Chapter 9

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.