Chapter XXXII: Lord Blachford (4)

The first appearance, then, of man in nature was the appearance of
a new being in nature; and this fact was relatively to the then
order of things miraculous; no more physical account can be given
of it than could be given of a resurrection to life now. What more
entirely new and eccentric fact, indeed, can be imagined than a
human soul first rising up amidst an animal and vegetable world?
Mere consciousness--was not that of itself a new world within the
old one? Mere knowledge--that nature herself became known to a
being within herself, was not that the same? Certainly man was not
all at once the skilled interpreter of nature, and yet there is
some interpretation of nature to which man as such is equal in
some degree. He derives an impression from the sight of nature
which an animal does not derive; for though the material spectacle
is imprinted on its retina, as it is on man's, it does not see
what man sees. The sun rose, then, and the sun descended, the
stars looked down upon the earth, the mountains climbed to heaven,
the cliffs stood upon the shore, the same as now, countless ages
before a single being existed who _saw_ it. The counterpart of
this whole scene was wanting--the understanding mind; that mirror
in which the whole was to be reflected; and when this arose it was
a new birth for creation itself, that it became _known_,--an image
in the mind of a conscious being. But even consciousness and
knowledge were a less strange and miraculous introduction into the
world than conscience.

Thus wholly mysterious in his entrance into this scene, man is
_now_ an insulation in it; he came in by no physical law, and his
freewill is in utter contrast to that law. What can be more
incomprehensible, more heterogeneous, a more ghostly resident in
nature, than the sense of right and wrong? What is it? Whence is
it? The obligation of man to sacrifice himself for right is a
truth which springs out of an abyss, the mere attempt to look down
into which confuses the reason. Such is the juxtaposition of
mysterious and physical contents in the same system. Man is alone,
then, in nature: he alone of all the creatures communes with a
Being out of nature; and he divides himself from all other
physical life by prophesying, in the face of universal visible
decay, his own immortality.

And till this anomaly has been removed--that is, till the last trace of what is moral in man has disappeared under the analysis of science, and what ought to be is resolved into a mere aspect of what is, this deep exception to the dominion of physical law remains as prominent and undeniable as physical law itself.

It is, indeed, avowed by those who reduce man in nature, that upon
the admission of free-will, the objection to the miraculous is over,
and that it is absurd to allow exception to law in man, and reject
it in nature.

But the broad, popular sense of natural order, and the instinctive and common repugnance to a palpable violation of it, have been forged and refined into the philosophical objection to miracles. Two great thinkers of past generations, two of the keenest and clearest intellects which have appeared since the Reformation, laid the foundations of it long ago. Spinoza urged the uselessness of miracles, and Hume their incredibility, with a guarded subtlety and longsighted refinement of statement which made them in advance of their age except with a few. But their reflections have fallen in with a more advanced stage of thought and a taste for increased precision and exactness, and they are beginning to bear their fruit. The great and telling objection to miracles is getting to be, not their want of evidence, but, prior to all question of evidence, the supposed impossibility of fitting them in with a scientific view of nature. Reason, looking at nature and experience, is said to raise an antecedent obstacle to them which no alleged proof of fact can get over. They cannot be, because they are so unlike to everything else in the world, even of the strangest kind, in this point--in avowedly breaking the order of nature. And reason cannot be admitted to take cognizance of their claims and to consider their character, their purpose, their results, their credentials, because the mere supposition of them violates the fundamental conception and condition of science, absolute and invariable law, as well as that common-sense persuasion which everybody has, whether philosopher or not, of the uniformity of the order of the world.

II

To make room for reason to come in and pronounce upon miracles on their own merits--to clear the ground for the consideration of their actual claims by disposing of the antecedent objection of impossibility, is Mr. Mozley's main object.

Whatever difficulty there is in believing in miracles in general
arises from the circumstance that they are in contradiction to or
unlike the order of nature. To estimate the force of this
difficulty, then, we must first understand what kind of belief it
is which we have in the order of nature; for the weight of the
objection to the miraculous must depend on the nature of the
belief to which the miraculous is opposed.

His examination of the alleged impossibility of miracles may be described as a very subtle turning the tables on Hume and the empirical philosophy. For when it is said that it is contrary to reason to believe in a suspension of the order of nature, he asks on what ground do we believe in the order of nature; and Hume himself supplies the answer. There is nothing of which we have a firmer persuasion. It is the basis of human life and knowledge. We assume at each step, without a doubt, that the future will be like the past. But why? Hume has carefully examined the question, and can find no answer, except the fact that we do assume it. "I apprehend," says Mr. Mozley, accepting Hume's view of the nature of probability, "that when we examine the different reasons which may be assigned for this connection, i.e. for the belief that the future will be like the past, they all come at last to be mere statements of the belief itself, and not reasons to account for it."

