Beyond the natural order; essays on prayer, miracles and the incarnation

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LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

PRINCETON, N. J.

Presented by

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BR 85 .B47 1908

Best, Nolan Rice, 1871-1930

Beyond the natural order

Beyond the Natural Order

Beyond the Natural Order

Essays on Prayer
Miracles and the
Incarnation ^

By /

RICE BE

EMtor of " The Interior "

NOLAN

ST

New York Chicago Toronto

Fleming H. Revell Company

London

AND

Edinburgh

Copyright, 1908, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue

Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street

TO THE WIFE

Who also sat beneath the evening
la??ip while these pages were written

If any reader asks what coordinating
thought lies beneath these discon7tected
essays^ suffer the author to propose this :
God^ if He is our Father^ must know
His children personally and deal with
thetn individually^ for hnpersonal and
mass relations never yet were fatherly.

CONTENTS

I. The Dynamics of Prayer

II. The Rationalities of Prayer

III. The Possibility of Miracle

IV. The Probability of Miracles

V. The Miracle of Jesus

II

35
69

93
13

I

The Dynamics of Prayer

THE DYNAMICS OF PRAYER

The prayer problem which is real to praying
men is not the problem that speculative philos-
ophers debate,— how the will of God may be
moved by the petitions of His creatures, — but the
profounder moral question why God must needs
be besought at all in behalf of any good. To
require a man to ask for his own blessings before
they are given, may seem, if nothing more, an
intelligible way of impressing a beneficiary with
his dependence ; but praying for one's self does
not fill up the Bible ideal of prayer. Prayer sub-
tends also a great arc of Scripture altruism. That
believers should " pray one for another " is the
letter of apostolic exhortation and the spirit of
the prayer-teaching of Christ. The duty of in-
tercession is emphasized in every New Testament
epistle ; the example of it abounds in the biog-
raphies of our Lord. On the prayers of his con-
verts Paul himself relied both to procure him " a
door for the word " and to assure him the grace
to " speak boldly as I ought to speak." He even
made the Christians of his time responsible for
the conduct of the pagan governments under
which they lived ; for only as they offered " sup-
13

14 Beyond the Natural Order

plications, prayers, intercessions, ... for
kings and all that are in high place," did the apos-
tle hope for them to obtain that justice and pub-
lic order under which they could enjoy " a tran-
quil and quiet hfe in all godliness and gravity."
And not even these large uses comprehended in
Paul's faith the utmost reach of prayer ; looking
beyond all his knowledge of his fellow mortals to
the very horizons of his imagination, he thought
it a reasonable and useful duty to pray " for all
men."

If prayer is to be to the Christian only an ex-
ercise by rote, its formal rituals may be spread to
any extent of words. But if the heart essays to
invoke all good on all mankind, there rise forth-
with distracting questions that enervate the spirit
of prayer. Why should I, an erring mortal, be
found beseeching the only good God to work
good in the world ? For what else does He sit
on the throne of creation ? Is not He infinitely
more concerned than I to exalt righteousness on
earth ? Will He have neglected aught that He
might have done for true rehgion's sake ; or will
my puny reminder recall Him to a slighted obli-
gation? Are not missions His own cause in
which He has dispatched His chosen agents to
the remotest lands, and has He now so forgotten
them that I should beg Him to prepare them " a
door for the word"? By what presumption
shall I dare to intercede for men and women far

The Dynamics of Prayer 15

godlier than I, who have already intrusted to the
Father for themselves their least and greatest
concerns ; will He wait to regard their pleas until
I interpose my unworthier petitions ?

In such perplexities I long strove to content
myself with the reflection that altruistic prayer is
certainly a cultivation of altruism, and may be
enjoined for that purpose. Without dispute it is
a good first step towards loving men to begin to
pray for them. And yet this is not sufficient to
satisfy. Any solely subjective explanation of
the worth of prayer gives me an unpleasant
sense of imputing dishonesty to God. That
certain very considerable reflex values accrue
from the exercise of prayer to him who prays, is
reasonably believable; but that wholly for the
sake of such reactions in a man's own life God
encourages a man to suppose that he is reaching
divine favour, is a proposition that ultimately
becomes impossible. It attributes to God an un-
candid makeshift. A kindergarten teacher, in
order to keep the children interested in their
calisthenics, may make believe with them that
they are brave knights with javelins ; but even
though we be children, prayer is not a game.
When I hear the voice of God inciting me to
pray that good may come into the world, I must
seriously conceive that somehow my prayer is
capable of bringing in the good. Otherwise I
shall not pray.

l6 Beyond the Natural Order

It was out of a verse in the epistle of James
that there first flashed on me a suggestion
towards the solving of this puzzle. The unique
rendering of our modern revisers held my
attention : " The supplication of a righteous man
availeth much in its working" (J as. 5 : i6). The
word ^' effectual " in the version long accepted
had been replaced by the last three words of the
revised sentence, — " in its working." Even my
slight acquaintance with the original could on
examination make out the necessity which com-
pelled the change. No mere proleptic adjective,
duplicating what the verb " avail " would express
without it, can show the lively and aggressive
force of the Greek participle involved. It would
endure an even stronger rendering : " A prayer
toihng earnestly availeth much." I trust I have
learned due caution about loading single words
of Scripture with emphasis ; the Bible writers no
more than other earnest men stopped to weigh
scruples and grams of philology. And yet a
diction so simple and straightforward as James
uses would scarcely employ a word so energetic
about prayer unless an idea of active energy stood
behind it. James conceived prayer, it would
seem, as a force at work. And why should I
deny the validity of his conception ? May it not
be true in literal fact that supplication is a deed ?
If a man turns his hand to do a kindly and right-
eous act in the world, I say he works for God.

The Dynamics of Prayer 17

If he strives to persuade his fellow men of the sal-
vation which is in Jesus Christ, I say he works for
God. Even if he thinks a great thought and tells
it for men to think after him, I say he works for
God. If he prays for men, shall I call him idle?

Perchance prayer is not after all a petition to
move the will of God ; perchance it is a power
put at the disposal of God wherewith to move
the will of men. Perhaps praying is achievement.
Physical science has its doctrine of the conserva-
tion of energy, — at this moment mayhap set in
some question of the universality assumed for it
until radium was known, but certainly not shaken
from any great area of its sway over nature.
Within all the range of average human observa-
tion it still remains indisputable that kinetic force
is nowhere obtained except at the expense of
force in some other form. The consumption of
energy is the only creation of energy. Work is
always a sort of combustion ; results prove the
eating up of fuel. Why may there not then be
in the spiritual world the analogue of this law ?
May it not be as impossible to move spiritual
means to spiritual effect as physical means to
physical effect without the process of wear which
liberates power? And may not prayer be the
combustion of a soul?

This suggestion I should not be satisfied to
have accepted simply as a graphic metaphor. It
has come to be to me something other than a

l8 Beyond the Natural Order

figure of rhetoric. Power is no more a metonomy
in the realm of mind — perhaps less— than in
the realm of matter. I am persuaded that the
human soul in the act of passionate willing and
wishing is a Hving dynamo. It is conscious with
itself of the forthputting of energy; it suffers
afterwards the weary reactions of toil. The man
who has longed mightily for great success or
great blessing knows that " virtue " has gone out
of him thereby. And if the thing wished for is
within the scope of human achievement, one may
recognize ocular and tangible demonstration that
the steadfast purpose of the mind is an achieving
power. There is a fiat force even in the will of
finite man. But when the wish of the soul
reaches upward to the things which human
hands are impotent to mold, shall all its travail
of desire, now ennobled by aspirations purer and
more unselfish than in lower spheres, lose efficacy
by very reason of its loftier spiritual exaltation ?
If a small longing is force to accomplish the pos-
sible, can a great longing to accomplish the im-
possible have no force at all ? Is there no law
of conservation in the spiritual world,— no econ-
omy to gather up the outraying spiritual energies
of men and employ them for work of a spiritual
sort ? Surely we may be bold to say that such a
law there ought to be, or else we must think that
the God who amid all the atomic excitements of
suns, planets, satellites and star-dust gathers up

The Dynamics of Prayer 19

the fragments of dynamics that nothing be lost,
has somehow betwixt the universe of the tem-
poral and the universe of the eternal forgotten
His divine frugality.

No, there is a conservation of spiritual energy,
and the law of it is the law of prayer. Prayer is
something better than presenting ourselves in the
audience chamber of God and suing for favour in
our own behalf or the behalf of those we love.
Prayer is summing up together our noblest and
ultimate desires, all that far excess of longings
which are beyond any capacity of ours to realize
save in dreams, and bringing all these hopes, so
futile in us, to the throne of the Omnipotent.
Intrusted with the sincere aspirations of His peo-
ple, God will waste, I dare believe, not so much
as one disheartened sigh. A man's first soul-felt
desires for " the profit of the many " go by hon-
est instinct into his work, wherein it is his high
honour to be " God's fellow worker." But a
good man's wish for better things in an improving
world very soon surpasses all his most zealous
toil, and prayer is a provision for banking his
overplus with God. And when God employs an
unselfish human wish as a part of the capital of
His providence and so fulfills it, a greater marvel
has come to pass, for God appears a Fellow
Worker with man. The Christian pities his
neighbour, and works the pity into a home-made,
hand-turned kindness. Ere long, with that

20 Beyond the Natural Order

benign discipline, his enlarging heart has begun
to pity the world — or some far-spread section of
it. But he cannot be kind to a whole world ; is
he then helpless? How shall his pity avail?
He shall pray, says his Lord, and his supplica-
tion shall " avail much in its working," — working
in large and distant places where the man could
not reach to work. What miracle of potentiality
then is this which is thus conferred on creatures
of clay ! If by prayer we can labour, neither
mountain nor chasm of difficulty shall be able to
hinder us. We are at the end of our own
devices ? Doubtless so. But we are not defeated.
It has simply come time to pray. With such an
enfranchisement for every hope, from what hope
— from what aspiration — shall " height or depth
or any other creature " forbid us ?

But if prayer is the going forth of energy into
the spiritual universe, we can scarcely escape
acknowledging that much of what we call prayer
ill deserves to be known by that name. Our
calm and urbane petitions, fiUing their modulated
place in our habitual worship, can hardly be sus-
pected of being ebullitions of vital force. Not
that I would seem to attribute virtue to vehe-
mence; we are not supplicating a deaf Baal.
But if not vehemence, certainly there must be
intensity in the voice of a heart that it is putting
itself forth for the world's sake in a passion of
Christly good will. At the gateway of prayer as

The Dynamics of Prayer 21

at every other gateway to the capital seat of the
kingdom " men of violence take it by force."
An overmastering wish does not march sedately
down the smooth-laid pavement of marble words ;
it runs and cries aloud. There are no hearts of
real prayer beating in our bosoms when we stand
and pray thus with ourselves : " It would gratify
us greatly, O Lord, if Thou wert pleased to bless
everybody in general very agreeably." Still as
of ancient times the ground of Peniel is beaten
hard with the feet of the wrestlers.

To be sure, there is a prayer of rest and
serenity, and it has its sweet and efficient place
in the experience of the devout. When we com-
mit to our loving and providential Father the
issues of our own welfare in the world, no stress
of soul is imposed upon us. " Your Father
knoweth what things ye have need of before ye
ask Him." Just the gentle truthful word which
tells Him what we feel of our want of Him and
how we throw ourselves upon Him for all our
necessities, — the quiet whisper which speaks in
His ear our confidence that according to His
promise He will not forget, — these outbreathings
of the soul at peace with God are by right un-
ruffled with any stir of the intense, active emo-
tions. In every case of his own fortunes " it is
good that a man should hope and quietly wait for
the salvation of Jehovah." Neither for bread
nor for garments do the trustful need to beg ;

22 Beyond the Natural Order

only to say we are looking to the Father for them
is enough. But where sin is involved — either our
own sin or others' — and stands in the way to be
conquered, prayer passes from a breath of calm
communion to an implement of pitched warfare,
and we must use it for blows struck heavy and
hard. Of the devils in ourselves and the devils
in other men, it is ever true as the Master said :
*' This kind can come out by nothing save by
prayer."

A more excitable generation going before our
own would not believe that men and women
could be converted to the way of our Lord Jesus
Christ, except as with weeping and wailing they
came through some strenuous agony of grief at
the *^ mourners' bench." These forefathers were
wrong, of course, psychologically and religiously,
in supposing that the spiritual revolution of a life
can be effected by the physical simulation of any
process or supposed process of the inner nature.
Yet none the less they had sight of a great soul
fact far beyond them, and their error was greatly
less than ours if we imagine, on the opposite
hand, that a few placid reflections on the beauty
of goodness can set a man free from his habits
of sin. The exorcism of the demons is by prayer
that strains the sinews of the soul, — not by some
languorous sentimental expectation that God will
be sorry for us, seeing that we are not near as
good as we should really love to be. When head

The Dynamics of Prayer 23

and heart, the whole man is in fiery revolt against
the tyranny of evil, and life has become one ter-
rific outcry for deliverance from " the body of
this death," then the victory is at hand. But the
highway that leads away from our sins towards
God is forever a path of battle, — a path to be
traversed only with prayer at every step — all
prayers of might and main. And the battling
prayer availeth much.

It is not different when we undertake to pray
our friends out of the same bondage. We may
from some sanctimonious sense of duty keep lists
of persons within our acquaintance who are not
yet Christians, and day by day may name them
over, adding punctiliously with each, " O God,
please save this man," but there is not energy
enough in the whole of such petitions to save
one of them. We have small ground to take any
comfort of conscience out of the custom, seeing
what meagre results come from it. But when
some day the horror of our neighbour's estrange-
ment from God, the despair of his rebellion
against the divine rule, the desperation of his
helplessness in the teeth of sin, all rush upon us
to grip our own throats like the assault of furies
in the dark, then we begin to pray. Then we
ourselves feel the pall fall on our own lives. Then
the agonized soul of sympathy nerves itself to
storm, if need be, the uppermost, innermost cita-
del of heaven ere it yields its vicarious pleading

24 Beyond the Natural Order

for the sinner's rescue. And then the fallen be-
gin to be saved. The mighty prayer of love
itself becomes dynamic; it lifts men from the
pit. Its very earnestness is intrinsic force, and
God makes that force efficient. Men, planning
for revivals, ask money and organization for
bringing their plans to pass ; God asks only
prayers. He can have a revival anywhere if He
may but have enough prayers of the right kind
to work with.

So with all manifold forms of Christian enter-
prise,— whether the measures and methods of the
local church or the cosmopolite mission agencies
of the church general, — prayer is the secret of
motive power for all ahke. The only successful
type of Christian enginery which God has at work
anywhere, is prayer-burning. When that fuel
fails, the machine stands still. No amount or
character of what we call Christian work will suf-
fice as a substitute. Work is indeed of itself an
obligation. The man who knows what to do
and how to do, ought to put himself with great
force into direct, sinewy toil. But not with all
force ; a part of his vital energy he ought always
to save for prayer. When from our days of
feverish, anxious effort we come home at night
too tired to pray, we have doubtless defrauded
God of a part of His resources on which He de-
pended more than upon our active deeds. Our
Father appears to have peculiar need of our

The Dynamics of Prayer 25

prayers for His greater purposes in the world.
There are some objects which manifestly He
cannot accompHsh with only our labour in hand.
Our planning and proclaiming and persuading do
not reach very far in the kingdom. But our
prayers, rising beyond what we see and handle to
all that we long for and dream of, sweep in their
currents of force round the outer horizons of man-
kind, and in God's infinite mechanics may serve
for immeasurable results. Busy here and there,
preoccupied with tangible duties, we may very
possibly be doing only the lesser things, while
meanwhile those who pray affect races and ages.
Prayer, one can well imagine, may be espe-
cially useful for those atmospheric influences
which change the inclinations of communities.
The missionary in a foreign land, may labour long
and with painful diHgence to gain the heed of his
pagan neighbours, and win scarcely casual inter-
est from a very few. Converts he probably has
none, until behind the scattered impressions
which he has been able to make on one and an-
other by personal touch, there rises mysteriously
a background of favourable disposition amidst
the populace at large. A better air prevails ; the
missionary can speak with more freedom, more
joy and more hope, and ears that listen begin to
reveal hearts that receive. He realizes the subtle
aid which buoyed up the apostles in Jerusalem—
" favour with all the people." The worker can-

26 Beyond the Natural Order

not explain what has come to pass ; he knows
it is no new power which he has acquired ; he can
only give glory to God for providential aid. But
no doubt if we could trace the whole chain of
cause and effect, we should perceive that it is not
a blessing wrought without means. Back in the
homeland certain devout souls, remembering the
missionary, have perchance wished for him a
readier acceptance among the people to whom he
had gone out, and that strong, selfless wish — that
far-travelling missionary wish — they have told to
God. It is not for mortals to surmise how
divinely glad the Father must be, knowing well
the discouragements of that servant of His, to
grasp up those prayers and guide them hastily to
the missionary's succour. And when enough
such loving petitions have followed and lighted on
the place, all the air around will grow warm and
genial with the lively sympathy of hearts that
care — and pray. In such tropic spiritual climate
the vine which the Lord's hand has planted can-
not fail to flourish.

Even more obvious is the connection between
prayer and its outgoing spiritual effects in the
home congregation. Many a disheartened minis-
ter has failed with woeful monotony in one attempt
after another to win the faithless and unbelieving
of his town. At every turn adamant barriers de-
fied his most assiduous effort. Men with whom
he argued and men with whom he pleaded and

The Dynamics of Prayer 27

men with whom he wept aUke resisted his minis-
try. Then suddenly there came a change. His
fellow citizens turned tacitly to acknowledge the
importance of the eternal things ; sneers ceased,
and sinners erstwhile indifferent were moved to
consider their ways ; some ere long yielded their
lives to the Saviour. Here too the minister of
God's message dared not account anything from
himself to have worked the difference. But
when he sought in quiet places for the clue, he
has discovered somebody praying. And the
prayers had wrought the revolution. God above
was never uninterested in that town nor ever
careless of the preacher's unrewarded struggles.
But nobody had afforded the overlooking Lord
enough prayers to use in that town, and it had
never been sanitated of its sinful miasmas.
Prayers rising from hearts that love God are like
the salt airs that rise from the sea ; they carry
healing on their wings wherever the breath of
heaven blows them. Abundance of prayer is a
charter of health to any community.

