The miracles I include in this class are the following:—
1. Water turned into wine (already treated; St John). 2. The draught of fishes (St Luke). 3. The draught of fishes (St John). 4. The four thousand fed (St Matthew, St Mark). 5. The five thousand fed (all four Evangelists). 6. The walking on the sea (St Matthew, St Mark, St John). 7. The stilling of the storm (St Matthew, St Mark, St Luke). 8. The fish bringing the piece of money (St Matthew alone).
These miracles, like those already considered, aim at the help or deliverance of man. They differ in working indirectly, through a change in external things, and not at once on their human objects.
Besides touching what we call nature, they form a class on another ground. The miracles of disease set right what has gone wrong, restoring humanity’s original condition. It is a law of nature that sin brings suffering, but even its cure helps restore that righteousness which is highest nature—for curing suffering is not the same as there being none. The miracles now in view interfere with what we may call the righteous laws of nature. Water should wet the foot and swallow whoever treads it. Bread should come last from the oven and first from the field. Fishes should be now here, now there, by laws ill understood—or by a piscine choice unknown to us. Wine should ripen in the grape and the bottle. In all these cases it is otherwise. Yet even here I think an original law is foreshown: the supremacy of righteous man. While a man cannot order his house as he would, something is wrong in him. A true man should rule winds and waters and loaves and fishes, for he comes of the Father who made the house for him. Had Jesus not been capable of these things, either he was not a perfect man or the perfect God was not in harmony with the perfect man. Man is not master in his house because he is not master in himself, not obedient to the law by which he exists. Harmony, that is law, alone is power; discord is weakness. God alone is perfect, living, self-existent law.
I will try, in a few words, to give the ground on which I find it possible to accept these miracles. I cannot lay it down for any other man. I do not wonder at most of those to whom the miracles are a stumbling-block; I do a little wonder at those who can believe in Christ and yet find them one.
How God creates, no man can tell. But as man is made in God’s image, dim analogies may arise from the depth of his nature that resemble God’s working. As we are God’s offspring, the children of his will, we live in God’s mind as thoughts move in a man’s. When God thinks anything, that thing is; his thought of it is its life. Can it be very hard to believe that he should alter by a thought any form or appearance of things about us?
“It is inconsistent to work otherwise than by law.”
True; but we know so little of this law that we cannot say what is essential in it and what is only the irregular consequence of the unnatural condition of those for whom it was made, who have not yet willed God’s harmony. What looks like an infringement may be a higher law rightly dominating another. It is the law that a stone falls; yet if a man’s hand beneath it is strong enough, the stone does not fall. The law has been lawfully prevented from working its full end. God might likewise stop one law by another, and such intervention, not understood by us, would be what we call a miracle. The question is whether we can believe the usual laws might be set aside by laws of higher principle and wider operation. I answer: give me good reason, and I can. If a man says my good reason is not his, we are both accountable to that being, if such there be, who lit in us the candle of judgment, and there is a final way of right to which every willing heart is led and which no one finds who does not seek it. All I want to show is a conceivable region in which a miracle might occur without violence to the order of things. Our power of belief depends greatly on our power of imagining such a region. Let us beware lest what we call faith be only the assent of a mind that has cared so little about its objects that it has never seen the difficulties; such believers are the worst antagonists of true faith—the children of the old Pharisees.
If anyone says we ought to receive nothing of which we have no experience, I answer that there is in me a necessity, a desire, before which all my experience shrivels into a mockery; its complement must lie beyond. We should accept nothing for which we cannot see the probability of some sufficient reason, but for me this reason is not limited to experience. To suppose it were would turn the hope of a life that might be an ever-burning sacrifice of thanksgiving into a poor struggle with events and chances, and doom the Psyche to perpetual imprisonment in the worm. I desire the higher. The one would make me despise my fellows and recoil from a self I cannot annihilate; the other fills me with humility, hope and love. Is preferring the one foolish, even to the meanest judgment?
