not absolute. Nature is a vaster realm of life and meaning, of which we men form a part, and of which the final unity is in God’s life. The rhythm of the heart-beat has its normal regularity, yet its limited persistence. Nature may be merely the habits of free will. Every region of this universally conscious world may be a centre whence issues new conscious life for communication to all the worlds.” Principal Fairbairn: “Nature is Spirit.” We prefer to say: “Nature is the manifestation of spirit, the regularities of freedom.”

(c) Other breaks in the uniformity of nature are the coming of Christ and the regeneration of a human soul. Harnack, What is Christianity, 18, holds that though there are no interruptions to the working of natural law, natural law is not yet fully known. While there are no miracles, there is plenty of the miraculous. The power of mind over matter is beyond our present conceptions. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 210—The effects are no more consequences of the laws than the laws are consequences of the effects = both laws and effects are exercises of divine will. King, Reconstruction in Theology, 56—We must hold, not to the uniformity of law, but to the universality of law; for evolution has successive stages with new laws coming in and becoming dominant that had not before appeared. The new and higher stage is practically a miracle from the point of view of the lower. See British Quarterly Review, Oct. 1881:154; Martineau, Study, 2:200, 203, 209.

C. Since the inworking of the moral law into the constitution and course of nature shows that nature exists, not for itself, but for the contemplation and use of moral beings, it is probable that the God of nature will produce effects aside from those of natural law, whenever there are sufficiently important moral ends to be served thereby.

Beneath the expectation of uniformity is the intuition of final cause; the former may therefore give way to the latter. See Porter, Human Intellect, 592-615—Efficient causes and final causes may conflict, and then the efficient give place to the final. This is miracle. See Hutton, in Nineteenth Century, Aug. 1885, and Channing, Evidences of Revealed Religion, quoted in Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:534, 535—“The order of the universe is a means, not an end, and like all other means must give way when the end can be best promoted without it. It is the mark of a weak mind to make an idol of order and method; to cling to established forms of business when they clog instead of advancing it.” Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 357—“The stability of the heavens is in the sight of God of less importance than the moral growth of the human spirit.” This is proved by the Incarnation. The Christian sees in this little earth the scene of God’s greatest revelation. The superiority of the spiritual to the physical helps us to see our true dignity in the creation, to rule our bodies, to overcome our sins. Christ’s suffering shows us that God is no indifferent spectator of human pain. He subjects himself to our conditions, or rather in this subjection reveals to us God’s own eternal suffering for sin. The atonement enables us to solve the problem of sin.

D. The existence of moral disorder consequent upon the free acts of man’s will, therefore, changes the presumption against miracles into a presumption in their favor. The non-appearance of miracles, in this case, would be the greatest of wonders.

Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 331-335—So a man’s personal consciousness of sin, and above all his personal experience of regenerating grace, will constitute the best preparation for the study of miracles. “Christianity cannot be proved except to a bad conscience.” The dying Vinet said well: “The greatest miracle that I know of is that of my conversion. I was dead, and I live; I was blind, and I see; I was a slave, and I am free; I was an enemy of God, and I love him; prayer, the Bible, the society of Christians, these were to me a source of profound ennui; whilst now it is the pleasures of the world that are wearisome to me, and piety is the source of all my joy. Behold the miracle! And if God has been able to work that one, there are none of which he is not capable.”

Yet the physical and the moral are not “sundered as with an axe.” Nature is but the lower stage or imperfect form of the revelation of God’s truth and holiness and love. It prepares the way for the miracle by suggesting, though more dimly, the same essential characteristics of the divine nature. Ignorance and sin necessitate a larger disclosure. G. S. Lee, The Shadow Christ, 84—“The pillar of cloud was the dim night-lamp that Jehovah kept burning over his infant children, to show them that he was there. They did not know that the night itself was God.” Why do we have Christmas presents in Christian homes? Because the parents do not love their children at other times? No; but because the mind becomes sluggish in the presence of merely regular kindness, and special gifts are needed to wake it to gratitude. So our sluggish and unloving minds need special testimonies of the divine mercy. Shall God alone be shut up to dull uniformities of action? Shall the heavenly Father alone be unable to make special communications of love? Why then are not miracles and revivals of religion constant and uniform? Because uniform blessings would be regarded simply as workings of a machine. See Mozley, Miracles, preface, xxiv; Turner, Wish and Will, 291-315; N. W. Taylor, Moral Government, 2:388-423.

E. As belief in the possibility of miracles rests upon our belief in the existence of a personal God, so belief in the probability of miracles rests upon our belief that God is a moral and benevolent being. He who has no God but a God of physical order will regard miracles as an impertinent intrusion upon that order. But he who yields to the testimony of conscience and regards God as a God of holiness, will see that man’s unholiness renders God’s miraculous interposition most necessary to man and most becoming to God. Our view of miracles will therefore be determined by our belief in a moral, or in a non-moral, God.

Philo, in his Life of Moses, 1:88, speaking of the miracles of the quails and of the water from the rock, says that “all these unexpected and extraordinary things are amusements or playthings of God.” He believes that there is room for arbitrariness in the divine procedure. Scripture however represents miracle as an extraordinary, rather than as an arbitrary, act. It is “his work, his strange work ... his act, his strange act” (Is. 28:21). God’s ordinary method is that of regular growth and development. Chadwick, Unitarianism, 72—“Nature is economical. If she wants an apple, she develops a leaf; if she wants a brain, she develops a vertebra. We always thought well of backbone; and, if Goethe’s was a sound suggestion, we think better of it now.”

It is commonly, but very erroneously, taken for granted that miracle requires a greater exercise of power than does God’s upholding of the ordinary processes of nature. But to an omnipotent Being our measures of power have no application. The question is not a question of power, but of rationality and love. Miracle implies self-restraint, as well as self-unfolding, on the part of him who works it. It is therefore not God’s common method of action; it is adopted only when regular methods will not suffice; it often seems accompanied by a sacrifice of feeling on the part of Christ Mat. 17:17—“O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I bear with you? bring him hither to me”; Mark 7:34—“looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened”; _cf.__ Mat. 12:39—_“An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet.”

F. From the point of view of ethical monism the probability of miracle becomes even greater. Since God is not merely the intellectual but the moral Reason of the world, the disturbances of the world-order which are due to sin are the matters which most deeply affect him. Christ, the life of the whole system and of humanity as well, must suffer; and, since we have evidence that he is merciful as well as just, it is probable that he will rectify the evil by extraordinary means, when merely ordinary means do not avail.

Like creation and providence, like inspiration and regeneration, miracle is a work in which God limits himself, by a new and peculiar exercise of his power,—limits himself as part of a process of condescending love and as a means of teaching sense-environed and sin-burdened humanity what it would not learn in any other way. Self-limitation, however, is the very perfection and glory of God, for without it no self-sacrificing love would be possible (see page 9, F.). The probability of miracles is therefore argued not only from God’s holiness but also from his love. His desire to save men from their sins must be as infinite as his nature. The incarnation, the atonement, the resurrection, when once made known to us, commend themselves, not only as satisfying our human needs, but as worthy of a God of moral perfection.

An argument for the probability of the miracle might be drawn from the concessions of one of its chief modern opponents, Thomas H. Huxley. He tells us in different places that the object of science is “the discovery of the rational order that pervades the universe,” which in spite of his professed agnosticism is an unconscious testimony to Reason and Will at the basis of all things. He tells us again that there is no necessity in the uniformities of nature: “When we change ‘will’ into ‘must,’ we introduce an idea of necessity which has no warrant in the observed facts, and has no warranty that I can discover elsewhere.” He speaks of “the infinite wickedness that has attended the course of human history.” Yet he has no hope in man’s power to save himself: “I would as soon adore a wilderness of apes,” as the Pantheist’s rationalized conception of humanity. He grants that Jesus Christ is “the noblest ideal of humanity which mankind has yet worshiped.” Why should he not go further and concede that Jesus Christ most truly represents the infinite Reason at the heart of things, and that his purity and love, demonstrated by suffering and death, make it probable that God will use extraordinary means for man’s deliverance? It is doubtful whether Huxley recognized his own personal sinfulness as fully as he recognized the sinfulness of humanity in general. If he had done so, he would have been willing to accept miracle upon even a slight preponderance of historical proof. As a matter of fact, he rejected miracle upon the grounds assigned by Hume, which we now proceed to mention.

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4. Amount of Testimony necessary to prove a Miracle

The amount of testimony necessary to prove a miracle is no greater than that which is requisite to prove the occurrence of any other unusual but confessedly possible event.

Hume, indeed, argued that a miracle is so contradictory of all human experience that it is more reasonable to believe any amount of testimony false than to believe a miracle to be true.

The original form of the argument can be found in Hume’s Philosophical Works, 4:124-150. See also Bib. Sac., Oct. 1867:615. For the most recent and plausible statement of it, see Supernatural Religion, 1:55-94. The argument maintains for substance that things are impossible because improbable. It ridicules the credulity of those who “thrust their fists against the posts, And still insist they see the ghosts,” and holds with the German philosopher who declared that he would not believe in a miracle, even if he saw one with his own eyes. Christianity is so miraculous that it takes a miracle to make one believe it.

The argument is fallacious, because

(a) It is chargeable with a petitio principii, in making our own personal experience the measure of all human experience. The same principle would make the proof of any absolutely new fact impossible. Even though God should work a miracle, he could never prove it.

(b) It involves a self-contradiction, since it seeks to overthrow our faith in human testimony by adducing to the contrary the general experience of men, of which we know only from testimony. This general experience, moreover, is merely negative, and cannot neutralize that which is positive, except upon principles which would invalidate all testimony whatever.