If missionaries in heathen lands cannot suc-
ceed unprayed for, what treason to our brother-
hood with them is it for us to forget and leave
them unsupplied with this essential resource!
If the minister in the pulpit of the home church
must be surrounded with prayers before he is
strong, what cruel faithlessness to let him stand
in his place unshielded' and unsupported ! For

28 Beyond the Natural Order

the smallness of our material gifts to the great
causes of good we may excuse ourselves by our
poverty of purse, but how shall we excuse our-
selves for our penuriousness of prayer. In
wealth of praying we might any one of us be
millionaire helpers, — if we but seriously put our-
selves to the trouble of it. Grant that this is the
true working wealth of evangelization far and
near, and what a reversal of all our common
standards of importance at once ensues ! No
longer is the indispensable strength of the con-
gregation in the dignified elder who discourses
of profound theology in the week-night prayer-
meeting, nor in the adroit trustee who contrives
to rescue the annual balance sheet from deficit,
nor yet in the eloquent pastor whose sermons are
the praise of his community. But the person on
whom the success of the church most radically
depends is that member who has learned to pray,
— not as a dress-parade evolution in open meet-
ing but with the inevitable outflowing of a soul
that for great love of God and people cannot
contain itself. Most likely it is some aged saint,
long educated in the spirit and long practiced in
the mystic skill of prayer, who on the records of
heaven is written down as the most important
member of such and such a church. Obscure on
earth, the giants of secret, heart prayer are
known of God, His greatest Heutenants no doubt
in the conquests of His universal kingdom.

The Dynamics of Prayer 29

The first objection to this teaching may readily
be anticipated. It will be said that the doctrine
makes the Creator a dependent subordinate of
His creatures, bound to wait their interest and
will for permission to accomplish His intents, —
even beholden for resources of power to the
finite works of His own omnipotence. It is
bootless to deny the contradiction, but the con-
tradiction is no disproof while as great a paradox
exists, unexplained but undeniable, in the mani-
fest fact that God's plans linger likewise for men's
labour. It is no less mystery that God should
abide slow and reluctant human service than that
He should abide the unfervent sluggishness of
human prayers. Yet the centuries are witness
that He will have no other method of bringing
forward His kingdom on earth than the en-
deavours of His earthly servants. The evangel
which He might have summoned quick angels
to preach in every land ere the morning of His
command had faded to its night, still remains in
many corners of the inhabited earth an unknown
story, because the Author of the message com-
mits its proclamation only to an unresponsive and
heavy-footed race. A thousand evident purposes
of providence remain through long years unful-
filled because no man cares enough to lend his toil
to these divine objects. A sovereign God whose
unaided word might in the twinkling of an eye
miraculously perform the last and greatest of

30 Beyond the Natural Order

'* His bright designs," denies Himself the hasty
satisfaction rather than take back to Himself an
atom of the work He has laid upon men to do.
And it is only another Hke marvel of inscrutable
patience if He has also bound Himself to tarry
from His purposed consummations until the
men who are working have also prayed. The
going forth of the missionary is no more an out-
putting of the strength of the church than is the
going forth of a fervent prayer, and the one is
no more needful than the other.

And in a thorough analysis it will clearly ap-
pear that to teach thus is not to teach that any
one has limited God, nor yet to attribute power
to another than He. The very essence of the
principle of the conservation of energy in the
science of physics consists in its ultimate
hypothesis — that all power which is manifested
in mundane phenomena is derived more or less
directly from the sun. The reason that there is
a certain sum of force in the world neither in-
creased nor diminished in its constant mutations,
lies alone in the fact that the great solar centre
is the world's only producer of energy ; energy
can come from nowhere else. So too this
spiritual parallel implies the same conception, —
that there is but one Source of the power of the
human soul. Far beyond the political sense in
which Paul used the expression, it is true in a
great cosmic sense : " There is no power but of

The Dynamics of Prayer 31

God." The Creator does not abdicate His own
omnipotence when He invests mankind with
prerogatives of directing certain forces that
radiate from Him ; He rather sets up new seats,
new viceroy alties, of His sovereignty. Men rule
in His name and stead when they handle the
lightnings by His laws ; they do no more when
they bring things to pass by the agency of
prayer. And if the Sovereign endures laxness
in those who fail of the duty which He commits
to their charge, it is but another phase in that
strange abstinence from His own liberty by which
God makes any human liberty possible. This
human Hberty may indeed stop God's work;
that half of the reflection is staggering ; but the
other half thereof should stir a true man's soul
like a challenge to heroism and mighty zeal, for
it is also man's possibility to make God, by God's
power, triumphant.

Explicit qualifications in every paragraph have
been designed to avert the suspicion that some
new theory of occult telepathy is being here in-
culcated. It is not meant to affirm — indeed, it
is explicitly meant to deny— that prayer effects
anything by direct impact. Prayer is not a
vagrant incantation wandering abroad among
men to lay a spell where it may chance to rest.
True prayer is directed to God, and to God it
goes. And whatsoever it accomplishes is ac-
complished because God "has taken hold of it and

32 Beyond the Natural Order

guided it to its destined result. The Father is a
Master- Worker with prayers ; He knows how to
get the most out of them — how to turn them to
the best advantage. And this is why we so often
do more by praying than by working. Our
endeavours, no matter how earnest, we often
blunder with, not knowing in what place to put
them nor how to fit them in the place they
should go. But our prayers go out of our man-
agement, and God neither experiments nor
blunders when He applies their force direct to
the point of first need.

To ask why God has staked the progress of
good among men on the precarious contingency
of our faithfulness in either toil or prayer, is
pushing far into the arcana of the divine dis-
cretions. We could accept the fact, if need be,
without even guessing the reason, and our
nearest explanation will hardly be more than a
guess. But doubtless the use of responsibility
in developing human character lies somewhere
close to the centre of the secret. To say this is
not to hark back to a subjective accounting for
the power of prayer. A method of discipline
is very different from a mere inspiring suggestion
to the mind. If God employs prayer to exercise
character, it is not a phantom appearance of in-
strumental good on which he relies, but an
actual tool of actual service. Had the Father in
heaven provided for some means of direct

The Dynamics of Prayer 33

heavenly appeal to human souls one by one,
and so saved them with no brotherly interven-
tion of other men, it is grievous to imagine what
a selfish and slothful company of the pious would
compose His church on earth. Taken as the
condition stands, with warning on every page
of Scripture and in every day of experience that
our neighbours' spiritual and temporal welfare
depends on our fidelity of Christian service to
them, the church yet attains no great distinction
for unselfishness. What would be its heartless
state if no sense of responsibility enlivened its
sympathy and care for the sin-fraught life by
which it is surrounded ! And if the commission
to heal the wounds of the world and to preach
in the world the glad tidings of the kingdom
serves at all to rescue Christian hearts from the
black stigma of unbrotherly isolation, much more
should the commission to pray for the world,
if seriously received, move them to a large and
divine love of their race. For we may render
the ministry of our hands only to a very few who
live hard by our own dweUing places, and very
parochial interests may go with exceeding zeal,
when immediate and personal labour is that zeal's
sole expression. But God is not parochial, and
He will not have us abide at home in our hearts.
He has other sheep beyond the seas whom He
would fold in our sympathies. Therefore He sets
us a task of prayer, and prayer circles the world,

34 Beyond the Natural Order

and coming home again brings back our unseen
brothers from far chmes and rude nations. Our
prayers are, please God, a blessing to them, but
not to them alone, for " God hath provided some
better thing concerning us that apart from us
they should not be made perfect."

Of all plights into which men can fall this is
the saddest — to have nobody to pray for them.
Well-mothered boys well prayed for have a vast
advantage in life, but what wonder is it that un-
prayed-for boys go far astray. And what a
divine service to humanity childless and lone
women may render if they will but take into
their hearts the motherless boys to pray for
them. And the weary shut-ins who so often call
themselves useless and only a burden, — they
have so much leisure to pray; let them re-
member with sacrifices of loving request the
many for whom no one else ever thinks to
pray. With such intercessions those who have
so learned Christ may save untold hosts from
the awful despair of believing that no man cares
for their souls.

A godly minister whom in high admiration
I venture to call friend has written of intercessory
prayer as " A Mighty Means of Usefulness,"
And such most truly it is,

II

The Rationalities of Prayer

II

THE RATIONALITIES OF PRAYER

Though the question of the possibility of
divine answer to human petition, which was de-
liberately passed by at the outset of the fore-
going chapter, is, as was there insisted, seldom a
disturbing problem to a man of vital prayer ex-
perience, it is one of the earliest riddles advanced
by the disputatious agnostic, and is doubtless
an actual stumbling-block to some who crave
the consolations of the faith from which this
difficulty seems to debar them. There are, there-
fore, times when by one circumstance or another
the Christian is challenged to give a reason for
the confidence with which he offers his suppli-
cations, and as forearming him against that de-
mand, some inquiry is justified into the ration-
ality of trusting a " prayer-hearing and prayer-
answering God." The discussion is not a scrip-
tural one; what the Scriptures teach is plain
enough ; the question here is whether that
teaching is agreeable to reason.

Those who deny fortify themselves with three
characters of argument. It is alleged, in the first
place, that the ** reign of law " in the universe ex-
37

38 Beyond the Natural Order

eludes the vacillation of a God who could be
swayed by " whims," either His own or those of
His favourites among men. Others, perhaps more
devout, stand upon the insistence that an om-
niscient and all-benevolent Father has beforehand
chosen what is best for each of His creatures,
and if prayers might induce Him to change, it
would necessarily be a change to some worse
thing. On a third part it is contended that God's
plans are comprehensive of the whole of man-
kind, insuring the highest good of the race
en masse, but that it is idle to imagine that among
the innumerable multitudes of men He can give
specific heed to desires of individuals. Of these
objections, the first is academic, the second me-
chanical, the third unimaginative.

The antagonism between law and prayer is
created by exaggerating both ideas. The mod-
ern pride over discovering coordination in nature
has made of modern thinkers a cult of law-wor-
shippers. To hear their sweeping syllogisms
one would imagine that a new race of divinities,
by family name called the laws of nature, had
established an absolute autocracy over the uni-
verse, in the grasp of which even the Creator
Himself is a rule-ridden slave. Such a mode of
speech either voices a wholly material pantheism,
or else evinces indiscrimination of the various
manners of God's action, which are summed up
under this term — the laws of nature. Undoubt-

The Rationalities of Prayer 39

edly many of the great facts which mankind
sees in creation the same from age to age are
structural and in that sense necessary ; they must
be as they are or the universe would be some-
thing other than it is. Gravitation may fairly be
said to be inevitable; human thought at least
could not imagine its absence or its negative in
a system of physical existence. So with the laws
of morals ; right is right and wrong is wrong, as
immutably to God as to man, and the question
of the patriarch, " Shall not the Judge of all the
earth do right ? " represents to the modern heart
as to the ancient the primal necessity apart from
which there may be no theistic faith. It may
raise an insurmountable paradox to the reason to
speak of God as obliged to do anything, but the
instinct of conscience declares that He is obliged
to be just, true and benevolent, and will not en-
dure to have it otherwise. There can be no
variation in the morality of God.

To this extent God's laws are changeless.
But prayer does not come into conflict with
either of these categories in His statutes. No
man prays God to suspend the interplanetary at-
tractions or to alter the colour composition of
light. And no man wittingly desires God to do
an evil thing. The requests of intelligent prayer
are requests for what the suppliant at least be-
lieves to be within the lawful right of God to
grant, without infringing on any of the estab-

40 Beyond the Natural Order

lished principles of natural order or working any
form of injustice to any. God's orator — to hark
back to the old meaning of the word which now
sounds so quaint — may be far astray in judgment
as to the possibility of the thing he asks for ; it
may involve impossible consequences, of which
his hmited human sight has afforded him no sus-
picion ; but his error of estimation in that par-
ticular does not destroy the general validity of
his trust. He is right in refusing to believe that
red tape of eternal precedents ties down the
Governor of creation from doing yet and now
what He will with His own. The heavenly
Father is not a petrified Spirit whose choice and
volition were exhausted in deciding on pre-crea-
tion decrees aeons ago. He saves to Himself, and
day by day enjoys, that liberty which energetic
men count the first condition of success — the
liberty to meet with new means the demands of
new circumstances. And to God the new cir-
cumstances may very likely be new prayers for
new blessings, — for God knows too well what
prayers mean to treat them as negligible factors
of any situation. Those laws of nature or the
spiritual realm which are simply men's notations
of God's habits, are not of any binding moral
force upon Him ; He determined the habit, and
He may desert it, when He will, for another habit
equally righteous. It is mere play upon words
to call it law-breaking for Him thus to change His

The Rationalities of Prayer 41

method. And the beneficiaries of such changes
may rightly be those who pray.

The relation of God to law in His universe
may be illustrated in a homely analogy by a
merchant's conduct of his business. Entering
upon any commercial enterprise, the manager of
affairs draws up a body of regulations for the
conduct of trade. Some of these rules are de-
termined by moral considerations, some by ac-
cepted principles of sound merchandising and
finance, some by respect to local expediencies,
and some by the mere need of having a uniform
practice throughout the establishment. The
chief, for discipline's sake, must require all his
subordinates to obey all the regulations without
discrimination, but he would be exceedingly
fatuous if he left no freedom of exceptions to
himself. To certain of his own laws he is indeed
as firmly bound as the least of his employees ;
he cannot honourably suspend the rule of honesty
nor the rule of courtesy, — they have the moral
sanction which no shifts of condition may alter.
He will- have no desire to suspend the rule
prescribing dignified advertising measures, for
these are involved in the fixed character of the
business. But the usual time of paying wages
may in holiday week be advanced for a day or
two or three in order to supply employees the
sooner with their Christmas money, because this
is no matter of principle but a rule of con-

42 Beyond the Natural Order

venience, and for convenience or kindness may
be altered. So, for another instance, the require-
ment of cash payment may be waived when a
charitable institution with an empty treasury
needs emergency supplies. A manager who
cannot make exceptions is to be pitied; he
needs a steel heart. There is nothing more
cruel than an inflexible rule; somewhere it is
sure to run over human rights and the instincts
of brotherhood like a juggernaut. No kind man
would ride such an uncontrollable machine.

Nor will God. It may seem gross to lay such
a commonplace illustration parallel to the divine
management of the world, but its plainness of
meaning will atone for that. God, like a stable
business man, has His fundamental rules which
He will not, cannot, on any consideration, set
aside. These are the rules which insure the
continuance of nature and morality. But He
has too His incidental rules, His nominal customs,
which prevail in the absence of reason for some-
thing other, but from which He may at choice
make exception, — as men would say, " to favour
a friend." And the foundations are not unsettled
when in such indulgent preference He answers a
personal prayer with a personal blessing. If for
his own prayer and the prayer of his friends
some sick Hezekiah is reprieved from immediate
death and granted fifteen years of added life,
nothing has happened except a gracious kind-

The Rationalities of Prayer 43

ness to one family, of which the consequences
are not at conflict with any larger purposes of
God. It is idle rhetoric to insist that such a
change from what would otherwise have been,
makes it impossible to suppose that God cherishes
fixed plans of action. Fifteen years of Hezekiah,
living or dead, do not deflect history. Or if in
case of straits a hard-working farmer prays for
prosperity, it does not require that the science of
meteorology must be undone in order to afford
him a timely rain on a well tilled field. Indeed
he can get that sort of answer only by means of
the laws of meteorology specially brought to bear
on his need, — which is no more lawless than to
take the rule of three out from among the set
" examples " in the arithmetic text-book and
apply it to a problem arisen in the actual course
of trade.

It is impossible, as it is needless, to go on to
illustrate this point by all the different kinds of
petition that men are prompted to offer. The
purpose is by meagre allusion simply to indicate
how wide the area in which there are at least no
structural reasons why God should not answer
prayer. It is granted that prayer cannot prevent
the sun from rising in the morning, for the sun
always does rise, and the presumption is that it
must needs do so. But it is not granted that the
prayer of sailors for the abatement of a storm
is by necessity futile, for storms do abate, and if

44 Beyond the Natural Order

God lives at all in His world, He must know a
way of abating storms and must have a discre-
tion in using that means. The centenarian may
not pray to Hve to be two hundred years old, for
there is an evident law against the extension of
human life to two centuries. But the growing
lad may pray to reach manhood, for boys do
come to manhood. Where it is reasonable to
wish, it is reasonable to pray, for a prayer is
simply a wish based on theistic faith. There is
nothing but empty bombast of words in declar-
ing that infrangible law governs every deed of
God ; neither our experience of the variety of
nature nor our experience of the liberty of per-
sonality in ourselves justifies such generalization.
The ideal of pervasive law in the universe is a
lofty thought, an enlargement for the mind it
enters. But its nobility is forfeited when it
grows so overbold as to try to put divinity in
shackles. God's universe is orderly but not
order-hampered. The broad current of His
plans runs in a channel, not in a groove. All
is lawful but not all is law.

It is still further beside the mark to charge God
with whims if He shall choose to regard the peti-
tions of men and consent to some of them. It is
not represented on the part of any who believe
in prayer that prayer is a compulsion on God.
His Bible promises to answer those who call upon
Him, in no wise bear the construction of con-

The Rationalities of Prayer 45

tracts to do all that may be asked. Prayer is not
a secret spring by which every comer advised in
the sleight of it may force open the treasure-box
of creation and help himself as he will. Nor yet
is it a requisition to be filled on sight according
to the terms of demand. It is instead a humble
petition presented to a just and discriminating
Judge, who grants only so much as His own
wisdom approves as of benefit to the petitioner.
The will of the supplicant has absolutely no con-
straining influence on the will of the great An-
swerer,— as was submissively recognized by the
best Praying Man who ever lived, the one whom
we should have thought entitled to require just
what He desired. And on God's part there is
not the least suggestion that " whim " enters into
the prayer interchange ; His responses are not
arbitrary but undoubtedly upon principle that
looks on the one hand to the large rights of hu-
manity, and on the other to the ultimate welfare
of the individual soul that entreats favour. It
may well be believed that in heaven the privilege
of prayer is considered a critically important
franchise for humanity, and as such is guarded
from abuse with the most jealous care. Even
good men must be watched lest they employ
their access to the audience chamber of the King
for the advance of selfish objects. Perhaps no
prayer is ever granted for a purely personal bless-
ing. Health is granted to a man, not so much

46 Beyond the Natural Order

for his own sake, but because he may, if he will,
use his strength to make others happy. A man
is given a happy home, not to enjoy in his own
life merely, but because a happy home can be
made the centre of some of the truest outgoing
social influences. So praying for one's self is
not a purely individualistic exercise when we get
into the final analysis of it ; it chimes in with the
music of the farthest spheres.

