MR. FOWLER ON MIRACLES.
TT is not often that men as eminent as Mr. Fowler in the com-
merce of the world take up subjects as truly important, as deep, and as far removed from the sphere of their ordinary busi- ness as the subject of Miracles ; or if they do take it up, discuss it with as much insight and fullness of appreciation. The subtle criticism by Dr. Tyndall in the Fortnightly Review some time ago on Mr. Mozley's able and elaborate book, has led Mr. Fowler to review the discussion carefully for himself, and the result is the thoughtful little tract to which we call attention below.* The whole controversy is far too wide, and in many of its aspects too vague, to be adequately described, much less discussed, within the limits of a newspaper article. But Mr. Fowler's essay gives us a good opportunity for explaining where, as we understand it, the true issue precisely is, in our own time, between those natural philosophers who have most to say for themselves, and whose authority commands most respect, in asserting the absolute uni- formity of nature, and denying the possibility of miracles ; and those, on the other hand, who, with Mr. Mozley, and Mr. Fowler, and the Duke of Argyll, and all who, like ourselves, retain their belief in the supernatural elements of the Christian faith, heartily accept them as historical facts.
First, then, we hold that both the greater physicists, like Dr. Tyndall, Mr. Huxley, and others, of the same high intellectual calibre, and the greater supernaturalists, are, for the most part, agreed in believing in the existence of great permanent natural forces (as distinguished from mere laws of phenomena), such as the force of gravitation and others which are more or less capable of transmutation inter se, according to Mr. Grove's doctrine of "cor- relation," being sometimes measurable in the form of motion, sometimes in the form of heat, for instance, but remaining ever constant and permanent in themselves. The supernaturalists, of course, refer these forces directly to the will of God ; the natural philosophers make no assumption of the kind, being content to affirm their actual existence, without inquiring into the question of origin. But both alike, as a rule, now admit their real exist- ence as forces external to the mind of the percipients, and as act- ing by absolutely uniform laws so far as they are known to act at all. The two different views for the most part break off from each other here,—that the supernaturalists believe in the real interference of spiritual, with the otherwise uniform results of natural forces ; they deny that physical nature can be abso- lutely isolated in distinct uniformities of its own ; they assert that the spiritual, moral, and physical arc so closely interwoven and blended that not only does the lower sphere affect the higher, —the bodily constitution of man his moral and spiritual con- stitution,—but also that the higher affects the lower, the spiritual and moral constitution of man affecting his physical constitution and vitally modifying its actual phenomena. They go further, and say that if there be any real free- dom in man by which he vitally modifies the range of the physical forces to which he is subjected,—if his freedom of resolve really makes the difference between his living in this way or in that, between his sailing in a ship which goes to the bottom (say) in a shipwreck, and staying at home to live for thirty years longer in the exercise of his special vocation, good or bad,—if there be at all, as they believe, so vital an influence exercised from above over the actual succession of events to which man's life is subject,—then it is out of all reason that God, if there be a God, should not exercise the same spiritual and moral influence on the order of events in an infinitely higher and more effectual degree, and this they call Providence. They go further, again, and say that if man's will be a really creative influence, however strictly limited, on the necessary forces (nervous or otherwise) encircling it,—if it have any power at all to arrest the rising tide of fear, or anger, Mozley and Tyndall on Miracles. An Essay. By William Fowler, LL.B. Lon- ' don: Longmaas. 