MR. LLEWELYN DAVIES ON CHRISTIAN MIRACLE.
IN the new number of the Fortnightly, Mr. Llewelyn Davies has written a thoughtful and impressive article to explain what he holds to be the true avenue to Christian faith as it was understood by Christ himself, though he has laid himself open to various misunderstandings by saying at the very opening of it, what is certain to mislead many readers as to its true drift:— " I believe that it will be entirely to the advantage of Christianity that we should dismiss the idea of the miraculous' from our contentions and our thoughts. The claim made in the name of miracles has had a pestilent effect upon the Christian cause." From this it will be inferred by those who do not carefully study the latter part of Mr. Lleweiyn Davies's article, that he thinks that the highest kind of belief in Christ can exist without belief in the Christian miracles, and we are quite sure that no more mistaken inference could be drawn. Mr. Llewelyn Davies only wants to express strongly his belief that Christ discouraged, and even severely condemned those who were drawn to him not by the spiritual spell of his own character, but by the wonder and awe with which they were impressed by his superhuman cures, or by his control of winds and waves, —to emphasise his deep conviction that the one great miracle in which all Christians are bound to believe first, and which if they believe, they will have but little difficulty in believing any other, is the stupendous miracle that Christ was given authority to declare to man the nature and character of the Eternal Power to which we owe our existence, and especially the will of that Power to forgive us our sins, and to renew us with a spirit which will reconcile us to himself. Mr. Davies asserts that it was not Christ's plan "to announce himself as a supernatural being, and to perform miracles as his credentials; on the contrary, he was deeply displeased by the demand for miracles, and repelled the support which men were willing to give to a miracle-worker. Bat from the beginning to the end he assumed authority as having come from the Father ; he taught, and gave commands, and organised his followers, and made plans for the future as one having authority. The adherents he desired, and whom alone he expected to win, were those who were childlike and ready to believe in a heavenly Father. To these he offered pardon, guidance, grace, and help of all kinds. The Galileans he selected and appointed as his envoys were simple, truthful men who believed in him because they could not doubt his assurance. And when these envoys went forth after his death to proclaim him as Lord, they still made the same remarkable offer,—that of forgiveness and reconciliation to the Father. He was exalted, they said, to give repentance to Israel and remission of sins. The word committed to them was : God forgives mankind,—be ye reconciled to God.' And St. Paul, the chief founder of the Church, was accustomed to protest that he stood on the self-commending power of this message, which was as light to those of his hearers who had eyes to see." In other words, Mr. Llewelyn Davies, so far from dismissing "the idea of 'the miraculous' from our con- tentions and our thoughts," as one which has had "a pestilent effect on the Christian cause," begins from the true miracle, the supernatural in Christ himself, and his authority to declare the very mind of the Eternal. "If we are to believe," as he puts it in a subsequent page, "that the man Jesus of Nazareth had a special commission to reveal the heavenly Father, we are admitting what every agnostic would repudiate as a stupendous miracle ; and I cannot imagine that if an agnostic were per- suaded to believe this, he would obstinately stumble at smaller miracles as incredible." Very true. Then why does Mr. Llewelyn Davies give room for misunderstanding by professing to wish "to dismiss the idea of the miraculous' from our con- tentions and our thoughts," when what he is really aiming at is to get men to see that it is easier to leap at once to the belief in the supernatural life of Christ, that is, in the greatest of all miracles, the miracle which assumes the moulding power of the spiritual over the natural, and the revealing power of the natural, when so moulded, than to begin by believing in one or two astounding interferences with the natural order, and to build up on this, inductively, a belief that Christ must have derived this power to interfere with the natural order from his command of supernatural resources ? What Mr. Llewelyn Davies really maintains is that we must be prepared by the spiritual power working in our own minds to accept the divine authority of Christ, before we pass any judgment on his physical miracles, and that it will be easier to believe his physical miracles because we believe in his divine nature, than it ever could be to believe in his divine nature because we are convinced that he effected astounding changes in the order of Nature. We heartily accept his position as a whole that,—man being what he is,—faith in the spiritually supernatural justifies belief in the physically supernatural, much more effectually and permanently, than any amount of astonishment at the physically supernatural is ever likely to justify faith in the spiritually supernatural. We believe, with Mr. Llewelyn Davies, that this was, on the whole, our Lord's own teaching, and that we should be rash and presumptuous in attempting to exchange his doctrine for what looks like,—though it is not,—a humbler and more inductive process. But though we accept Mr. Llewelyn