IV. THE MEANING OF THE MIRACLES JOHN in prison had fallen into momentary doubt as to the messiahship of Jesus. Accordingly, he sent two of his disciples to the Master with the question, "Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?" The answer was, "Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see: the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them" (Matt. xi. 4, 5). The proof which Jesus had to furnish was twofold, his words and his works, his gospel and his miracles. If these bore upon them the sure marks of their divine origin, then but one conclusion was possible, that Jesus was the Christ. In our own times one half of this evidence is widely discredited. The miracles are felt by many to be a burden. rather than a help to Christianity. Popular scepticism directs its most successful assaults against the miraculous element in the Christian system. It must be confessed that even the defenders of Christianity show a certain timidity in dealing with the subject. Partly this is the result of an undue emphasis laid upon the miracles in the evidences of Christianity, which has brought about its inevitable reaction. But still more it is the result of a misunderstanding of what miracles are. They have been regarded too much as mere acts of power, designed to arouse wonder and thus perforce to compel belief in the divine mission of prophets and apostles and the Christ himself. The moral and spiritual meaning, which belongs intrinsically to them, has not been sufficiently perceived, nor has their organic connection with God's great work of revelation and redemption. If the reality of the mir acles is made to rest upon mere testimony, even though it be the testimony of the best and most self-sacrificing of men, the task of vindicating them must always be most. difficult, so that by the time we have made out a fair case for them, they have become of but little use in the evidences of Christianity. But if we can show that the miracles are part and parcel of God's redemptive revelation itself, that they are in their moral character as expressive of God's grace as any words uttered by inspired lips, that they reveal truths that no mere words could make known, in a word, that revelation and redemption would be imperfect and maimed without miracles-then the work of proving their reality becomes comparatively easy and their use in the proof of Christianity invaluable. It is my purpose to show, so far as I can in a single chapter, what is the true meaning of the scriptural miracles and the place they occupy in the Christian system. I am sure that, even though I should succeed only in part, there are some who will be helped and strengthened in their faith by a fuller understanding of this difficult subject. I. In the first place, the miracles presuppose the disturbance of the order of physical nature by sin. That there is such a disturbance every thoughtful person must admit, whether he looks for knowledge on the subject to the teachings of scripture or the facts of experience. We do not stand in our true relation to the world about us. Man was made to have dominion over nature. That is the truth the Bible declares upon its first page. It is the truth prophesied by the evolution of the lower orders of being in the earlier history of the world. It is the truth borne in upon us by all our observation of the world as it is to-day. To begin with what is nearest to us: in the true relation of things our souls should have dominion over our bodies. The body was meant to be the obedient organ of the spirit. Nothing could be more striking than the difference between the animal and man in this respect. Without denying the reality, within certain limits, of animal intelligence, yet it is evident that instinct or inherited habit has a far larger influence in the bodily actions of the animal. The new-born calf or colt is to a great extent already in possession of the bodily activities which it is to use in after life. It has no infancy and but a very short childhood. It has but little to learn and it learns it quickly. But in the case of man how different. How enormous is the change from the utter helplessness of infancy to the full activity of maturity. And the whole process of education, by which the mature state is attained, is a continuous process of the mastery of the soul over the body. An animal walks at birth. A child learns to walk, gaining by slow degrees the power to use its muscles and limbs. Still more complicated and difficult is the learning to talk and the learning to think connected with it. We do not see how the brain is slowly exercised to its work, by what processes its delicate machinery is put into gear and trained to work. But the slightest consideration suffices to give us an inkling of the wonderful truth. Nor is it needful to do more than allude to the equally marvellous processes by which the bodily dexterities of later life are attained. Watch once the practised fingers of the musician as they fly over the keys, and think of the mastery of the mind over the body thus manifested. There is no limit to the possible power of our free wills over the physical organisms associated with them. And undoubtedly it was meant that the control should be perfect, that our bodies should become in all things the willing instruments of our spirits, and especially that they should carry out the behests of souls devoted to holy ends. But how far is the actual from the ideal! Our bodies. are not and never become what they were meant to be. Sinful influences, running through long lines of ancestry to our first parents, have impaired our physical constitution. We come into the world disordered, born to weakness, sickness, and death. In every pain we bear, in every failure of our physical powers by which we are hindered in our work, in the sensitiveness and irritability which turn the harmony of body and soul into discord, we have the witness to the confusion sin has wrought. Still more in death. Death is not natural. It is the one unnatural, utterly unnatural experience of the world. Christianity may take away even now its sting. Christ's redemption may even throw a glory around death as the entrance into the heavenly blessedness. But until the resurrection day brings the final conquest over death, it will be the great evidence of the confusion sin has wrought in nature. For man was not made to die. Death, that to the brute is natural, is to man the subversion of his true destination. It is the superficial sentiment of popular religion that tries to comfort the mother who has laid away in the grave the precious body of her child by telling her that death is beautiful. The Bible never repre sents it so. Infirmity, disease, death come to us as the result of others' sin, the corporate sin of the world, in the consequences of which we all participate. But our own sin produces the same result, adding to the heritage of disor der into which we are born. How many there are who with bodies weakened, strength gone, ability for useful work crippled, life fast ebbing, must confess that their own sin has made it so. And it is not only in our relation to our bodies that the disorder which sin has brought into the world is manifest. Sin has disturbed man's relation to external nature. the broad scale of the world's life this is manifest enough. On The pride, the avarice, the cruelty of man have turned many of earth's most lovely regions into a desert. War with its devastation has altered the very climate of the regions over which it has swept. Think how the selfish greed for wealth-and that is merely one of the manifestations of sin-is to-day cutting down our forests, impoverishing our soil, filling up our rivers and harbors. Sin has turned man's relation to the animal creation, which should be a relation of protection and friendship, into a relation of enmity and tyranny. How little we think of destroying a whole race of song-birds to gratify the pride of a foolish fashion! And what is true of men in the large is true of us as individuals. Nature, which was made to be our friend, which ought to be the willing and obedient servant of a holy will, is treated as our enemy. We fear her. We oppress her. We turn from her. How we huddle ourselves together in cities and banish from us every vestige of nature as God has made it. How we shut ourselves up in dark houses and stew ourselves with unnatural heat. Anything rather than to let God's bright sunshine tinge our cheeks with its glow or God's pure air fill our lungs and send the warm blood tingling through our veins. It is sin that crowds the poor together in narrow alleys and festering tenement-houses. It is sin that feeds them with poisoned food. And because man has fallen out with nature, nature has her revenge. She torments us with her tempests and floods and dronghts. She kills us with her miasma and her cholera. She fills our cities with discomforts and distresses. She hides her brighter aspects from us. Longfellow tells us in melodious verse of the naturalist Agassiz, how "He wandered away and away With Nature, the dear old nurse, |