Let us imagine the occurrence of a particular physical phenomenon
for the first time. Upon that single occurrence we should have but
the very faintest expectation of another. If it did occur again
once or twice, so far from counting on another recurrence, a
cessation would come as the more natural event to us. But let it
occur a hundred times, and we should feel no hesitation in
inviting persons from a distance to see it; and if it occurred
every day for years, its recurrence would then be a certainty to
us, its cessation a marvel. But what has taken place in the
interim to produce this total change in our belief? From the mere
repetition do we know anything more about its cause? No. Then what
have we got besides the past repetition itself? Nothing. Why,
then, are we so certain of its _future_ repetition? All we can say
is that the known casts its shadow before; we project into unborn
time the existing types, and the secret skill of nature intercepts
the darkness of the future by ever suspending before our eyes, as
it were in a mirror, a reflection of the past. We really look at a
blank before us, but the mind, full of the scene behind, sees it
again in front....

What ground of reason, then, can we assign for our expectation
that any part of the course of nature will the _next_ moment be
like what it has been up to _this_ moment, i.e. for our belief
in the uniformity of nature? None. No demonstrative reason can be
given, for the contrary to the recurrence of a fact of nature is
no contradiction. No probable reason can be given, for all
probable reasoning respecting the course of nature is founded
_upon_ this presumption of likeness, and therefore cannot be the
foundation of it. No reason can be given for this belief. It is
without a reason. It rests upon no rational ground and can be
traced to no rational principle. Everything connected with human
life depends upon this belief, every practical plan or purpose
that we form implies it, every provision we make for the future,
every safeguard and caution we employ against it, all calculation,
all adjustment of means to ends, supposes this belief; it is this
principle alone which renders our experience of the slightest use
to us, and without it there would be, so far as we are concerned,
no order of nature and no laws of nature; and yet this belief has
no more producible reason for it than a speculation of fancy. A
natural fact has been repeated; it will be repeated:--I am
conscious of utter darkness when I try to see why one of these
follows from the other: I not only see no reason, but I perceive
that I see none, though I can no more help the expectation than I
can stop the circulation of my blood. There is a premiss, and
there is a conclusion, but there is a total want of connection
between the two. The inference, then, from the one of these to the
other rests upon no ground of the understanding; by no search or
analysis, however subtle or minute, can we extract from any corner
of the human mind and intelligence, however remote, the very
faintest reason for it.

Hume, who had urged with great force that miracles were contrary to that probability which is created by experience, had also said that this probability had no producible ground in reason; that, universal, unfailing, indispensable as it was to the course of human life, it was but an instinct which defied analysis, a process of thought and inference for which he vainly sought the rational steps. There is no absurdity, though the greatest impossibility, in supposing this order to stop to-morrow; and, if the world ends at all, its end will be in an increasing degree improbable up to the very last moment. But, if this whole ground of belief is in its own nature avowedly instinctive and independent of reason, what right has it to raise up a bar of intellectual necessity, and to shut out reason from entertaining the question of miracles? They may have grounds which appeal to reason; and an unintelligent instinct forbids reason from fairly considering what they are. Reason cannot get beyond the actual fact of the present state of things for believing in the order of nature; it professes to find no necessity for it; the interruption of that order, therefore, whether probable or not, is not against reason. Philosophy itself, says Mr. Mozley, cuts away the ground on which it had raised its preliminary objection to miracles.

And now the belief in the order of nature being thus, however
powerful and useful, an unintelligent impulse of which we can give
no rational account, in what way does this discovery affect the
question of miracles? In this way, that this belief not having
itself its foundation in reason, the ground is gone upon which it
could be maintained that miracles as opposed to the order of
nature were opposed to reason. There being no producible reason
why a new event should be like the hitherto course of nature, no
decision of reason is contradicted by its unlikeness. A miracle,
in being opposed to our experience, is not only not opposed to
necessary reasoning, but to any reasoning. Do I see by a certain
perception the connection between these two--It _has_ happened so,
it _will_ happen so; then may I reject a new reported fact which
has _not_ happened so as an impossibility. But if I do not see the
connection between these two by a certain perception, or by any
perception, I cannot. For a miracle to be rejected as such, there
must, at any rate, be some proposition in the mind of man which is
opposed to it; and that proposition can only spring from the
quarter to which we have been referring--that of elementary
experimental reasoning. But if this experimental reasoning is of
that nature which philosophy describes it as being of, i.e. if
it is not itself a process of reason, how can there from an
irrational process of the mind arise a proposition at all,--to
make which is the function of the rational faculty alone? There
cannot; and it is evident that the miraculous does not stand in
any opposition whatever to reason....