The argument that the Father has already
chosen the best course of hfe for every creature
of His, and that therefore a grant of requests
offered in prayer is not only impossible, but
would involve, if possible, a descent from God's
ideal to some worse thing preferred only by hu-
man ignorance, is likewise a fallacy produced by
overstretching truth. It is a precious and beauti-
ful faith that, as Dr. Bushnell delighted to preach,
" every man's life is a plan of God." We are not
cast into this world at random for fit or misfit, as
may chance. By divine forethought each soul is
undoubtedly adapted to occupy a certain exact
place in the organization of history, and while for
sake of sacred human liberty the soul is permitted
choice whether it will or will not discharge its
destiny, yet the constraint of adaptations and en-
vironments is so strong that most men are proba-
bly to be found in approximately the places in
the world for which God intended them. Never-
theless as the prevalence of law fixing the main

The Rationalities of Prayer 47

course of nature does not imply the fixing of
every natural incident, so the marking out of a
great ultimate usefulness for any one life does not
needfully include at the same time the determina-
tion of all the intermediate experiences through
which the life is to realize its appointment. It
may be that A has been set apart in the counsels
of providence to accomplish some great social
reform, but until A has proved what manner of
man he is, it may yet remain an open question
whether he is to achieve his great deed in sore
personal chastisement after tedious delay, or with
joy and speedy triumphing. If A is headstrong
and self-reliant, it may be impossible to grant his
prayers for quick success; it might ruin him.
But if he is a humble man, trusting solely in the
aid of God, and his prayers attest his character,
God may be able to meet his petitions with vic-
tory ere they have fairly risen from the warm
altar of his lips.

To say that for a praying man God can do no
more than He could do — and would do — by gen-
eral benevolence for the same man if he did not
pray, ignores the merit in the act and attitude of
prayer. Any discreet earthly father should be
able to understand how it is that more can be
done in the home for the child who modestly and
submissively asks kindnesses and is grateful on
receiving them, than for either the child who is
indifferent to loving gifts or the child who im-

48 Beyond the Natural Order

pudently demands favours as his pampered right.
So what God may do for men depends very
greatly on how men treat God. His will to be
kind is the same towards each of His children ;
His chance to be kind is in different cases very
different. Blessings at best are dangerous things,
and those which are unsolicited are most apt to
be to the hurt of the recipient. It is a frequent
theme of the Bible writers — and where else are
there so shrewd analyzers of human nature ? — how
Jeshurun kicks when he has waxed fat. When
the ground of a certain rich man brought forth
plentifully, so that he had to pull down his barns
and build greater, the bounty of the earth evoked
no thought of God ; it was a Voice wholly strange
to him which that night called his soul. If there-
fore the common provisions of nature — the kind-
nesses of simple prosperity and health — exalt the
proud hearts of men to self-sufficiency and re-
bellion, God would scarcely dare to confer on a
prayerless man the choicest mercies that his
yearnings of love could devise.

But if the man should somehow be brought to
turn his mind back to heaven and pray, how
gladly must the Father see the conversion of
heart which makes possible a larger indulgence
of His kind desires towards another child. For
by coming with a petition the man confesses
himself a dependent, abdicating his vain preten-
sions to win his own place and provide his own

The Rationalities of Prayer 49

way in life. Now if he receives special and un-
usual mercy, he may perhaps be trusted not to
" glory as if he had not received it." Now the
answer of his best hopes may not plume him
with such eclat that he shall forget the depend-
ence which his prayer confessed. Now he may
remember to be grateful ; now he may not, in
proud satisfaction, tear himself from the leader-
ship of the Hand that has blessed him. With a
praying man there is hope that great mercy may
not be ruinous. But towards the many, irrev-
erent and contumacious, God must restrain Him-
self, lest by giving to the utmost of His divine
impulses He might further harden the hearts of
the thankless, as children are spoiled by the un-
reckoning indulgence of too complacent parents.
Yet all that we know of the Father above per-
suades us that beyond all else He rejoices in be-
ing good — munificently good — to men. Is it
then of sound reason to believe that by some
predestinarian Hmitation He would tie Himself
down to do no more for the son come humbly
home to the Father's house than He may venture
to do for the same son living the prodigal life in
a far land? He would surely leave Himself the
right to enrich the soul that bows and worships
with at least all those mercies that He longed to
give, but dared not, while in vainglory of unre-
pentant sin the soul would have nothing of Him.
It would be an unjust heaven which could do

50 Beyond the Natural Order

nothing more for the man of prayer than for the
man who will not even draw near to the door of
supplication to read the promise of its open por-
tals.

God then will show mercy to the prayerless,
but to the praying He will, as He can, show
greater mercy. In this case the alternative of
good is not evil but greater good. The sup-
pliant is not complaining of the portion allotted
him in the general ordering of human affairs ;
but he puts himself in willing personal relation
to do still larger things for God, and if it be the
divine will, to enjoy higher things from God. It
is true enough that in prayer — so short is our
earth-seeing sight — we often ask for things that
are ill for us, and no real blessings at all. But
this observation only requires it to be said again
that there is no contract basis for prayer ; God is
free to refuse. And whoever prays in any wis-
dom at all implies with whatever he asks the
qualifying petition that God may consider his de-
sires and allow only what in the long account
may be for his welfare. Prayer is only danger-
ous when pressed headstrongly ; of such prayer
the sufficient punishment may be its grant in
full, bringing that sombre irony of prosperous
fortune depicted by the psalmist :

" He gave them their request,
But sent leanness into their soul."

The Rationalities of Prayer 51

But from his spiritual tragedy — poverty in
wealth — it requires only a simple and submissive
heart to save a devout man. To ask the best
the heart prompts ; to receive the kindest God
prepares, — this is the noble commerce of prayer.
In these paragraphs I am perfectly aware that
" I speak after the manner of men." Back of
this whole discussion remains unanswered the
logical question : How may anything that God
foreknows be treated as contingent? May we
speak of His doing better or worse for a man ac-
cording to whether or not the man prays ? Does
not God well know what He will do, and does
not that knowledge shut up the man to the atti-
tude which is antecedent to God's foreseen
course ? In answer I can only appeal once more
to the native sense of personality which abides
in every man's mind till excess of logic obscures
it. By all our experience, observational and sub-
jective, the finest type of human person is con-
strained to follow righteousness and constrained
to keep law, but in decisions of expediency and
in adaptations of means to ends is unconstrained
and self-willing. And it is the natural naive in-
stinct of the human heart to attribute to the
God of heaven the best things that it perceives
in the qualities of great and good men. The
teaching of Jesus, especially as regards the divine
Fatherhood, justifies the instinct. It is indeed a
noteworthy sign of how truly the Bible is a book

52 Beyond the Natural Order

of life and not of philosophy, that it is so human
in its representation of God — so anthropomorphic,
if you will. No trace appears there of this
metaphysical puzzle over the necessary prede-
terminations of Omniscience. The primitive
portions of the book calmly represent God as
changing His mind even to the extent of re-
penting for past actions ; and when the reader
has advanced to the passages most intellectually
refined, he still finds Paul, the very indoctrinator
of predestination, bidding his Gentile converts
beware lest the Power that grafted them into
the gospel tree might for unbelief cut them off
again, and fearing for himself that his Redeemer
may in the end of all judge him not worth
saving.

Doubt of God's ability to attend to each of
His creatures on earth individual by individual is,
on the other hand, an induction from human
personality to divine personality which quite
misleads. It is an argument not from man's
highest possibilities but from one of his narrowest
limitations. This is a faculty soon exhausted
with us — the power of holding in eye or mind
separately the units of a mass. The eye may
see a group of eight or ten as so many persons ;
after that it takes them in as a company unless
they are separated by a laborious process of
counting. And the mind of the average man
finds it difficult to form and keep distinct im-

The Rationalities of Prayer 53

pressions of all the several members of a school,
society or congregation after the number has
risen much above a hundred. Even in a com-
munity where he has lived long and has abundant
social fellowships with his neighbours, the ordinary
citizen would nothkely call more than a thousand
men acquaintances, — many fewer friends. And
it is because we have these experiences of our
own to suggest the difficulty of individualizing
even a few out of the great gray conglomerate of
human life which walls us in, that we disbelieve
the heavenly Father's discriminate knowledge
of the billion and a half atoms in the aggregate
of the race. But it is a disbelief that will not
endure analysis ; it comes to be trivial and almost
ridiculous when we realize that we are making
out a thing impossible to God just because it is
staggering to us. We do not so hamper the
greatest men among us ; we admire and applaud
those whose extraordinary capacity for details
accomplishes feats of management that we ac-
knowledge impossible for ourselves ; or to take
the very case that we are here considering, — it
is the topic of comment in the life of almost
every famous statesman that he had a marvellous
gift for accumulating and remembering acquaint-
ances. If these lines of enlarging faculty run on
out beyond the best abilities of the world of men
as known to men, by what human compasses
shall their arc be spanned when they have come

54 Beyond the Natural Order

to infinity ? Measure the distance from the most
ambitious human mechanics to the mechanism
of the starry heavens, — from the administration
of the vastest human plans to the ordering of
that divine plan which covers eternal history, —
and say whether these are any lesser distance
than from the acquaintanceship of men with their
friends to the acquaintanceship of God with His
hosts of earthly charges from pole to pole and
the world around. If we consent to infinity, let
us not deny infinitude.

The ideal of the fatherhood of God has a
singular appeal to the human heart — an appeal
that even agnostics are fain to acknowledge.
But it is very clear that there is no Fatherhood
in the universe unless this individual dealing of
God with individuals is a literal and commonplace
fact. That type of man whose affairs have got
out of his hands by overgrowth ; who now has
so many subordinates at work for him that he
cannot possibly know them longer by name and
face and with personal interest, is no longer to be
called a father to his dependents, as in the old
days of patriarchal industry a good employer
might very appropriately have been styled. The
distinctive product of the stupendous modern
factory system is the general manager, who has
not men to do the work for him but a force to
do it under him. The business has grown to
such immense proportions that the general

The Rationalities of Prayer 55

manager can no longer consider men at all ; he
is barely able to keep the business itself in sight
through his elaborate system and routine. Now
the whole question here at stake is whether the
business of governing mankind has likewise
grown so enormous and distracting that it has
reduced God to the hard-driven role of a general
manager. It would be pity of pity if that had
indeed happened ; all the unmoral conditions of
our modern industrial situation have followed
the change that obliterated personal relations
from between employer and employed, for a man
and a mass can never be in love. A like un-
morality would soon disrupt a universe where
there was only a God and a mass to deal back
and forth between earth and heaven. Once again
the heart revolts ; understanding all that the
theory of impersonal providence means, it will
not have it so. The soul cries out for a Father
and will not be orphaned by its own logic.

Fatherhood will not content itself with provid-
ing for the family a general fund of support, out
of which each child may get for himself the best
that by shift and scramble he can secure.
Fatherhood will not be satisfied with the dis-
cipline of a reform school where uniform dress
and treadmill exercise make every boy like all
the rest. The true father rejoices to make dis-
tinction among his children — not the distinction
of favouritism, not the injustice of taking from

^6 Beyond the Natural Order

the one to bestow upon the other, but the kindly
discrimination which answers to the pecuhar
traits of each with the exhibits of love most suit-
able thereto. How sadly would a father convict
himself of lack of insight and lack of interest if
he brought home to his children identical Christ-
mas presents for all. He has entered but
poorly into their hearts if he has not learned
how to suit with varying gifts the instinctive
bent of their various natures. He cannot teach
different laws of righteousness to different chil-
dren, but he must teach the same laws with
different emphasis and by adapted methods of
impression if he would affect each of the young
lives equally. And when it comes to matters of
education, the father must plan still more
diversely ; he must study the inborn talent, the
native trend, of son and daughter, and afford to
each the advantages that will serve most
effectually their respective development. All this
is a parent's special providence — done not in
contradiction of his comprehensive duty to all
the family but as a required part and phase of
that duty without which the inclusive obligation
would have been left incomplete. And it is for
such individual adaptation of His divine bounties
that we look to a loving God above, before
whom none of us are more than children ; with
whom :'j :s honour and riches enough to be that
alone. And here again our faith is only that

The Rationalities of Prayer 57

simple faith which the Master justified : " Of
which of you that is a father shall his son?
. . . how much more shall your heavenly
Father ! "

There is then room in reason for a logical
belief in individual providence — in prayer heeded
at the Centre of the universe and answered when
it agrees with the Universal Will. There re-
mains of course the experimental question —
whether in actual living men do enjoy these
prayer answers which are rationally possible.
For that question no reply can be written in a
book. It must be answered by test. It is for
every man to try and see. It is for every man
to look and see. Yet those who put the reality
of prayer to trial, either in the study of other
men's lives or in the outworking of their own,
must beware not to conclude their opinions too
hastily. Certain manifest principles are to be
taken into account which some have blindly
ignored who are ready to proclaim prayer a de-
lusion.

It will not do, for example, to hold that pray-
ing is vain because such and such a godly man,
having asked for a good favour, did not obtain
it. Still less is it to be argued that prayer is
discredited because in a devised case various
persons have agreed to ask for some curious sign
and have not received it. A remark so obvious
as this latter I should scarcely think it needful to

58 Beyond the Natural Order

make if in a recent work by an eminent Christian
scholar I had not read a serious challenge to
praying men to concoct a laboratory experi-
ment— to settle on some unlikely thing and pray
for it to come to pass as a demonstration of
special providence. The author rather brutally
intimated that the devout are afraid of such a test,
expecting no result and shrinking from the
ungrateful disillusion. To a man who can argue
so the scathing responses of Jesus Christ to the
Pharisees who " sought of Him a sign from
heaven," seem not to have penetrated. God is
not an exhibitor of wonders. He answers
prayers as He does all His work — for concrete
ends of good. Like the supreme court of our
land, the Supreme Court of heaven passes on no
hypothetical matters ; the petitioner must have a
real case in order to obtain attention. More-
over,— and this especially, — not the most select
coterie of the veriest saints on earth would have
any right to present their prayers as demands
upon God. No matter how thoroughly per-
suaded they might be that they asked only what
was good ; no matter how real in their opinion
might be the need for the supply of which they
made intercession, it would be far beyond the
conscious fallibility of all wise men to assert that
Goodness and Power and Knowledge in the
absolute could do no better than to do their
way. All the piety in the world of men could

The Rationalities of Prayer 59

not frame one complete prayer without " Thy
will be done " for its climax.

If prayer framed by a multitude of counselors
for objects external to their own interests cannot
be certified to God as safe to indorse without ex-
amination, prayer offered by the individual soul
for blessings within its own hfe boundaries, liable
to the admixture of adulterant selfishness, may
hardly claim God's " carte blanche " in return.
Indeed, it is the necessary groundwork of any
sane faith in prayer to have it understood that
God answers not with the " let it be so " of some
lazy despot, but with active deliberation and con-
triving of His own highest wisdom for our ad-
vantage not merely immediate but ultimate.
There would be no genuine comfort in the per-
mission to pray if it gave only access to a
reservoir of power with no discretion but our
own to determine the use of power. Any soul
that knows itself right well knows only too well
that it needs, more than the supplement of weak-
ness, the correction of folly. And the profound-
est satisfaction of prayer in the heart that con-
siders its privileges truly, is not the thought that
what is asked is now about to be obtained, but
that what is asked is submitted to the wisdom of
Another who in all-wise love will deny harmful
things sought in ignorance. Every full grown
man is thankful now for some of his father's re-
fusals that seemed harsh in boyhood. Taking

6o Beyond the Natural Order

into account the aspect of life which always lies
before our physical sight, it is perhaps not blame-
worthy that the most of our prayers are for
material blessings. But the God who is wholly
spirit must necessarily count spiritual things of
more worth, and He cannot be expected to bestow
a blessing for the body which would be a detri-
ment to the soul. He must be expected on the
contrary to secure spiritual growth even at
material expense, where by any chance the
spiritual and material may be at odds. It would
be a sad miscalculation therefore to count on an
agreeable response to every prayer for temporal
good fortune.

This observation is, however, not intended to
substantiate that mediaeval monkish notion that
all the good things of the present world are en-
joyed, if at all, at so much fixed cost to the
spirit and its religious life. Under the influence
of that idea a few were courageous enough to
renounce every temporal joy for the sake of the
soul's cultivation, but the most were not equal to
the unnatural and needless sacrifice. A truer
apprehension sees that normally it is the purpose
of God that His obedient children shall enjoy the
best things of earth — the actually best. The
lesson is not that those who would please Him
must voluntarily devote themselves to gloom and
asceticism, but only that they should try to hold
the external delights of life at their true valuation

The Rationalities of Prayer 6i

— ^which, of course, sensible men must be pre-
pared to surrender for any more lasting satisfac-
tion that excludes them. In part it is the man's
duty to study such exclusions and adopt them of
his own motion for the sake of the higher life,
but in larger part he needs the lesson to reconcile
him to the ordering of God, who takes away the
pleasant bauble that He may bestow the genuine
jewel. Over against the unquestionable fact that
the good people of the earth, taken all in all to-
gether, do have much better fortune in life than
the bad people, must be set the other fact, quite
as far above dispute, that many good people are
made better and many bad people turned back
to righteousness by being deprived of their
pleasures and thrust into loss, affliction and sor-
row. The man absorbed in his tangible posses-
sions, having lost them, thinks more of treasures
in heaven. The man who in health and strength
carried with him a proud sense of self-sufficiency,
begins in sickness to feel his need of a stronger
arm. It is not to be supposed that from the
viewpoint of the spiritual Governor of men,
there could be a moment's hesitance to cast away
health and property for these spiritual results.
Moreover the heavenly Father, while heartily de-
lighting to fill the cup of goodness and mercy to
the brim for those whom He cherishes, must
keenly feel the necessity of breaking the Hnk be-
tween goodness and prosperity now and again in

62 Beyond the Natural Order

order to save the suspicion that goodness has a
commercial purchasing value at the marts of
providence. " Doth Job fear God for naught ? "
Well, sometimes at least he must, both to stop
the mouth of Satan and to save Job himself from
putting a price on character. And it seems ap-
parent at any rate that it is by moderate gifts of
earthly benefits that God conveys the fullest joy ;
the wicked He punishes either by dire poverty or
excessive wealth.

