think, however, that the maintenance of it would cause him some embarrassment in the face of his present statement: "I believe most emphatically in His Supernatural Birth; but I cannot so easily bring myself to think that His Birth was (as I should regard it) unnatural." What is it that Dr. Sanday supposes that Mary could and did bear witness to with respect to the extraordinary birth of her son? Precisely the one thing which Mary was competent to testify to with conviction and full knowledge—with indubitable weight-is what Dr. Sanday here calls the "unnatural birth"; and that is precisely the thing she does testify to, if this narrative has any validity at all as the vehicle of her witness; and we cannot be surprised that a precise assertion of it from her lips is embodied in the narrative: "I know not a man” (Lk. i. 34). The only thing that Dr. Sanday is prepared to accept now on Mary's testimony is just the thing that Mary had no competency to attest as a witness: that the Holy Spirit was so far concerned in this birth as to sanctify the product, so that It should be holy. What Mary was competent to attest-he refuses to believe: what she was not competent to attest— is all that he will believe. Phenomena like this increase our difficulty in crediting that Dr. Sanday's opinions as to miracles are the pure result of his critical examination of the evidence.

Let us take another example even more startling. Dr. Sanday seems still to profess readiness to accept any miracle adequately attested. In adequate attestation, he gives us to understand, first-handedness holds with him a primary place. "For instance, whenever we have the direct evidence of St. Paul, that evidence is immediate and cannot be questioned."98 He suggests that the only miracles receiving such first-hand attestation are of the class called by him supra naturam in contrast with those which he calls contra naturam,-that is to say they are such as are wrought through the medium of natural forces, not independently of

Bishop Gore's Challenge, etc., p. 24.

them. It is not immediately apparent on what grounds he bases this opinion. Paul, for example, in his references to miracles speaks quite generally99 and Paul is not the only first-hand witness. Dr. Sanday does not doubt, for instance, that Luke was both Paul's companion and the author of the Book of Acts: and in that case it is hard to deny to Luke recognition as a first-hand witness to miracles, Paul's and others'. On Paul's and Luke's testimony we may be sure, and Dr. Sanday is sure, that miracles happened in the early days of the Church.100 The miracles to which Luke testifies, however, are not all of the sort that Dr. Sanday calls supra naturam. But Luke testifies not only to the miracles of the early Christians but to miracles wrought by Jesus, and though he does not pretend to have himself witnessed any of these, as Paul's companion he enjoyed excellent opportunities of informing himself on first-hand authority of what really happened (as say with respect to the resurrection of Jesus), and we can hardly doubt, on his testimony alone, that Jesus Himself as well as His followers worked miracles, and Dr. Sanday does not doubt it. If Luke is not technically a first-hand witness that fault, to all who believe, with Dr. Sanday,101 that the Fourth Gospel is the work of an eye-witness, is fully cured by the testimony of John. We can moreover get behind Luke. As Dr. Sanday himself points out,102 each of the chief documents which underlie Luke, the Narrative Source, the Discourse Source, and the so-called Special Source, testifies to abounding miracles wrought by Jesus. And, as Dr. Sanday again himself points out,103 the distinction which he draws between supra naturam and contra naturam miracles "certainly was not present to the mind of the Biblical historians, and miracles of the one class are not inferior in attestation to those of

"Cf. the passages; Roms. xv. 18, 19; 2 Cor. xii. 12; 1 Cor. xii. 6, 8, 10, xiv. 7, 5, 19; Gal. iii. 8, cited in The Expository Times, xiv. p. 62. Cf. the Church Congress at Middlesbrough, p. 183.

100 The Expository Times, as cited, pp. 64 ff.

101 Ibid.

108 Ibid.

the other". These historians, indeed, in the most trustworthy accounts of His teaching which they have transmitted to us, represent Jesus as Himself bearing witness to His own miracle-working. There are no better attested sayings of our Lord's than those in which He pronounces woes upon Bethsaida and Chorazin (Mat. xi. 21, Lk. x. 13), replies to John the Baptist's inquiry as to who He was (Mat. xi. 5, Lk. vii. 22) and speaks of a faith which can remove mountains (Mat. xvii. 20, Lk. xvii. 6). Each of these saying includes a direct claim on our Lord's part to be a miracle-worker, and the only two of them which intimate the nature of His miracles, intimate that they included "nature miracles", Dr. Sanday's contra-naturam miracles. If it is unreasonable to doubt that these are genuine sayings of our Lord,—and surely Dr. Sanday will not doubt that 104 -we seem to have our Lord's own witness to the fact that He wrought "nature miracles".

