Supernatural Religion (Discovering the Reality of Divine Revelation). Walter Richard Cassels

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СКАЧАТЬ or pious imagination, how can the miracles of the Gospel, which are precisely the same in type, and not better established as facts, remain unshaken? The Apostles and Evangelists were men of like passions, and also of like superstitions with others of their time, and must be measured by the same standard. Dr. Mozley will not admit that, even in such a case, the difficulty of distinguishing the true miracles amongst the mass of spurious justifies the rejection of all, and he demands a judicial process in each case, and settlement according to the evidence in that case.(1) We might reply that if the great mass of asserted miracles be determined to be spurious, there is no reason shown for entering upon a more minute consideration of pretensions, which knowledge and experience force us à priori to regard as incredible, and which examination, in so many cases, has proved to be delusion. Even if the plea, that "the evidence of the Gospel miracles is a special case which must be decided on its own grounds," be admitted, it must be apparent that the rejection of the mass of other miracles is serious presumptive evidence also against them.

      2.

      The argument for the reality of miracles receives very little strength from the character of either the early or the later ages of Christianity. "It is but too plain," says Dr. Mozley, "in discussing ecclesiastical miracles, that in later ages, as the Church advanced in worldly power and position, besides the mistakes of imagination and impression, a temper of deliberate and audacious fraud set itself in action for the spread of certain doctrines, as well as for the great object of the concentration of Church power in one absolute monarchy."(2) We have already quoted words of Dean Milman regarding the frame of mind of the early Church, and it may not be out of place to add a few lines from the same writer. Speaking of the writings of the first ages of Christianity, he says: "That some of the Christian legends were deliberate forgeries can scarcely be questioned; the principle of pious fraud appeared to justify this mode of working on the popular mind; it was admitted and avowed. To deceive into Christianity was so valuable a service as to hallow deceit itself. But the largest portion was probably the natural birth of that imaginative excitement which quickens its day-dreams and nightly visions into reality. The Christian lived in a supernatural world; the notion of the divine power, the perpetual interference of the Deity, the agency of the countless invisible beings which hovered over mankind, was so strongly impressed upon the belief, that every extraordinary, and almost every ordinary incident became a miracle, every inward emotion a suggestion either of a good or an evil spirit. A mythic period was thus gradually formed, in which reality melted into fable, and invention unconsciously trespassed on the province of history."(1) Whether we look upon this picture or on that, the result is equally unfavourable to miracles, and a ready explanation both of the earlier and later instances is suggested. We must, however, again recall the fact that, setting aside for the present the effect of pious fraud, this vivid and superstitious imagination, which so freely created for itself the miraculous, was not merely developed by Christianity, but was equally rampant before it, and was a marked characteristic of the Jews. The same writer, in a passage already quoted, says: "During the whole life of Christ, and the early propagation of the religion, it must be borne in mind that they took place in an age, and among a people which superstition had made so familiar with what were supposed to be preternatural events, that wonders awakened no emotion, or were speedily superseded by some new demand on the ever ready belief. The Jews of that period not only believed that the Supreme Being had the power of controlling the course of nature, but that the same influence was possessed by multitudes of subordinate spirits, both good and evil."(1) Between the "superstition," "imaginative excitement," and "pious fraud" of the early Church, and the "deliberate and audacious fraud" of the later, we have abundant material for the natural explanation of all supposed miracles, without going to such an extreme hypothesis as exceptions to the order of nature, or supposing that a few miracles can be accepted as supernatural facts, whilst all the rest must be discarded as human fables.

      It is certain that throughout the whole period during which miracles are said to have been performed, gross ignorance and superstition prevailed, and nowhere more so than amongst the Jews where those miracles occurred. Almost every operation of nature was inexplicable, and everything which was inexplicable was considered supernatural. Miracles seemed as credible to the mind of that age as deviations from the order of nature seem incredible in ours. It is a suggestive fact that miracles are limited to periods when almost every common incident was readily ascribed to supernatural agency. There is, however, one remarkable circumstance which casts some light upon the origin of narratives of miracles. Throughout the New Testament, patristic literature, and the records of ecclesiastical miracles, although we have narratives of countless wonderful works performed by others than the writers, and abundant assertion of the possession of miraculous power by the Church, there is no instance whatever, that we can remember, in which a writer claims to have himself performed a miracle.(1) Wherever there has existed even the comparatively accurate means of information which a person who himself performed a miracle might possess, the miraculous entirely fails, and it is found only where faith or credulity usurps the place of knowledge. Pious men were perfectly ready to believe the supposed miracles of others, and to report them as facts, who were too veracious to imagine any of their own. Even if Apostles and Saints had chronicled their own miraculous deeds, the argument for their reality would not have been much advanced; but the uniform absence of such personal pretension enables us more clearly to trace such narratives to pious credulity or superstition.

      If we consider the particular part which miracles have played in human history, we find precisely the phenomena which might have been expected if miracles, instead of being considered as real occurrences, were recognized as the mistakes or creations of ignorance and superstition during that period in which "reality melted into fable, and invention unconsciously trespassed on the province of history." Their occurrence is limited to ages which were totally ignorant of physical laws, and they have been numerous or rare precisely in proportion to the degree of imagination and love of the marvellous characterizing the people amongst whom they are said to have occurred. Instead of a few evidential miracles taking place at one epoch of history, and filling the world with surprise at such novel and exceptional phenomena, we find miracles represented as taking place in all ages and in all countries. The Gospel miracles are set in the midst of a series of similar wonders, which commenced

      1 This is fully discussed in the third volume.

      many centuries before the dawn of Christianity and continued, without interruption, for fifteen hundred years after it. They did not in the most remote degree originate the belief in miracles, or give the first suggestion of spurious imitation. It may, on the contrary, be much more truly said that the already existing belief created these miracles. No divine originality characterized the evidence selected to accredit the Divine Revelation. The miracles with which the history of the world is full occurred in ages of darkness and superstition, and they gradually ceased when enlightenment became more generally diffused. At the very time when knowledge of the laws of nature began to render men capable of judging of the reality of miracles, these wonders entirely failed. This extraordinary cessation of miracles, precisely at the time when their evidence might have acquired value by an appeal to persons capable of appreciating them, is perfectly unintelligible if they be viewed as the supernatural credentials of a Divine revelation. If, on the other hand, they be regarded as the mistakes of imaginative excitement and ignorance, nothing is more natural than their extinction at the time when the superstition which created them gave place to knowledge.

      As a historical fact, there is nothing more certain than that miracles, and the belief in them, disappeared exactly when education and knowledge of the operation of natural laws became diffused throughout Europe, and that the last traces of belief in supernatural interference with the order of nature are only to be found in localities where ignorance and superstition still prevail, and render delusion or pious fraud of that description possible. Miracles are now denied to places more enlightened than Naples or La Salette. The inevitable inference from this fact is fatal to the mass of miracles, and it is not possible to protect them from it. Miracle cures by the relics of saints, upheld for fifteen centuries by all the power of the Church, utterly failed when medical science, increasing in spite of persecution, demonstrated the natural action of physiological laws. The theory of the demoniacal origin of disease has been СКАЧАТЬ