Thus step by step has philosophy loosened the connection of the
order of nature with the ground of reason, befriending, in exact
proportion as it has done this, the principle of miracles. In the
argument against miracles the first objection is that they are
against _law_; and this is answered by saying that we know nothing
in nature of law in the sense in which it prevents miracles. Law
can only prevent miracles by _compelling_ and making necessary the
succession of nature, i.e. in the sense of causation; but
science has itself proclaimed the truth that we see no causes in
nature, that the whole chain of physical succession is to the eye
of reason a rope of sand, consisting of antecedents and
consequents, but without a rational link or trace of necessary
connection between them. We only know of law in nature in the
sense of recurrences in nature, classes of facts, _like_ facts in
nature--a chain of which, the junction not being reducible to
reason, the interruption is not against reason. The claim of law
settled, the next objection in the argument against miracles is
that they are against _experience_; because we expect facts _like_
to those of our experience, and miracles are _unlike_ ones. The
weight, then, of the objection of unlikeness to experience depends
on the reason which can be produced for the expectation of
likeness; and to this call philosophy has replied by the summary
confession that we have _no_ reason. Philosophy, then, could not
have overthrown more thoroughly than it has done the order of
nature as a necessary course of things, or cleared the ground more
effectually for the principle of miracles.

Nor, he argues, does this instinct change its nature, or become a necessary law of reason, when it takes the form of an inference from induction. For the last step of the inductive process, the creation of its supposed universal, is, when compared with the real standard of universality acknowledged by reason, an incomplete and more or less precarious process; "it gets out of facts something more than what they actually contain"; and it can give no reason for itself but what the common faith derived from experience can give, the anticipation of uniform recurrence. "The inductive principle," he says, "is only the unreasoning impulse applied to a scientifically ascertained fact, instead of to a vulgarly ascertained fact.... Science has led up to the fact, but there it stops, and for converting the fact into a law a totally unscientific principle comes in, the same as that which generalises the commonest observations in nature."

The scientific part of induction being only the pursuit of a
particular fact, miracles cannot in the nature of the case receive
any blow from the scientific part of induction; because the
existence of one fact does not interfere with the existence of
another dissimilar fact. That which _does_ resist the miraculous
is the _un_scientific part of induction, or the instinctive
generalisation upon this fact.... It does not belong to this
principle to lay down speculative positions, and to say what can
or cannot take place in the world. It does not belong to it to
control religious belief, or to determine that certain acts of God
for the revelation of His will to man, reported to have taken
place, have not taken place. Such decisions are totally out of its
sphere; it can assert the universal as a _law_, but the universal
as a law and the universal as a proposition are wholly distinct.
The one asserts the universal as a fact, the other as a
presumption; the one as an absolute certainty, the other as a
practical certainty, when there is no reason to expect the
contrary. The one contains and includes the particular, the other
does not; from the one we argue mathematically to the falsehood of
any opposite particular; from the other we do not.... For example,
one signal miracle, pre-eminent for its grandeur, crowned the
evidence of the supernatural character and office of our Lord--our
Lord's ascension--His going up with His body of flesh and bones
into the sky in the presence of His disciples. "He lifted up His
hands, and blessed them. And while He blessed them, He was parted
from them, and carried up into heaven. And they looked stedfastly
toward heaven as He went up, and a cloud received Him out of their
sight."

Here is an amazing scene, which strikes even the devout believer,
coming across it in the sacred page suddenly or by chance, amid
the routine of life, with a fresh surprise. Did, then, this event
really take place? Or is the evidence of it forestalled by the
inductive principle compelling us to remove the scene _as such_
out of the category of matters of fact? The answer is, that the
inductive principle is in its own nature only an _expectation_;
and that the expectation, that what is unlike our experience will
not happen, is quite consistent with its occurrence in fact. This
principle does not pretend to decide the question of fact, which
is wholly out of its province and beyond its function. It can only
decide the fact by the medium of a universal; the universal
proposition that no man has ascended to heaven. But this is a
statement which exceeds its power; it is as radically incompetent
to pronounce it as the taste or smell is to decide on matters of
sight; its function is practical, not logical. No antecedent
statement, then, which touches my belief in this scene, is allowed
by the laws of thought. Converted indeed into a universal
proposition, the inductive principle is omnipotent, and totally
annihilates every particular which does not come within its range.
The universal statement that no man has ascended into heaven
absolutely falsifies the fact that One Man has. But, thus
transmuted, the inductive principle issues out of this
metamorphose, a fiction not a truth; a weapon of air, which even
in the hands of a giant can inflict no blow because it is itself a
shadow. The object of assault receives the unsubstantial thrust
without a shock, only exposing the want of solidity in the
implement of war. The battle against the supernatural has been
going on long, and strong men have conducted it, and are
conducting it--but what they want is a weapon. The logic of
unbelief wants a universal. But no real universal is forthcoming,
and it only wastes its strength in wielding a fictitious one.