(c) It requires belief in a greater wonder than those which it would escape. That multitudes of intelligent and honest men should against all their interests unite in deliberate and persistent falsehood, under the circumstances narrated in the New Testament record, involves a change in the sequences of nature far more incredible than the miracles of Christ and his apostles.

(a) John Stuart Mill, Essays on Theism, 216-241, grants that, even if a miracle were wrought, it would be impossible to prove it. In this he only echoes Hume, Miracles, 112—“The ultimate standard by which we determine all disputes that may arise is always derived from experience and observation.” But here our own personal experience is made the standard by which to judge all human experience. Whately, Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Buonaparte, shows that the same rule would require us to deny the existence of the great Frenchman, since Napoleon’s conquests were contrary to all experience, and civilized nations had never before been so subdued. The London Times for June 18, 1888, for the first time in at least a hundred years or in 31,200 issues, was misdated, and certain pages read June 17, although June 17 was Sunday. Yet the paper would have been admitted in a court of justice as evidence of a marriage. The real wonder is, not the break in experience, but the continuity without the break.

(b) Lyman Abbott: “If the Old Testament told the story of a naval engagement between the Jewish people and a pagan people, in which all the ships of the pagan people were absolutely destroyed and not a single man was killed among the Jews, all the sceptics would have scorned the narrative. Every one now believes it, except those who live in Spain.” There are people who in a similar way refuse to investigate the phenomena of hypnotism, second sight, clairvoyance, and telepathy, declaring a priori that all these things are impossible. Prophecy, in the sense of prediction, is discredited. Upon the same principle wireless telegraphy might be denounced as an imposture. The son of Erin charged with murder defended himself by saying: “Your honor, I can bring fifty people who did not see me do it.” Our faith in testimony cannot be due to experience.

(c) On this point, see Chalmers, Christian Revelation, 3:70; Starkie on Evidence, 739; De Quincey, Theological Essays, 1:162-188; Thornton, Old-fashioned Ethics, 143-153; Campbell on Miracles. South’s sermon on The Certainty of our Savior’s Resurrection had stated and answered this objection long before Hume propounded it.

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5. Evidential force of Miracles

(a) Miracles are the natural accompaniments and attestations of new communications from God. The great epochs of miracles—represented by Moses, the prophets, the first and second comings of Christ—are coincident with the great epochs of revelation. Miracles serve to draw attention to new truth, and cease when this truth has gained currency and foothold.

Miracles are not scattered evenly over the whole course of history. Few miracles are recorded during the 2500 years from Adam to Moses. When the N. T. Canon is completed and the internal evidence of Scripture has attained its greatest strength, the external attestations by miracle are either wholly withdrawn or begin to disappear. The spiritual wonders of regeneration remain, and for these the way has been prepared by the long progress from the miracles of power wrought by Moses to the miracles of grace wrought by Christ. Miracles disappeared because newer and higher proofs rendered them unnecessary. Better things than these are now in evidence. Thomas Fuller: “Miracles are the swaddling-clothes of the infant church.” John Foster: “Miracles are the great bell of the universe, which draws men to God’s sermon.” Henry Ward Beecher: “Miracles are the midwives of great moral truths; candles lit before the dawn but put out after the sun has risen.” Illingworth, in Lux Mundi, 210—“When we are told that miracles contradict experience, we point to the daily occurrence of the spiritual miracle of regeneration and ask: ‘Which is easier to say, Thy sins are forgiven; or to say, Arise and walk?’ (Mat. 9:5).”

Miracles and inspiration go together; if the former remain in the church, the latter should remain also; see Marsh, in Bap. Quar. Rev., 1887:225-242. On the cessation of miracles in the early church, see Henderson, Inspiration, 443-490; Bückmann, in Zeitsch. f. luth. Theol. u. Kirche, 1878:216. On miracles in the second century, see Barnard, Literature of the Second Century, 139-180. A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 167—“The apostles were commissioned to speak for Christ till the N. T. Scriptures, his authoritative voice, were completed. In the apostolate we have a provisional inspiration; in the N. T. a stereotyped inspiration; the first being endowed with authority ad interim to forgive sins, and the second having this authority in perpetuo.” Dr. Gordon draws an analogy between coal, which is fossil sunlight, and the New Testament, which is fossil inspiration. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 74—“The Bible is very free from the senseless prodigies of oriental mythology. The great prophets, Isaiah, Amos, Micah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, work no miracles. Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness is a victory of the moral consciousness over the religion of mere physical prodigy.” Trench says that miracles cluster about the foundation of the theocratic kingdom under Moses and Joshua, and about the restoration of that kingdom under Elijah and Elisha. In the O. T., miracles confute the gods of Egypt under Moses, the Phœnician Baal under Elijah and Elisha, and the gods of Babylon under Daniel. See Diman, Theistic Argument, 376, and art.: Miracle, by Bernard, in Hastings’ Bible Dictionary.

(b) Miracles generally certify to the truth of doctrine, not directly, but indirectly; otherwise a new miracle must needs accompany each new doctrine taught. Miracles primarily and directly certify to the divine commission and authority of a religious teacher, and therefore warrant acceptance of his doctrines and obedience to his commands as the doctrines and commands of God, whether these be communicated at intervals or all together, orally or in written documents.

The exceptions to the above statement are very few, and are found only in cases where the whole commission and authority of Christ, and not some fragmentary doctrine, are involved. Jesus appeals to his miracles as proof of the truth of his teaching in Mat. 9:5, 6—“Which is easier to say, Thy sins are forgiven; or to say, Arise and walk? But that ye may know that the Son of man hath authority on earth to forgive sins (then saith he to the sick of the palsy), Arise, and take up thy bed, and go unto thy house”; 12:28—“if I by the spirit of God cast out demons, then is the kingdom of God come upon you.” So Paul in Rom. 1:4, says that Jesus “was declared to be the Son of God with power, ... by the resurrection from the dead.” Mair, Christian Evidences, 223, quotes from Natural Religion, 181—“It is said that the theo-philanthropist Larévellière-Lépeaux once confided to Talleyrand his disappointment at the ill success of his attempt to bring into vogue a sort of improved Christianity, a sort of benevolent rationalism which he had invented to meet the wants of a benevolent age. ‘His propaganda made no way,’ he said. ‘What was he to do?’ he asked. The ex-bishop Talleyrand politely condoled with him, feared it was a difficult task to found a new religion, more difficult than he had imagined, so difficult that he hardly knew what to advise. ‘Still,’—so he went on after a moment’s reflection,—‘there is one plan which you might at least try: I should recommend you to be crucified, and to rise again the third day.’ ” See also Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 147-167; Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:168-172.

(c) Miracles, therefore, do not stand alone as evidences. Power alone cannot prove a divine commission. Purity of life and doctrine must go with the miracles to assure us that a religious teacher has come from God. The miracles and the doctrine in this manner mutually support each other, and form parts of one whole. The internal evidence for the Christian system may have greater power over certain minds and over certain ages than the external evidence.

Pascal’s aphorism that “doctrines must be judged by miracles, miracles by doctrine,” needs to be supplemented by Mozley’s statement that “a supernatural fact is the proper proof of a supernatural doctrine, while a supernatural doctrine is not the proper proof of a supernatural fact.” E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 107, would “defend miracles, but would not buttress up Christianity by them.... No amount of miracles could convince a good man of the divine commission of a known bad man; nor, on the other hand, could any degree of miraculous power suffice to silence the doubts of an evil-minded man.... The miracle is a certification only to him who can perceive its significance.... The Christian church has the resurrection written all over it. Its very existence is proof of the resurrection. Twelve men could never have founded the church, if Christ had remained in the tomb. The living church is the burning bush that is not consumed.” Gore, Incarnation, 57—“Jesus did not appear after his resurrection to unbelievers, but to believers only,—which means that this crowning miracle was meant to confirm an existing faith, not to create one where it did not exist.”

Christian Union, July 11, 1891—“If the anticipated resurrection of Joseph Smith were to take place, it would add nothing whatever to the authority of the Mormon religion.” Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 57—“Miracles are merely the bells to call primitive peoples to church. Sweet as the music they once made, modern ears find them jangling and out of tune, and their dissonant notes scare away pious souls who would fain enter the temple of worship.” A new definition of miracle which recognizes their possible classification as extraordinary occurrences in nature, yet sees in all nature the working of the living God, may do much to remove this prejudice. Bishop of Southampton, Place of Miracle, 53—“Miracles alone could not produce conviction. The Pharisees ascribed them to Beelzebub. Though Jesus had done so many signs, yet they believed not.... Though miracles were frequently wrought, they were rarely appealed to as evidence of the truth of the gospel. They are simply signs of God’s presence in his world. By itself a miracle had no evidential force. The only test for distinguishing divine from Satanic miracles is that of the moral character and purpose of the worker; and therefore miracles depend for all their force upon a previous appreciation of the character and personality of Christ (79). The earliest apologists make no use of miracles. They are of no value except in connection with prophecy. Miracles are the revelation of God, not the proof of revelation.” Versus Supernatural Religion, 1:23, and Stearns, in New Englander, Jan. 1882:80. See Mozley, Miracles, 15; Nicoll, Life of Jesus Christ, 133; Mill, Logic, 374-382; H. B. Smith, Int. to Christ. Theology, 167-169; Fisher, in Journ. Christ. Philos., April, 1883:270-283.

