Ideal
Life to which they seem to form the almost natural accompaniment.
The Life itself is the great miracle. When we come to see it as it
really is, and to enter, if even in some dim and groping way, into
its inner recesses, we feel ourselves abashed and dumb. Yet this
self-evidential character is found in portions of the narrative
that are quite unmiraculous. These, perhaps, are in reality the
most marvellous, though the miracles themselves will seem in place
when their spiritual significance is understood and they are
ranged in order round their common centre. Doubtless some elements
of superstition may be mixed up in the record as it has come down
to us. There is a manifest gap between the reality and the story
of it. The Evangelists were for the most part 'Jews who sought
after a sign.' Something of this wonder-seeking curiosity may very
well have given a colour to their account of events in which the
really transcendental element was less visible and tangible. We
cannot now distinguish with any degree of accuracy between the
subjective and the objective in the report. But that miracles, or
what we call such, did in some shape take place, is, I believe,
simply a matter of attested fact. When we consider it in its
relation to the rest of the narrative, to tear out the miraculous
bodily from the Gospels seems to me in the first instance a
violation of history and criticism rather than of faith.

Still the author of 'Supernatural Religion' is, no doubt, justified
in raising the question, Did miracles really happen? I only wish
to protest against the idea that such a question can be adequately
discussed as something isolated and distinct, in which all that
is necessary is to produce and substantiate the documents as in
a forensic process. Such a 'world-historical' event (if I may for
the moment borrow an expressive Germanism) as the founding of
Christianity cannot be thrown into a merely forensic form.
Considerations of this kind may indeed enter in, but to suppose
that they can be justly estimated by themselves alone is an error.
And it is still more an error to suppose that the riddle of the
universe, or rather that part of the riddle which to us is most
important, the religious nature of man and, the objective facts
and relations that correspond to it, can all be reduced to some
four or five simple propositions which admit of being proved or
disproved by a short and easy Q.E.D.

It would have been a far more pro