It is not in reason, which refuses to pronounce upon the possible merely from experience of the actual, that the antecedent objection to miracles is rooted. Yet that the objection is a powerful one the consciousness of every reflecting mind testifies. What, then, is the secret of its force? In a lecture of singular power Mr. Mozley gives his answer. What tells beforehand against miracles is not reason, but imagination. Imagination is often thought to favour especially the supernatural and miraculous. It does do so, no doubt. But the truth is, that imagination tells both ways--as much against the miraculous as for it. The imagination, that faculty by which we give life and body and reality to our intellectual conceptions, takes its character from the intellectual conceptions with which it is habitually associated. It accepts the miraculous or shrinks from it and throws it off, according to the leaning of the mind of which it is the more vivid and, so to speak, passionate expression. And as it may easily exaggerate on one side, so it may just as easily do the same on the other. Every one is familiar with that imaginative exaggeration which fills the world with miracles. But there is another form of imagination, not so distinctly recognised, which is oppressed by the presence of unchanging succession and visible uniformity, which cannot shake off the yoke of custom or allow anything different to seem to it real. The sensitiveness and impressibility of the imagination are affected, and unhealthily affected, not merely by strangeness, but by sameness; to one as to the other it may "passively submit and surrender itself, give way to the mere form of attraction, and, instead of grasping something else, be itself grasped and mastered by some dominant idea." And it is then, in one case as much as in the other, "not a power, but a failing and weakness of nature."

The passive imagination, then, in the present case exaggerates a
practical expectation of the uniformity of nature, implanted in us
for practical ends, into a scientific or universal proposition;
and it does this by surrendering itself to the impression produced
by the constant spectacle of the regularity of visible nature. By
such a course a person allows the weight and pressure of this idea
to grow upon him till it reaches the point of actually restricting
his sense of possibility to the mould of physical order.... The
order of nature thus stamps upon some minds the idea of its
immutability simply by its repetition. The imagination we usually
indeed associate with the acceptance of the supernatural rather
than with the denial of it; but the passive imagination is in
truth neutral; it only increases the force and tightens the hold
of any impression upon us, to whatever class the impression may
belong, and surrenders itself to a superstitious or a physical
idea, as it may be. Materialism itself is the result of
imagination, which is so impressed by matter that it cannot
realise the existence of spirit.

The great opponent, then, of miracles, considered as possible occurrences, is not reason, but something which on other great subjects is continually found on the opposite side to reason, resisting and counteracting it; that powerful overbearing sense of the actual and the real, which when it is opposed by reason is apt to make reason seem like the creator of mere ideal theories; which gives to arguments implying a different condition of things from one which is familiar to present experience the disadvantage of appearing like artificial and unsubstantial refinements of thought, such as, to the uncultivated mind, appear not merely metaphysical discussions, but what are known to be the most certain reasonings of physical and mathematical science. It is that measure of the probable, impressed upon us by the spectacle; to which we are accustomed all our lives long, of things as we find them, and which repels the possibility of a break or variation; that sense of probability which the keenest of philosophers declares to be incapable of rational analysis, and pronounces allied to irrational portions of our constitution, like custom, and the effect of time, and which is just as much an enemy to invention, to improvement, to a different state of things in the future, as it is to the belief and realising of a different state of things in the past. The antecedent objection to the miraculous is not reason, but an argument which limits and narrows the domain of reason; which excludes dry, abstract, passionless reason--with its appeals to considerations remote from common experience, its demands for severe reflection, its balancing and long chains of thought--from pronouncing on what seems to belong to the flesh and blood realities of life as we know it. Against this tyrannical influence, which may be in a vulgar and popular as in a scientific form, which may be the dull result of habit or the more specious effect of a sensitive and receptive imagination, but which in all cases is at bottom the same, Mr. Mozley claims to appeal to reason:--

To conclude, then, let us suppose an intelligent Christian of the
present day asked, not what evidence he has of miracles, but how
he can antecedently to all evidence think such amazing occurrences
_possible_, he would reply, "You refer me to a certain sense of
impossibility which you suppose me to possess, applying not to
mathematics but to facts. Now, on this head, I am conscious of a
certain natural resistance in my mind to events unlike the order
of nature. But I resist many things which I know to be certain:
infinity of space, infinity of time, eternity past, eternity
future, the very idea of a God and another world. If I take mere
resistance, therefore, for denial, I am confined in every quarter
of my mind; I cannot carry out the very laws of reason, I am
placed under conditions which are obviously false. I conclude,
therefore, that I may resist and believe at the same time. If
Providence has implanted in me a certain expectation of uniformity
or likeness in nature, there is implied in that very expectations
resistance to an _un_like event, which resistance does not cease
even when upon evidence I _believe_ the event, but goes on as a
mechanical impression, though the reason counterbalances it.
Resistance, therefore, is not disbelief, unless by an act of my
own reason I _give_ it an absolute veto, which I do _not_ do. My
reason is clear upon the point, that there is no disagreement
between itself and a miracle as such." ... Nor is it dealing
artificially with ourselves to exert a force upon our minds
against the false certainty of the resisting imagination--such a
force as is necessary to enable reason to stand its ground, and
bend back again that spring of impression against the miraculous
which has illegally tightened itself into a law to the
understanding. Reason does not always prevail spontaneously and
without effort even in questions of belief; so far from it, that
the question of faith against reason may often be more properly
termed the question of reason against imagination. It does not
seldom require faith to believe reason, isolated as she may be
amid vast irrational influences, the weight of custom, the power
of association, the strength of passion, the _vis inertiae_ of
sense, the mere force of the uniformity of nature as a
spectacle--those influences which make up that power of the world
which Scripture always speaks of as the antagonist of faith.