(d) Yet the Christian miracles do not lose their value as evidence in the process of ages. The loftier the structure of Christian life and doctrine the greater need that its foundation be secure. The authority of Christ as a teacher of supernatural truth rests upon his miracles, and especially upon the miracle of his resurrection. That one miracle to which the church looks back as the source of her life carries with it irresistibly all the other miracles of the Scripture record; upon it alone we may safely rest the proof that the Scriptures are an authoritative revelation from God.

The miracles of Christ are simple correlates of the Incarnation—proper insignia of his royalty and divinity. By mere external evidence however we can more easily prove the resurrection than the incarnation. In our arguments with sceptics, we should not begin with the ass that spoke to Balaam, or the fish that swallowed Jonah, but with the resurrection of Christ; that conceded, all other Biblical miracles will seem only natural preparations, accompaniments, or consequences. G. F. Wright, in Bib. Sac., 1889:707—“The difficulties created by the miraculous character of Christianity may be compared to those assumed by a builder when great permanence is desired in the structure erected. It is easier to lay the foundation of a temporary structure than of one which is to endure for the ages.” Pressensé: “The empty tomb of Christ has been the cradle of the church, and if in this foundation of her faith the church has been mistaken, she must needs lay herself down by the side of the mortal remains, I say, not of a man, but of a religion.”

President Schurman believes the resurrection of Christ to be “an obsolete picture of an eternal truth—the fact of a continued life with God.” Harnack, Wesen des Christenthums, 102, thinks no consistent union of the gospel accounts of Christ’s resurrection can be attained; apparently doubts a literal and bodily rising; yet traces Christianity back to an invincible faith in Christ’s conquering of death and his continued life. But why believe the gospels when they speak of the sympathy of Christ, yet disbelieve them when they speak of his miraculous power? We have no right to trust the narrative when it gives us Christ’s words “Weep not” to the widow of Nain, (Luke 7:13), and then to distrust it when it tells us of his raising the widow’s son. The words “Jesus wept” belong inseparably to a story of which “Lazarus, come forth!” forms a part (John 11:35, 43). It is improbable that the disciples should have believed so stupendous a miracle as Christ’s resurrection, if they had not previously seen other manifestations of miraculous power on the part of Christ. Christ himself is the great miracle. The conception of him as the risen and glorified Savior can be explained only by the fact that he did so rise. E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 109—“The Church attests the fact of the resurrection quite as much as the resurrection attests the divine origin of the church. Resurrection, as an evidence, depends on the existence of the church which proclaims it.”

(e) The resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ—by which we mean his coming forth from the sepulchre in body as well as in spirit—is demonstrated by evidence as varied and as conclusive as that which proves to us any single fact of ancient history. Without it Christianity itself is inexplicable, as is shown by the failure of all modern rationalistic theories to account for its rise and progress.

In discussing the evidence of Jesus’ resurrection, we are confronted with three main rationalistic theories:

I. The Swoon-theory of Strauss. This holds that Jesus did not really die. The cold and the spices of the sepulchre revived him. We reply that the blood and water, and the testimony of the centurion (Mark 15:45), proved actual death (see Bib. Sac., April, 1889:228; Forrest, Christ of History and Experience, 137-170). The rolling away of the stone, and Jesus’ power immediately after, are inconsistent with immediately preceding swoon and suspended animation. How was his life preserved? where did he go? when did he die? His not dying implies deceit on his own part or on that of his disciples.

II. The Spirit-theory of Keim. Jesus really died, but only his spirit appeared. The spirit of Jesus gave the disciples a sign of his continued life, a telegram from heaven. But we reply that the telegram was untrue, for it asserted that his body had risen from the tomb. The tomb was empty and the linen cloths showed an orderly departure. Jesus himself denied that he was a bodiless spirit: “a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me having” (Luke 24:39). Did “his flesh see corruption” (Acts 2:31)? Was the penitent thief raised from the dead as much as he? Godet, Lectures in Defence of the Christian Faith, lect. i: A dilemma for those who deny the fact of Christ’s resurrection: Either his body remained in the hands of his disciples, or it was given up to the Jews. If the disciples retained it, they were impostors: but this is not maintained by modern rationalists. If the Jews retained it, why did they not produce it as conclusive evidence against the disciples?

III. The Vision-theory of Renan. Jesus died, and there was no objective appearance even of his spirit. Mary Magdalene was the victim of subjective hallucination, and her hallucination became contagious. This was natural because the Jews expected that the Messiah would work miracles and would rise from the dead. We reply that the disciples did not expect Jesus’ resurrection. The women went to the sepulchre, not to see a risen Redeemer, but to embalm a dead body. Thomas and those at Emmaus had given up all hope. Four hundred years had passed since the days of miracles; John the Baptist “did no miracle” (John 10:41); the Sadducees said “there is no resurrection” (Mat. 22:23). There were thirteen different appearances, to: 1. the Magdalen; 2. other women; 3. Peter; 4. Emmaus; 5. the Twelve; 6. the Twelve after eight days; 7. Galilee seashore; 8. Galilee mountain; 9. Galilee five hundred; 10. James; 11. ascension at Bethany; 12. Stephen; 13. Paul on way to Damascus. Paul describes Christ’s appearance to him as something objective, and he implies that Christ’s previous appearances to others were objective also: “last of all [these bodily appearances], ... he appeared to me also” (1 Cor. 15:8). Bruce, Apologetics, 396—“Paul’s interest and intention in classing the two together was to level his own vision [of Christ] up to the objectivity of the early Christophanies. He believed that the eleven, that Peter in particular, had seen the risen Christ with the eye of the body, and he meant to claim for himself a vision of the same kind.” Paul’s was a sane, strong nature. Subjective visions do not transform human lives; the resurrection moulded the apostles; they did not create the resurrection (see Gore, Incarnation, 76). These appearances soon ceased, unlike the law of hallucinations, which increase in frequency and intensity. It is impossible to explain the ordinances, the Lord’s day, or Christianity itself, if Jesus did not rise from the dead.

The resurrection of our Lord teaches three important lessons: (1) It showed that his work of atonement was completed and was stamped with the divine approval; (2) It showed him to be Lord of all and gave the one sufficient external proof of Christianity; (3) It furnished the ground and pledge of our own resurrection, and thus “brought life and immortality to light” (2 Tim. 1:10). It must be remembered that the resurrection was the one sign upon which Jesus himself staked his claims—“the sign of Jonah” (Luke 11:29); and that the resurrection is proof, not simply of God’s power, but of Christ’s own power: John 10:18—“I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again”; 2:19—“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up”.... 21—“he spake of the temple of his body.” See Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 9, 158-224, 302; Mill, Theism, 216; Auberlen, Div. Revelation, 56; Boston Lectures, 203-239; Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, 448-503; Row, Bampton Lectures, 1887:358-423; Hutton, Essays, 1:119; Schaff, in Princeton Rev., May, 1880; 411-419; Fisher, Christian Evidences, 41-46, 82-85; West, in Defence and Conf. of Faith, 80-129; also special works on the Resurrection of our Lord, by Milligan, Morrison, Kennedy, J. Baldwin Brown.

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6. Counterfeit Miracles

Since only an act directly wrought by God can properly be called a miracle, it follows that surprising events brought about by evil spirits or by men, through the use of natural agencies beyond our knowledge, are not entitled to this appellation. The Scriptures recognize the existence of such, but denominate them “lying wonders” (2 Thess. 2:9).

These counterfeit miracles in various ages argue that the belief in miracles is natural to the race, and that somewhere there must exist the true. They serve to show that not all supernatural occurrences are divine, and to impress upon us the necessity of careful examination before we accept them as divine.

False miracles may commonly be distinguished from the true by (a) their accompaniments of immoral conduct or of doctrine contradictory to truth already revealed—as in modern spiritualism; (b) their internal characteristics of inanity and extravagance—as in the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius, or the miracles of the Apocryphal New Testament; (c) the insufficiency of the object which they are designed to further—as in the case of Apollonius of Tyana, or of the miracles said to accompany the publication of the doctrines of the immaculate conception and of the papal infallibility; (d) their lack of substantiating evidence—as in mediæval miracles, so seldom attested by contemporary and disinterested witnesses; (e) their denial or undervaluing of God’s previous revelation of himself in nature—as shown by the neglect of ordinary means, in the cases of Faith-cure and of so-called Christian Science.

Only what is valuable is counterfeited. False miracles presuppose the true. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 283—“The miracles of Jesus originated faith in him, while mediæval miracles follow established faith. The testimony of the apostles was given in the face of incredulous Sadducees. They were ridiculed and maltreated on account of it. It was no time for devout dreams and the invention of romances.” The blood of St. Januarius at Naples is said to be contained in a vial, one side of which is of thick glass, while the other side is of thin. A similar miracle was wrought at Hales in Gloucestershire. St. Alban, the first martyr of Britain, after his head is cut off, carries it about in his hand. In Ireland the place is shown where St. Patrick in the fifth century drove all the toads and snakes over a precipice into the nether regions. The legend however did not become current until some hundreds of years after the saint’s bones had crumbled to dust at Saul, near Downpatrick (see Hemphill, Literature of the Second Century, 180-182). Compare the story of the book of Tobit (6-8), which relates the expulsion of a demon by smoke from the burning heart and liver of a fish caught in the Tigris, and the story of the Apocryphal New Testament (I, Infancy), which tells of the expulsion of Satan in the form of a mad dog from Judas by the child Jesus. On counterfeit miracles in general, see Mozley, Miracles, 15, 161; F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 72; A. S. Farrar, Science and Theology, 208; Tholuck, Vermischte Schriften, 1:27; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:630; Presb. Rev., 1881:687-719.