A higher harmony with law may one day enable us to do things that now appear an interruption of law. I believe it is by virtue of his absolute harmony, his perfect righteousness, that God can create at all. If man were righteous too, he would inherit from his Father something answering in his degree to the creative power in Him, and the world he inhabits, which is but an extension of his body, would be subject to him beyond his wildest dreams of dominion—the perfect dominion of holy law, flowing to and from him through perfect obedience. I suspect our Lord in all his dominion over nature set forth only the complete man, as God means him one day to be. Why should he not know where the fishes were, or make them come at his will? If we admit the doctrine of the Incarnation—the only fundamental idea on which I can speculate in harmony with facts, which alone opens regions where contradictions are soluble—or even only that Jesus was good beyond any goodness we know, why should the whole region of inferior things not be more subject to him than to us? And if more, why not altogether? I believe some of these miracles were the natural result of a physical nature made perfect by the indwelling of a perfect soul, whose unity with the Life of all things was absolute—whose sonship was perfect.
If God visited his people in human form, he would naturally show himself Lord over their circumstances; he will not lord it over their minds, which is abhorrent to him, for they must themselves see and rejoice in acknowledging the lordship that makes them free. Some say it is higher to believe he led the revealing life without wonders; for himself, he did: he needed no miracle, seeing the root of the matter—the care of God. But he comes to reveal the Father, and showed this root in a few rare, hastened flowers to eyes that could not see to the root. For himself, perfect submission to lower law; for them, revelation of the Father by higher laws working in the upper regions bordering on ours, joined to ours by gently ascending stairs, many steps of which he could blend in one descent. He revealed the Father as under no law but as law itself, the cause of the laws we know and of all harmony, because himself the harmony. Men had to be delivered not only from fear of suffering and death but from the fear, a kind of worship, of nature, and shown that Nature is subject to the Father and the one he sent. They had to see through the little works of the Son the great works of the Father, and that it was God who did such things whenever they were done: he causes the corn to grow and gives every fish a man eats. Even terrible things are God’s, and the Lord will still the storm for their faith in Him as a man tames a wild beast. For himself, his faith is enough; he sleeps on his pillow and never dreams of perishing.
On the individual miracles of this class I have not much to say. The first of them was wrought in the animal kingdom.
He was teaching on the lake shore, crowded by the people. To speak more freely he stepped into an empty boat, asked its owner Simon, washing his nets nearby, to push off a little, and taught from the boat. Then he told Simon to launch out and let down his nets. Simon had little hope, for there had been no fish all night, but he obeyed, and caught so many that the net broke; they called another boat, and both began to sink. But the marvel worked on Simon as every wonder tends to work on an honest man: it brought his sinfulness before him, and he fell at Jesus’ knees in self-abasement. Whether he thought of particular sins we cannot tell, but he knew he was not what he ought to be. I do not believe he truly wished to be rid of the holy presence, except as a passing result of distress; like the centurion, he felt unworthy to have the Lord in his boat, and perhaps feared the Lord took him for a good man, a mistake his honesty could not endure:
“Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.”
The Lord accepted the spirit, therefore not the word, of his prayer: “Do not be afraid; from now on you will catch men.”
His sense of sinfulness, far from driving the Lord from him, should draw other men to him. As soon as that cry broke from his lips he had become fit to be a fisher of men, having begun to abjure what separates man from man.
After his resurrection, St John tells us, the Lord appeared on the lake shore to disciples who had again toiled all night in vain, told them again how to cast their net, and they could not draw it for the fishes.
“It is the Lord,” said St John, purer-hearted, perhaps therefore keener-eyed, than the rest. Since the same thing had happened before, Simon had become the fisher of men, but had sinned grievously against his Lord. He knew that Lord so much better now, however, that on hearing it was he, instead of crying Depart from me, he cast himself into the sea to go to him.
I take next the feeding of the four thousand with the seven loaves and the few little fishes, and of the five thousand with the five loaves and the two fishes.