The antecedent questions about miracles, before coming to the question of the actual evidence of any, are questions about which reason--reason disengaged and disembarrassed from the arbitrary veto of experience--has a right to give its verdict. Miracles presuppose the existence of God, and it is from reason alone that we get the idea of God; and the antecedent question then is, whether they are really compatible with the idea of God which reason gives us. Mr. Mozley remarks that the question of miracles is really "shut up in the enclosure of one assumption, that of the existence of God"; and that if we believe in a personal Deity with all power over nature, that belief brings along with it the possibility of His interrupting natural order for His own purposes. He also bids us observe that the idea of God which reason gives us is exposed to resistance of the same kind, and from precisely the same forces, in our mental constitution, as the idea of miracles. When reason has finished its overwhelming proof, still there is a step to be taken before the mind embraces the equally overwhelming conclusion--a step which calls for a distinct effort, which obliges the mind, satisfied as it may be, to beat back the counteracting pressure of what is visible and customary. After reason--not opposed to it or independent of it, but growing out of it, yet a distinct and further movement--comes faith. This is the case, not specially in religion, but in all subjects, where the conclusions of reason cannot be subjected to immediate verification. How often, as he observes, do we see persons "who, when they are in possession of the best arguments, and what is more, understand those arguments, are still shaken by almost any opposition, because they want the faculty to _trust_ an argument when they have got one."

Not, however, that the existence of a God is so clearly seen by
reason as to dispense with faith; not from any want of cogency in
the reasons, but from the amazing nature of the conclusion--that
it is so unparalleled, transcendent, and inconceivable a truth to
believe. It requires trust to commit oneself to the conclusion of
any reasoning, however strong, when such as this is the
conclusion: to put enough dependence and reliance upon any
premisses, to accept upon the strength of them so immense a
result. The issue of the argument is so astonishing that if we do
not tremble for its safety, it must be on account of a practical
principle in our minds which enables us to _confide_ and trust in
reasons, when they are really strong and good ones.... Faith, when
for convenience' sake we do distinguish it from reason, is not
distinguished from reason by the want of premisses, but by the
nature of the conclusions. Are our conclusions of the customary
type? Then custom imparts the full sense of security. Are they not
of the customary, but of a strange and unknown type? Then the
mechanical sense of security is wanting, and a certain trust is
required for reposing in them, which we call faith. But that which
draws these conclusions is in either case reason. We infer, we go
upon reasons, we use premisses in either case. The premisses of
faith are not so palpable as those of ordinary reason, but they
are as real and solid premisses all the same. Our faith in the
existence of a God and a future state is founded upon reasons as
much so as the belief in the commonest kind of facts. The reasons
are in themselves as strong, but, because the conclusions are
marvellous and are not seconded and backed by known parallels or
by experience, we do not so passively acquiesce in them; there is
an exertion of confidence in depending upon them and assuring
ourselves of their force. The inward energy of the reason has to
be evoked, when she can no longer lean upon the outward prop of
custom, but is thrown back upon herself and the intrinsic force of
her premisses. Which reason, not leaning upon custom, is faith;
she obtains the latter name when she depends entirely upon her own
insight into certain grounds, premisses, and evidences, and
follows it though it leads to transcendent, unparalleled, and
supernatural conclusions....

Indeed, does not our heart bear witness to the fact that to
believe in a God is an exercise of faith? That the universe was
produced by the will of a personal Being, that its infinite forces
are all the power of that one Being, its infinite relations the
perceptions of one Mind--would not this, if any truth could,
demand the application of the maxim, _Credo quia impossibile_?
Look at it only as a conception, and does the wildest fiction of
the imagination equal it? No premisses, no arguments therefore,
can so accommodate this truth to us as not to leave the belief in
it an act of mental ascent and trust, of faith as distinguished
from sight. _Divest_ reason of its trust, and the universe stops
at the impersonal stage--there is no God; and yet, if the first
step in religion is the greatest, how is it that the freest and
boldest speculator rarely declines it? How is it that the most
mysterious of all truths is a universally accepted one? What is it
which guards this truth? What is it which makes men shrink from
denying it? Why is atheism a crime? Is it that authority still
reigns upon one question, and that the voice of all ages is too
potent to be withstood?

But the progress of civilisation and thought has impressed this amazing idea on the general mind. It is no matter-of-course conception. The difficulties attending it were long insuperable to the deepest thought as well as to popular belief; and the triumph of the modern and Christian idea of God is the result not merely of the eager forwardness of faith, but of the patient and inquiring waiting of reason. And the question, whether we shall pronounce the miraculous to be impossible as such, is really the question whether we shall once more let this belief go.

