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occurrence and a miracle. Dr. Carpenter however has adopted the idea that to constitute an event a miracle, its occurrence must involve either a violation or a suspension of the laws of nature; and that it would no longer be a miracle if caused by the agency of forces already existing. He seems in short to think that a miracle must be brought about by the direct agency of the divine will alone, without the intervention of any secondary causes. The inaccuracy of this idea I have already pointed out in a supplement to a former Lecture. As therefore it is quite conceivable that Our Lord's miracles wrought in material nature, such as the turning of the water into wine, and the feeding of the five thousand, may have had a "foundation" in forces already existing, by combining and imparting to them a different direction, without involving any creative act, in the same manner He may have made use of forces energizing in man, for the purpose of effecting his miraculous cures. I do not say that this was the real mode of their performance; but the mere possibility that it was so is a sufficient answer to Dr. Carpenter's objection. He that used a strong east wind as the intermediate agent for effecting the great miracle of the Exodus may also have wrought His miraculous cures by the combination and intensifying of forces already acting in man. The event would be none the less a miracle, provided it exceeded human power to summon them into activity, and to combine and direct them in such a manner as to realize the special purpose of His will.

But Dr. Carpenter goes considerably further, and observing that Our Lord and His Apostles generally required "faith" in the patient as a condition of the exercise of their miraculous powers, propounds a theory that their miracles may have been brought about in a manner similar to the wonders of mesmerism and spiritualism; and that the operator discovered the presence of a suitable amount of faith in the patient by a kind of intuition.

Here again the reasoning is singularly unfortunate, for

unless the principle which he has laid down is capable of accounting for all the miracles recorded in the New Testament, it is valueless as affording an adequate account of the origin of any of them. Even if we admit that some of the cures could have been effected by exciting a powerful action on the nervous system, all the most important miracles lie outside its limits; but Dr. Carpenter falls into the fallacy to which I have already alluded of disposing of them all in a mass.

It will be unnecessary to discuss the truth of his position, as to the influence which a powerfully excited "faith," call it by whatever name we please, whether prepossession, fixed idea, or expectancy, can exert on our bodily frames. It is doubtless startling to be informed that mental phenomena of this description can produce the stigmata; but on general points of physiology I am ready to accept Dr. Carpenter as an authority. There can be no doubt, that not only is "faith" the mightiest power in the moral and spiritual worlds, but it can also exert a powerful influence on man's bodily structure. Of this we have all of us, in greater or less degree, had experience. But real as this power is, and although the precise limits within which it can be exerted are unknown, there are certain bounds which it cannot pass. I submit, therefore, the following reasons, which render it certain that Dr. Carpenter's position leaves the Christian argument untouched.

First: whatever power faith may be capable of exerting, it is plain that it could not have effected the Resurrection of Our Lord; and that this event, if an actual occurrence, lay wholly beyond its limits. This being so, it is simply futile to propound the action of this principle, as accounting for any number of the miracles of the Gospels, while it leaves the greatest of them unexplained.

Secondly: there are several other miracles recorded in the Gospels, such as the instantaneous giving of sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech to the dumb, the cure of lepers by a word, and others, which the principle of faith

in any known condition of its action, would have been utterly unable to effect. This being so, it is useless to propound this principle as a rational explanation of the miracles in the New Testament, while it is at best only capable of accounting for a limited number of them.

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Thirdly it by no means follows, even if the action of powerful faith was one of the intermediate instrumentalities through which the miracles of the New Testament were effected, that it nullifies their miraculous character. To affirm that it does so, is quietly to assume that God cannot work miracles through the agency of forces already existing in nature and in man. I must repeat it once more, that the particular force employed in its production does not constitute an event a miracle, but the combining of forces, be they what they may, and the imparting to them such a direction as to be a manifestation of purpose. Let us take as an illustration the case of the woman who for twelve years had suffered from an issue of blood, and whose case had baffled the skill of the physicians of the time. Our Lord tells her that her faith has saved her. If we admit that her faith wrought so powerfully on her bodily frame that it effected her instant cure, will Dr. Carpenter affirm that there are any known cases of instantaneous cures effected by mesmerism? If not, the principle is worthless to invalidate the reality of even the miracle in question, still more that of the miracles of the New Testament in general.