1868. or pity, or any other passion,—if it can lift or stay the arm, and so partly determine the distribution, at least, if not the quantity, of the physical motion around it,—then it is only reasonable to suppose that God's will must, without any infraction of law, have an infinitely higher influence of the same kind to arrest, or liberate, or infinitely vary, the physical forces of the universe,—a conclu- sion which is only indefinitely the more likely if those forces be nothing but the commoner modes of the exertion of His will, as they themselves really hold. They admit that there would be no reason to believe in these spiritual modifications of physical law without positive evidence. But they conceive that that evidence consists of two elements, first, the evidence addressed to the judgment through outward testimony that such modifica- tions have really taken place ; and secondly, the evidence addressed directly to the spiritual reason through the highest faculties of the soul that such modifications of physical law had a meaning and a purpose of their own, calculated to confirm and strengthen those highest faculties for the sake of which they did take place. In all human concerns the credibility of extraordinary actions is always indefinitely diminished by the complete absence of any intelligible reason for them, indefinitely increased by the clear presence of such a coherent reason. And so it is natural enough that the evidence of miracles is held insufficient by those who find nothing of spiritual reason in them,—sufficient by those who find in them the highest appeal to spiritual reason. Mr. Fowler has pressed with great justice the argument of Mr. Mansel that " miracle is not wrought for the sake of the physical universe, but for the sake of the moral beings within it, and the question to be considered is not whether a divine interposition is needed to regulate the machinery of nature, but whether it is needed or adapted to promote the religious welfare of man." (We think, by the way, that Mr. Fowler has made a mistake in accepting for a moment Mr. Manses notion of a miracle as a mere mode of proof, authenticating a revelation, but not itself forming part of the revelation. Unless miracle be itself a revealing power, that is, something which enlarges our grasp of spiritual truth, without relation to the accident, as we may call it, that it transcended human power to effect, we do not believe that it would be more than an excrescence on Christianity, instead of an essential part of it. But this we remark only casually, and cannot here stay to justify.) It seems to us a most essential part of any reasonable belief in miracle that credence is given because it makes appeal to the higher reason, and is a difficulty only to what we may call the customary or sensuous reason of man. Nothing can be truer than the admirable passage which Mr. Fowler cites on this question from Mr. Mozley :— " Surely it is quite true that 'reason does not always prevail spon- taneously and without effort even in questions of belief ; so far from it, that the question of faith against reason may often be more properly termed the question of reason against imagination. It does not seldom require faith to believe reason, isolated as she may be amid vast irrational influences, the weight of custom, the power of association, the strength of passion, the vis inertia of sense, the mere force of the uniformity of nature as a spectacle, those influences which make up that power of the world which Scripture always speaks of as the antagonist of faith.'
' Are our conclusions of the customary type ? Then custom imparts the full sense of security. Are they not of the customary, but of a strange and unknown type ? Then the mechanical sense of security is wanting, and a certain trust is required for reposing in them, which we call faith. Bat that which draws these conclusions is in either case reason.' "
This is, as we understand it, the abstract case of the super- naturalists, who, on the concrete side, affirm that our Lord's resurrection, believed as it was by a number of witnesses who spent their lives in proclaiming it, and sacrificed their lives for their faith in His continual spiritual reign, gives, to all who believe in God on the evidence of their own souls, a secure and rational basis for belief in historical miracle, so far, at least, as they find in it a new source of light on the nature of God and on His relation to men.