The conception of a limited Deity then, i.e. a Being really
circumscribed in power, and not verbally only by a confinement to
necessary truth, is at variance with our fundamental idea of a
God; to depart from which is to retrograde from modern thought to
ancient, and to go from Christianity back again to Paganism. The
God of ancient religion was either not a personal Being or not an
omnipotent Being; the God of modern religion is both. For, indeed,
civilisation is not opposed to faith. The idea of the Supreme
Being in the mind of European society now is more primitive, more
childlike, more imaginative than the idea of the ancient Brahman
or Alexandrian philosopher; it is an idea which both of these
would have derided as the notion of a child--a _negotiosus Deus_,
who interposes in human affairs and answers prayers. So far from
the philosophical conception of the Deity having advanced with
civilisation, and the poetical receded, the philosophical has
receded and the poetical advanced. The God of whom it is said,
"Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them
is forgotten before God; but even the very hairs of your head are
numbered," is the object of modern worship. Nor, again, has
civilisation shown any signs of rejecting doctrine. Certain ages
are, indeed, called the ages of faith; but the bulk of society in
_this_ age believes that it lives under a supernatural
dispensation, and accepts truths which are not less supernatural,
though they have more proof, than some doctrines of the Middle
Ages; and, if so, _this_ is an age of faith. It is true that most
people do not live up to their faith now; neither did they in the
Middle Ages.

Has not modern philosophy, again, shown both more strength and
acuteness, and also more faith, than the ancient? I speak of the
main current. Those ancient thinkers who reduced the Supreme Being
to a negation, with all their subtlety, wanted strength, and
settled questions by an easier test than that of modern
philosophy. The merit of a modern metaphysician is, like that of a
good chemist or naturalist, accurate observation in noting the
facts of mind. Is there a contradiction in the idea of creation?
Is there a contradiction in the idea of a personal Infinite Being?
He examines his own mind, and if he does not see one, he passes
the idea. But the ancient speculators decided, without examination
of the true facts of mind, by a kind of philosophical fancy; and,
according to this loose criterion, the creation of matter and a
personal Infinite Being were impossibilities, for they mistook the
inconceivable for the impossible. And thus a stringent test has
admitted what a loose but capricious test discarded, and the true
notion of God has issued safe out of the crucible of modern
metaphysics. Reason has shown its strength, but then it has turned
that strength back upon itself; it has become its own critic; and
in becoming its own critic it has become its own check.

If the belief, then, in a personal Deity lies at the bottom of all
religious and virtuous practice, and if the removal of it would be
a descent for human nature, the withdrawal of its inspiration and
support, and a fall in its whole standard; the failure of the very
breath of moral life in the individual and in society; the decay
and degeneration of the very stock of mankind;--does a theory
which would withdraw miraculous action from the Deity interfere
with that belief? If it would, it is but prudent to count the cost
of that interference. Would a Deity deprived of miraculous action
possess action at all? And would a God who cannot act be a God? If
this would be the issue, such an issue is the very last which
religious men can desire. The question here has been all
throughout, not whether upon any ground, but whether upon a
religious ground and by religious believers, the miraculous as
such could be rejected. But to that there is but one answer--that
it is impossible in reason to separate religion from the
supernatural, and upon a religious basis to overthrow miracles....

And so we arrive again by another route at the old turning
question; for the question whether man is or is not the _vertex_
of nature, is the question whether there is or is not a God. Does
free agency stop at the human stage, or is there a sphere of
free-will above the human, in which, as in the human, not physical
law but spirit moves matter? And does that free-will penetrate the
universal frame invisibly to us, an omnipresent agent? If so,
every miracle in Scripture is as natural an event in the universe
as any chemical experiment in the physical world; if not, the seat
of the great Presiding Will is empty, and nature has no Personal
Head; man is her highest point; he finishes her ascent; though by
this very supremacy he falls, for under fate he is not free
himself; all nature either ascends to God, or descends to law. Is
there above the level of material causes a region of Providence?
If there is, nature there is moved by the Supreme Free Agent; and
of such a realm a miracle is the natural production.

Two rationales of miracles thus present themselves to our choice;
one more accommodating to the physical imagination and easy to
fall in with, on a level with custom, common conceptions, and
ordinary history, and requiring no ascent of the mind to embrace,
viz. the solution of miracles as the growth of fancy and legend;
the other requiring an ascent of the reason to embrace it, viz.
the rationale of the supremacy of a Personal Will in nature. The
one is the explanation to which we fall when we dare not trust our
reason, but mistake its inconceivable truths for sublime but
unsubstantial visions; the other is that to which we rise when we
dare trust our reason, and the evidences which it lays before us
of the existence of a Personal Supreme Being.