The position which I take is this. The miracles wrought by Our Lord were the natural results of the divine which dwelt within Him, just as ordinary human actions are the natural results of the forces energizing in man. Neither the one nor the other necessarily involves an interruption of the order of nature. To take an illustration: If the more intelligent animals have any perception of such an order, a large number of human actions must appear to them violations of the only order which their limited faculties enable them to conceive. At any rate, they must be to them utterly incomprehensible; nor can they have the smallest

idea of the nature of the forces by which they are effected. Relatively to them therefore, they are miraculous. Yet we know that what man really does, when he performs such actions, is not to suspend or violate any natural law, but merely to give a particular direction to the existing forces of the universe, by means of his intelligent volition. In the same manner then, if our blessed Lord was really a superhuman Christ, actions which were the natural results of His superhuman working would be miraculous to men, just as in accordance with the above illustration many human actions must be to the highest intelligence of the inferior races. Such actions are in fact signs (onμtia); those which are peculiar to man, of the presence of human intelligence and power; those of the divine Christ, of divine intelligence and power. It follows therefore, that even if Dr. Carpenter's theory is correct, it is useless for the purpose of explaining away the miracles which the Gospels have attributed to Our Lord.

As the real nature of possession is a point still eagerly debated, it will be unnecessary for me to express an opinion of my own. I have fully considered the position taken by the writers of the New Testament on that subject in Chapters IX. to XII. of The Supernatural in the New Testament. I shall only observe that Dr. Carpenter is labouring under a misconception when he supposes that the question of possession has been finally disposed of, and that the belief in its objective reality is incapable of a rational defence. Before we can arrive at this conclusion, his philosophy must give us a rational solution of those terrible manifestations of the human mind, which a most intelligent and trustworthy witness has recently described as having come under his own observation among the devil-worshippers in India ;* and of many other of its abnormal activities. As far as the present argument is concerned, it matters not whether the persons

*See Contemporary Review, February, 1876, "Demonolatry, Devildancing and Demoniacal Possession."

who were cured by Our Lord were demoniacs, or maniacs, or both. In either case their cure, as described in the Gospels, would have been equally miraculous. Insanity is in many instances a complaint capable of cure by human means, under proper treatment. But the mode in which Our Lord cured demoniacs would be found utterly inefficacious in the hands of our physicians for the cure of lunacy. The successful application of their method is a sign (onμɛtov) of human skill; that of Our Lord, of the power of the divine Christ.

With respect to the descent of the angel to trouble the waters at the Pool of Bethesda, I need only remark that the issue here raised is irrelevant to the point under discussion. He seems not to be aware that most recent editions of the Greek Testament, on the authority of the best manuscripts, reject the passage as a spurious addition to the Fourth Gospel.

I fully concur with Dr. Carpenter, that it is both our right and our duty to bring to bear on the Gospel narratives the same principles of criticism as guided the early fathers in their construction of the Canon, aided by all the enlightenment which we derive from the subsequent history of Christianity, and of other forms of religious belief. I would even add to what he considers necessary for the successful study of the question, and say, aided by all the light which we can derive from any quarter whatever. Those who have studied the Gospel narratives have long felt this to be both their right and their duty; and that it is so, is certainly no discovery of the author before me. But while we feel it to be a duty to bring to bear the whole enlightenment of modern times on this subject, we think that this can only be successfully done by the use of methods which are strictly logical, and in conformity with the principles of the inductive philosophy; not by the practice so generally adopted by a particular school of critical historians, of creating history out of their own subjective consciousness; nor by assuming that everything which is possible is probable, and that everything which is probable, so long as it

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