Dr. Sanday is indeed so deeply committed to this conclusion that we can only wonder at the extreme embarrassment into which he has brought himself by his denial that our Lord nevertheless wrought any miracles contra naturam. The narrative of our Lord's Temptation and its implications Dr. Sanday has by repeated and searching critical examinations of it made peculiarly his own. This narrative, he strongly holds, presents evidence that our Lord claimed to work miracles and really did work miracles which Dr. Sanday ventures to characterize as "quite stringent", indeed "as stringent as a proposition of Euclid."105 For this account of the Temptation, he argues, 106 is of such a kind

104 See what Dr. Sanday says in the paper at the Church Congress at Middlesbrough on Mat. xi. 21; Lk. x. 13, and in The Life of Christ in Recent Research, p. 224, on Mat. xvii. 20; Lk. xvii. 6. Cf. also what Dr. Headlam says in his paper at the Church Congress at Middlesbrough (p. 187) on Mat. xi. 21; Lk. x. 17, and Mat. xi. 5; Lk. vii. 32.

105 The Expository Times, xiv, p. 63 f.

108 Ibid.: the argument here is repeated from Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, ii. p. 624 b, where it is more expanded: cf. also pp. 612 f.

and contains features of such a character as to make it intrinsically certain that it could not have been invented, but "must have come from our Lord Himself and no other". "But the story of the Temptation," he proceeds, "all turns on the assumption of the power of working miracles. All three temptations have for their object to induce Him to work miracles for purposes other than those for which He was prepared to work them. The story would be null and void if He worked no miracles at all." That is to say our Lord Himself bears witness in the account of the Temptation which He, and no other, must have given and therefore actually did give, that He was conscious of the power to work miracles, and did work them on all proper occasions. Here is stringent evidence indeed, independent of all inquiry into "sources": the narrative in itself bears convincing testimony to its authenticity as a personal witness of our Lord's own; and this witness is to His miracle-working. The point now to be pressed is that this stringent witness of our Lord's own to His miracleworking concerns particularly "nature miracles", miracles contra naturam. The making of the stones into bread is as distinctly a nature miracle, for example, as the multiplication of the loaves and fishes which Dr. Sanday refuses to believe happened, on this precise ground. How can Dr. Sanday insist, then, that "nature miracles" did not happen and could not happen? Has he convicted our Lord of falsewitness to the nature and extent of His powers-transmuted Him into an empty boaster in the accounts He gives of Himself? Or does he wish to abandon his elaborate proof of the necessary origin of the account of the Temptation in our Lord's own report? One thing stands out with great clearness. Dr. Sanday's rejection of "nature miracles" does not rest on critical grounds. His most elaborate, thorough and characteristic essays in criticism accredit them. If he refuses to believe that such miracles occurred he can ground his refusal in nothing but an a priori pronouncement that such miracles are impossible.

This having been said, everything has been said. Dr. Sanday has given his life to the study of criticism. At the end of the day he casts criticism and all its findings out of the window and falls back on a bald anti-supernaturalistic preconception. All his suggestions are dictated not by the facts as ascertained by critical inquiry, but by a philosophical principle assumed at the outset. The underlying motive seems to be, as Mr. Knox would say,107 to make Christianity easy "for Jones to swallow". It is not of the ascertainment of the pure truth that Dr. Sanday seems to be thinking at the bottom of his mind, but of the placating of "the modern mind" and the adjustment of Christianity to its ingrained point of view. He seems to value his suggestions looking to the substitution of an unmiraculous Christianity for the supernatural Christianity hitherto believed in by men, because by them Christianity would be made more acceptable to "the modern mind". He tells us with charming naïveté 108

"What they would mean is that the greatest of all stumblingblocks to the modern mind is removed, and that the beautiful regularity that we see around us now has been, and will be, the law of the Divine action from the beginning to the end of time. There has been just this one little submerged rock in our navigation of the universe. If we look at it from a cosmical standpoint, how infinitesimal does it seem! And yet that one little rock has been the cause of many a shipwreck of faith. If it is really taken out of the way, the whole expanse of the ocean of thought will be open and free.

But what if that "one little submerged rock" is just Christianity? Does it not fall strangely upon our ears, to hear a Christian theologian speak thus belittlingly of the whole supernatural element in Christianity? When Dr. Sanday read that amazing paper on Miracles at the Church Congress at Middlesbrough (in 1912) in which he preadumbrated all that he has since said, there were those on the platform with him who, had he only been willing to hearken to them, could have corrected his deflected points of view. Dr.

107 Some Loose Stones, 1913, pp. 9 ff.

108

Bishop Gore's Challenge to Criticism, etc., p. 30.