Davies's position as a whole, and think it a matter of no little importance that this method should be followed, we cannot at all agree in Mr. Llewelyn Davies's strong asser- tion that "it was not his [Christ's] plan to announce himself as a supernatural being, and to perform miracles as his credentials." That is precisely what he did, though he did it only as verifying by actions of infinitely less moment than those which warranted the great faith he demanded,the conviction that there was that in him which did not merely impose on the imagina- tion of his disciples, but which wielded real forces, and forces quite outside the region where illusion was easy. When he said to the paralytic, "Thy sins be forgiven thee," and the standers-by asked who it was that assumed a power to forgive sins, he added, —" But that ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins, Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house." This is surely exactly. what Mr. Llewelyn Davies denies, a claim to supernatural power of the highest order ; and then, in order to prevent men from thinking that the power to which they had surrendered themselves could be founded on mere illusions of the imagination, he gave evidence that he could thrill the body,—a much less wonder, and yet one less liable to imaginative misapprehension,—with the same health-giving power with which he claimed that he could thrill the soul. And it is just the same when John the Baptist sends his disciples to ask if Jesus were "he that should come," or whether they were to look beyond him, and our Lord replies, —" Go, and show John again those things which ye do hear and see; the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them; and blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me." How could Christ have said more plainly,—' Yes ; I claim to be the true and ultimate object of your hopes and expectations, and though I can only appeal to your spirits to prove that great claim, I can give you these further evidences that I am not bewildering your imaginations, for I will do in the physical world what I claim to do in the spiritual world,—fill you with new life' ? Christ's rebuke to the mere craving for signs seems to us to be directed not to the very natural and human self-distrust which was expressed by the two disciples in the walk to Emmaus when they confessed that the crucifixion had shaken their hope that Christ was he who should fulfil the desire of Israel, but to the state of mind which had no disposition to believe in the spiritual origin of the natural, unless that disposition could be engendered by the contemplation of a number of preter- natural occurrences which they would not be able to account for except by some sort of omnipotent interference. Even the passage which Mr. Llewelyn Davies refers to, when our Lord says, "Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe," appears to show this. For when the nobleman answers simply, "Sir, come down ere my child die," Christ accords to the implicit belief in him so expressed what he would not have accorded to the mere craving for a sign, and yet makes it a sign as well, as is shown by the exact accordance of the hour of the crisis in the disease with the hoar of Christ's assurance, "Thy son liveth." There was here, therefore, a distinct purpose to let the sign produce its effect on a mind which had already felt the attraction of our Lord's goodness. It was only to those who, while they asked for signs from him, were apt to ascribe them, when they saw them, to evil powers, that Christ sternly refused to show any sign. To those who could understand, and trust in, the physical "signs of the times," but who could not understand or trust in the spiritual signs of the times, he refused to exhibit his divine power. But to those whose hearts were stirred deeply by his influence, but who hardly knew whether they ought to trust the deeper impulses within them or not, he seems to us to have been most willing and anxious to prove that it was no illusion of the imagination to which they were giving way. "The wicked and adulterous generation" which sought after a sign, and to which no sign was to be given but the sign of the prophet Jonah, were not those who were yearning to believe in Christ, but who, like the Apostles themselves, found their faith oozing out with every discourage- ment. Be denounced those who yearned for prodigies only, and even when they had prodigies, saw no spiritual meaning in them, but rather an unspiritual meaning. But even St. Paul insisted that if the great sign of the Resurrection were untrust- worthy, the whole Gospel which he had declared was a dream.
We cannot but regret that Mr. Llewelyn Davies has put his pro- test against the old and unspiritual use of miracles to force belief on sceptical hearts and consciences, with what appears to us more energy than discrimination. For while we heartily agree with his main drift, we are quite sure that the physical miracles of the New Testament add a majesty of their own to the whole effect of the great spiritual miracle in which Mr. Llewelyn Davies very justly demands our faith, and are not, as it has lately been the custom to represent them, a mere dead weight on the spiritual grandeur of the Gospel, rendering it more difficult to believe than it would have been without them. Yet there are passages in this interesting and powerful article which, if taken alone, would certainly convey this false impression, though we do not think that Mr. Llewelyn Davies in the least intended to convey it.
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