- 7 -
have already been indicated in our foregoing remarks. But in reference to the
characteristic of power as connected with these miracles, it may be remarked that its
exhibition was not only necessary for the vindication of the authority of the prophet, or
rather of Him in Whose Name he spake, but that they also do not present a mere
display of power. For it was always associated with an ultimate moral purpose in
regard to the Gentiles or to Israel - the believing or the unbelieving among them; and in
all the leading instances (which must rule the rest) it was brought about not only in the
Name of Jehovah, but by calling upon Him as the direct Agent in it (comp. for the
present Volume I Kings 17:4, 9, 14, 20- 22). Thus viewed, this extraordinary display of
the miraculous appears, like that in the first proclamation of Christianity among the
heathen, "for a sign, not to them that believe, but to them that believe not" (1
Corinthians 14:22) - as Bengel explains, in order that, drawn and held thereby, they
might be made to listen.
But even so, some further remarks may here be allowed; not, indeed, in the way of
attempted disquisition on what must always be a prime postulate in our faith, but as
helps in our thinking. It seems to me, that miracles require for their (objective)
possibility - that is, subjectively viewed for their credibility^1 - only one postulate: that
of the True and the Living God. It is often asserted, that miracles are not the traversing
of the established, but the outcome of a higher order of things.
Given, that there is a God (be the seeming hypothetication forgiven!), and in living
connection with His rational creatures - and it seems to follow that He must teach and
train them. It equally follows, that such teaching must be adapted to their stage and
capacity (power of receptiveness). Now in this respect all times may be arranged into
two periods that of outward, and that of inward spiritual communication (of Law and
Persuasion). During the former, the miraculous could scarcely be called an
extraordinary mode of Divine communication, since men generally, Jews and Gentiles
alike, expected miracles. Outside this general circle (among deeper thinkers) there was
only a "feeling after God," which in no case led up to firm conviction. But in the
second stage personal determination is the great characteristic. Reason has taken the
place of sense; the child has grown to the man. The ancient world as much expected an
argument from the miraculous as we do from the purely rational or the logically
evidential. That was their mode of apprehension, this is ours. To them, in one sense,
the miraculous was really not the miraculous, but the expected; to us it is and would be
interference with our laws and habits of thinking. It was adapted to the first period; it is
not to the second.
It would lead beyond our present limits to inquire into the connection of this change
with the appearance of the God-man and the indwelling of the Holy Ghost in the
Church. As we have shown in a previous Volume, under the Old Testament the Holy
(^)