Concerning these miracles I think I have already said almost all I have to say. If he was the Son of God, the bread might as well grow in his hands as the corn in the fields. It is only a doing in condensed form—and so more easily associated with its real source—of what God is for ever doing more widely, more slowly, and with more detail of wonder and loveliness. Whence more fittingly might food come than from the hands of such an elder brother? There will always be men who cannot believe it—happy are they who demand a good reason and yet can believe a wonder! Joined to foolish or poor words I should not believe it; joined to such words as his, I receive it easily and with rejoicing. In the feeding of the five thousand, the other evangelists relate only the deed done for the multitude’s necessities, but St John records also the use our Lord made of it. It came from his essential relation to humanity, of which he was ever the sustaining food, and to which he was about to give himself, as shadowed first in speech and afterwards in the eucharist. The miracle was a type of his life as the life of the world. The bread we eat is only its outer husk; the true bread is the Lord himself, to have whom in us is eternal life: “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood ye have no life in you.” He knew the grand figure would tell the loving heart more than any definition, yet fall far short of the holy fact; and lest they take it wrongly, he says afterwards that his body should return to God and that what he said of eating it had a spiritual sense: “It is the spirit that giveth life; the flesh profiteth nothing.” In words he contradicts what he said before, so they might see it meant more than words could say: not their bodies on his body, but their souls must live on his soul, by a union of which eating his flesh and drinking his blood was a poor, faint figure. In this miracle, for souls as for bodies, he did and revealed the work of the Father. Whoever has understood Christ’s words in connection with it can never be content that they be less than true of his Father in heaven. A perfect Father must bestow his very being as the daily food of his creatures; and he who loves the glory of God will be jealous of any word that enhances his greatness by calling him incapable of suffering. God has taken, and will ever take, his largest share of that suffering in and through which the whole creation groans for the sonship.
Follows the story of his walking on the sea to help his disciples. After the former miracle the multitude would have taken him by force and made him king; any honour they would give him except obedience for the truth’s sake, which was all he cared for. He went alone into a mountain to pray. Likely he was weary in body and worn in spirit for lack of the finer sympathy his earthly disciples could not give. He had to bear the world-pressure of surrounding humanity in all its ungodlike phases, so even he found it needful to retire to solitary places, where his senses were free and his soul could better commune with the Father. The mountain-top was his chamber, the solitude its closed door, the evening sky its open window. There he gathered strength from the Father’s will for the rest of the world’s redemption. How little could the men below understand such communion! Yet every one of them must go hungering in vain until the door of that communion was opened for him. They would have made him a king; he would make them poor in spirit, mighty in aspiration, all kings and priests unto God.
But in the midst of his prayer he saw his disciples thwarted by a wind stronger than all their rowing; he came down the hill and walked out on the water to help them.
If ignorant yet devout speculation may be borne with, I venture to say that whatever change was needed before the body of the Son of Man could, like the Spirit of old, move upon the face of the waters passed not upon the water but, by his own will, upon his own body. I shall say more in a later chapter; now I add only that we know next to nothing of the relation between a right soul and a healthy body. By an absolutely healthy body I mean not merely perfect animal functions but one wholly under the indwelling spirit and responsive at once to all the laws of its supremacy. As we are, the diseased body tyrannizes over the almost helpless mind; the healthy body would be absolutely obedient.
What power over his own dwelling a Saviour might have, coming fresh from the closest speech with him who made that body for holy subjection, who can tell! If I hear of any reasonable wonder resulting, I shall not find it hard to believe, and shall wait until I, made pure, inhabit an obedient house, to understand the plain thing that is now a mystery. Meanwhile I honour the laws honest men have found, as do those who think me foolish to speculate here; but where does the constructive faculty belong if not to the unknown the heart yearns to know? That cannot be the unknowable. It is endless comfort to think of something that might be true; and whatever seems true to a human heart I expect to find true in its essence, in greater forms and without the degrading accidents that so often accompany it in the brain of the purest thinker. There is a wide may be around us, and every true speculation widens the probability of changing the may be into the is. The laws known and the laws to be known are all lights from the Father of lights, and whoever reverently searches for them will not long mistake a flash in his own brain for the candle of the Lord. If he mistakes, he is little the worse so long as he is humble; if he is right, he may gain some honour from those who, verifying an idea by experiment, do not forget that without foregone speculation the idea would never have appeared to guide them.
