PART II. RATIONALISM AND MIRACLES. CHAPTER I. CHRISTIANITY INSEPARABLY INTERWOVEN WITH MIRACLE. W E now pass to another side of the Christian Controversy, which engrosses much attention at the present day. We refer to the miraculous claims of Christianity. There is a widespread aversion now-a-days to believe in miracles; the scientific mind finds in all departments of nature the evidence of law-of a uniform ordered course of events, and recoils from the thought that the Creator could ever have set aside His own laws. There is amongst many of our scientific men an invincible repugnance to receive what the Bible tells us of the miraculous doings of Christ, and immense ingenuity has been expended to eliminate this element from Christianity, without destroying its texture: it is thought that the moral and supernatural can be separated, and that Christianity can be retained while rejecting miracles. We believe this to be a delusion; miracle is so interwoven with the framework of the Bible that the two must stand or fall together, and that colourless compound, which may be extracted from the Scriptures, after all the supernatural is expunged, will never form the basis of a Divine religion. We use here the terms miraculous and supernatural as synonymous for the sake of convenience, though they are not strictly so. The former is usually restricted to visible and external interference with the course of nature; whereas the latter properly applies to all divine manifestations transcending human experience; and thus some of Christ's sayings and doings may be termed supernatural, or, at least, superhuman, which are not strictly miraculous. But we are chiefly concerned here with the objections urged against the miraculous events, properly so called, related in the New Testament. |