and action which are
absolutely baffling. They can be eliminated from the narrative only by a
procedure which might just as well eliminate the narrative. In many of
the narratives there may be much that is true. In some all may be as
related. In Jesus' time, on the witness of the Scripture itself, it was
assumed as something no one questioned, that miraculous deeds were
performed, not alone by Jesus and the apostles, but by many others, and
not always even by the good. Such deeds were performed through the power
of evil spirits as well as by the power of God. To imagine that the
working of miracles proved that Jesus came from God, is the most patent
importation of a modern apologetic notion into the area of ancient
thought. We must remember that Jesus himself laid no great weight upon
the miracles which we assume that he believed he wrought, and some of
which we may believe that he did work. Many he performed with hesitation
and desired so far as possible to conceal.

Even if we were in a position at one point or another in the life of
Jesus to defend the traditional assumptions concerning the miraculous,
yet it must be evident how opposed it is to right reason, to lay stress
on the abstract necessity of belief in the miraculous. The traditional
conception of the miraculous is done away for us. This is not at all by
the fact that we are in a position to say with Matthew Arnold: 'The
trouble with miracles is that they never happen.' We do not know enough
to say that. To stake all on the assertion of the impossibility of
so-called miracles is as foolish as to stake much on the affirmation of
their actuality. The connexion of nature is only an induction. This can
never be complete. The real question is both more complex and also more
simple. The question is whether, even if an event, the most unparalleled
of those related in the Gospels or outside of them, should be proved
before our very eyes to have taken place, the question is whether we
should believe it to have been a miracle in the traditional sense, an
event in which the actual--not the known, but the possible--order of
nature had been broken through, and in the old sense, God had
arbitrarily supervened.

Allowed that the event were, in our own experience and in the known
experience of the race, unparalleled, yet it would never occur to us to
suppose but that there was a law of this case, also, a connexion in
nature in which, as work of God, it occurred, and in wh