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The Fundamentals honest who in these days professes to believe in the miracles of the Bible. It is overstating the case to speak of this repugnance to miracle, and rejection of it in the Bible, as if it were really new. I t is as old as rationalism itself. You find it in Spinoza, in Reimarus, in Strauss, in numberless others. DeWette and Vatke, among earlier Old Testament critics, manifested it as strongly as their followers do now, and made it a pivot of their criticism. It governed the attacks on Christianity made in the age of the deists. David Hume wrote an essay against miracles which he thought had settled the question forever. But, seriously considered, can this attack on the idea of mir acle, derived from our experience of the uniformity of nature’s laws, be defended? Does it not in itself involve a huge assumption, and run counter to experience and common sense ? The question is one well worth asking. First, what is a miracle? Various definitions might be given, but it will be enough to speak of it here as any effect in nature, or deviation from its ordinary course, due to the interposition of a supernatural cause. I t is no necessary part, it should be observed, of the Biblical idea of miracle, that natural agencies should not be employed as far as they will go. I f the drying of the Red Sea to let the Israelites pass over was due in part to a great wind that blew, this was none the less of God’s ordering, and did not detract from the super natural character of the event as a whole. I t was still at God’s command that the waters were parted, and that a way was made at that particular time and place for the people to go through. These are what theologians call “providential” miracles, in which, so far as one can see, natural agencies, under divine direction, suffice to produce the result. There is, however, another and more conspicuous class, the instanta neous cleansing of the leper, e. g., or the raising of the dead, in which natural agencies are obviously altogether transcended.
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