It may be said that such remarks leave the
signs of prayer-answer so uncertain that no man
can make test of the theory practically. By this
reasoning failure to secure the gift prayed for
may be as good a sign of providence as the
coming of the gift. Nothing then is proved
either way. And this I think true as respects
any one given circumstance. I should not
venture to fix on any one blessing in my life
as proof that God is concerned for my welfare.
Nor of all the remarkable instances that I have
heard narrated by others do I recall any entirely
convincing. In truth I doubt the serviceable-
ness of the industry shown by some who go
about labelling unrelated incidents " Marvellous
Answers to Prayer." It is too easy for the un-
persuaded to reply, "Coincidences!" But the
real proof comes in the consonant experience of a
whole life together — a form of demonstration
which means more, of course, to the man him-

The Rationalities of Prayer 63

self than it can mean to any other. But that
limitation is also doubtless intended ; God would
have this faith more for the sustenance of each
life within itself than for retailing far abroad.
One occasion of blessing may be a coincident,
but a whole life of blessing is not strung to-
gether from happen-sos. Not simply a single
circumstance convinces, but two, three, a dozen,
a thousand circumstances in a conspiracy of good
pile up the cumulative proof that finally com-
mands the invincible faith of the happy soul.
And especially when a man is able to discover in
some disaster or affliction the direct agent for
helping him up to a loftier attainment than would
otherwise have been possible to him, he has
made the demonstration absolute. Only a divine
intervention can produce from the rock the
sweetness of honey and the cool drink of living
fountains. As from stage to stage of life one
goes on to find, as Paul says, that all things work
together for his good, — light and shadow blend-
ing and major and minor chords singing them-
selves into harmony, — a comprehending, fore-
seeing thought of it all becomes more and more
necessary to explain the mystery of the lengthen-
ing agreement. And who should be the thinker
of that thought save Him who spake to Israel :
" I know the thoughts that I think towards you,
thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you
hope in your latter end."

64 Beyond the Natural Order

Special providence in the affairs of the many
is a more hidden problem. Human calamities
of the sort for which the names Pelee, Iroquois
and Slocum stand in the shuddering memory of
the present-day man, are tangled puzzles. Their
place in the governmental poHcy of God it may
be beyond the earthly mind to discern. But
some considerations of various degrees of perti-
nence may be recalled as emphasizing at least the
ignorance that forbids us to say that God is un-
just. Perhaps the most pertinent is to remind
ourselves of the outstanding note of this discus-
sion— that indulgent blessing is not the first
principle of God's sway. The fundamental
standard of His dealing with men is the law of
righteousness ; His fundamental purpose not to
make men happy but to conform their characters
to that everlasting law. He can then never ex-
tend His benevolence to a point where it might
obscure the statutes of His kingdom. His love
and pity may have carried men many days of
old, and yet when they begin to presume upon
His mercy and to persuade themselves that He
no more exacts the penalties of sin, He must
wreathe His chariot with clouds again and let the
lightnings strike. Then men know that judg-
ment has not perished from the heavens. When
those charged with responsibility for the lives of
their fellows have grown reckless of their duty,
how shall God recall them to fidelity and the sav-

The Rationalities of Prayer 65

ing thought for others except by leaving them to
the due consequences of their neglect? The
nature of those consequences is of course such
as involves the innocent with the guilty — the
innocent perhaps in far the greater suffering.
But that too is of long fixed law. A part of the
punishment of the wicked is the shame of bring-
ing undeserved evil upon the heads of the
righteous. The awful lesson of the disasters in
burning building and burning ship just recurred
to, would have been a lesson incomplete and by
so much less efficient if some miracle of selection
had provided for the escape of all the women
and children. The sacrifice of these white lives
was just what cut through hardened consciences
to the quick. The volcano's outburst is, by
candid admission, a still heavier theme for faith
to handle, but its reason also, if we could probe
to it, would doubtless appear to be a reason of
government on the one hand and perchance like-
wise a reason of sin on the other.

Men who see other men only by externals
can never know " how unsearchable are His
judgments and His ways past tracing out." God
sees the hidden desert. A punishment falling
on what appears to us a blameless life may
actually have searched out some secret sin ag-
gravated by prolonged and gross offense against
light. It may be the exaction of a score long
overdue, forgotten by ail except by the One who

66 Beyond the Natural Order

never forgets. Some far-spread misfortunes are
undoubtedly disciplinary for peoples as individual
sufferings are disciplinary for single souls. Many
are hurt in the mischief of their mistakes who are
not condemned for sin ; for the God who for-
gives, still, as with Moses and Aaron and Samuel
of the patriarchs and prophets, takes vengeance
of the doings of the good. And withal, while
we debate these seemingly harsh providences
there remains to remember the Christian story of
a life beyond which forbids us to call death the
supreme calamity. If righteous men are to live
again in a better state than this, an ordering of
human affairs which hastens them thither cannot
be reasonably treated as a cataclysm of disaster
for them. Men most inconsistently profess the
Christian doctrine of immortality and belie their
own profession by speaking of death as if it were
the last abyss of irrevocable disaster. Let us not
coddle our faith by denying the hard questions
of life, but in our questionings let us give God at
least the benefit of His own truth.

And when we are weary of the weighing of
minute doubts and their answers, let us rest our-
selves with a wider view. Take account of the
beginning of the race, and behold to-day's stage
of its march towards its yet invisible destiny. Is
there any man of the stubborn hardihood to
deny that all the path hither has been in one
direction forward and by steady rise upward to

The Rationalities of Prayer 67

things higher and better than racial infancy had
the imagination to dream of? Then who is
Leader on the road ? Is it by wilderness wander-
ing that humanity has come so far ? Nay ; look
again and see ♦' the fiery, cloudy pillar." The
methods of providence may not be vindicated on
every page of history, but they will be vindicated
before the volume is closed. A redeemed society,
a purified earth, a loyal kingdom, will yet prove
the age-long Worker in His glorious work. The
event let us await in the sweet Quaker bard's
confidence :

"Believe and trust; through stars and suns,

Through life and death, through soul and sense,
His wise paternal purpose runs ;
The darkness of His providence
Is star-lit with divine intents."

Ill

The Possibility of Miracle

in

THE POSSIBILITY OF MIRACLE

Respecting Bible miracles the one correction
of view that would go furthest to clear the popular
mind would be a dispelling of the notion that a
miracle is God's first preferred method. Our own
predilections are debased by our lust for the
spectacular; we love to accomplish our designs
by the most singular and bizarre methods that
we can invent. We tire of routine and plan to
amaze all onlookers by doing some new thing m
an outlandish way. In our smallness we imagme
that it must be for some like reason that the Lord
works — or has worked — miracles.

At the utmost remove from such a conception,
the Bible consistently implies that God employs
miracle with reluctance and only in extreme
necessity— where no other method is available.
It is particularly apparent that Jesus deliberately
subordinated the miracle element in His own
ministry, doing wonders sparingly,— except, it
may be, as to miracles of heaUng,— and seekmg
to reduce the area of each miracle with as many
adjuncts of natural circumstance as possible.
Before He fed the five thousand, He gathered to-
gether all the natural food supply of the camp ;
71

72 Beyond the Natural Order

before He called Lazarus from the grave, He had
neighbours* hands roll back the sepulchre door.
And herein without question the Master truly
pictures His Father and ours. The ordinary-
course of nature is not to God an irksome hum-
drum from which at every trivial excuse He flings
Himself forth into erratic excursions of magic.
This is not a discredited arrangement of affairs
under which the world runs on, one common day
after another. It is the superior arrangement.
The common way of things is the best way ; the
order of nature the most excellent order. Above
all, it is the normal and, in the most comprehen-
sive sense, the natural way — natural to the human
soul as well as to things material and inanimate.
How could it be otherwise ? Why should God
ordain it to be usual if it were not best ? Would
He drive a heavy-wheeled chariot year after year
in order to save a better chariot for His occasions
of state ?

Miracle then is abnormal ; it meets conditions
abnormal among men, and provides for emergen-
cies unprovided for in the regular working speci-
fications of the universe. It is extorted by crisis.
The greatest miracle recorded in history is that
God gave His Son to become flesh for the salva-
tion of men, and the worst abnormality in the
world — the fact of sin — made that miracle neces-
sary, for the natural mechanism of creation in-
cluded no apparatus for forgiving sins. So like-

The Possibility of Miracle 73

wise have other deficiencies of humanity required
miracle. As the Saviour taught so plainly, the
Father seeks worshippers to render their homage
spiritually. By the still voice that speaks with-
out words in the secret heart of the inner man,
God had rather come to His children. But He
can avail Himself of other means i( He must. In
the olden time He brought forth out of a degrad-
ing bondage a race singularly suited to His prov-
idential purposes. It was a race potentially
spiritual, but at that epoch of development still
too gross for strictly spiritual influences to touch
either its faith or its will. Must this people then
go uninstructed because their King could not
speak to their understanding in the language of
the heavenly courts? By no means; if heart
speech will not reach them. He will make them
understand in the sign language of the deaf.
How vain it would have been to bid them study
the linking together of life's commonplaces — to
hope that in the daily dovetailing of ordinary
blessings they would see tokens of a Hand of
divine skill. It must be a great, startling object-
lesson by which such untutored slaves learn prov-
idence, and that object-lesson they shall have,
— a wind-blown sea-bottom safe till they have
escaped, then a mortal snare to their enemies.
Fresh from a land where all the gods were
imaged in tangible shape, they could not con-
ceive at once a God unembodied and present with

74 Beyond the Natural Order

them invisibly. But Jehovah, though He could
not lend His glory to a graven image, was not
baffled. A pillar of fire sentinelling their camp
by night, of cloud guiding it by day ; the light-
ning-riven smoke veihng the mountain crest ; the
banquet table spread before the mysterious sap-
phire vision in Sinai's high recess, — with one
device and another the spiritual God made Him-^
self real to this unspiritual people. And so long
years together and patiently He bent Himself
to education of these childish wards of His by
ways that behooved the Teacher of children.

But will He therefore desire to come now in an
elder age of mankind and manifest His presence
before His worshippers again by wonders of the
fiery cloud and the earthquaking trumpet ?
Verily, no ; " for ye are not come unto a mount
that might be touched and that burned with fire,
and unto blackness and darkness and tempest,
and the sound of a trumpet and the voice of
words, . . . but ye are come unto Mount
Zion and unto the city of the living God."
After all these centuries of wooing the souls of
men to know Him as Father of their spirits,
what pity if of all those who gather in His courts
He could yet address few or none in that spirit-
ual speech which is the native tongue of Deity.
That God should ever need to speak in thunders
is no doubt to Him a painful requirement, as to a
gentleman obliged to shout aloud in the market-

The Possibility of Miracle 75

place. He loves rather quiet heart-to-heart con-
verse heralded by no external sign, nor by any
sign in the soul itself, save the sweet glow of
warmth excited when a Friend draws near.
Vast, then, would be the error which expected to
see Sinai repeated where enHghtened congrega-
tions of His saints appear to-day. And even
among those who do not know Him well, it is a
truer introduction of the Holy Self wherein He
would become Companion and Helper, if His
voice is heard pleading and gentle,— a word very
nigh them, wakening their ears to hear as those
that are taught. Any other fashion of address is
an exceptional expedient to reach a desperate

case, as was the smiting of Saul in the Damascus

highway.

LXhe obvious question which, with unphilosoph-
ical people at least, makes all the difficulty in
reading miraculous Bible history, is the question
why there are not miracles nowif there were mir-
acles in Bible times. The prevalent treatment of
the subject in the churches points logically to the
conclusion— though to come out there would
evoke horror— that God lacks some power that I le
once had. It is constantly assumed that supernatu-
ral manifestations of His omnipotence are God's
special delight,— even His forte, if one may say
so reverently. By presumption from that view-
point, it could be argued that God would crowd
into the world now and always all the miracles

76 Beyond the Natural Order

that He could manage. But reverse the pre-
sumption, and we come out on what agrees with
history as we have it, — that as the world develops
and comes nearer to the ideal towards which
God is working, miracles grow fewer and fewer,
because there is less and less need of them.
From the day of Eden until now God has had
humanity in school. He began in the kinder-
garten, and He had to use kindergarten methods.
Modern followers of Froebel have merely been
picking out in the latter generations principles of
pedagogy that the Creator applied from the
eozoic hour of His human enterprise. The
teacher of the youngest learners gives shaped
blocks and coloured cards and paper figures for
lessons — concrete things for minds to grasp which
are not yet able to hold to things abstract.
These least folk must learn the primary processes
of mathematics on an abacus of bright beads ;
even written symbols — not to speak of unaided
mental calculations — are beyond them. But will
the educator argue that because child-training has
begun with kindergarten objects, it must be con-
tinued to high school and college with the same
apparatus ? Not so ; the beads are soon super-
seded by chalked signs on the blackboard, and
the skilled teacher is by no means content until
even the conventional symbols are gone and the
ready scholar can think the process through by
mathematic imagination. So all education pro-

The Possibility of Miracle 77

gresses, leaving behind the things of form and
body and going on to the things fixed in mental
conception alone. Even physical science leads
the student through such development, — first the
observation of the evident phenomena, then the
experimental search for phenomena hidden and
elusive, finally the generalization from phenomena
to nature's unwritten statutes. From tangible to
intangible, from crudely apparent to fundamen-
tally inherent, is the road of all human learning.
And such likewise is the road of human ad-
vance in religion. The race grows religiously
from primary school to high school. It grows
from apprehension with the eyes to apprehension
with reason and affections. And the fact that
there should have been physical miracles formerly
to attest the presence of God and no physical
miracles now, is no more strange than that there
should be gaily coloured blocks in the kinder-
garten and text-books in the university. The
centuries do not elapse in vain ; the race acquires
education. It would make a certain doubt of the
pedagogic wisdom of God if it should appear that
to the highly developed humanity of the current
age He had no appeal different from that which
served to command the faith of the nomadic
patriarchs. Sometimes it is alleged to be a sus-
picious count against the miracle stories that they
come from a time when miracles were constantly
expected by the populace. On the contrary this

78 Beyond the Natural Order

fact substantiates the stories, for it signifies that
God used the high common sense of giving to
His message the form that suited the age to which
it was dispatched. It shows that God is not
above expedients that ** reach the masses." It is
a striking note of verification in the narrative of
the wise men who came to worship the infant
Christ that they are said to have travelled to
Judaea in obedience to a star sign. The Zoroas-
trian Magi are historically known to have been
devoted astrologers and to have entertained ex-
pectations of a Messiah. The revelation of Jesus
was consequently in their case made meet for as-
trologers. That a star in the Persian sky should
have been to them a true guide to the world's
Redeemer proves not that God upholds astrology,
but that men who seriously seek religious guid-
ance through a delusion, may be compassionately
met and aided by a watchful Lord even in the
field of their delusion. God's earthly preachers
may have much anxious care for the dignity of
their methods ; God evidently is concerned only
that the method be honest and kindly, effectual
both in reaching men and for showing truth.

Nevertheless the Father in His ministry to men
does not forever follow with indulgent grace the
vagaries of the superstitious. Gently, gradually,
He draws them out to a clearer path and a
brighter light. He grants the crutch of the mi-
raculous to help halt feet, but at the same time He

The Possibility of Miracle 79

would teach the strong to run without it. Jesus
Christ came at a time when it is improbable that
anybody would have acknowledged His divine-
ness if He had done no " mighty work." Such
works were the universally expected manifest of
incarnate God. The Master, therefore, did per-
form certain wonders which He offered as His
credentials. Yet they were not wonders promis-
cuous and unlimited. Without exception He
made them benevolently useful to the needy and
offered none as baits to curiosity-seekers. Like-
wise they all had the singularly beautiful distinc-
tion of being in no way for His own advantage
or personal comfort. Repeatedly He refused
skeptical challenges to make exhibition of His
power; He had no answer at all for the insolent
question : " What doest Thou for a sign that we
may see and believe Thee ; what workest Thou ? "
To the undeveloped common people He would
accommodate His teaching as their ignorance
might require, but to stubborn, proud bigotry,
the Pharisaic blindness that with pompous con-
fidence led the bhnd, He would afford no encour-
agement. It must have been great joy to Him
to be sought out by such a Jewish grandee as
Nicodemus, who asked no more signs but desired
to hear the truth of God to which the signs
pointed. Were Jesus Christ to come again on a
preaching mission to a time and nation like our
own, — enlightened enough to comprehend in

8o Beyond the Natural Order

some degree the mysteries of nature itself as
divine, — He would doubtless do nothing more
supernatural in a physical way than the great
human preachers of our generation are doing.
The manifestation of His glory He would make
just as exclusively spiritual as conditions around
Him would allow. If He came instead to the
cruder heathen of uncivilized nations, the miracles
might be as necessary as of old. And indeed the
argument suggests in passing the observation that
nearly all the well authenticated instances that
smack of miracle in modern times are reported
from the mission fields. China alone, for exam-
ple, seems to furnish a recognizable present-day
analogue for demoniac possession and its cure in
the name of Christ.

