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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 priorithat 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.