Some modern writers have maintained that the gift of miracles still remains in the church. Bengel: “The reason why many miracles are not now wrought is not so much because faith is established, as because unbelief reigns.” Christlieb: “It is the want of faith in our age which is the greatest hindrance to the stronger and more marked appearance of that miraculous power which is working here and there in quiet concealment. Unbelief is the final and most important reason for the retrogression of miracles.” Edward Irving, Works, 5:464—“Sickness is sin apparent in the body, the presentiment of death, the forerunner of corruption. Now, as Christ came to destroy death, and will yet redeem the body from the bondage of corruption, if the church is to have a first fruits or earnest of this power, it must be by receiving power over diseases that are the first fruits and earnest of death.” Dr. A. J. Gordon, in his Ministry of Healing, held to this view. See also Boys, Proofs of the Miraculous in the Experience of the Church; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 446-492; Review of Gordon, by Vincent, in Presb. Rev., 1883:473-502; Review of Vincent, in Presb. Rev., 1884:49-79.

In reply to the advocates of faith-cure in general, we would grant that nature is plastic in God’s hand; that he can work miracle when and where it pleases him; and that he has given promises which, with certain Scriptural and rational limitations, encourage believing prayer for healing in cases of sickness. But we incline to the belief that in these later ages God answers such prayer, not by miracle, but by special providence, and by gifts of courage, faith and will, thus acting by his Spirit directly upon the soul and only indirectly upon the body. The laws of nature are generic volitions of God, and to ignore them and disuse means is presumption and disrespect to God himself. The Scripture promise to faith is always expressly or impliedly conditioned upon our use of means: we are to work out our own salvation, for the very reason that it is God who works in us; it is vain for the drowning man to pray, so long as he refuses to lay hold of the rope that is thrown to him. Medicines and physicians are the rope thrown to us by God; we cannot expect miraculous help, while we neglect the help God has already given us; to refuse this help is practically to deny Christ’s revelation in nature. Why not live without eating, as well as recover from sickness without medicine? Faith-feeding is quite as rational as faith-healing. To except cases of disease from this general rule as to the use of means has no warrant either in reason or in Scripture. The atonement has purchased complete salvation, and some day salvation shall be ours. But death and depravity still remain, not as penalty, but as chastisement. So disease remains also. Hospitals for Incurables, and the deaths even of advocates of faith-cure, show that they too are compelled to recognize some limit to the application of the New Testament promise.

In view of the preceding discussion we must regard the so-called Christian Science as neither Christian nor scientific. Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy denies the authority of all that part of revelation which God has made to man in nature, and holds that the laws of nature may be disregarded with impunity by those who have proper faith; see G. F. Wright, in Bib. Sac., April, 1899:375. Bishop Lawrence of Massachusetts: “One of the errors of Christian Science is its neglect of accumulated knowledge, of the fund of information stored up for these Christian centuries. That knowledge is just as much God’s gift as is the knowledge obtained from direct revelation. In rejecting accumulated knowledge and professional skill, Christian Science rejects the gift of God.” Most of the professed cures of Christian Science are explicable by the influence of the mind upon the body, through hypnosis or suggestion; (see A. A. Bennett, in Watchman, Feb. 13, 1903). Mental disturbance may make the mother’s milk a poison to the child; mental excitement is a common cause of indigestion; mental depression induces bowel disorders; depressed mental and moral conditions render a person more susceptible to grippe, pneumonia, typhoid fever. Reading the account of an accident in which the body is torn or maimed, we ourselves feel pain in the same spot; when the child’s hand is crushed, the mother’s hand, though at a distance, becomes swollen; the mediæval stigmata probably resulted from continuous brooding upon the sufferings of Christ (see Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 676-690).

But mental states may help as well as harm the body. Mental expectancy facilitates cure in cases of sickness. The physician helps the patient by inspiring hope and courage. Imagination works wonders, especially in the case of nervous disorders. The diseases said to be cured by Christian Science are commonly of this sort. In every age fakirs, mesmerists, and quacks have availed themselves of these underlying mental forces. By inducing expectancy, imparting courage, rousing the paralyzed will, they have indirectly caused bodily changes which have been mistaken for miracle. Tacitus tells us of the healing of a blind man by the Emperor Vespasian. Undoubted cures have been wrought by the royal touch in England. Since such wonders have been performed by Indian medicine-men, we cannot regard them as having any specific Christian character, and when, as in the present case, we find them used to aid in the spread of false doctrine with regard to sin, Christ, atonement, and the church, we must class them with the “lying wonders” of which we are warned in 2 Thess. 2:9. See Harris, Philosophical Basis of Theism, 381-386; Buckley, Faith-Healing, and in Century Magazine, June, 1886:221-236; Bruce, Miraculous Element in Gospels, lecture 8; Andover Review, 1887:249-264.

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IV. Prophecy as Attesting a Divine Revelation

We here consider prophecy in its narrow sense of mere prediction, reserving to a subsequent chapter the consideration of prophecy as interpretation of the divine will in general.

1. Definition. Prophecy is the foretelling of future events by virtue of direct communication from God—a foretelling, therefore, which, though not contravening any laws of the human mind, those laws, if fully known, would not, without this agency of God, be sufficient to explain.

In discussing the subject of prophecy, we are met at the outset by the contention that there is not, and never has been, any real foretelling of future events beyond that which is possible to natural prescience. This is the view of Kuenen, Prophets and Prophecy in Israel. Pfleiderer, Philos. Relig., 2:42, denies any direct prediction. Prophecy in Israel, he intimates, was simply the consciousness of God’s righteousness, proclaiming its ideals of the future, and declaring that the will of God is the moral ideal of the good and the law of the world’s history, so that the fates of nations are conditioned by their bearing toward this moral purpose of God: “The fundamental error of the vulgar apologetics is that it confounds prophecy with heathen soothsaying—national salvation without character.” W. Robertson Smith, in Encyc. Britannica, 19:821, tells us that “detailed prediction occupies a very secondary place in the writings of the prophets; or rather indeed what seem to be predictions in detail are usually only free poetical illustrations of historical principles, which neither received nor demanded exact fulfilment.”

As in the case of miracles, our faith in an immanent God, who is none other than the Logos or larger Christ, gives us a point of view from which we may reconcile the contentions of the naturalists and supernaturalists. Prophecy is an immediate act of God; but, since all natural genius is also due to God’s energizing, we do not need to deny the employment of man’s natural gifts in prophecy. The instances of telepathy, presentiment, and second sight which the Society for Psychical Research has demonstrated to be facts show that prediction, in the history of divine revelation, may be only an intensification, under the extraordinary impulse of the divine Spirit, of a power that is in some degree latent in all men. The author of every great work of creative imagination knows that a higher power than his own has possessed him. In all human reason there is a natural activity of the divine Reason or Logos, and he is “the light which lighteth every man” (John 1:9). So there is a natural activity of the Holy Spirit, and he who completes the circle of the divine consciousness completes also the circle of human consciousness, gives self-hood to every soul, makes available to man the natural as well as the spiritual gifts of Christ; _cf.__ John 16:14—“he shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you.” The same Spirit who in the beginning “brooded over the face of the waters” (Gen. 1:2) also broods over humanity, and it is he who, according to Christ’s promise, was to “declare unto you the things that are to come” (John 16:13)_. The gift of prophecy may have its natural side, like the gift of miracles, yet may be finally explicable only as the result of an extraordinary working of that Spirit of Christ who to some degree manifests himself in the reason and conscience of every man; _cf.__ 1 Pet 1:11—_“searching what time or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did point unto, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glories that should follow them.” See Myers, Human Personality, 2:262-292.

A. B. Davidson, in his article on Prophecy and Prophets, in Hastings’ Bible Dictionary, 4:120, 121, gives little weight to this view that prophecy is based on a natural power of the human mind: “The arguments by which Giesebrecht, Berufsgabung, 13 ff., supports the theory of a ‘faculty of presentiment’ have little cogency. This faculty is supposed to reveal itself particularly on the approach of death (Gen. 28 and 49). The contemporaries of most great religious personages have attributed to them a prophetic gift. The answer of John Knox to those who credited him with such a gift is worth reading: ‘My assurances are not marvels of Merlin, nor yet the dark sentences of profane prophecy. But first, the plain truth of God’s word; second, the invincible justice of the everlasting God; and third, the ordinary course of his punishments and plagues from the beginning, are my assurances and grounds.’ ” While Davidson grants the fulfilment of certain specific predictions of Scripture, to be hereafter mentioned, he holds that “such presentiments as we can observe to be authentic are chiefly products of the conscience or moral reason. True prophecy is based on moral grounds. Everywhere the menacing future is connected with the evil past by ‘therefore’ (Micah 3:12; Is. 5:13; Amos 1:2).” We hold with Davidson to the moral element in prophecy, but we also recognize a power in normal humanity which he would minimize or deny. We claim that the human mind even in its ordinary and secular working gives occasional signs of transcending the limitations of the present. Believing in the continual activity of the divine Reason in the reason of man, we have no need to doubt the possibility of an extraordinary insight into the future, and such insight is needed at the great epochs of religious history. Expositor’s Gk. Test., 2:34—“Savonarola foretold as early as 1496 the capture of Rome, which happened in 1527, and he did this not only in general terms but in detail; his words were realized to the letter when the sacred churches of St. Peter and St. Paul became, as the prophet foretold, stables for the conquerors’ horses.” On the general subject, see Payne-Smith, Prophecy a Preparation for Christ; Alexander, Christ and Christianity; Farrar, Science and Theology, 106; Newton on Prophecy; Fairbairn on Prophecy.