LThe Bible is not a miracle book. To say this
is, of course, to contradict a prevalent impression,
for to most casual-minded people the miracles are
the most characteristic feature of the Scriptures.
The theme and outlook of the Book are indeed
distinctly supernatural, and every page carries the
high faith that God has directly to do with the
affairs of men, and orders the march of events by
the interposition of His providence. But for the
most part the method of action is His accustomed
action familiar and expected to this day. It is
only of comparatively rare occasion that the
governing King is recorded to have accomplished
His counsel among men by means so unique as

The Possibility of Miracle 8i

properly to be termed miraculous. If this were
a volume of marvel tales got up out of the folk-
lore of a credulous peasantry, or concocted for
the religious impression which the legends were
expected to convey, its authors would not have
produced so meagre a showing. Where mere
wonder-mongering runs to, when licensed imagi-
nation is at work, any one may see by reading
the apocryphal gospels or the mediaeval lives of
the saints. Every paragraph can display its
amazing prodigy in that kind of writing ; the au-
thors of such works apparently feel themselves
discredited if the story gets down for even a little
interlude to the hard ground of every-day plausi-
bility. There are on the contrary long stretches
of Bible history as clear of the marvellous
as any rationalistic critic could demand. The
great mass of the miracles of the Bible are
grouped in a very few cycles — a circumstance un-
accountable if they are simply expressions of the
credulity of semi-civilization, which is a constant
factor, but entirely explicable if it be admitted
that God resorts to miracle only in crises.
Among these miracle epochs the chief are the
times of the migration of Israel from Egypt to
Canaan ; the times of threatened destruction of
Israelitish nationality under the chaotic govern-
ment of the judges ; the times of religious decay
when Elijah and Elisha were the Lord's commis-
sioned reformers, and finally the times of the

82 Beyond the Natural Order

showing of the Christ and the estabHshment of
His church.

These were all great times in the history of
that people among whom God undertook to pre-
serve and foster the germinal stock of the tree
whose leaves were in later ages to heal the
nations. They were doubtless eras in which the
success of the colossal experiment was most in
jeopardy, and exceptional measures had become
absolutely requisite. But they were not the eras
which a romantic patriot writing an epic hero
history of the fatherland would naturally have
selected for adornment with demi-deistic legend.
The fanciful traditions of shepherds' tents and
villagers' cottages would not have gathered by
mere gravitation around memories of religious
apostasy or tribal vagabondage. The days of
national power instead would have thrilled the
racial imagination of the Jews, — the more
especially since that period of glory was identified
with the two characters most dazzling in all the
Hebrew story. Had it been solely by slow proc-
ess of legendizing that Bible miracles had been
created, they would infallibly have attached
themselves to the names of David and Solomon.
David peculiarly would have suited the hero role
in a great patriotic saga, and his valorous deeds,
if the Hebrew mind had worked with the
Olympian imagination of the Greek, would have
been the natural seed of growing myths. But

The Possibility of Miracle 83

of such a tendency there is not the least sign to
be traced in the extant record. The Bible
biography of David contains no incident of
human action and only one of divine interven-
tion that could be dubbed incredible by the most
skeptical criticism. The kilhng of Goliath could
easily have been the nucleus of a cycle of tales
as wonderful as the twelve labours of Hercules.
But as a matter of fact the biblical account is so
reserved that the greatest improbability that can
be picked out in the whole of it is Saul's failure
to recognize his former minstrel. The action of
the narrative is a simple illustration of a military
maxim newly proved in every generation — that
mobility and marksmanship are better fighting
assets than bulk. So with Solomon ; glamourous
figure of magnificence he is, and yet the most
extraordinary thing written of him is that he
heard God speak in a dream. These lives are no
product of myth-making. The place and pitch
of the miracle strata in the Bible are not ex-
plained by theories of folk-lore ; they do not
occur where the folk-lore would have been de-
posited. They are like the geologic strata in the
earth — the records of genuine life.

1 When the question of the authenticity of
miracles is pending, the issue divides itself into
two. One inquiry is whether in the nature of
things there can be miracles ; the other is
whether, supposing miracles to be possible, those

84 Beyond the Natural Order

recorded in the Bible are credibly attested. Re-
specting the first matter much ground has been
cleared if the argument of the foregoing chapter
for special providence has seemed reasonable.
If it is allowed that God enjoys liberty enough
in His world for kindnesses to individual
creatures, there is room sufficient for miraculous
kindnesses, since those who doubt do not dis-
pute God's power but only His freedom in the
presence of universal law. It has already be-
come plain, I trust, that this book veils no pur-
pose to derogate from the subhme thought of
law as the norm of God's governmental action
over man and matter. But while it is gladly
recognized that there are universal laws which
guarantee the integrity of righteous principle
throughout the realm of creation " forever and a
day," — those oath-confirmed ** immutable things
in which it is impossible for God to lie," — yet it
is insisted that God is not a mere administrative
officer whose discretions are confined to a statute
book. The large fundamentals of His sway are
eternally fixed, continuous and infrangible ; the
incidentals await His sovereign pleasure to be
adapted to incidents as they arise. Part of what
we call the laws of God are the manifestations of
His unchanging goodness ; part the expressions
of His comprehensive ageless purpose. The
latter no concern of a day or year or generation
may affect. But many apparent laws do not

The Possibility of Miracle 85

partake of that all-embracing character. They
are from God's standpoint only the normally
preferable manner of fulfilling His fatherly ob-
Hgations to men. Knowing Him as a God of
order, — it may even be said, of habit,— it is
natural for us to expect His future action to run
according to His known and experienced past
action. And indeed there is presumption— in
the absence of known exceptional conditions —
that all His past action has been uniform. But
it is certainly conceivable that difference of con-
dition may at any time make different action
expedient. And where the difference involves
no breach of honour, honesty or fidelity, there
is no more impropriety — not to speak of impos-
sibility— in a change of method on God's part
than on the part of any faithful man. As for
its likelihood, it would seem the more likely by
as much as God's omniscient insight would give
Him surer notice of deep conditions demanding
change. And if for divine expediency on any
day He departed from His ordinary custom of
dealing with men, that would be a miracle.

Miracles, therefore, are not mere eccentricities.
Nor, on the other hand, are they radical revolu-
tions in principle. They do not alter the
essential relations of things, nor derange the
moral character of creation. And it is a notable
point to observe and verify that no marvel
announced in the Bible overruns the limits set

86 Beyond the Natural Order

by these negative definitions. It is narrated
that the migrating tribes of Israel, being in
imminent peril of starvation in a land that could
not possibly afford them natural sustenance,
were supphed with a miraculous food. Laying
aside for the moment the historic probability of
the story, it cannot be contended that such a
provision for an obscure people diverted the rule
of seed-sowing and harvest in nature, unsettled
the principle of toil as price of bread in
economics, or destroyed the penalties of indo-
lence in morals. After the emergent circum-
stances were passed, Israel went back to the
ordinary experience of the race at large, and
found no law weakened by their temporary,
though prolonged, hving under exceptional
conditions. Again it became necessary for them
to till the ground and rely on rain and sunshine.
Meanwhile the rest of mankind were totally un-
affected either for advantage or detriment.
Certainly there is no rational ground for arguing
that such a special measure of providence for a
peculiar need of a few nomads would dislocate
the order of nature or the sanctions of morality.
And it is simply an affectation to allege that it
would shake the confidence of men thereafter in
the impartial sway of cause and effect in the
world ; millions who have believed this history
true have none the less trusted the usual pro-
vision for human support and adapted them-

The Possibility of Miracle 87

selves to it. Likewise it is recorded in the
Bible that certain persons were raised from the
dead, but such a fact did not suspend the law of
mortality nor occasion in others a hope of return-
ing from the grave. The risen died again under
universal law, and all the rest of men continued
one by one to meet death as the •' dread, inevi-
table hour." Even though Christ walked on the
water, calculations of specific gravity are not
thereby invalidated. No bibHcal wonder is of a
character that could have demoralized nature.
The " standing still " of the sun at Gibeon is the
only debatable exception to this claim, and the
supposition of mirage is quite sufficient to render
that — if one may so say — innocuous. Or let us
allow, as the text does indeed seem to justify,
that the passage is exuberantly metaphorical.

When this subject is more closely analyzed, it
is clear that by conformity to natural law we
mean simply conformity to our own experience,
or at the most, conformity to the experience of
the men of our own times. A miracle is a
miracle not because it is wonderful or even inex-
plicable,— modern science can often enough
amaze and mystify us, — but only because it has
never happened within the range of this experi-
ence by which our expectation is formed. Yet
no living man would be foolish enough to aver
that his own knowledge or even the combined
knowledge of all men covers to the uttermost

88 Beyond the Natural Order

limits all that is possible. Fifteen years since
civilized men were quite as proud of their under-
standing of the processes of nature as they dare
to be to-day ; and yet it would have then been
deemed impossible that rays of photographic
power could penetrate bodies then styled opaque.
Ten years ago it would have been regarded still
farther from possibility that electrical messages
could be transmitted through the air without
wire connection, — ^just as seventy-five years ago
electrical communication of any kind was in-
credible. The revelation of these possibilities
has not of course increased the sum of natural
law, but only demonstrated anew what had
appeared innumerable times before — that the
measure of human knowledge is no measure of
the forces existent in God's creation. Most
evidently, except for sheer contradictories of
facts already fully ascertained, it lies within no
man's province to say that any imaginable
thing is not possible. The only hypothesis re-
quired to bring any miracle of the Bible within
the field of law is to suppose that the mind
directing the miracle was aware of, and could
command, some force not available to a mind on
the human plane of that given time. And from
the premises of the Bible-story that hypothesis is
reasonable. The Scriptures do not tax us to be-
lieve tales of black art wrought by other men on
strength of their own occult information. Every

The Possibility of Miracle 89

miracle of the word of God is based on the
personal will and action of the Creator or of His
appointed Representative in the world, Jesus
Christ. Is it irrational to assume that a divine
Governor of " this universal frame " knows
powers and possibiHties contained within it
which His ever-learning creatures have not yet
discovered? Or is there improbability in con-
ceiving that His Messenger commissioned to the
world shared in that larger and divine knowl-
edge ? Even though we should consent to con-
sider that Christ's emptying of Himself — the
" kenosis " — deprived Him in His earthly Hfe of
both omniscience and omnipotence, it is still
common sense to believe that He must have re-
tained all supernatural endowment practically
useful to His mission — the skill of miracles
among other skills if miracles could be service-
able to His purposes and God's.

The miracles of Christ would not be "ex-
plained away " but rather certified if the laws by
which they were accomplished should later come
to light in human discovery. It begins to be
said on some hands that the Lord did works of
healing by that mysterious means which modern
medical men are just now coming to recognize —
the power of mental suggestion. Not all of the
cures effected by the Lord are open to this ex-
planation, but certain of them may be. And it
would in no wise class Christ as a charlatan hypno-

90 Beyond the Natural Order

tist to admit His use of psychic force to destroy
bodily disease ; it would rather be an indirect
proof of His divine origin i{ it should thus ap-
pear that by independent knowledge He could
seize upon and put to a proper, beneficent use a
law which nineteen centuries later mere human
minds still discern but dimly and .^mploy mostly
in insincere, mountebank fashion.) And it may
yet remain for scientific research to reveal other
laws and operations through which He worked
others of His profounder wonders. It would not
in the least detract from His unique position in
His own age and place if, following long eras after,
men tardily should succeed in duplicating some
of the deeds of Jesus. The groping of science
in that direction is to be neither feared nor re-
sented, even though, as is most unlikely and yet
is to be contemplated with perfect equanimity, it
should result in making manifest the secret of
the premier miracle of all — the making of life.
The chemistry of foods, completely comprehended,
might very possibly cover a process that would
make water into wine in the midst of an open
jar as well as beneath the purple skin of the grape.
Perhaps the growth principle in the seed does
not altogether forfeit its mystic potentiality when
it passes into bread ; it might be that multiply-
ing the loaves was as scientific as sowing the
seed. And as for the stupendous miracle of
Christ's resurrection, it is expressly taught in the

The Possibility of Miracle 91

Bible that this was but the prior application of a
law which is yet to become appHcable to the
whole human race. And men who believe that
God has a power of creating ought not to make
difficulty over allowing Him a power of re-
creating.

By such argument I would defend the propo-
sition that there lies against the miraculousness of
the Bible no a priori impossibility. The consid-
eration remains whether the specific miracles
therein reported are plausible in detail. To that
large and still more crucial phase of the subject
it seems better to devote another chapter.

IV

The Probability of Miracles

IV

THE PROBABILITY OF MIRACLES

To show that God can do miracles is not, of
course, to show that He ever has done a miracle.
Indeed, the platform of many rationaHsts lies
just here — that the miraculous is possible enough
but as a matter of fact has never appeared ; that
the faultless theory has nothing to substantiate it
in actual event. And candour will admit that cer-
tain presumptions stand against all miracle nar-
ratives which affirmative reasons must overcome
before such stories can be rationally accepted.
The preceding chapter was itself in large part
an attempt to establish a presumption against
frequent and promiscuous miracle in God's world.
There was besides confessed the inertia of ex-
perience, which drives our natural expectation of
the future along the straight line of all that we
have most familiarly seen and heard heretofore.
Reflexively the same disposition inclines us to
believe from the past whatever moves most
nearly in the same plane with present common-
places. And perhaps more suggestive of skep-
ticism than all else is. the suspicion which we
have learned to entertain of the credulity of the
95

96 Beyond the Natural Order

elder races. All reading men know how cruder
ages than our own have been wont to frame
half-reverent, half-affrighted accounts, all sur-
charged with mystery, respecting events to them
unusual, finding it easier to attribute a strange
happening to supernatural influence than to in-
vestigate its real causes.

By reason of these obstacles to belief, I feel
obliged without debate to confess that it is
quite out of the question to advance at this late
day indubitable and conclusive evidence of any
one miraculous incident in Scripture. To say
this is not to " give the whole case away."
The same thing might be said of almost any in-
cident of secular history torn apart from its
connection. Historians do not floor their
readers with " knock-down arguments " ; they
hold to lines of probability and win belief by
accumulation of Hkelihoods. The signing of
the Declaration of Independence can be demon-
strated; the original document exists to prove
it. So also some of the oldest history of the
world is proved by documents — in stone, in
clay and on buried papyri. But most of what
we know of the human story has been learned
through much more precarious transmission in
manuscripts, themselves transient. The Bible
shares this uncertainty of manuscript succession
without signed, sealed and surviving proofs.
Those portions of Scripture which approach

The Probability of Miracles 97

most nearly the documentary character as to
their contents and contemporary production, —
the epistles of Paul being the striking ex-
amples,— are not historical in cast. Thus even
ordinary events in the Bible we may not term
demonstrable in a mathematical sense, — much
less miraculous events.

But all this by no means puts away full, faith-
ful, rational belief from the Bible narrative, either
as to its natural or as to its supernatural features.
It is perhaps with a wiser phrase than we ap-
preciate that at times we say of things not posi-
tively provable that they are " morally certain."
There is undoubtedly a disciplinary moral effect
in the open choice of truth, where opposing
possibilities are to be balanced and the decision
for the more probable is partially influenced by
a love of the nobler and grander alternative in
believing. At least it is not conceivable that a
quality of character has been added to a man
when he adopts a proposition in geometry which
he simply could not deny unless he was ready
for a madhouse. Religious faith is a more live,
more voluntary thing than that. And it is a more
than superficial suggestion that herein may lie
the very reason why religious truth, historical or
theological, is never presented to men in a fashion
to compel acceptance. The compulsion would de-
stroy the live assimilating power of the soul.
Therefore, to grant that single incidents of scrip-

gS Beyond the Natural Order

tural history cannot be set beyond doubt does not
admit that they must fall short of " moral cer-
tainty." Taken not singly but collectively, not as
arithmetical problems but as pictures of life, not
for idle tales of imagination but for — what they
purport to be — a serious effort to expHcate God's
relations to mankind, the chapters of the Bible
story rise by degrees of cumulative dignity to a
point where their total effect challenges the
honest heart — not irresistibly but with the power
of a mighty spiritual magnetism — to come and
take them for its creed and counsel. Over
against those anti- miracle presumptions which
have been so freely confessed, there rise, when
the whole Bible is taken in evidence, a number
of distinct elements of likelihood that seem ample
to turn the scale. To avoid an appearance of
special pleading, let us enumerate seriatim con-
siderations to which a candid man would natu-
rally look to determine whether any narrative —
in itself of an improbable sound — was supported
to his credence by circumstances external to it
or purposes tacitly implied in it. Any of the
following observations would help to confirm it :
I. A high moral and intellectual standard in
the literature bearing the story would inspire be-
lief. Superstitious and false records of contact
with divinity presuppose a low degree of spiritual
perception ; wild and preposterous traditions live
among peoples of crude mental perception. A

The Probability of Miracles 99

book which reveals the deficiency of its authors
in these respects and suggests the childish dis-
position to revel in imagination of fairies and
goblins, may well be suspected of dealing with
tales of vagary when it penetrates wonderland.
But if the reader has come upon a book which
is boldly marked with lofty spiritual ideas of God,
— a conception of His majesty that would logically
put Him far aloof from the minor matters of man-
kind,— then reports therein contained that He
descended to appear among men and engage in
miraculous labours for their benefit take on an
aspect different from the mere myth-spinning
of maudlin grandsires in barbarian desert camps.
A volume which shows divine largeness — mighty
hymns to a spiritual Creator ruling the universe
and preparing men for high destinies by stupen-
dous means ; pure prayers of aspiration lifted up
not to bestial or licentious deities but to a holy
and infinite King; a theology revealing a Friend
and Father for men, viewless to the eyes but
present to the heart, — a book of these sublime
contents is not the product of weak and trivial
mental powers on which the fancies and follies
of superstition might endlessly impose. It is not
a hodge-podge of savage tradition on the one
hand nor an anthology of imaginative, poetic
myth on the other. A great grave book of re-
ligion must be seriously taken ; if it shows a
sense of dealing with ' a mighty theme, it may

loo Beyond the Natural Order

not rudely be affronted with charges of having
brought debased materials to serve its exalted
intention. Character backs the testimony of a
book as it does the witness of a man.