The belief in a personal God thus bringing with it the possibility of miracles, what reason then has to judge is whether it can accept miracles as such, or any set of miracles, as worthy of a reasonable conception of the Divine Nature, and whether it can be fairly said that such miracles have answered a purpose which approves itself to our reason. Testimony will always speak at a disadvantage till we are assured on these points. Into the subject of testimony Mr. Mozley enters only in a general way, though his remarks on the relation of testimony to facts of so exceptional a nature as miracles, and also on the distinct peculiarities of Christian evidence as contrasted with the evidence of all other classes of alleged miracles, are marked by a characteristic combination of acuteness, precision, and broad practical sobriety and moderation. He rebukes with quiet and temperate and yet resolute plainness of statement the misplaced ingenuity which, on different sides, to serve very different causes, has tried to confuse and perplex the claims of the great Christian miracles by comparisons which it is really mere wantonness to make with later ones; for, be they what they may, it is certain that the Gospel miracles, in nature, in evidence, and in purpose and result, are absolutely unique in the world, and have nothing like them. And though the book mainly confines itself to its proper subject, the antecedent question of credibility, some of the most striking remarks in it relate to the way in which the purpose of miracles is visible in those of Christianity, and has been served by them. A miracle is an instrument--an instrument without which revelation is impossible; and Mr. Mozley meets Spinoza's objection to the unmeaning isolation of a miracle by insisting on the distinction, which Spinoza failed to see, between a miracle simply as a wonder for its own sake, and as a means, deriving its use and its value simply from the end which it was to serve. He observes that all the stupendous "marvels of nature do not speak to us in that way in which one miracle does, because they do not tell us that we are not like themselves"; and he remarks on the "perverse determination of Spinoza to look at miracles in that aspect which does not belong to them, and not to look at them in that aspect which does."

He compares miracles with nature, and then says how wise is the
order of nature, how meaningless the violation of it; how
expressive of the Almighty Mind the one, what a concealment of it
the other! But no one pretends to say that a miracle competes with
nature, in physical purpose and effectiveness. That is not its
object. But a miracle, though it does not profess to compete with
nature upon its rival's own ground, has a ghostly force and import
which nature has not. If real, it is a token, more pointed and
direct than physical order can be, of another world, and of Moral
Being and Will in that world.

Thus, regarding miracles as means to fulfil a purpose, Mr. Mozley shows what has come of them. His lecture on "Miracles regarded in their Practical Result" is excelled by some of the others as examples of subtle and searching thought and well-balanced and compact argument; but it is a fine example of the way in which a familiar view can have fresh colour and force thrown into it by the way in which it is treated. He shows that it is impossible in fact to separate from the miracles in which it professed to begin, the greatest and deepest moral change which the world has ever known. This change was made not by miracles but by certain doctrines. The Epistle to the Romans surveyed the moral failure of the world; St. Paul looked on the chasm between knowledge and action, the "unbridged gulf, this incredible inability of man to do what was right, with profound wonder"; but in the face of this hopeless spectacle he dared to prophesy the moral elevation which we have witnessed, and the power to which he looked to bring it about was the Christian doctrines. St. Paul "takes what may be called the high view of human nature--i.e. what human nature is capable of when the proper motive and impulse is applied to it." He sees in Christian doctrine that strong force which is to break down "the _vis inertiae_ of man, to set human nature going, to touch the spring of man's heart"; and he compares with St. Paul's doctrines and hopefulness the doctrinal barrenness, the despair of Mohammedanism:--

If one had to express in a short compass the character of its
remarkable founder as a teacher, it would be that that great man
had no faith in human nature. There were two things which he
thought man could do and would do for the glory of God--transact
religious forms, and fight; and upon those two points he was
severe; but within the sphere of common practical life, where
man's great trial lies, his code exhibits the disdainful laxity of
a legislator who accommodates his rule to the recipient, and shows
his estimate of the recipient by the accommodation which he
adopts. Did we search history for a contrast, we could hardly
discover a deeper one than that between St. Paul's overflowing
standard of the capabilities of human nature and the oracular
cynicism of the great false Prophet. The writer of the Koran does,
indeed, if any discerner of hearts ever did, take the measure of
mankind; and his measure is the same that Satire has taken, only
expressed with the majestic brevity of one who had once lived in
the realm of Silence. "Man is weak," says Mahomet. And upon that
maxim he legislates.... The keenness of Mahomet's insight into
human nature, a wide knowledge of its temptations, persuasives,
influences under which it acts, a vast immense capacity of
forbearance for it, half grave half genial, half sympathy half
scorn, issue in a somewhat Horatian model, the character of the
man of experience who despairs of any change in man, and lays down
the maxim that we must take him as we find him. It was indeed his
supremacy in both faculties, the largeness of the passive nature
and the splendour of action, that constituted the secret of his
success. The breadth and flexibility of mind that could negotiate
with every motive of interest, passion, and pride in man is
surprising; there is boundless sagacity; what is wanting is hope,
a belief in the capabilities of human nature. There is no upward
flight in the teacher's idea of man. Instead of which, the notion
of the power of earth, and the impossibility of resisting it,
depresses his whole aim, and the shadow of the tomb falls upon the
work of the great false Prophet.