2. Relation of Prophecy to Miracles. Miracles are attestations of revelation proceeding from divine power; prophecy is an attestation of revelation proceeding from divine knowledge. Only God can know the contingencies of the future. The possibility and probability of prophecy may be argued upon the same grounds upon which we argue the possibility and probability of miracles. As an evidence of divine revelation, however, prophecy possesses two advantages over miracles, namely: (a) The proof, in the case of prophecy, is not derived from ancient testimony, but is under our eyes. (b) The evidence of miracles cannot become stronger, whereas every new fulfilment adds to the argument from prophecy.

3. Requirements in Prophecy, considered as an Evidence of Revelation. (a) The utterance must be distant from the event. (b) Nothing must exist to suggest the event to merely natural prescience. (c) The utterance must be free from ambiguity. (d) Yet it must not be so precise as to secure its own fulfilment. (e) It must be followed in due time by the event predicted.

Hume: “All prophecies are real miracles, and only as such can be admitted as proof of any revelation.” See Wardlaw, Syst. Theol., 1:347. (a) Hundreds of years intervened between certain of the O. T. predictions and their fulfilment. (b) Stanley instances the natural sagacity of Burke, which enabled him to predict the French Revolution. But Burke also predicted in 1793 that France would be partitioned like Poland among a confederacy of hostile powers. Canning predicted that South American colonies would grow up as the United States had grown. D’Israeli predicted that our Southern Confederacy would become an independent nation. Ingersoll predicted that within ten years there would be two theatres for one church. (c) Illustrate ambiguous prophecies by the Delphic oracle to Crœsus: “Crossing the river, thou destroyest a great nation”—whether his own or his enemy’s the oracle left undetermined. “Ibis et redibis nunquam peribis in bello.” (d) Strauss held that O. T. prophecy itself determined either the events or the narratives of the gospels. See Greg, Creed of Christendom, chap. 4. (e) Cardan, the Italian mathematician, predicted the day and hour of his own death, and committed suicide at the proper time to prove the prediction true. Jehovah makes the fulfilment of his predictions the proof of his deity in the controversy with false gods: Is. 41:23—“Declare the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods”; 42:9—“Behold, the former things are come to pass and new things do I declare: before they spring forth I tell you of them.”

4. General Features of Prophecy in the Scriptures. (a) Its large amount—occupying a great portion of the Bible, and extending over many hundred years. (b) Its ethical and religious nature—the events of the future being regarded as outgrowths and results of men’s present attitude toward God. (c) Its unity in diversity—finding its central point in Christ the true servant of God and deliverer of his people. (d) Its actual fulfilment as regards many of its predictions—while seeming non-fulfilments are explicable from its figurative and conditional nature.

A. B. Davidson, in Hastings’ Bible Dictionary, 4:125, has suggested reasons for the apparent non-fulfilment of certain predictions. Prophecy is poetical and figurative; its details are not to be pressed; they are only drapery, needed for the expression of the idea. In Isa. 13:16—“Their infants shall be dashed in pieces ... and their wives ravished”—the prophet gives an ideal picture of the sack of a city; these things did not actually happen, but Cyrus entered Babylon “in peace.” Yet the essential truth remained that the city fell into the enemy’s hands. The prediction of Ezekiel with regard to Tyre, Ez. 26:7-14, is recognized in Ez. 29:17-20 as having been fulfilled not in its details but in its essence—the actual event having been the breaking of the power of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar. Is. 17:1—“Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap”—must be interpreted as predicting the blotting out of its dominion, since Damascus has probably never ceased to be a city. The conditional nature of prophecy explains other seeming non-fulfilments. Predictions were often threats, which might be revoked upon repentance. Jer. 26:13—“amend your ways ... and the Lord will repent him of the evil which he hath pronounced against you.” Jonah 3:4—“Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown ...” 10—God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, which he said he would do unto them; and he did it not; _cf.__ Jer. 18:8_; 26:19.

Instances of actual fulfilment of prophecy are found, according to Davidson, in Samuel’s prediction of some things that would happen to Saul, which the history declares did happen (1 Sam. 1 and 10). Jeremiah predicted the death of Hananiah within the year, which took place (Jer. 28). Micaiah predicted the defeat and death of Ahab at Ramoth-Gilead (1 Kings 22). Isaiah predicted the failure of the northern coalition to subdue Jerusalem (Is. 7); the overthrow in two or three years of Damascus and Northern Israel before the Assyrians (Is. 8 and 17); the failure of Sennacherib to capture Jerusalem, and the melting away of his army (Is. 37:34-37). “And in general, apart from details, the main predictions of the prophets regarding Israel and the nations were verified in history, for example, Amos 1 and 2. The chief predictions of the prophets relate to the imminent downfall of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah; to what lies beyond this, namely, the restoration of the kingdom of God; and to the state of the people in their condition of final felicity.” For predictions of the exile and the return of Israel, see especially Amos 9:9—“For, lo, I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel among all the nations, like as grain is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least kernel fall upon the earth.... _14—_And I will bring again the captivity of my people Israel, and they shall build the waste cities and inhabit them.” Even if we accept the theory of composite authorship of the book of Isaiah, we still have a foretelling of the sending back of the Jews from Babylon, and a designation of Cyrus as God’s agent, in Is. 44:28—“that saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying of Jerusalem, She shall be built; and of the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid”; see George Adam Smith, in Hastings’ Bible Dictionary, 2:493. Frederick the Great said to his chaplain: “Give me in one word a proof of the divine origin of the Bible”; and the chaplain well replied: “The Jews, your Majesty.” In the case of the Jews we have even now the unique phenomena of a people without a land, and a land without a people,—yet both these were predicted centuries before the event.

5. Messianic Prophecy in general. (a) Direct predictions of events—as in Old Testament prophecies of Christ’s birth, suffering and subsequent glory. (b) General prophecy of the Kingdom in the Old Testament, and of its gradual triumph. (c) Historical types in a nation and in individuals—as Jonah and David. (d) Prefigurations of the future in rites and ordinances—as in sacrifice, circumcision, and the passover.

6. Special Prophecies uttered by Christ. (a) As to his own death and resurrection. (b) As to events occurring between his death and the destruction of Jerusalem (multitudes of impostors; wars and rumors of wars; famine and pestilence). (c) As to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish polity (Jerusalem compassed with armies; abomination of desolation in the holy place; flight of Christians; misery; massacre; dispersion). (d) As to the world-wide diffusion of his gospel (the Bible already the most widely circulated book in the world).

The most important feature in prophecy is its Messianic element; see Luke 24:27—“beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself”; Acts 10:43—“to him bear all the prophets witness”; Rev. 19:10—“the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” Types are intended resemblances, designed prefigurations; for example, Israel is a type of the Christian church; outside nations are types of the hostile world; Jonah and David are types of Christ. The typical nature of Israel rests upon the deeper fact of the community of life. As the life of God the Logos lies at the basis of universal humanity and interpenetrates it in every part, so out of this universal humanity grows Israel in general; out of Israel as a nation springs the spiritual Israel, and out of spiritual Israel Christ according to the flesh,—the upward rising pyramid finds its apex and culmination in him. Hence the predictions with regard to “the servant of Jehovah” (Is. 42:1-7), and “the Messiah” (Is. 61:1; John 1:41), have partial fulfilment in Israel, but perfect fulfilment only in Christ; so Delitzsch, Oehler, and Cheyne on Isaiah, 2:253. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 59—“If humanity were not potentially and in some degree Immanuel, God with us, there would never have issued from its bosom he who bore and revealed this blessed name.” Gardiner, O. T. and N. T. in their Mutual Relations, 170-194.

In the O. T., Jehovah is the Redeemer of his people. He works through judges, prophets, kings, but he himself remains the Savior; “it is only the Divine in them that saves”; “Salvation is of Jehovah” (Jonah 2:9). Jehovah is manifested in the Davidic King under the monarchy; in Israel, the Servant of the Lord, during the exile; and in the Messiah, or Anointed One, in the post-exilian period. Because of its conscious identification with Jehovah, Israel is always a forward-looking people. Each new judge, king, prophet is regarded as heralding the coming reign of righteousness and peace. These earthly deliverers are saluted with rapturous expectation; the prophets express this expectation in terms that transcend the possibilities of the present; and, when this expectation fails to be fully realized, the Messianic hope is simply transferred to a larger future. Each separate prophecy has its drapery furnished by the prophet’s immediate surroundings, and finds its occasion in some event of contemporaneous history. But by degrees it becomes evident that only an ideal and perfect King and Savior can fill out the requirements of prophecy. Only when Christ appears, does the real meaning of the various Old Testament predictions become manifest. Only then are men able to combine the seemingly inconsistent prophecies of a priest who is also a king (Psalm 110), and of a royal but at the same time a suffering Messiah (Isaiah 53). It is not enough for us to ask what the prophet himself meant, or what his earliest hearers understood, by his prophecy. This is to regard prophecy as having only a single, and that a human, author. With the spirit of man coöperated the Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit (1 Pet. 1:11—“the Spirit of Christ which was in them”; 2 Pet. 1:21—“no prophecy ever came by the will of man; but men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Spirit”). All prophecy has a twofold authorship, human and divine; the same Christ who spoke through the prophets brought about the fulfilment of their words.

