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ence of the human soul which should receive it. The dignity could not be separated from the service; the prayer "Thy kingdom come" could only be answered to the man whose life had realized the petition, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Nothing can more clearly exhibit this consciousness on the part of Jesus than the scene on the Mount of Temptation. The Tempter would have divorced the two ideals, would have offered a Messianic dignity without service: "command that these stones be made bread," "cast Thyself down," "all these kingdoms of the world will I give Thee." Christ tells him that he has left out the other half of the Messianic ideal, that the life of reigning must be preceded by a life of obedience, and the throne of the universe conquered by a surrender of the will: "Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.”

As to the form which this self-surrender was to take, I think that in the human consciousness of Jesus it was as yet indefinite. From the moment of His Messianic conviction He felt that His life on earth must be a life of sacrifice, but the special mode of that sacrifice was, I believe, the special thing in which "He grew in wisdom and in knowledge." What He felt at the outset was simply that through His Messianic consciousness there was laid upon Him the necessity of a perpetual and unwavering surrender to the Father's will; He said to that will," I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest." I do not think He had a definite conviction from the outset of His Messianic consciousness, that the will of the Father must necessarily lead Him in one direction. I am speaking of course of the human soul, of that part of Christ's nature which was subject to the limitations of our nature. But looking exclusively to this side of His being, it seems natural to suppose that the road over which He travelled was a road whose purpose and plan were progressively revealed to His own mind. The work set before Him from the beginning was to do the will of His Father, whatever that will might be, wherever that will might lead. As long as the will was indefinitely revealed, it was always within His province to say, “If it be possible, let this cup pass from Me." But even while the revelation was indefinite, the mission of the Son of Man was felt to be a mission of selfsurrender. His very consciousness of being the Messiah was the consciousness of being a servant. He felt that He must go, and only go, where the Spirit should drive Him. The direction in which the Spirit should drive Him may have been often concealed from His view. It may have been often doubtful whether the Divine impulse was to lead Him up to a mount of transfiguration or into a wilderness of trial. His province was to be in expectancy of either fortune, to hold Himself meantime in suspense till the will of the Father should be declared, and at the moment of its declaration to arise and go. The cup given Him to drink may have been only gradually exhibited, but there never was a doubt that a cup had been given Him whatever its form might be, its essence at least was clear-the implicit and unwavering obedience to the will of the Heavenly Father.

Such, then, was the sense in which almost at the opening of His

ministry Christ uttered the words, "I am come to fulfil." On the very threshold of His earthly journey He declared Himself to be conscious of a mission. Not in spite of, but by reason of His Messianic conviction He felt that He had a servant's part to play. He did not say, as yet, that He came to die. The form of the coming cross may have been at this stage hid from His human soul. But He realized even now the essence of that cross. He declared that it consisted in the very acceptance of the indefinite, in the very surrender to a will whose full purpose had not appeared, and the details of whose plan had not yet been manifested. But if, even at this early stage, there was this consciousness on the part of Jesus, let us consider well what it amounts to. If in this most practical, most untheological sermon, marking the initial stage of Christ's teaching, and wholly free from dogmatic colouring, we are yet confronted by the evidence of a conscious mission dominating the soul of Jesus, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the Christ of history is at the same time the Christ of theology. It has been the common practice with modern writers of the life of Jesus to approach the study of the subject by clearing away what they call the incrustations of Paulinism. They tell us that, to get a pure picture of the life of Jesus, we must sweep from our minds the accretions lent to Christianity by the theology of St. Paul, must divest our imagination of all those dogmatic prepossessions derived from the succeeding age, and must fix our thoughts exclusively on the portrait of a man of Galilee. They forget that the portrait of a man of Galilee must of necessity be the portrait of a theologian. In any other country than Palestine there would be force in the contrast between the historical and the theological spirit. But in Palestine the historical and the theological are one. That land has its secular place in history by reason of that which is not secular. The environment in which the Jew lived was an environment of ideas; everything around him owed its significance to the presence and the purpose of an unseen God. The writer of the life of Jesus has a perfect right to clear away from his mind the aftergrowths of the Pauline theology, but he must remember that there was a theology before the Pauline; a theology inseparable from Jewish history, and specially inseparable from the idea of the Jewish Messiah. He must remember that the idea of the Jewish Messiah involved at its very root the thought of atonement to the God of Israel, the conception of a life which should merit the favour of heaven by a complete observance and a perfect fulfilment of the law. Every attempt to write the life of Christ from a purely untheological standpoint has only ended in producing a modern instead of an ancient picture. If the most recent lives of Jesus have freed themselves from Pauline prepossessions, they have placed in their room the prepossessions of the nineteenth century. The Christs of this century have no Jewish atmosphere. The Christ of Schenkel has the atmosphere of Berlin; the Christ of Renan has the atmosphere of Paris; the Christ of "Ecce Homo" has the atmosphere of London; the Christ of Strauss has no atmosphere at all, either in heaven, or on earth, or in the waters under the earth. If we

