iracles take as regards us
who read them many centuries after, and as regards those who witnessed
and recorded them at the time, is quite different. To them the miracles
were the first and often the chief proof that the man who wrought them
had been sent by God, and that His message was a revelation, not an
imposture; to us they are, if accepted at all, accepted as a part of the
revelation itself. There are no doubt a few minds that are convinced by
Paley's argument, and beginning with accepting the miracles as proved by
sufficient external evidence, go on to accept the conclusion that
therefore the teaching that was thus accompanied must be divine. But
most men are quite unable to take to pieces in this way the records in
which Revelation is contained, and to go from external evidence taken
alone to the messengers who thus proved their mission, and thence to the
substance of the message which they taught. To most of us, on the
contrary, the Revelation is a whole, capable of being looked at from
many sides, and found to be divine from whatever side it is seen; and
one of its aspects is this supernatural character by which it appears
to assert its identity with that Moral Law which claims absolute
supremacy over all the physical world. The main evidence of the
Revelation to us consists in its harmony with the voice of the spiritual
faculty within us; and the claim which it asserts to have come through
teachers endowed with supernatural power is so far corroborative
evidence as it falls in with the essential character of the Moral Law.
That eternal law claims supremacy over the physical world and actually
asserts it in the freedom of the human will; and a Revelation which
comes from Him Who in His own essential Being is that very law
personified, might be expected to exhibit the same claim in actual
manifestation in its approach to men.

Bearing these limitations and characteristics of the miraculous element
in the Bible in mind, let us ask how that miraculous element is therein
presented.

First, in the account of the creation, it is taught that the original
existence of all matter flows from a spiritual source. We do not define
God as the cause, meaning that that is His essence, and that except as
causing other things to exist He does not exist Himself. But we
describe Him as the Cause, meaning that all things exist by His Will,
and that without His Will nothing could ever have existed. And as the
Revelation tells us