On the other hand, we understand the natural philosophers, who differ from us, to reason as follows. The permanence of order in certain natural phenomena, now known to be connected with great and permanent forces, is the best established fact to which we have any testimony. It is attested by the experience of every day and minute of every man's life through centuries, while the asserted exceptions to this permanence are few and far between, and all of any weight are historical phenomena not capable of being re-examined by scientific criticism. If probability is to be measured by experience, the probability that exceptions have occurred long ago, which cannot be persuaded to repeat themselves before our eyes, ought to diminish with our distance from the events and the necessary obscurity which time must throw over the possible loop- holes for error in the testimony. As to free-will and its power of altering the succession of events before our eyes, that is itself a disputed phenomenon ; and apart from the dispute on this head, we know of no instance in which free-will could prevent a human body from sinking in water, or in any way alter the effects of the thoroughly known and computed physical forces. It may be able to vary the orbit (as we may call it) of man, and so determine what physical influences, what attractions and perturbations, he shall be subject to. But it cannot alter them an iota when he is once subjected to them. The whole drift of modern science is in favour of strictly defined regions of absolutely unalterable force, which we have as much power to increase or diminish as we have to alter the amount of heat emitted by the sun, or to beckon a dis- tant star towards us. If we accept miracle against this testimony, we accept the evidence of an unscientific age which had no notion of the extent of the marvel it was believing, against a creed resting on verified and rapidly accumulating evidence. It may be true that there are various spiritual elements in our nature, of the significance and power and full extent of which we have as yet no clear idea. But it is always wise to mould our views of what we understand but little into conformity with our most accurate and certain knowledge, rather than to suppose excep- tions in laws which we have arrived at by scientific processes in order to satisfy the vague assumptions of a terra incognita like the religious nature of man. In answer to Mr. Fowler's state- ment, that " the marvels of history " (a priori often of the highest improbability) are believed on no better testimony, the anti-super- naturalist would say that this sort of improbability is of a different kind,—an improbability only in the sense in which drawing on the first trial an individual ball out of a box, containing a hundred thousand others, is improbable,—an event which, however impro- bable, may be said to be certain to occur some time or other, if you go on making a sufficient number of experiments from age to age. On the other hand, he would maintain that when philo- sophy leads us to believe that a "marvel of history" is not only dependent on an exceedingly rare combination of coincidences, but one clearly outside the limits of the known causes, (as if it were asserted that a ball had been drawn out which we had every reason to know was never in the box), it would not be accepted -on the evidence assumed.
Such we suppose to be a fair statement of the real issue between the supernaturalists and anti-supernaturalists. It seems to us that the decision must necessarily rest on the reality and force of apprehension with which men believe in God as a vera causa who enters into the very heart of human actions, and has full power at least to prove Himself, if He chooses, the controller of human events. To those who feel this only faintly,—only at intervals,— to whom the life of our Lord seems rather a saintly dream than the voice of a power higher than any other power, the only voice which ever told us clearly for what human nature was really treated, and of what it is capable—the only voice which ever revealed the " true meaning of our being and the secret of our des- tiny,"—we do not wonder that the argument against miracles should seem overwhelming. Those, on the contrary, who recognize, -with us, that God is habitually dealing personally with us, answer- ing daily prayers, altering by His personal intercourse the very 'conditions of the life we live, the fact that miracles are so exceptional seems no ground for rejecting them. Is it not natural that, however much it may be for human benefit to place man under an unalterable and rigid regime of natural laws, once at least, if not oftener, in the history of man the gulf between nature and spirit should have been bridged, and God identified with the very origin of those laws which His Spirit is now engaged in teaching us how to use? Intellectually, we hold that Mr. Fowler, fair as he is, scarcely does justice to the position of the anti-super- naturalist. The comparative weight of the opposite cases must be judged according to the intensity of the individual apprehension of the divine will as a real cause. Those who apprehend it only faintly will be overpowered by the great array of visible uniformities of nature marching on through history, and only showing doubtful indications here and there of any supernatural modification. Those who apprehend it as the Cause of causes, always behind the veil, always penetrating it through spiritual channels, always leading our thoughts back to Christ as the very focus of human history, will feel no more surprise at exceptional phenomena then occurring to bridge the chasm between the spiritual and natural world, than they would at discovering, if it could be discovered, that those who have passed through death take up a totally different relation to the physical forces of the universe. It is certainly much truer that it needs direct divine influence to make us believe in miracle, than that it needs miracle to make us believe in direct divine influence. Miracle may be, we think it is, an essen- tial part of revelation,—revealing, as nothing else reveals, the identity of the spiritual and physical causes of the universe ; but till you have got a thorough and positive belief in the spiritual causes, apart from the physical, it can teach you nothing, but is a mere burden on a sensuous imagination educated into disbelief of it.
Previous page