would picture the Christ of Judæa, we must revive the Christ of theology. We must throw ourselves back into the attitude of men who expected the advent of a kingdom, and yet believed that the kingdom waited for the ripening of one human soul-waited until there should appear one spirit whose perfect and unblemished life should become the medium for transmitting the new light to the world. We shall only write successfully the history of Jesus of Nazareth when behind the very beginning of His earthly acts we recognize the mission, "I am come to fulfil."

SCIENTIFIC

THOUGHT.

BY REV. W. D. THOMSON, M.A.

THE POSSIBILITY OF MIRACLES AND SCIENCE.-A recent number of The Review of the Churches contained a sermon by the Rev. W. H. Dallinger entitled, "A Scientist's Defence of the Miraculous." The first part of the sermon is apologetic, and is intended to reconcile the possibility of the miraculous with natural laws. The importance of the question thus raised the preacher strongly emphasizes: "I tell you, it is the earnest, thoughtful, yearning question of the profoundest minds that live in this age." He is safe in asserting that "the possibility of miracles is no longer disputed"; at any rate, no one would venture to dispute it who took an intelligent view alike of the knowledge and of the ignorance of science regarding the operations of

nature.

The way, however, in which, from a scientific standpoint, he presents the argument in favour of the possibility of miracles is not altogether free from objection. His object, it requires to be noted, is not to explain why the Christian miracles occurred, nor how they occurred. Nor is it to prove that they did occur: whether or not they are facts is a question which must be argued purely on historical and moral grounds. What he seeks to prove is that they could occur; and while their possibility is readily granted by such scientists as Professor Huxley, all must feel who are interested in the question that it is of the utmost consequence to have the scientific grounds of their possibility made as plain as perfectly valid scientific deductions permit. In regard to such plainness the sermon referred to seems to come short.

In the first place, the sermon does not make it sufficiently clear that an occurrence is not necessarily miraculous because it happens to be mysterious. It is quite true, as is affirmed, that "the history of the Gospel claims to be associated with the mysterious, that is to say, with miracle." But then it might be objected that many facts and occurrences in nature have elements of mystery in them or about them which are not on that account miraculous. Indeed, there is absolutely nothing in the creation which is not suggestive of mystery in one direction or another to the thoughtful mind. What is the

most distinctive feature of the Christian miracles? Not their mysteriousness; nor their professed object and fitness to serve wise and beneficent ends; nor even that which presented itself as extraordinary and singular in their visible or tangible aspects. They were, indeed, marked by all these features. But their fundamental distinction consisted in the fact that they were effects from extraordinary as contrasted with ordinary exercises of the Divine personal efficiency immanent in nature. As regards the cause that produced them, that is the supreme claim set up for them in the Christian Scriptures; and that they could be so produced is what the Christian apologist has to prove. Nor is it enough to show, as the sermon does, that man possesses what it calls a "miracle-working power," arising wholly in his power to discover and to obey the laws of nature, and thereby to accomplish such things as the sending of a message through the telegraph. Between such things as done by the knowledge and power of man and the Christian miracles as done by the knowledge and power of God there are points of similarity: but there is also a radical difference; and it is this fact which has placed those miracles in dispute as events in the history of natural phenomena and of Christianity.