The idea of God is akin to the idea of man. "He knows us," says
Mahomet. God's _knowledge_, the vast _experience_, so to speak, of
the Divine Being, His infinite acquaintance with man's frailties
and temptations, is appealed to as the ground of confidence. "He
is the Wise, the Knowing One," "He is the Knowing, the Wise," "He
is easy to be reconciled." Thus is raised a notion of the Supreme
Being, which is rather an extension of the character of the
large-minded and sagacious man of the world than an extension of
man's virtue and holiness. He forgives because He knows too much
to be rigid, because sin universal ceases to be sin, and must be
given way to. Take a man who has had large opportunity of studying
mankind, and has come into contact with every form of human
weakness and corruption; such a man is indulgent as a simple
consequence of his knowledge, because nothing surprises him. So
the God of Mahomet forgives by reason of His vast knowledge.

In contrast with the fruit of this he observes that "the prophecy in the Epistle to the Romans has been fulfilled, and that doctrine has been historically at the bottom of a great change of moral practice in mankind." The key has been found to set man's moral nature in action, to check and reverse that course of universal failure manifest before; and this key is Christian doctrine. "A stimulus has been given to human nature which has extracted an amount of action from it which no Greek or Roman could have believed possible." It is inconceivable that but for such doctrine such results as have been seen in Christendon would have followed; and were it now taken away we cannot see anything else that would have the faintest expectation of taking its place. "Could we commit mankind to a moral Deism without trembling for the result?" Can the enthusiasm for the divinity of human nature stand the test of clear, unsparing observation? Would it not issue in such an estimate of human nature as Mahomet took? "A deification of humanity upon its own grounds, an exaltation which is all height and no depth, wants power because it wants truth. It is not founded upon the facts of human nature, and therefore issues in vain and vapid aspiration, and injures the solidity of man's character." As he says, "The Gospel doctrine of the Incarnation and its effects alone unites the sagacious view of human nature with the enthusiastic." And now what is the historical root and basis from which this one great moral revolution in the world's history, so successful, so fruitful, so inexhaustible, has started?

But if, as the source and inspiration of practice, doctrine has
been the foundation of a new state of the world, and of that
change which distinguishes the world under Christianity from the
world before it, miracles, as the proof of that doctrine, stand
before us in a very remarkable and peculiar light. Far from being
mere idle feats of power to gratify the love of the marvellous;
far even from being mere particular and occasional rescues from
the operation of general laws,--they come before us as means for
accomplishing the largest and most important practical object that
has ever been accomplished in the history of mankind. They lie at
the bottom of the difference of the modern from the ancient world;
so far, i.e., as that difference is moral. We see as a fact a
change in the moral condition of mankind, which marks ancient and
modern society as two different states of mankind. What has
produced this change, and elicited this new power of action?
Doctrine. And what was the proof of that doctrine, or essential to
the proof of it? Miracles. The greatness of the result thus throws
light upon the propriety of the means, and shows the fitting
object which was presented for the introduction of such means--the
fitting occasion which had arisen for the use of them; for,
indeed, no more weighty, grand, or solemn occasion can be
conceived than the foundation of such a new order of things in the
world. Extraordinary action of Divine power for such an end has
the benefit of a justifying object of incalculable weight; which
though not of itself, indeed, proof of the fact, comes with
striking force upon the mind in connection with the proper proof.
It is reasonable, it is inevitable, that we should be impressed by
such a result; for it shows that the miraculous system has been a
practical one; that it has been a step in the ladder of man's
ascent, the means of introducing those powerful truths which have
set his moral nature in action.

Of this work, remarkable in so many ways, we will add but one thing more. It is marked throughout with the most serious and earnest conviction, but it is without a single word, from first to last, of asperity or insinuation against opponents; and this, not from any deficiency of feeling as to the importance of the issue, but from a deliberate and resolutely maintained self-control, and from an overruling ever-present sense of the duty, on themes like these, of a more than judicial calmness.

IX

ECCE HOMO[11]

[11]
_Ecce Homo: A Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus Christ. Guardian_,
7th February 1866.

This is a dangerous book to review. The critic of it, if he is prudent, will feel that it is more than most books a touchstone of his own capacity, and that in giving his judgment upon it he cannot help giving his own measure and betraying what he is himself worth. All the unconscious guiding which a name, even if hitherto unknown, gives to opinion is wanting. The first aspect of the book is perplexing; closer examination does not clear up all the questions which present themselves; and many people, after they have read it through, will not feel quite certain what it means. Much of what is on the surface and much of what is inherent in the nature of the work will jar painfully on many minds; while others who begin to read it under one set of impressions may by the time they have got to the end complain of having been taken in. There can be no doubt on which side the book is; but it may be open to debate from which side it has come. The unknown champion who comes into the lists with barred vizor and no cognisance on his shield leaves it not long uncertain for which of the contending parties he appears; but his weapons and his manner of fighting are not the ordinary ones of the side which he takes; and there is a force in his arm, and a sweep in his stroke, which is not that of common men. The book is one which it is easy to take exception to, and perhaps still easier to praise at random; but the subject is put before us in so unusual a way, and one so removed from the ordinary grooves of thought, that in trying to form an adequate estimate of the work as a whole, a man feels as he does when he is in the presence of something utterly unfamiliar and unique, when common rules and inferences fail him, and in pronouncing upon which he must make something of a venture.