It is no wonder that he who through the prophets uttered predictions with regard to himself should, when he became incarnate, be the prophet par excellence (Deut. 18:15; Acts 3:22—“Moses indeed said, A prophet shall the Lord God raise up from among your brethren, like unto me; to him shall ye hearken”). In the predictions of Jesus we find the proper key to the interpretation of prophecy in general, and the evidence that while no one of the three theories—the preterist, the continuist, the futurist—furnishes an exhaustive explanation, each one of these has its element of truth. Our Lord made the fulfilment of the prediction of his own resurrection a test of his divine commission: it was “the sign of Jonah the prophet” (Mat. 12:39). He promised that his disciples should have prophetic gifts: John 15:15—“No longer do I call you servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I heard from my Father I have made known unto you”; 16:13—“the Spirit of truth ... he shall declare unto you the things that are to come.” Agabus predicted the famine and Paul’s imprisonment (Acts 11:28; 21:10); Paul predicted heresies (Acts 20:29, 30), shipwreck (Acts 27:10, 21-26), “the man of sin” (2 Thess. 2:3), Christ’s second coming, and the resurrection of the saints (1 Thess. 4:15-17).

7. On the double sense of Prophecy.

(a) Certain prophecies apparently contain a fulness of meaning which is not exhausted by the event to which they most obviously and literally refer. A prophecy which had a partial fulfilment at a time not remote from its utterance, may find its chief fulfilment in an event far distant. Since the principles of God’s administration find ever recurring and ever enlarging illustration in history, prophecies which have already had a partial fulfilment may have whole cycles of fulfilment yet before them.

In prophecy there is an absence of perspective; as in Japanese pictures the near and the far appear equally distant; as in dissolving views, the immediate future melts into a future immeasurably far away. The candle that shines through a narrow aperture sends out its light through an ever-increasing area; sections of the triangle correspond to each other, but the more distant are far greater than the near. The châlet on the mountain-side may turn out to be only a black cat on the woodpile, or a speck upon the window pane. “A hill which appears to rise close behind another is found on nearer approach to have receded a great way from it.” The painter, by foreshortening, brings together things or parts that are relatively distant from each other. The prophet is a painter whose foreshortenings are supernatural; he seems freed from the law of space and time, and, rapt into the timelessness of God, he views the events of history “sub specie eternitatis.” Prophecy was the sketching of an outline-map. Even the prophet could not fill up the outline. The absence of perspective in prophecy may account for Paul’s being misunderstood by the Thessalonians, and for the necessity of his explanations in 2 Thess. 2:1, 2. In Isaiah 10 and 11, the fall of Lebanon (the Assyrian) is immediately connected with the rise of the Branch (Christ); in Jeremiah 51:41, the first capture and the complete destruction of Babylon are connected with each other, without notice of the interval of a thousand years between them.

Instances of the double sense of prophecy may be found in Is. 7:14-16; 9:6, 7—“a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, ... unto us a son is given”—compared with Mat. 1:22, 23, where the prophecy is applied to Christ (see Meyer, in loco); Hos. 11:1—“I ... called my son out of Egypt”—referring originally to the calling of the nation out of Egypt—is in Mat. 2:15 referred to Christ, who embodied and consummated the mission of Israel; Psalm 118:22, 23—“The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner”—which primarily referred to the Jewish nation, conquered, carried away, and flung aside as of no use, but divinely destined to a future of importance and grandeur, is in Mat. 21:42 referred by Jesus to himself, as the true embodiment of Israel. William Arnold Stevens, on The Man of Sin, in Bap. Quar. Rev., July, 1889:328-360—As in Daniel 11:36, the great enemy of the faith, who “shall exalt himself, and magnify himself above every god,” is the Syrian King, Antiochus Epiphanes, so “the man of lawlessness” described by Paul in 2 Thess. 2:3 is the corrupt and impious Judaism of the apostolic age. This had its seat in the temple of God, but was doomed to destruction when the Lord should come at the fall of Jerusalem. But even this second fulfilment of the prophecy does not preclude a future and final fulfilment. Broadus on Mat., page 480—In Isaiah 41:8 to chapter 53, the predictions with regard to “the servant of Jehovah” make a gradual transition from Israel to the Messiah, the former alone being seen in 41:8, the Messiah also appearing in _42:1 __sq._, and Israel quite sinking out of sight in chapter 53.

The most marked illustration of the double sense of prophecy however is to be found in Matthew 24 and 25, especially 24:34 and 25:31, where Christ’s prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem passes into a prophecy of the end of the world. Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 183—“To him history was the robe of God, and therefore a constant repetition of positions really similar, kaleidoscopic combining of a few truths, as the facts varied in which they were to be embodied.” A. J. Gordon: “Prophecy has no sooner become history, than history in turn becomes prophecy.” Lord Bacon: “Divine prophecies have springing and germinant accomplishment through many ages, though the height or fulness of them may refer to some one age.” In a similar manner there is a manifoldness of meaning in Dante’s Divine Comedy. C. E. Norton, Inferno, xvi—“The narrative of the poet’s spiritual journey is so vivid and consistent that it has all the reality of an account of an actual experience; but within and beneath runs a stream of allegory not less consistent and hardly less continuous than the narrative itself.” A. H. Strong, The Great Poets and their Theology, 116—“Dante himself has told us that there are four separate senses which he intends his story to convey. There are the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the analogical. In Psalm 114:1 we have the words, ‘When Israel went forth out of Egypt.’ This, says the poet, may be taken literally, of the actual deliverance of God’s ancient people; or allegorically, of the redemption of the world through Christ; or morally, of the rescue of the sinner from the bondage of his sin; or anagogically, of the passage of both soul and body from the lower life of earth to the higher life of heaven. So from Scripture Dante illustrates the method of his poem.” See further, our treatment of Eschatology. See also Dr. Arnold of Rugby, Sermons on the Interpretation of Scripture, Appendix A, pages 441-454; Aids to Faith, 449-462; Smith’s Bible Dict., 4:2727. Per contra, see Elliott, Horæ Apocalypticæ, 4:662. Gardiner, O. T. and N. T., 262-274, denies double sense, but affirms manifold applications of a single sense. Broadus, on Mat. 24:1, denies double sense, but affirms the use of types.

(b) The prophet was not always aware of the meaning of his own prophecies (1 Pet. 1:11). It is enough to constitute his prophecies a proof of divine revelation, if it can be shown that the correspondences between them and the actual events are such as to indicate divine wisdom and purpose in the giving of them—in other words, it is enough if the inspiring Spirit knew their meaning, even though the inspired prophet did not.

It is not inconsistent with this view, but rather confirms it, that the near event, and not the distant fulfilment, was often chiefly, if not exclusively, in the mind of the prophet when he wrote. Scripture declares that the prophets did not always understand their own predictions: 1 Pet. 1:11—“searching what time or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did point unto, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glories that should follow them.” Emerson: “Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew.” Keble: “As little children lisp and tell of heaven, So thoughts beyond their thoughts to those high bards were given.” Westcott: Preface to Com. on Hebrews, vi—“No one would limit the teaching of a poet’s words to that which was definitely present to his mind. Still less can we suppose that he who is inspired to give a message of God to all ages sees himself the completeness of the truth which all life serves to illuminate.” Alexander McLaren: “Peter teaches that Jewish prophets foretold the events of Christ’s life and especially his sufferings; that they did so as organs of God’s Spirit; that they were so completely organs of a higher voice that they did not understand the significance of their own words, but were wiser than they knew and had to search what were the date and the characteristics of the strange things which they foretold; and that by further revelation they learned that ‘the vision is yet for many days’ (Is. 24:22; Dan. 10:14). If Peter was right in his conception of the nature of Messianic prophecy, a good many learned men of to-day are wrong.” Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma: “Might not the prophetic ideals be poetic dreams, and the correspondence between them and the life of Jesus, so far as real, only a curious historical phenomenon?” Bruce, Apologetics, 359, replies: “Such scepticism is possible only to those who have no faith in a living God who works out purposes in history.” It is comparable only to the unbelief of the materialist who regards the physical constitution of the universe as explicable by the fortuitous concourse of atoms.

8. Purpose of Prophecy—so far as it is yet unfulfilled. (a) Not to enable us to map out the details of the future; but rather (b) To give general assurance of God’s power and foreseeing wisdom, and of the certainty of his triumph; and (c) To furnish, after fulfilment, the proof that God saw the end from the beginning.

Dan. 12:8, 9—“And I heard, but I understood not; then said I, O my Lord, what shall be the issue of these things? And he said, Go thy way, Daniel; for the words are shut up and sealed till the time of the end”; 2 Pet. 1:19—prophecy is “a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawn”—not until day dawns can distant objects be seen; 20—“no prophecy of scripture is of private interpretation”—only God, by the event, can interpret it. Sir Isaac Newton: “God gave the prophecies, not to gratify men’s curiosity by enabling them to foreknow things, but that after they were fulfilled they might be interpreted by the event, and his own providence, not the interpreter’s, be thereby manifested to the world.” Alexander McLaren: “Great tracts of Scripture are dark to us till life explains them, and then they come on us with the force of a new revelation, like the messages which of old were sent by a strip of parchment coiled upon a bâton and then written upon, and which were unintelligible unless the receiver had a corresponding bâton to wrap them round.” A. H. Strong, The Great Poets and their Theology, 23—“Archilochus, a poet of about 700 B. C., speaks of ‘a grievous scytale’—the scytale being the staff on which a strip of leather for writing purposes was rolled slantwise, so that the message inscribed upon the strip could not be read until the leather was rolled again upon another staff of the same size; since only the writer and the receiver possessed staves of the proper size, the scytale answered all the ends of a message in cypher.”