2. A general sanity of view respecting the
common things of life establishes strong reason
for credence in occasional reports of things ex-
traordinary. Writings that are amazed at all
that happens are scarcely good reporters of things
that should rightfully amaze. Where one reads
continually of elves and sprites dwelling in the
forests, nymphs and mermaids disporting in the
fountains and the seas, gods and goddesses
batthng in the mountains and the clouds, nothing
can possibly impress him as reflecting reality in
the midst of so much unreal. ■ History that turns
on signs, horoscopes, divinations or ghostly ap-
pearances betrays a self-evident bias towards
supernatural in preference to natural explana-
tions of events, and is in consequence self-dis-
credited. But in a library of manuscripts which
accept the customary order of phenomena as
wrought by natural — though divinely guided —
forces, the chapters detailing phenomena not so
wrought are plainly not vitiated by any such bias.
Here is no expectation of being astonished mo-
mentarily by the descent of a divinity from the
machine above ; no pressure to keep up a certain
ratio of superhuman episodes. In manuscripts
of this tempered sort, impartial towards unmirac-

The Probability of Miracles loi

ulous cause and effect, such miraculous marvels
as are reported suffer no depreciation. They are
at least not brought forth by a preinclination to
wonders. These sober reports can indeed be
fairly credited with a positive claim upon belief
by sheer reason of this internal plausibility. If
they were invented stories, they could scarcely
fail to run to the unrestrained riot of pagan myth-
ology.

3. A clear bill of unselfishness, when it can
be accorded to writers reporting miracles, adds
vastly to the believableness of their histories.
It is familiarly known how many men have tried
to make the multitudes accept their claims of
supernatural power and have later revealed the
animus of their self-advertising by using to their
own personal profit the faith in themselves
which they succeeded in awaking. But a record
of much greater wonders will commend itself to
far readier and more considerate attention, if it
shall appear that no participant in these miracu-
lous occurrences nor any historian of them had
anything to gain of selfish advantage, emolu-
ment or luxury by having them become known
abroad. In such a case the only motive that is
supposable is the motive of enthusiasm for the
truth and the hope that the knowledge of the
truth may bring useful aid in living to other
men. It is not impossible of course that honest
men may be mistaken, but the writing of an

102 Beyond the Natural Order

honest, philanthropic and unambitious man
is far more to be relied upon — this is the
simplest of moral axioms — than what is said by
one to whom these virtues could not be heartily
and quickly attributed. And if a number of such
selfless men, taking up a common theme from
varying points of original interest, should agree
in the general terms of separate individual testi-
mony, their consensus becomes convincing
enough to avail in the court of history, — not to
say, in a court of law. So too, if on matters not
contemporary in time but connected by a linking
of identical purpose, a successive line of witnesses,
all above reproach for sinister designs, agree har-
moniously as to the miraculous religious ele-
ments involved, it is easier to believe that they
are telling the truth than that from century to
century they have adhered to the same form of
misrepresentation.

4. Finally, the preeminent test for the reality
of a miracle story lies in the question whether it
covers an occasion and circumstances that de-
mand a departure from the ordinary processes of
nature. The course of argument which we have
been following is all based upon the principle
that nature is by divine ordering made sufficient
for all usual needs of men and conjunctures of
history ; that other processes than those of
nature are to be expected only when a condition
emerges to which the routine of the universe is

The Probability of Miracles 103

not adequate. The major premise laid down is
that God may perform a miracle whenever He
will, but that as matter of fact He will perform
none unless His purpose in hand is otherwise un-
attainable. The reasoning is, of course, induc-
tive from observation rather than deductive from
revelation. But to one who accepts the sound-
ness of the principle the clinching claim of a
miracle to be believed appears when reason is
shown for surmising that it was essential to some
certain great object in the counsels of the Lord
Jehovah. If we once can eliminate the suspi-
cion of caprice and sleight-of-hand exhibition from
any given marvel, we have brought it to a place
where the intellect may receive it with entire con-
sistency.

Thus we return once more to specific inquiry
— whether the Bible as a whole fulfills the first
three conditions of credibility and its narrations
of miracle the last. The former division of this
question I do not think it needful to debate.
There can certainly be no denial of the unique
spiritual exaltation of the Scriptures, the com-
mon-sense naturalism of its estimate of every-day
phenomena, and the unselfishness of its procla-
mations and evangel. So far from seeking to at-
tain advantage through His many benevolent
services to His countrymen, the Master continu-
ally strove to prevent the wide advertisement of
His kindness. And His disciples were as

104 Beyond the Natural Order

entirely free from serving their own individual in-
terests. Not only are these things evident, but I
judge there will be equal consent to the proposi-
tion that the four evangelists are in harmony as
viritnessing conjointly to the miraculous character
of the Saviour's ministry, and that the Bible
authors in general from first to last present
mutually corroborative pictures of the Creator's
providential and potentially miraculous relations
to His people. The strength of such agreeing
historic evidence may therefore be claimed with
assurance on the side of the miracles.

The other matter — whether the miracle ac-
counts appear in such times, places and relations
as imperatively demand supernatural action, nat-
ural action being obviously insufficient — is a val-
uation of circumstances which each man must
make for himself if he is to feel the weight of the
persuasion. It is a sort of matter on which con-
viction of the truth is not readily conveyed from
one mind to another. To set the balances
squarely, however, it must be recognized that
with God moral ends are, by essence of the case,
quite as compelling as any physical aims, —
doubtless we should say far more compelling.
We can imagine that God would call greater
forces into play to make a good man than to
save a sun from wreck. And it is likewise to be
held in consideration, for due reserve of our
estimates, that we can never be sure of sufficient

The Probability of Miracles 105

data to calculate the necessity that moves God.
The calculation of likelihoods in the miracles
must self-evidently count more strongly for af-
firmative than for negative conclusions. When
one finds himself coming out to a negative an-
swer, he is obliged to admit that the appearance
of the matter might be vastly different if he
knew more of antecedents and particularly more
of consequents. I must honestly confess that
there are some stories of wonders in the Bible
which do not appeal to me as necessary in the
sense which I am here trying to define, and I do
not therefore feel assured of them specifically in
the degree which I should gladly attain as cor-
responding to my general confidence in the Bible.
Such are some of the miracles in the career of
Elisha and the uncanny experience of Saul in the
house of the witch at Endor. I mention these
particular examples of my own difficulty both
with the desire to be as candid as honourable
discussion demands, and with the further intent
of pointing out how these incidents are of a sort
and class which are not characteristic of the Bible,
being, as far as the record gives a clue, what Peter
would call " of private interpretation," and not
manifestly involved with the advance of the king-
dom of God. For myself I should not expect
the Lord to save me the expense of replacing a
borrowed ax-head that I had lost, but I have to
admit that I do not know what long chain of

lo6 Beyond the Natural Order

disastrous results might have followed in the col-
lege of the prophets if the careless young man
had been unable to return that particular ax.
And I must certainly confess utter ignorance of
the necessity which called a chariot of fire from
heaven to wing Elijah past the mouth of the
sepulchre and away bodily to an invisible world.
But the mass of the miracles of Scripture can
be placed in striking contrast with such as these,
evidencing on their face certain considerable pur-
poses in view of which they were wrought. A
large field of Bible-study here awaits painstaking
work, — the careful review one by one of the
supernatural interventions which the Book re-
cords, with the object of tracing in each the con-
dition of crisis to which as an extraordinary
emergency measure it answered. In some cases
perhaps it might be needful to associate a train
of miracles before there appeared a purpose con-
trolling and unifying all; but on the whole, I
believe, there would be very small area in which
this analysis would yield no results accrediting
the Scriptures. Take the great disciplinary
period of the Israelitish tribes when they were set
free from their Egyptian bondage; it was not
physically necessary to lead them through the
Red Sea in order to bring them to Canaan, but
evidently there was a strategic importance in
putting behind them a barrier past which they
could not retreat. And more than that, there

The Probability of Miracles 107

was a religious importance in giving to such
debased and blunted serf-peasantry a demonstra-
tion of the reality of the invisible Jehovah which
they could comprehend and which would educate
them to more spiritual conceptions of Him. To
such end also served all the awesome manifesta-
tions at Sinai. The water and the food provided
in the desert were physically necessary. And
all of these miracles crowded one upon another
not merely because it was a critical and turning
hour in the annals of a then unknown nation but
because there was at stake the prime world-scheme
of God — His purpose to construct in the midst
of this people (refractory material but the best at
hand) an incandescent spiritual centre whence
truth and salvation were to radiate to all the rest
of mankind. The whole scheme was constantly
imperilled by the uncertain conditions of this
transitional time, and when either the physical
survival or the spiritual integrity of these closely
guarded tribes was in danger, God hurried to the
rescue with any and every available means of
precaution. For which reason miracle is specially
heaped together on those Pentateuchal pages
that relate the Israelitish wanderings.

In connection with the same divine enterprise,
pursued from century to century, it often became
imperative to support individual leaders among
"a disobedient and gainsaying people" with
special signs and assurances. These superficially

lo8 Beyond the Natural Order

are individual miracles, but really they are na-
tional. Moses was granted a sight of the burn-
ing bush, and Gideon was indulged in his request
for the sign of the fleeces wet and dry, not for
their own sakes, but to strengthen them in their
people's service. Elijah's success on Mount Car-
mel came at a time when true religion would
probably have utterly perished from the true re-
ligious centre of the world except for some loan
of miraculous aid to the sole preacher of Jehovah.
The occasion was certainly desperate enough to
justify the most heroic remedies. Of the mira-
cles that attended our Lord's ministry something
has been said already, and something remains to
be said in a chapter to come. Here it suffices
simply to point out that the earth-Hfe of Christ
marked the climax of that world-plan whose un-
folding had been attended by wonders ; the cul-
mination might naturally be expected to be an
hour of still mightier works. The necessity for
Christ's miracles was doubtless subjective in the
minds of those to whom He came ; although it
may be questioned whether even we should be
able to read in His life all the abundance of the
Father's loving kindness if His best deeds of
mercy had not overrun the limit of our human
inabilities. Miracles attending the founding of
the church seem to have continued as long as the
conditions of gospel propaganda required them.
When Christianity had become so well estab-

The Probability of Miracles 109

lished in the hearts of men, that spiritual expe-
rience had risen to be an impregnable base of its
operations, the cruder external signs which
bolstered up a semi-materialistic faith passed
away, and the more substantial form of soul trust,
rooted in an invisible fellowship with God, took
and held a stronger place.

This line of apologetic, however, does not
assume that " the age of miracles is past." On
the contrary, though recognizing the presump-
tion that non-natural wonders are less probable
now than once, this logic implies that wherever
old conditions recurred to-day, the old miracles
would recur. I am not prepared to deny all re-
ported modern miracles at a sweep. Quite
otherwise, I would accept any miracle of any
date for which the moral certainty rises as high
as in the Bible account. But the condition from
which the miracle came, and the rationality and
largeness of effect towards which it looked,
would weigh more for plausibility than any
amount of individual testimony. I do not at
the present moment fix on any post-biblical
miracle in which I should express belief, al-
though it seems to me that many of the so-
called " fortunate chances " on which history
has turned for lasting good, — as the dispersion
of the Spanish Armada by singularly opportune
storms, — are essentially miraculous, even though
accomplished by invocation of entirely familiar

no Beyond the Natural Order

laws. As has been remarked before, the door
of providence opens directly into the hall of
miracle.

The saying so bitterly resented by many — that
miracles do not help the modern man to have
faith — I have no hesitation to admit. In fact, it
appears to follow from the principles of miracle
which have here been written out. A miracle is
an evidence to the eyes; its prime evidential
value is by nature of the case for eye-witnesses
only. Unlike a proof addressed to the reason,
it cannot be transmitted in its full force by words
either spoken or written. Even at the first re-
move from the actual seeing of it, a miraculous
event has lost vastly from its convincing power.
The witness perceived at a glance ; the hearer at
second-hand must summon his powers of judg-
ment to weigh and decide whether the report is
believable. And except for the incarnation and
resurrection of Christ,^ — which involve certain
outcomes reaching down to the present day, — I
do not think any of the Bible miracles were
wrought with any purpose of transmitting evi-
dence to a later time ; they were done for the
help of the persons, few or many, immediately
present. If as has been here held, we have
come to a time in the evolution of religion where
new miracles are not required for proving the
gospel, evidently we have as little present need
for proof arising from the old miracles. The

The Probability of Miracles 1 1 1

reason of the preservation of the miracle stories
in Scripture is, therefore, not to sustain our
present faith but to afford us a true history of
what God's workings have been in the past. It
was the fidelity of the record, not the progress
of belief, which was at stake when these stories
of marvel were committed to writing ; and our
reverent reading of them is important just as our
reading of all history is important, teaching us
to understand from what has been what now is.
It is not therefore an occasion of distress to the
faithful, but the condition inevitable — indeed,
desirable — that to-day men should be found not
believing in Jesus Christ because of the miracles,
but — as in fact the most orthodox of us do — in
the miracles because of Jesus Christ.

The man who, because he feels incapable
of believing the miracles, patiently goes to
work to sever the miraculous element in the
Bible from its moral and spiritual teachings, in
order that he may believe this remainder, has
my sympathetic regard. I am glad to see him
making such attempt rather than casting the
whole of the Bible away together as utterly ref-
use. I am happy to perceive that his cherished
remainder is as large as it is, and that his ac-
ceptance of it has such character-power in his
life. Yet though I will praise him for having
done so well with the Bible, I will not praise him
as having done the best. I will not grant his

1 1 2 Beyond the Natural Order

plea if he argues it is better for us all to drop
the miracles from consideration and proceed
hereafter to the teaching of the world as if there
were no " powers " or signs in history. It is too
much for him to assume that his difficulty is a
prevalent difficulty, — his disability of belief uni-
versal. For myself I am anxious to believe as
much as is really true in the world ; it would be
a loss not to believe anything that ought to be
believed. Not all truth is necessary for life but
all truth is worth accepting. Agnosticism — con-
fessed, satisfied agnosticism — shall not prevent
my following on to know as much as I am able.
Doubtless, I shall not often have positive knowl-
edge to guide me, but where I see the gleam of
the brightest light, I shall at least pursue in hope
of greater light. And if those who prefer the
more trodden paths of common human experi-
ence do consider themselves closer companions
of a logical reason, perchance it shall be my
compensation to carry in my heart more of the
past and present wonder of God.

V

The Miracle of Jesus

THE MIRACLE OF JESUS

The most elaborate and connected — indeed,
one might say, the only — attempt in the Scrip-
tures to exhibit the rationale of a divine incarna-
tion, is included in the first chapter of the
Gospel of John. As I attempt to translate the
argument from mystic oriental philosophizing to
plainer occidental logic, it takes on for me a
mightily convincing quality. It certainly makes
the idea of incarnation intellectually plausible.
The following I judge to be a fair paraphrase
into modern terms of reasoning :

From all primal eternity the self-existing God
put forth the Expression of Himself. He craved
to do works that would make Himself known —
as all personality must according to the very
nature of personality. Therefore to declare
God's infinite power and wisdom the Expression
of Him created all the universal order of suns
and satellites. Then, in order that what was ex-
pressed might become complete in being known,
He peopled at least one world with conscious
and cognizant lives. These sentient creatures
were themselves a part of what was made mani-
fest concerning God, being not only the superla-
1^5

Il6 Beyond the Natural Order

tive tokens of His power but also essential
replicas of His own spiritual individuality.
Their gifts of soul and mind were all endow-
ments which the divine Expression shared with
them as revealings of God ; all their lights were
kindled from the one everlasting Light. But the
great tragedy and pity of creation was that
neither from the wonder of their own souls nor
from the goodliness of the embodied frame of
matter did men learn to perceive the revelation
that God eternally longed to make. Age after
age they plodded on through the world all un-
hearing the Voice that spoke to them out of
every kind of existence. Yet never was the
divine Expression silent or invisible; still on
every man born into the world He bestowed
heavenly affinities, and still throughout the world
He shed the light which to seeing eyes would a
" great Original proclaim."

But at length the eternal Father was no longer
content to seek the understanding of men
through the message of the creation alone nor
merely through the consciousness of the human
soul. He would go farther; His yearning Ex-
pression He would embody in the clear form of
manhood ; the Forth-Speaking of Himself should
become flesh. So the divine PersonaHty ap-
peared in the world a human Person — the ulti-
mate possibility in the stupendous enterprise of
making known to mankind the nature of God.

The Miracle of Jesus 1 1 7

This was the plainest, simplest, most complete
epiphany of which the Expression of divinity
was capable, and in this epiphany He dwelt
familiarly with the humblest of men so that they
might know Him heart to heart as friend is
known by friend. Such was — almost so to say
— the extravagance of God's eagerness for
acquaintance with humanity. But the greater
tragedy waited for this greater manifestation.
When the Holy Expression clothed in flesh
entered into the domain of His own earthly
works, though all lesser things recognized their
Lord, the men whom He came especially to woo
not only knew Him not as the Messenger of
Jehovah but utterly spurned the loving advances
of His friendship. Yet a few did accept Him
and attend to His message, and these learned
from His teaching a blessed secret. He lifted
them up into a nearer and sweeter relation to
God than they had ever dared to imagine;
He taught them to see in themselves not the mere
creatures of an ineffable Power, but the royal
sons of a kingly Father. By the gentle Expres-
sion thus led on from truth to truth, they entered
into rights of fellowship with God whence
they drew a life of more than human strength
with joys of nobler than earthly origin. Day by
day their communion with God's Expression re-
vealed in Him a wondrous fullness of gracious
virtues which joined with His perfect truthful-

ii8 Beyond the Natural Order

ness to make a character of such glory as they
instinctively felt to be the mirror of deity. Bet-
ter than all, as they associated with Him, — and
since He had gone away, as they tried to be
loyal to Him, — they dared to say that little by
little they were themselves acquiring some of
those virtues which had burned so beautifully in
Him. Still conscious of human limitations,
they made no claim of having beheld the
actual God-head, but having known His Ex-
pression, they doubted not that the Father in
all His perfections had been fully " declared " to
them.