But there is another weakness, and rather a serious one, in the mode of arguing followed in the sermon. This appears in various passages, but one will suffice to indicate its nature. "I submit that theology places itself falsely, that the whole theism stands in jeopardy by the definition which it gives of miracles. I submit that miracle is neither a contravention nor a suspension of the laws of nature any more than a telegraph message or electric light is. A miracle is the application of those laws by perfect knowledge to a specific end." The last sentence brings out the point in question. The position laid down in it cannot be absolutely defended in view of the character of the Christian miracles and those natural laws which have been the occasion of placing their actual occurrence under suspicion. The real truth is that where there is no departure from natural law in any occurrence, there is no miracle, in the generally accepted sense of the word. It is not meant, indeed, that there was no fulfilment of natural laws of any kind in the Christian miracles. But what is meant is, and that which Dr. Dallinger has failed to point out is, that those events or incidents were miraculous, and miraculous only, to the extent in which one or more of the ordinary laws of nature were disobeyed. Let the miracle of our Lord walking on the sea be taken as an instance. In ordinary circumstances, any man attempting to walk on the same lake would sink, owing to the specific gravity of his body being greater than that of water. And it was just because the natural law involved in this was not fulfilled that our Lord did not sink, and that His journey over the waves was miraculous. In the same way, when He turned the water into wine, the miraculous nature of the occurrence consisted in a departure from those natural laws according to which the juice of the vine is produced by organic processes and converted into wine. Or let the Incarnation be taken. In what sense was it miraculous

as viewed on the human side of the event?

It was a miracle because it

involved disobedience to the biological law of gamogenesis, according to which every individual possessing a human nature starts his organic existence both from a human father and a human mother. For reasons such as these, then, it is obvious that it weakens the scientific argument for the possibility of the Christian miracles to make the sweeping and unguarded assertion that miracle is the application of natural laws. Nor is it at all necessary to take up such a position in defence of miracles.

But in order to prove their possibility, it is very necessary to present the true scientific conception as to what the laws of nature are, and to insist upon this view being taken of them. And here again, and to the disadvantage of the preacher's argument, the sermon is at serious fault. It commits the great mistake-a mistake surprisingly common in sermon literature of speaking of natural laws as acting. Many commit the same mistake, who seem not to know the real nature of the laws in question. But Dr. Dallinger doubtless does know what it is, and so it may be concluded that, in ascribing action to those laws, he did so simply to accommodate his speech to popular though at the same time most unscientific ideas. In the course of the sermon there occur such utterances as these: "We are able to explain the phenomena of heat. manner of their action; but for all inquiring, Why do these laws exist? Who first set them in action?" Again, speaking of evolution as a law, he says: 'We stand before it asking, Who caused the law? Who first put it into this mode of action? How does it act so?"

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We know its laws, and we know the that we find ourselves instinctively Why do they operate as they do?

Now, in regard to the instances of the mistake we are noting, what has to be observed is that they ascribe that to natural laws which belongs solely to the function of natural forces. Evolution, in so far as it has entered into natural processes, has never acted. It is at most a result from the action of other causes. It does not belong to its nature to act. Nor does it belong to the nature of the laws of heat or of any other laws, whether organic or inorganic, to act. Nothing is ever created, or evolved, or modified by natural laws; they are absolutely without power of causation. They are to be distinguished from natural forces, which do all the work of the universe in its various forms, dead and living. They are generalizations of the human mind-representations in words, or other symbols, of the absolutely regular and persistent manner in which any natural force, or any combination of natural forces, acts in every instance where the action takes place under precisely similar conditions.

This is the strictly scientific conception of natural law. And when this definition is kept in view and taken advantage of, in the course of argument, there is no difficulty whatsoever in reconciling the possibility of the Christian miracles both with the laws and with the forces of nature. But in order to secure all possible clearness and strength for the argument, it is necessary to shift the ground on which it is based from the laws of nature to its forces— to their nature and capabilities.

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