Prophecy is like the German sentence,—it can be understood only when we have read its last word. A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 48—“God’s providence is like the Hebrew Bible; we must begin at the end and read backward, in order to understand it.” Yet Dr. Gordon seems to assert that such understanding is possible even before fulfilment: “Christ did not know the day of the end when here in his state of humiliation; but he does know now. He has shown his knowledge in the Apocalypse, and we have received ‘The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show unto his servants, even the things which must shortly come to pass’ (Rev. 1:1).” A study however of the multitudinous and conflicting views of the so-called interpreters of prophecy leads us to prefer to Dr. Gordon’s view that of Briggs, Messianic Prophecies, 49—“The first advent is the resolver of all Old Testament prophecy; ... the second advent will give the key to New Testament prophecy. It is ‘the Lamb that hath been slain’ (Rev. 5:12) ... who alone opens the sealed book, solves the riddles of time, and resolves the symbols of prophecy.”

Nitzsch: “It is the essential condition of prophecy that it should not disturb man’s relation to history.” In so far as this is forgotten, and it is falsely assumed that the purpose of prophecy is to enable us to map out the precise events of the future before they occur, the study of prophecy ministers to a diseased imagination and diverts attention from practical Christian duty. Calvin: “Aut insanum inveniet aut faciet”; or, as Lord Brougham translated it: “The study of prophecy either finds a man crazy, or it leaves him so.” Second Adventists do not often seek conversions. Dr. Cumming warned the women of his flock that they must not study prophecy so much as to neglect their household duties. Paul has such in mind in 2 Thess. 2:1, 2—“touching the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ ... that ye be not quickly shaken from your mind ... as that the day of the Lord is just at hand”; 3:11—“For we hear of some that walk among you disorderly.”

9. Evidential force of Prophecy—so far as it is fulfilled. Prophecy, like miracles, does not stand alone as evidence of the divine commission of the Scripture writers and teachers. It is simply a corroborative attestation, which unites with miracles to prove that a religious teacher has come from God and speaks with divine authority. We cannot, however, dispense with this portion of the evidences,—for unless the death and resurrection of Christ are events foreknown and foretold by himself, as well as by the ancient prophets, we lose one main proof of his authority as a teacher sent from God.

Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 338—“The Christian’s own life is the progressive fulfilment of the prophecy that whoever accepts Christ’s grace shall be born again, sanctified, and saved. Hence the Christian can believe in God’s power to predict, and in God’s actual predictions.” See Stanley Leathes, O. T. Prophecy, xvii—“Unless we have access to the supernatural, we have no access to God.” In our discussions of prophecy, we are to remember that before making the truth of Christianity stand or fall with any particular passage that has been regarded as prediction, we must be certain that the passage is meant as prediction, and not as merely figurative description. Gladden, Seven Puzzling Bible Books, 195—“The book of Daniel is not a prophecy,—it is an apocalypse.... The author [of such books] puts his words into the mouth of some historical or traditional writer of eminence. Such are the Book of Enoch, the Assumption of Moses, Baruch, 1 and 2 Esdras, and the Sibylline Oracles. Enigmatic form indicates persons without naming them, and historic events as animal forms or as operations of nature.... The book of Daniel is not intended to teach us history. It does not look forward from the sixth century before Christ, but backward from the second century before Christ. It is a kind of story which the Jews called Haggada. It is aimed at Antiochus Epiphanes, who, from his occasional fits of melancholy, was called Epimanes, or Antiochus the Mad.”

Whatever may be our conclusion as to the authorship of the book of Daniel, we must recognize in it an element of prediction which has been actually fulfilled. The most radical interpreters do not place its date later than 163 B. C. Our Lord sees in the book clear reference to himself (Mat. 26:64—“the Son of man, sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven”; cf. Dan. 7:13); and he repeats with emphasis certain predictions of the prophet which were yet unfulfilled (Mat. 24:15—“When ye see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of through Daniel the prophet”; cf. Dan. 9:27; 11:31; 12:11). The book of Daniel must therefore be counted profitable not only for its moral and spiritual lessons, but also for its actual predictions of Christ and of the universal triumph of his kingdom (Dan. 2:45—“a stone cut out of the mountain without hands”). See on Daniel, Hastings’ Bible Dictionary; Farrar, in Expositor’s Bible. On the general subject see Annotated Paragraph Bible, Introd. to Prophetical Books; Cairns, on Present State of Christian Argument from Prophecy, in Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 27; Edersheim, Prophecy and History; Briggs, Messianic Prophecy; Redford, Prophecy, its Nature and Evidence; Willis J. Beecher, the Prophet and the Promise; Orr, Problem of the O. T., 455-465.

Having thus removed the presumption originally existing against miracles and prophecy, we may now consider the ordinary laws of evidence and determine the rules to be followed in estimating the weight of the Scripture testimony.

V. Principles of Historical Evidence applicable to the Proof of a Divine Revelation.

PRINCIPLES OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE APPLICABLE TO THE PROOF OF A DIVINE REVELATION (mainly derived from Greenleaf, Testimony of the Evangelists, and from Starkie on Evidence).

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1. As to documentary evidence

(a) Documents apparently ancient, not bearing upon their face the marks of forgery, and found in proper custody, are presumed to be genuine until sufficient evidence is brought to the contrary. The New Testament documents, since they are found in the custody of the church, their natural and legitimate depository, must by this rule be presumed to be genuine.

The Christian documents were not found, like the Book of Mormon, in a cave, or in the custody of angels. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 322—“The Mormon prophet, who cannot tell God from devil close at hand, is well up with the history of both worlds, and commissioned to get ready the second promised land.” Washington Gladden, Who wrote the Bible?—“An angel appeared to Smith and told him where he would find this book; he went to the spot designated and found in a stone box a volume six inches thick, composed of thin gold plates, eight inches by seven, held together by three gold rings; these plates were covered with writing, in the ‘Reformed Egyptian tongue’; with this book were the ‘Urim and Thummim’, a pair of supernatural spectacles, by means of which he was able to read and translate this ‘Reformed Egyptian’ language.” Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 113—“If the ledger of a business firm has always been received and regarded as a ledger, its value is not at all impeached if it is impossible to tell which particular clerk kept this ledger.... The epistle to the Hebrews would be no less valuable as evidence, if shown not to have been written by Paul.” See Starkie on Evidence, 480 sq.; Chalmers, Christian Revelation, in Works, 3:147-171.

(b) Copies of ancient documents, made by those most interested in their faithfulness, are presumed to correspond with the originals, even although those originals no longer exist. Since it was the church’s interest to have faithful copies, the burden of proof rests upon the objector to the Christian documents.

Upon the evidence of a copy of its own records, the originals having been lost, the House of Lords decided a claim to the peerage; see Starkie on Evidence, 51. There is no manuscript of Sophocles earlier than the tenth century, while at least two manuscripts of the N. T. go back to the fourth century. Frederick George Kenyon, Handbook to Textual Criticism of N. T.: “We owe our knowledge of most of the great works of Greek and Latin literature—Æschylus, Sophocles, Thucydides, Horace, Lucretius, Tacitus, and many more—to manuscripts written from 900 to 1500 years after their authors’ deaths; while of the N. T. we have two excellent and approximately complete copies at an interval of only 250 years. Again, of the classical writers we have as a rule only a few score of copies (often less), of which one or two stand out as decisively superior to all the rest; but of the N. T. we have more than 3000 copies (besides a very large number of versions), and many of these have distinct and independent value.” The mother of Tischendorf named him Lobgott, because her fear that her babe would be born blind had not come true. No man ever had keener sight than he. He spent his life in deciphering old manuscripts which other eyes could not read. The Sinaitic manuscript which he discovered takes us back within three centuries of the time of the apostles.

(c) In determining matters of fact, after the lapse of considerable time, documentary evidence is to be allowed greater weight than oral testimony. Neither memory nor tradition can long be trusted to give absolutely correct accounts of particular facts. The New Testament documents, therefore, are of greater weight in evidence than tradition would be, even if only thirty years had elapsed since the death of the actors in the scenes they relate.

See Starkie on Evidence, 51, 730. The Roman Catholic Church, in its legends of the saints, shows how quickly mere tradition can become corrupt. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, yet sermons preached to-day on the anniversary of his birth make him out to be Unitarian, Universalist, or Orthodox, according as the preacher himself believes.

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2. As to testimony in general

(a) In questions as to matters of fact, the proper inquiry is not whether it is possible that the testimony may be false, but whether there is sufficient probability that it is true. It is unfair, therefore, to allow our examination of the Scripture witnesses to be prejudiced by suspicion, merely because their story is a sacred one.

There must be no prejudice against, there must be open-mindedness to, truth; there must be a normal aspiration after the signs of communication from God. Telepathy, forty days fasting, parthenogenesis, all these might once have seemed antecedently incredible. Now we see that it would have been more rational to admit their existence on presentation of appropriate evidence.

(b) A proposition of fact is proved when its truth is established by competent and satisfactory evidence. By competent evidence is meant such evidence as the nature of the thing to be proved admits. By satisfactory evidence is meant that amount of proof which ordinarily satisfies an unprejudiced mind beyond a reasonable doubt. Scripture facts are therefore proved when they are established by that kind and degree of evidence which would in the affairs of ordinary life satisfy the mind and conscience of a common man. When we have this kind and degree of evidence it is unreasonable to require more.

In matters of morals and religion competent evidence need not be mathematical or even logical. The majority of cases in criminal courts are decided upon evidence that is circumstantial. We do not determine our choice of friends or of partners in life by strict processes of reasoning. The heart as well as the head must be permitted a voice, and competent evidence includes considerations arising from the moral needs of the soul. The evidence, moreover, does not require to be demonstrative. Even a slight balance of probability, when nothing more certain is attainable, may suffice to constitute rational proof and to bind our moral action.