The argument seems peculiarly satisfying. It
is so consistent with fundamental things of our
knowledge that it carries a sort of axiomatic
force. The impulse of personality to photograph
itself in work that it loves, we are all in some
degree conscious of ; we can understand the same
impulse in God, and it makes a reason, vaguely
seen but comprehensible, for creation. And
after men had been created, it is natural that
God should wish to be acquainted, — I sincerely
trust that I seem to speak with as much reverence
as I intend. All that we see around us is most
intelligible when we interpret it as God seeking
introduction to us and our fellows. From the
mighty clouds that thunder in the heavens to the
violet that blooms silently in the hidden copse, it
is all God trying to speak to us — to speak to us

The Miracle of Jesus 119

by His " Word," through whom ** all things
were made, and without Him was not anything
made that hath been made." Yet we cannot
help knowing how ill this language reaches the
ears of the many ; it is communication, but to
the multitudes it does not communicate. Shall
then God be baffled ? What shall He do more ?
Confronting that question, I for one can only as-
sent to the rationality of John's further teaching
— that going on beyond the works of nature, God
pressed still closer to the heart of mankind and
caused His " Word " to become incarnate and
dwell with men not as creating Spirit but as
burden-sharing Friend. To say the least, God
would not have tried the highest form of self-ex-
pressing speech to men without voicing Himself
in a Man. Other forms of nature are a bodying
forth of gross matter alone, but humanity is a
clothing for spirits — spirits kindred to Himself.
To hear then that God, who had exhibited His
own character in every other work of His hands,
at length employed the most refined medium of ex-
pression accessible — human personality — singu-
larly accords with the fit evolution of such a pur-
pose. A rational outlook might almost, one
feels, have foreseen it unaided. When the
potentates of nations would become friends, it
does not satisfy to send gifts and letters ; each
must send to the other a man. Even so the
whole of the message of heaven was not delivered

120 Beyond the Natural Order

in the earth until there came forth from God an
Ambassador — a Man.

Had John offered this reasoning as a theorem
only, I think it would have impressed me enough
to compel a search through history to find the
One who fulfilled this role of the Interpreter of
God. Could such a quest have ever rested at the
feet of any other character than this Nazarene
whom John adored while he wrote ? Is there in
all the world's chronicle another figure of whom
an inquirer would dare to think as the very Ex-
pression of the Most High ? Take this verse
from the evangelist, — "We beheld His glory,
glory as of the only begotten from the Father,"
— and can you write into it any name but Jesus
and have the world heed you ? But write
" Jesus " there, and all the world will pay at least
respect. Men cannot gainsay Jesus. Even
those who will not allow that He came as God or
from God, freely grant it no strange thing that
His lovers believed they saw God in this Man's
moral beauty. Nay, more; they confess that
whoever in the will to know God studies the
Galilean Master does not belie God in what he
learns. By all agreement this Man is at the least
One like unto the Highest. To substantiate the
incarnation then, we have a chain of logic, inter-
linked from evident facts of nature and person-
ality, which leads direct to such a manifestation,
and beyond all the logic, we have a Personage in

The Miracle of Jesus 121

history who perfectly suffices the ideal. Is it not
a manifold proof? John wrote but a few decades
after his Master had been taken away from his
head, but his estimate of his beloved Friend con-
tinues, relative to personal qualities, the estimate
of the intelligent world. Some decline John's
theological deductions, but none disparage the
" grace and truth " which he said filled the Lord's
life. Yet certainly an appraisement of character
which, at that near time and in spite of the bias
of intimacy, was sane and sound enough to com-
mand the assent of the world until now, argues
behind it a stable judgment whose account of the
origin of that character also deserves the most
serious weight in the minds of the candid.

By the reasoning of John the miracle of the
incarnation comes under the rule of necessity
which in a previous chapter has been proposed
for a true credential of the miraculous. God's
endeavour to make Himself known to men in the
ordinary operation of nature, had, through men's
stupidity, largely come to naught. But His
desire to be known still persisting. He must needs
go on to the next advance of method — the resort
to human personality. There was no other
available expedient. And this called for an un-
precedented and therefore essentially miraculous
entering of the divine existence into human con-
/ditions. Some element of miracle is inevitable
by nature of the case; for this exhibitory union

122 Beyond the Natural Order

of God with mankind is a thing done once for all
— necessarily unique and unrepeatable. It can-
not therefore become to any race or generation a
matter of experience, and what men have not
experienced they will of course esteem miraculous
when it comes to pass. What means would be
needful to procure a thoroughly true revelation
of God in human guise, it is clearly impossible
for any mundane mind even to guess ; whether
the phenomena that made this incarnation differ-
ent from the birth of another child into the world
would be apparent to observation or hidden away
in those secret places where all life is a viewless
mystery, not the wisest of thinkers might assume
to decide a priori. There is a recognizable pre-
sumption of miracle, but not of any particular sort
of miracle. Had we read, therefore, that the
birth of the Lord was wholly after the ordinary
physical manner, we should have held no reason-
able prejudice against the account nor have
needed to deny on that score the divine revela-
tion in His nature. We should simply have
supposed that the miracle in His coming to earth
lay farther back in a spiritual sphere. But when
we do read that He was not born by usual human
parentage, — but instead of a virgin mother, — we
should indulge as little prejudice, for, to speak
entirely within bounds, it is at least not surpris-
ing that the moral miracle of God incarnate in
human flesh should have a physical corollary.

The Miracle of Jesus 123

Whether this corollary was involved in some
necessary sequence of cause and effect — the
human showing forth of divinity being attainable
in no other way — or whether it was a mere in-
cident appropriate to the conditions, the gospel
writers do not affect to understand. Doubtless
we moderns had better curb our speculations by
the example of their reticence. In any case, the
common theological account — that Jesus was
born of woman alone in order that He might in-
herit a less contaminating heredity, a less portion
of original sin— is scarcely more illuminating than
convincing. It does occur to me, however, when
I reflect upon the mother's mystic pre-natal in-
fluence on the character of her child, that for the
pure and passionless Son of God it was a peculiar
sanctification that no memory of the red desires
of the flesh stained the white broodings of
maternity above the forming members of His
earthly frame.

The reticence of the evangelists from specula-
tions concerning the virgin birth seems to be but
part of a characteristic reticence throughout the
early church about the fact of it. While Mary
lived at least, the Christians appear to have felt
the mystery of her marvellous Child too intimate
and sacred a matter to be bruited abroad to the
world ; it was a sacred knowledge esoteric to the
church,— an incident of such dehcacy that they
would talk of it freely only where they were as-

124 Beyond the Natural Order

sured that they would be heard with reverence.
Their historians wrote down the true relation of
the matter when they undertook to tell of the
birth of their Lord ; fidelity to truth demanded
that, and at any rate these works were expected
to be read chiefly among the faithful. But so far
as can now be judged from what remains to us of
the sermons of the first generation of preachers,
the contemporaries of our Lord, the proclama-
tion which they carried out to the world, bidding
men repent and believe on Jesus of Nazareth for
salvation from their sins, said nothing whatever
about His having been born of a virgin mother.
They preached Him fearlessly and without
hesitance as the very Christ of God, but they
did not deem it needful to cite His miraculous
birth in proof of His divine character. The res-
urrection was to them the all-sufficient demon-
stration of His superhumanity, and they felt no
need of supplementing that proof.

In this they merely followed a lesson which
they had learned from the teaching of their Lord
as He declared His own ministry. He, when
pressed for a " sign " of His Messiahship, pointed
forward to His rising from the dead, and would
not turn back to lay even His reverent hand on
the holy secret of His maternity, to bring that
forth as a credential of His authority before a
gapingly curious crowd. Undoubtedly thousands
of the early Christians believed on His name as

The Miracle of Jesus 125

the eternal Son of God — the Logos who in the
beginning was with God and who was God —
before they so much as heard that He was born
into the world other than as all men are born.
There are, to be sure, many critics who argue
from these circumstances that the first gospel
preachers had not heard of any miraculous nativ-
ity. But that assumption raises instantly inex-
plicable difficulties, of which the most insoluble
is the impossibility of supposing that Paul, the
prince of preachers, would be unaware or skep-
tical of any incident in the careful biography of
Jesus prepared by his own faithful companion,
Luke. I make this statement strong, because
the present trend of New Testament study forti-
fies more stoutly than ever before the behef that
the physician who travelled with Paul wrote the
third gospel and wrote it as we have it now.
The argument from silence to ignorance and
thence to the unreality of the story is therefore
a hazardous and unpersuasive path of reasoning.
On the other hand, to think of the Christians
delicately guarding among themselves a beauti-
ful mystery concerning their Lord and His
mother, which it was not necessary to publish
for the salvation of the world, but which sweetly
fostered their own veneration for the angel-visited
home in Nazareth and the strawy manger bed in
Bethlehem, agrees entirely with the face-appear-
ance of the New Testament — gospels, Acts and

126 Beyond the Natural Order

epistles together. And although the bit of senti-
ment cannot really be said to argue anything, it
is pleasant to recognize, in this respectful hiding
away of Mary's mother-secret while she lived, a
chivalric gentlemanliness which beginning thus
with the apostles — nay, with Jesus Himself — has
continued to characterize pure Christian life until
this day.

The omission of the fact of the virginal birth
from the evangelistic preaching of the apostles
is a circumstance of the largest value in estimat-
ing the credibility of the nativity narratives.
Practically the sole reason why anybody who
otherwise adheres to the evangelical faith enter-
tains doubt of this birth story is the easily sug-
gested suspicion that the early church felt anxious
to establish some tale of Christ's supernatural
origin in order to insure Him an exaltation suit-
able for the worship of His followers. But a very
little serious study of the apostolic records shows
conclusively that the early church felt no such
necessity. Quite irrespective of the miracle of
His parentage, His first disciples lifted up their
Master's name above every name; no added
incident of life or death could exalt Him in their
esteem and in their preaching above that supreme
pinnacle on which they placed Him by virtue of
His own word to them and by virtue of His felt
sway over their lives. There was therefore no
conceivable incentive to include wonder legends

The Miracle of Jesus 127

about Him in the characteristic Hterature of the
church. It may, indeed, be alleged with a certain
plausibility that Matthew had an unbalancing
bias towards some story of virgin birth because
he knew a passage in the prophecy of Isaiah
which appeared to him to foretell that the
Messiah would be thus born. But it seems critic-
ally assured that Matthew could never from his
parents or the rabbis of his people have learned
to connect that verse with Messiah ; the Jewish
interpreters of the Scriptures did not look upon
the passage as Messianic, and among their mani-
fold anticipations of a coming Son of David had
no expectation of His being brought into the
world without a human father. The only likely
suggestion therefore which accounts for the
publican apostle's use of this verse of prophecy
is that after he had learned of the manner of
Christ's entrance into the number of humanity,
he lighted for himself upon Isaiah's words and
made what seemed to him — after the fact — the
obvious application. Otherwise he would have
shpped over the passage unthinkingly, and never
have dreamed of connecting it with Jesus. This
assertion can be put forward with the more posi-
tiveness because Matthew's very apparent pur-
pose in citing Old Testament quotations was to
convince unbelieving Jews that the prophets had
spoken of Jesus of Nazareth. But it would have
been bootless for him to direct their attention

128 Beyond the Natural Order

to a scripture which they did not apply to the
" Anointed One," unless he had at hand the
clearest proof that in the case of Jesus there had
been a wholly unanticipated fulfillment of words
whose predictive character nobody had before
observed.

But whatever may be said of the reliability of
Matthew, none can charge Luke with bias towards
a story of miraculous conception. As a physician
he would instead feel an almost inevitable repug-
nance to such a report. Medicine was not of
course in those days the lofty science that it is
to-day, but it was of all the vocations most
familiar with the physical facts of existence, and
had begun to accumulate something of the
modern respect for the invariable processes of
nature. With such training Luke would not
readily believe an account of virginal birth. He
would be the more incredulous because, as the
introductory paragraph of his gospel evidences,
he understood the danger that superstitious tradi-
tions would, among the ignorant, soon gather
around the memory of an heroic popular figure.
Indeed, his words appear to indicate his suspicion
that already irresponsible persons had written
misleading stories about the Master's life. He
keenly foresaw that the world in time to come
would be intensely interested in the life of Jesus,
and he appreciated the importance of creating a
record of painstaking accuracy to which all

The Miracle of Jesus 129

future inquirers could refer with confidence. He
estimated correctly the need of having this record
made out by an impartial investigator while it
was yet possible for him to collect data from eye-
witnesses, and while nothing of consequence had
to be taken at second hand. He wanted " cer-
tainty " himself and proposed to afford " cer-
tainty " to others.

An intelligent and educated author undertak-
ing his task in this spirit of conscientious obliga-
tion to his inquiring fellows could hardly get
astray on any considerable matter. And least of
all would he be likely to be involved in telling a
fiction about the birth of his Hero. Luke was
too sophisticated a man of the world not to think
at once what a turn the ribald would give to his
account of how an unmarried woman became a
mother; he certainly would not have exposed
Mary to such a cruel slur — which afterwards both
Jew and Roman infidels did visit upon her — if he
could have been true to the truth without relating
the story which he did write. And there could
have been to Luke no allurement to draw for his
Lord a parallel with the tales of deific paternity
in the Olympian myths of his native tongue;
their grossness could only have revolted his pure
mind ; they could not possibly have suggested to
him a new way of honouring his Saviour. More-
over, the nativity chapters of Luke are not Greek ;
they are Hebraic — strongly Hebraic in their no-

130 Beyond the Natural Order

ble psalmody not more than in their intense Jew-
ish nationaHsm. But Hebrew minds could not
have concocted artificially a legend of virgin birth
for the elevation of their Messiah, for so funda-
mental and penetrating was the Jewish respect
for family life that birth outside a family could
not possibly have seemed on theory a greater
honour. Several Old Testament women " got a
man with the help of Jehovah," but they bore
their sons by nature to their husbands. So these
eminently Hebraic chapters are founded on an
idea of which there is no prior Hebrew trace.
The whole survey of the case narrows down from
all sides to one only reasonable conclusion — that
Luke wrote what he did about Nazareth and
Bethlehem simply because, when he had dili-
gently sought out the truth, the facts compelled
him to this record. And God made the facts.

When a man says he does not believe in the
virgin birth, it is usually quite uncertain what he
means. If he intends to say that he possesses no
indisputable evidence of it which would make it
impossible to suppose the contrary, then he can
only be answered that he is simply in the same
case as all the rest of men — believers and unbe-
lievers. But that is of little significance. The
same thing could be said respecting almost any
other single event of ancient history if taken in
isolation. The corroborations of the past seldom
rise to the point of demonstration. Yet such an

The Miracle of Jesus 131

admission by no means abolishes believing, nor
resolves all credence into credulity. Facts far
from demonstrable are yet soundly established —
established by the great overplus of probability
which remains when all testimony and all likeli-
hoods and all mutual dependences have been
sifted, weighed and balanced with impartial cal-
culation. No studious man can doubt that a
sane historical judgment, practiced in this art of
analyzing human chronicles, arrives at grounds
of assurance on which the most unreserved faith
may be lawfully and safely founded. The con-
sensus of such faith in many men is in fact the
world's belief in its own history. But if a man
demands something more than such assurance
for accepting the fact of the virgin birth, then it
must frankly be admitted to him that there is
nothing more. Indeed in one respect the virgin
motherhood is more remote from demonstration
than an ordinary matter of common record, for
it never was demonstrable. Even the contem-
poraries of Mary had to accept it by faith in her
purity and veracity. This observation, however,
stands not at all against the truth of the asserted
fact, since it is a condition that inheres in the cir-
cumstances. A fair man ought to make allow-
ance for the circumstances in fixing the measure
of proof which he must have to make him be-
Heve. A man who insists on more proof than
normally belongs to the matter at issue makes me

132 Beyond the Natural Order

question whether he is not seeking to evade be-
hef rather than to attain it Before such sus-
picion I cannot help it if at times my sympathy
with the difficulties ofthe doubter rather suddenly
evaporates. And if besides persisting in his own
extravagance he blames me with dishonesty be-
cause I am willing to beheve on more moderate
allowance of corroboration, I resent the insolence
and charge against him a still heavier score of
unfairness.

For the other doubter who recognizes cor-
rectly that only average historic probability can
be expected to substantiate any history — biblical
or secular — but who does not find enough of
such probability in this case to weigh down the
affirmative side of his judgment, I entertain on
the contrary the liveliest sympathy. If truly he
*• cannot believe," then I think it entirely legiti-
mate to remind him of the fact already adverted
to — that in apostolic times many undoubtedly re-
ceived the Son of God to the regeneration of
their souls all unwitting that there had been a
virgin birth. What did not seem an essential
doctrine of grace to the first preachers, no
preacher has the authority to pronounce essential
now. Therefore I should beg each honest
seeker after God not to cease from following
after Jesus for his doubts in this respect. He
may be a Christian none the less, believing in
the blessed Saviourhood of the crucified Lord

The Miracle of Jesus 133

and trusting the leadership of the living Christ.
Yet I would never say to such a man that it
makes no difference whether he believes in the
virgin birth or not. I am fully persuaded that
there is gain in believing everything that is true
and loss in disbelieving the slightest fact that has
been or is. The universe is the sum of all truths,
and the man who has refused — though under
disability of the most conscientious doubt that
ever possessed a man's mind — to receive any
portion of that sum, has by so much put himself
out of parallel with the universal movement of
realities. What the penalty may be, or in how
far for the credit of his honesty a compassionate
God may commute an unbeliever's penalty, it is
far from me to try to say. But I dare not think
that it is as well with any man that he should dis-
beheve as that he should beheve the fact of things.
Therefore if our Lord Christ was born of a vir-
gin, I desire to believe it ; it may not be essen-
tial, but I cannot suppose it unimportant. And
I do believe it, because when all considerations
are summed up together, it appears to my judg-
ment far more plausible that the nativity of Jesus
was as the gospels relate than that stories so au-
thenticated could have sprung up from seeds of
either imagination or superstition.