Nor would it be impossible to imagine how St Peter might come within the sphere of the holy influence and for a moment walk on the water too. Faith will yet prove as mighty a power as certain words of the Lord represent it—words now a stumbling-block even to devout Christians, who accept them only by explanations unworthy of his utterance. By a power I mean not power in itself but the conduit connecting the helpless with the helpful, through which the power of the creating God may flow to the created necessity.
When the Lord got into the boat the wind ceased, “and immediately,” says St John, “the ship was at the land whither they went.” Whether the wind ceased by ordinary laws or by some higher law first setting them in operation, no one who has followed my remarks will wonder that I do not care to inquire: they are all of one. Nor will they wonder if I think we may have here one instance of space itself being subject to the obedient God, and that the wearied disciples might well find themselves at their haven as soon as they received him into the boat. Either God is all in all, or he is nothing. Either Jesus is the Son of the Father, or he did no miracle. Either the miracles are fact, or I lose—not my faith in this man—but certain outward signs of truths which these signs have helped me to see.
The miracle of the stilling of the storm follows naturally. Why should not he who taught that God numbers the very hairs of our heads do what his Father constantly does—still storms, bring peace out of uproar? If the storm was stilled, it was by natural causes, such as could still a storm; that anything should be done by unnatural causes, not of the nature of the things concerned, is absurd. The sole question is whether Nature works alone, as some speculators think, or whether there is a soul in her, an intent—whether these things result from thought, or spring from a dead heart, unconscious yet producing conscious beings who, born of unthinking matter, invent the notion of an all-lovely, self-denying being whose thought gives form to matter, life to nature and thought to man, and who bears for their sakes the troubles their waywardness has brought, that they may see the Holy face to face and think his thoughts and will his wisdom!
A man feels it a mockery that things should go by a law that does not recognize the loftiest in him; there is little more satisfaction in it than if all were the chance result of conflicting forces. Wherever individual necessity, choice and prayer come in, there must be the present God, ready to fit circumstances to the varying need of the thinking, willing beings he has created. That God might make a world run on in physical perfection for ever I could easily believe; but where is the gain, or the fitness, if he would train thinking beings to his own freedom? For these he must be ever present, with room to order things for their growth and discipline. The present living idea informing the cosmos is nobler than all forsaken perfection, as a living man is nobler than an automaton.
If one says, “The laws of God ought to admit of no change,” I answer: the same working of unalterable laws might under new circumstances look a breach of them. That God will never alter his laws, which are the outcome of his truth and fact, I fully uphold; but that he might not act in ways we cannot recognize as consistent with them, I have yet to see reason to believe. Why should his perfect will be limited by our understanding of it? That he should require us to believe of him what we think wrong, I do not believe; that he should present to our vision what is inconsistent with our half-digested, ever-changing theories, I can well believe—if only to keep us from petrifying an imperfect notion and calling it an Idea. What I would believe is that a present God directs those laws, as a man works out his will amid and by means of them. Shall God create what shall fetter and enslave himself? His laws, as we know them, are the active mode in which he embodies certain truths, and that mode is the outcome of his own nature; so they must be capable of falling in with, if not of effecting, any expression of his will.
One miracle of this class remains, to some minds more difficult than all the rest. They say the story of the fish with a piece of money in its mouth is more like an eastern tale than a sober narrative of the quiet-toned gospel. I acknowledge a likeness: why might there not be some likeness between what God does and what man invents? But there is one difference: no colour in the style. No great roc, no valley of diamonds, no earthly grandeur is hinted at in the poor bare tale. Peter dealt with fishes every day; an ordinary fish taken with the hook was here the servant of the Lord—and why should the poor fish not have its share in the Master’s service, showing for itself and its kind that they, with the waters they dwell in and the wind that lifts the waves, were utterly his? What the scaly minister brought was no ring or rich jewel but a simple piece of money, just enough, I presume, to meet the demand of those whom, though they had no legal claim, our Lord would not offend by refusing; for he never cared to stand on his rights or treat as a principle what could be waived without loss of righteousness. I take for granted there was no other way at hand for those poor men to supply the sum.