(c) In the absence of circumstances which generate suspicion, every witness is to be presumed credible, until the contrary is shown; the burden of impeaching his testimony lying upon the objector. The principle which leads men to give true witness to facts is stronger than that which leads them to give false witness. It is therefore unjust to compel the Christian to establish the credibility of his witnesses before proceeding to adduce their testimony, and it is equally unjust to allow the uncorroborated testimony of a profane writer to outweigh that of a Christian writer. Christian witnesses should not be considered interested, and therefore untrustworthy; for they became Christians against their worldly interests, and because they could not resist the force of testimony. Varying accounts among them should be estimated as we estimate the varying accounts of profane writers.

John’s account of Jesus differs from that of the synoptic gospels; but in a very similar manner, and probably for a very similar reason, Plato’s account of Socrates differs from that of Xenophon. Each saw and described that side of his subject which he was by nature best fitted to comprehend,—compare the Venice of Canaletto with the Venice of Turner, the former the picture of an expert draughtsman, the latter the vision of a poet who sees the palaces of the Doges glorified by air and mist and distance. In Christ there was a “hiding of his power” (Hab. 3:4); “how small a whisper do we hear of him!” (Job 26:14); he, rather than Shakespeare, is “the myriad-minded”; no one evangelist can be expected to know or describe him except “in part” (1 Cor. 13:12). Frances Power Cobbe, Life, 2:402—“All of us human beings resemble diamonds, in having several distinct facets to our characters; and, as we always turn one of these to one person and another to another, there is generally some fresh side to be seen in a particularly brilliant gem.” E. P. Tenney, Coronation, 45—“The secret and powerful life he [the hero of the story] was leading was like certain solitary streams, deep, wide, and swift, which run unseen through vast and unfrequented forests. So wide and varied was this man’s nature, that whole courses of life might thrive in its secret places,—and his neighbors might touch him and know him only on that side on which he was like them.”

(d) A slight amount of positive testimony, so long as it is uncontradicted, outweighs a very great amount of testimony that is merely negative. The silence of a second witness, or his testimony that he did not see a certain alleged occurrence, cannot counterbalance the positive testimony of a first witness that he did see it. We should therefore estimate the silence of profane writers with regard to facts narrated in Scripture precisely as we should estimate it if the facts about which they are silent were narrated by other profane writers, instead of being narrated by the writers of Scripture.

Egyptian monuments make no mention of the destruction of Pharaoh and his army; but then, Napoleon’s dispatches also make no mention of his defeat at Trafalgar. At the tomb of Napoleon in the Invalides of Paris, the walls are inscribed with names of a multitude of places where his battles were fought, but Waterloo, the scene of his great defeat, is not recorded there. So Sennacherib, in all his monuments, does not refer to the destruction of his army in the time of Hezekiah. Napoleon gathered 450,000 men at Dresden to invade Russia. At Moscow the soft-falling snow conquered him. In one night 20,000 horses perished with cold. Not without reason at Moscow, on the anniversary of the retreat of the French, the exultation of the prophet over the fall of Sennacherib is read in the churches. James Robertson, Early History of Israel, 395, note—“Whately, in his Historic Doubts, draws attention to the fact that the principal Parisian journal in 1814, on the very day on which the allied armies entered Paris as conquerors, makes no mention of any such event. The battle of Poictiers in 732, which effectually checked the spread of Mohammedanism across Europe, is not once referred to in the monastic annals of the period. Sir Thomas Browne lived through the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth, yet there is no syllable in his writings with regard to them. Sale says that circumcision is regarded by Mohammedans as an ancient divine institution, the rite having been in use many years before Mohammed, yet it is not so much as once mentioned in the Koran.”

Even though we should grant that Josephus does not mention Jesus, we should have a parallel in Thucydides, who never once mentions Socrates, the most important character of the twenty years embraced in his history. Wieseler, however, in Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 23:98, maintains the essential genuineness of the commonly rejected passage with regard to Jesus in Josephus, Antiq., 18:3:3, omitting, however, as interpolations, the phrases: “if it be right to call him man”; “this was the Christ”; “he appeared alive the third day according to prophecy”; for these, if genuine, would prove Josephus a Christian, which he, by all ancient accounts, was not. Josephus lived from A. D. 34 to possibly 114. He does elsewhere speak of Christ; for he records (20:9:1) that Albinus “assembled the Sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others ... and delivered them to be stoned.” See Niese’s new edition of Josephus; also a monograph on the subject by Gustav Adolph Müller, published at Innsbruck, 1890. Rush Rhees, Life of Jesus of Nazareth, 22—“To mention Jesus more fully would have required some approval of his life and teaching. This would have been a condemnation of his own people whom he desired to commend to Gentile regard, and he seems to have taken the cowardly course of silence concerning a matter more noteworthy, for that generation, than much else of which he writes very fully.”

(e) “The credit due to the testimony of witnesses depends upon: first, their ability; secondly, their honesty; thirdly, their number and the consistency of their testimony; fourthly, the conformity of their testimony with experience; and fifthly, the coincidence of their testimony with collateral circumstances.” We confidently submit the New Testament witnesses to each and all of these tests.

See Starkie on Evidence, 726.

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II. Positive Proofs That The Scriptures Are A Divine Revelation

I. Genuineness of the Christian Documents.

THE GENUINENESS OF THE CHRISTIAN DOCUMENTS, or proof that the books of the Old and New Testaments were written at the age to which they are assigned and by the men or class of men to whom they are ascribed.

Our present discussion comprises the first part, and only the first part, of the doctrine of the Canon (κανών, a measuring-reed; hence, a rule, a standard). It is important to observe that the determination of the Canon, or list of the books of sacred Scripture, is not the work of the church as an organized body. We do not receive these books upon the authority of Fathers or Councils. We receive them, only as the Fathers and Councils received them, because we have evidence that they are the writings of the men, or class of men, whose names they bear, and that they are also credible and inspired. If the previous epistle alluded to in 1 Cor. 5:9 should be discovered and be universally judged authentic, it could be placed with Paul’s other letters and could form part of the Canon, even though it has been lost for 1800 years. Bruce, Apologetics, 321—“Abstractly the Canon is an open question. It can never be anything else on the principles of Protestantism which forbid us to accept the decisions of church councils, whether ancient or modern, as final. But practically the question of the Canon is closed.” The Westminster Confession says that the authority of the word of God “does not rest upon historic evidence; it does not rest upon the authority of Councils; it does not rest upon the consent of the past or the excellence of the matter; but it rests upon the Spirit of God bearing witness to our hearts concerning its divine authority.” Clarke, Christian Theology, 24—“The value of the Scriptures to us does not depend upon our knowing who wrote them. In the O. T. half its pages are of uncertain authorship. New dates mean new authorship. Criticism is a duty, for dates of authorship give means of interpretation. The Scriptures have power because God is in them, and because they describe the entrance of God into the life of man.”

Saintine, Picciola, 782—“Has not a feeble reed provided man with his first arrow, his first pen, his first instrument of music?” Hugh Macmillan: “The idea of stringed instruments was first derived from the twang of the well strung bow, as the archer shot his arrows; the lyre and the harp which discourse the sweetest music of peace were invented by those who first heard this inspiring sound in the excitement of battle. And so there is no music so delightful amid the jarring discord of the world, turning everything to music and harmonizing earth and heaven, as when the heart rises out of the gloom of anger and revenge, and converts its bow into a harp, and sings to it the Lord’s song of infinite forgiveness.” George Adam Smith, Mod. Criticism and Preaching of O. T., 5—“The church has never renounced her liberty to revise the Canon. The liberty at the beginning cannot be more than the liberty thereafter. The Holy Spirit has not forsaken the leaders of the church. Apostolic writers nowhere define the limits of the Canon, any more than Jesus did. Indeed, they employed extra-canonical writings. Christ and the apostles nowhere bound the church to believe all the teachings of the O. T. Christ discriminates, and forbids the literal interpretation of its contents. Many of the apostolic interpretations challenge our sense of truth. Much of their exegesis was temporary and false. Their judgment was that much in the O. T. was rudimentary. This opens the question of development in revelation, and justifies the attempt to fix the historic order. The N. T. criticism of the O. T. gives the liberty of criticism, and the need, and the obligation of it. O. T. criticism is not, like Baur’s of the N. T., the result of a priori Hegelian reasoning. From the time of Samuel we have real history. The prophets do not appeal to miracles. There is more gospel in the book of Jonah, when it is treated as a parable. The O. T. is a gradual ethical revelation of God. Few realize that the church of Christ has a higher warrant for her Canon of the O. T. than she has for her Canon of the N. T. The O. T. was the result of criticism in the widest sense of that word. But what the church thus once achieved, the church may at any time revise.”

We reserve to a point somewhat later the proof of the credibility and the inspiration of the Scriptures. We now show their genuineness, as we would show the genuineness of other religious books, like the Koran, or of secular documents, like Cicero’s Orations against Catiline. Genuineness, in the sense in which we use the term, does not necessarily imply authenticity (i. e., truthfulness and authority); see Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theol., art.: Authenticity. Documents may be genuine which are written in whole or in part by persons other than they whose names they bear, provided these persons belong to the same class. The Epistle to the Hebrews, though not written by Paul, is genuine, because it proceeds from one of the apostolic class. The addition of Deut. 34, after Moses’ death, does not invalidate the genuineness of the Pentateuch; nor would the theory of a later Isaiah, even if it were established, disprove the genuineness of that prophecy; provided, in both cases, that the additions were made by men of the prophetic class. On the general subject of the genuineness of the Scripture documents, see Alexander, McIlvaine, Chalmers, Dodge, and Peabody, on the Evidences of Christianity; also Archibald, The Bible Verified.

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