Of the miracle of the resurrection not so much
can be conceded as has been conceded concern-
ing the virgin birth. The apostles did preach

134 Beyond the Natural Order

the resurrection of Christ, and preached it cen-
trally in their message to a sinning world which
they sought to disciple for Him. Christ crucified
was no stronger note in the apostolic sermons
than Christ risen. In part, no doubt, this em-
phasis simply testifies to their own sense of the
pressure of the world-old question : " If a man
die, shall he live again?" The joy of having
seen their dead and buried Master triumphantly
alive once more after He had broken the bonds
of the tomb remained with them a comforting and
all-conclusive assurance that death would have no
deadly sting when they came to encounter it.
And they were human and brotherly enough to
understand that through the dubious and grop-
ing pagan world no other ray of their gospel
could so directly strike to the darkest vortex of
prevailing spiritual despair ; it must greatly have
disappointed them that so often the men who
most needed the story of the resurrection to
answer and dissipate persistent fears would not
receive it because it answered those fears too
well ; it was " too good to be true." But there
was far more to the primitive preaching of the
resurrection than merely a proclamation of com-
fort in face of a mysterious beyond. The early
missionaries recognized themselves as commis-
sioned warriors against the sin of the world, and
they knew that in that desperate conflict they
must needs have a living Champion. They were

The Miracle of Jesus 135

evangelists to men who required indeed a Sacri-
fice for sins past, but who would be Httle bettered
by a cancellation of old debts if they could not
find besides a Helper now at hand, to hft them
out of the foulness of their evil-disposed hearts
and hold them steady to the clean ways of right-
eousness. Then as now sin demanded a
" double cure " ; sinners must be saved from
both " its guilt and power." The resurrection
was the Christians' pledge of such a Leader for
their own enterprises of rescue and such a
Helper to be commended to the multitudes
whom they summoned with the call of God
" commanding men that they should all every-
where repent."

Had their faith that "Jesus died and rose
again," ever have been cleft in twain, and the
victorious second clause of their creed wiped out,
it would inevitably have destroyed both the
courage and the confidence of their evangelism.
They would have been left without a message.
These downright and tremendously practical
men would never have achieved the dilettante
skill to repair the loss with artificial rhetoric
about the beautiful ethical example of Christ.
They must have a present Saviour — a past Ex-
ample would not suffice. It was undoubtedly
this feeling which made Paul say : " If Christ
hath not been raised, your faith is vain ; ye are
yet in your sins." It was this feehng which in

136 Beyond the Natural Order

every missionary sermon forced him straight up
to the dimax of the Risen Man ordained of God
not only for salvation but for judgment. And if
he was unable to convince his hearers of this
preeminent assertion in his preaching — as was
the unhappy case at Athens — he quite despaired
of bringing them to any saving faith in Jesus,
and dejectedly resumed his journey in hope of
lighting next upon a place where the prejudices
of the people were not so obdurate before
the central declaration of his evangel. When
Peter preached to Cornelius and John wrote to
the seven churches of Asia, the stress of doctrine
was on the same pivotal point of life from the
dead. It goes without saying that what all the
apostles thus staked all their ministry upon, they
all believed without hesitation or allowance.
Whatever the church of the twentieth century
may say of the resurrection, it is sure that the
church of the first century never spoke dubiously
of it. If there had been no resurrection, there
would have been no church.

As concerns the crisis between the crucifixion
and Pentecost, this latter remark has often been
made, and its obvious force has been generally
acknowledged. The immense reversal of con-
ditions at Jerusalem, whereby a scattered party
of discouraged peasants, dashed down to despair
by the execution of their Prophet, were suddenly
transformed into a bold and even defiant group

The Miracle of Jesus 137

of propagandists, recklessly accusative of their
rulers and absolutely indifferent to threatenings
of persecution and death, is a historic puzzle for
which no solution has ever been suggested ex-
cept the solution which the New Testament
authors all relate — that the downcast peasants
saw their Lord again alive and responded with
the stir of an unconquerable loyalty to His
charge to preach His name everywhere coupled
with His promise to be with them in their
service " all the days even unto the consumma-
tion of the age." This amazing, radical and
far-fraught change in a company of men who
had had few or no native elements of initiative
or aggressiveness in themselves, is, even by itself,
almost a decisive proof of the rising of Christ,
for with the rising the change is explicable and
without it it is not. But the explicatory reach of
the resurrection down the history of the develop-
ment of the church goes much farther than
merely to Pentecost. Without an actual and
indubitable return of the Lord Jesus to life and
to at least a temporary guiding fellowship with
His disciples, the paramountcy of resurrection
doctrine in the later preaching of their gospel
would have been impossible. That other note
which was in their preaching at first very
noticeably and very naturally — how Jesus " went
about doing good and healing all that were op-
pressed of the devil " — would infallibly have

138 Beyond the Natural Order

come uppermost if their later and more mar-
vellous experience with their Master had not
intervened with an equal reality between their
apostleship and that sweet Galilean discipleship
in which they knew Him only as a kindly
wonder-worker. No matter how zealously they
might have resolved upon some factitious allega-
tion in His honour or how far they might have
been beguiled by some fond illusion of His
memory, their last and deepest real contact with
such a personaHty as Jesus must in the long run
dominate what they said about Him in their
descriptions of Him to the world. The con-
sistency of resurrection preaching in the apostolic
church is therefore a singularly forcible sub-
stantiation of the truth of what was thus so often
and so agreeingly declared. If to these con-
siderations there shall be added the many in-
dependent strands of testimony to His appear-
ances, in form not only visible but tangible,
many days after the Romans had sealed His
dead body in the tomb, it becomes no vain boast
to claim, as some are wont to do, that the resur-
rection of Christ is fully as well attested as any
other incident in the annals of mankind. It is
difficult to harmonize all the varying accounts of
the meetings of the Lord and His friends be-
tween the resurrection and the ascension, but
the very multiplicity of such accounts and the
manifest independence of the sources from

The Miracle of Jesus

139

which they were taken down for record, makes
stronger their united evidence to the one crucial
fact — that Jesus of Nazareth was " aUve after His
passion."

It is of course impossible that the church of
the present time should retain that same vivid
experiential impression of a glorified Saviour,
walking again amidst the former haunts of His
humiliation, which was painted indelibly on the
memories of those who companied with Him
during those mystic forty days while He was
"Speaking the things concerning the kingdom
of God." The best substitute for it which we
may enjoy is the liveliest historical imagination
that the faithful study of their legacies to us
will evoke. How exactly we must grasp up into
minds of behef the precise circumstantial inci-
dents which they remembered and recorded, in
order that we also with them may realize Him
as the Ever-Living One, I do not judge it need-
ful here to try to analyze. But I do think it
clear that if the church to-day desires to preach
the same gospel to the same purpose as the
church of the Lord's own age preached, it must
be inspired with identically the same faith — that
the Master who lived a revealing life and died a
vicarious death in Judsea nineteen hundred years
ago, still survives triumphant and reigning to this
hour, ready with omnipotent strength and limit-
less good will to fight the fight of any struggling

140 Beyond the Natural Order

man caught in toils of that enemy whom He
Himself encountered in many a weary conflict
in this world. The need of the present genera-
tion is as sore as that of any other generation
for the " double cure " of sin, and whoever speaks
of no contemporary Saviour offers but half a
cure. And I do not conceive how any one can
make mention of such a living salvation, except
he allows for some triumph over death and time
like to what the resurrection bespeaks. While
emphasizing this great evangelistic meaning in
the miracle, however, I cannot follow those who
would load it with all the burden of questions
about the mode of existence of immortal spirits
after death. Whether the body which the dis-
ciples saw and were even allowed to touch when
Jesus reappeared to them, was the typical em-
bodiment of the happy dead, is scarcely an in-
quiry with which a religious faith in the rising of
Christ should be entangled. It is sufficient to
be assured that the Lord came back to those who
loved Him in such guise that they were con-
vinced of His actual personal presence with them
again, and knew thereby that " it was not pos-
sible that He should be holden of death." This
was the didactic worth of the resurrection; it
cannot arbitrarily be required to stretch farther.
So too the Lord's ascension need not be en-
cumbered with crude difficulties about whither
His body was transported from earth. It is

The Miracle of Jesus 141

enough to know that His followers had at the
end of their bHssful month and ten days a sight
before their eyes that told them their Leader
was going away from them not dyingly but
livingly into a realm invisible. And there faith
still beholds Him abiding, yet not forgetful of the
world in which He suffered for the race of man-
kind whom He " loved unto the end."

The apostles did not belie the earthly life of
their Captain when they chiefly preached Him as
the Conqueror of sin. That had been the out-
standing character of His ministry. Granting
that He was the true divine " Expression of
God," He could not have put any phase or factor
of His mission above or before His enmity to
evil. When He " went about doing good," He
beautifully revealed and exemplified that impartial
benevolence of the Father who " maketh His sun
to rise on the evil and the good and sendeth rain
on the just and on the unjust." When He
" healed all that were sick," He tenderly pictured
to men the Father's constant thought for the
health and welfare of the physical tenement
made to house humanity. When He joined the
festivities of happy homes, He made manifest the
Father's joy in the joys of men. When He
stilled the storm, He evidenced the Creator's
command over creation. But these all were in-
cidentals of revelation compared with what it
meant for Him to say : '• Son, be of good

142 Beyond the Natural Order

cheer ; thy sins are forgiven." This was the
very master-word of His Messiahship ; this the
dimactic note of His message to mankind. For
the Father whom He came to express to men, is
indeed kindly, sympathizing, protective and
powerful, but above all these. He is righteous,
holy, pure. The governance of nature, the sup-
port of hfe, the evolvement of humane society
are without doubt great and grave concerns of
God, but the overwhelming problem of the
divine rule of the world is the problem of sin.
The rebellion of men against the vast, just laws
of heaven is the only threat of disorder in the
whole universe. The vindication then of His
own sovereignty, and even more than that. His
infinite pity for the ruin in which men madly in-
volve themselves by their transgressions, make
the rooting out of human evil the fundamental
task of the Most High — a task the more painful
and precarious because it must be accomplished
without forfeiture of the essential freedom with
which man has been invested as his most glorious
endowment. And if God's Ambassador faith-
fully represents Him among men, this must be
also the superlative business of the Christ — to de-
liver men from sin and rid the world of its blight.
An incarnation not intimately bound up with the
questions of sin and of salvation would be an idle
and inconsequential demonstration. It would
serve no use equal to the power put into it.

The Miracle of Jesus 143

And the Lord Jesus was not a failure in regard
of this primary mission. He did not evade or
minimize it. He came to close grapple with sin ;
He brought the revelation of the mind and heart
of God to shine near and straight into the dis-
torted face of evil. He thrust Himself fair into
the midst of the sinning world, and when the
undermined wrecks of wickedness fell, they fell
on Him. He received upon and into Himself
the weight of sin ; He felt the impact of tempta-
tion ; He knew what it was to be all but swept
from His footing by the rush of it. By a tele-
pathic sympathy in itself peculiarly godlike, He
knew, without the stain, the shame of sin ; He
felt the strike-back of it into the Hfe which it dis-
honours ; He felt its hopelessness and its timid
dreads. And it was out over the waste of such
discouragement and desolation of hearts that He
threw the great white light of His intrusted mes-
sage. He had much to reveal. He had to re-
veal for the first clear time among men the
paradox which in their gropings hitherto they
had never quite discovered — that God hates
sin and loves the sinner. Even the noblest of
the prophets of Israel had never brought to-
gether the two halves of that principle into per-
fect harmony. When the smoke of the sacri-
fices rose, not only in Israel but even more in all
pagan lands, the people thought of an angry
face-averted Deity over them who hated them

144 Beyond the Natural Order

because of their transgressions. Jesus un-
covered a Face that is never turned away and
never clouded with an unloving thought. He
showed the Face infinitely pitiful for all their
wanderings and all the sorrows which overtook
them in their own paths far from the Father's
house. He spoke of forgiveness in accents
which offered not simply a gladly granted boon
to the distressed, but which seemed to plead
with men for a privilege — the privilege of casting
all their sins behind the back of even Omniscient
Knowledge and remembering their iniquities no
more.

Yet it took infinite care — infinite pains, in a
very literal sense — to keep the character of that
offer exactly true to the nature of God. Jesus
offered forgiveness, but there are two kinds of
forgiveness in the world. It was crucially need-
ful that there should never be any confusion such
that men might mistake which sort God offered.
There is an easy forgiveness which, too indolent
to make issue with sin, wipes out the score in
preference to being annoyed by it, or too tender
to rebuke the sinner, glozes over the offense and
dismisses the offender to repeat the same trans-
gression when he will. This is the forgiveness
of the weak and of the immoral ; it is a truce
with sin, not a conquest of it. It is the forgive-
ness by which slothful parents often sentence
their boys and girls to ruin ; it is forgiveness that

The Miracle of Jesus 14J;

repeals the laws of righteousness and confounds
evil with good. If God forgave thus, morality
would disappear from the world over night.
But there is another forgiveness — the forgiveness
of great anguish. This is the forgiveness by
which purity and honour and justice and love
rescue the sinner and condemn the sin. There
is no compromise in such forgiving ; it sur-
renders nothing to the powers of darkness ; it
beats them off with mighty struggle and snatches
the soul it loves from out their captivity. When
a man is forgiven by such forgiveness, he does
not jauntily imagine that he is the half-admirable
hero of a trivial escapade from which he has had
the good fortune to get free without discredit.
He knows that he has been redeemed at
"tremendous cost " from the peril of a life-and-
death crisis. He understands that he has
jeopardied not only his own soul but the soul
that forgave. And this is the kind of pardon
that we inherit from God — a pardon red with all
the fierce bitterness of the conflict which God
had fought against sin from the hour of the first
iniquity ; a pardon bleeding with all the suffering
which God suffers when He beholds us, erring
children of His boundless compassion, torn and
distracted and thwarted by the due recompense
of our own ill deeds. It is pardon given as from
the immersement of the sinner's own despair —
feeling all his helplessness, all his failure, all his

146 Beyond the Natural Order

loss, all his pain, and all that his aspiration would
be if from that depth he could behold the glorious
heights of holiness. Truly it is painful pardon,
but given gladly for the sweet sake of an im-
measurable Love.

And how did Jesus Christ make sure that the
world should not mistake the quality of the for-
giveness which He came to make known?
How could He, save in one way ? He suffered
before the world's sight according to the forgiv-
ing pain of God. He died on Calvary. As He
pushed farther and farther into the black domain
of the world's wickedness, it accumulated around
Him and more and more impeded His way.
Finally it bodied itself in human anger, and rose
and slew Him. The woe which sin works in the
world concretely and visibly befell Him. He
died as a .malefactor died, bearing without fault
of His own the fit penalty of the faults of many
others. He made Himself one with sinners in
the most desperate of their distresses, because
He submitted Himself to the deepest of their
shames. Thus on the most colossal and sublime
stage of history He showed forth the true
parable of God undergoing the weight of man-
kind's wickedness. " Surely He hath borne our
griefs and carried our sorrows."

Will any man now, having beheld Cavalry, ask
to be forgiven and imagine that he asks a light
thing ? Verily not. Let him look and see how

The Miracle of Jesus 147

God sets us free from the burden and hurt of ouf
sin only by receiving the burden of it upon Him-
self. Sin is real to God ; it is not some ugly im-
agination cancellable with a wave of the hand.
An eraser will not end it. It must be suffered
out. Somebody must meet and face its dire
reality. If God protects us from sin's conse-
quences, it is only by interposing Himself in our
stead to meet and deal with it in a more victorious
strength than our unequal powers could muster.
He settles the punitive judgment that in the
eternal accounts of righteousness lies against us.
The moralities of the divine government are pre-
served because sin is not extenuated or apolo-
gized for ; it is borne, it is expiated. What divine
love cannot endure to see its creatures bear, it
bears itself. Men go free ; divine love does the
penance. Whether Calvary itself was symbol or
act, this is the meaning of it.

The ever-living intercession of Christ is this
eternal bearing of the sins and the other burdens
of men. It is strange that theology should so
long have persisted in seeing in the intercession
an unending duel in heaven between justice and
mercy. There is no conflict between justice and
mercy in heaven or on earth. Love and wisdom
dominate them everywhere where God reigns,
and not only harmonize but unify them. The
intercession of Christ is sympathy and interpreta-
tion at the very centre of the universe. "All the

148 Beyond the Natural Order

days of old " the Saviour of men " in all their
affliction was afflicted, and the angel of His pres-
ence saved them," and so it is even until this day ;
still He redeems and bears and carries them.
By His own temptation He knows the tempta-
tions of men and fortifies them with His protec-
tion. By His own weakness in the flesh He
pities our frequent frailties, and with new propi-
tiations of His love forgives our recurring tres-
passes. By His sorrows He enters ours, and out
of hke strengthening as He received in the gar-
den, He comforts us. Our feeblest motions after
good He eagerly considers and magnifies them in
His love and vitalizes them by His life. Long
since He told His disciples that He would not
pray the Father for them ; " for the Father Him-
self loveth you ; " it is quite inexplicable that
while that word from His lips stood fast, any
should have depicted the Christ as standing be-
fore a throne of wrath to plead away thunder-
bolts of vengeance. But He did promise that
where He went He would remember those whom
He loved on earth, and He bade those who be-
lieved in God to believe in Him and not be
troubled. Sure then we may be that where God
is and the destinies of men are decided, there is
not only love for us but perfect understanding
of us — the understanding of One who has lived
our life and knows our trials, our failures, our
better purposes and our dearest hopes. We shall

The Miracle of Jesus 149

not be misjudged in heaven; we shall not be
laden with burdens too heavy for us to bear ; we
shall not be forsaken when our needs grow keen
and our strength grows small ; " He ever liveth
to make intercession for us."

There is only one deep cleavage through the
religious thought of the world. There are some
who conceive that men are but blind and unled
" seekers after God," groping by one unmarked
road and another through the dark on the chance
hope that they may find Him here or there, but
still unknowing whether they have come near to
Him or not. Others joyfully believe that God
has reached down to find men, cleared a path for
them and bidden them come up to Him, — more
than all, has sent a Guide to lend them a hand
of help on the upward way. Among those to
whom the latter faith is real, there may be many
divergences which measure wide in the surveys
of the schools, but from overhead the severance
must appear shallow and insignificant. Only
grant us a Father to love us and a Brother to
lead us, and we shall not miss the way.

By HUGH BLACK

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