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IX. THE GOVERNMENT OF NATURE.
The miracles I include in this class are the following:--
1. The turning of water into wine, already treated of, given by St John.
2. The draught of fishes, given by St Luke. 3. The draught of fishes,
given by St John. 4 The feeding of the four thousand, given by St
Matthew and St Mark. 5. The feeding of the five thousand, recorded by
all the Evangelists. 6. The walking on the sea, given by St Matthew, St
Mark, and St John. 7. The stilling of the storm, given by St Matthew, St
Mark, and St Luke. 8. The fish bringing the piece of money, told by St
Matthew alone.
These miracles, in common with those already considered, have for their
end the help or deliverance of man. They differ from those, however, in
operating mediately, through a change upon external things, and not at
once on their human objects.
But besides the fact that they have to do with what we call nature, they
would form a class on another ground. In those cases of disease,
the miracles are for the setting right of what has gone wrong, the
restoration of the order of things,--namely, of the original condition
of humanity. No doubt it is a law of nature that where there is sin
there should be suffering; but even its cure helps to restore that
righteousness which is highest nature; for the cure of suffering must
not be confounded with the absence of suffering. But the miracles of
which I have now to speak, show themselves as interfering with what we
may call the righteous laws of nature. Water should wet the foot, should
ingulf him who would tread its surface. Bread should come from the
oven last, from the field first. Fishes should be now here now there,
according to laws ill understood of men--nay, possibly according to a
piscine choice quite unknown of men. Wine should take ripening in the
grape and in the bottle. In all these cases it is otherwise. Yet even
in these, I think, the restoration of an original law--the supremacy of
righteous man, is foreshown. While a man cannot order his own house as
he would, something is wrong in him, and therefore in his house. I
think a true man should be able to rule winds and waters and loaves and
fishes, for he comes of the Father who made the house for him. Had Jesus
not been capable of these things, he might have been the best of men,
but either he could not have been a perfect man, or the perfect God, if
such there were, was not in harmony with the perfect man. Man is not
master in his own house because he is not master in himself, because he
is not a law unto himself--is not himself obedient to the law by which
he exists. Harmony, that is law, alone is power. Discord is weakness.
God alone is perfect, living, self-existent law.
I will try, in a few words, to give the ground on which I find it
possible to accept these miracles. I cannot lay it down as for any
other man. I do not wonder at most of those to whom the miracles are a
stumbling-block. I do a little wonder at those who can believe in Christ
and yet find them a stumbling-block.
How God creates, no man can tell. But as man is made in God's image, he
may think about God's work, and dim analogies may arise out of the depth
of his nature which have some resemblance to the way in which God works.
I say then, that, as we are the offspring of God--the children of his
will, like as the thoughts move in a man's mind, we live in God's mind.
When God thinks anything, then that thing is. His thought of it is its
life. Everything is because God thinks it into being. Can it then be
very hard to believe that he should alter by a thought any form or
appearance of things about us?
"It is inconsistent to work otherwise than by law."
True; but we know so little of this law that we cannot say what is
essential in it, and what only the so far irregular consequence of the
unnatural condition of those for whom it was made, but who have not yet
willed God's harmony. We know so little of law that we cannot certainly
say what would be an infringement of this or that law. That which at
first sight appears as such, may be but the operating of a higher law
which rightly dominates the other. It is the law, as we call it, that a
stone should fall to the ground. A man may place his hand beneath the
stone, and then, if his hand be strong enough, it is the law that the
stone shall not fall to the ground. The law has been lawfully prevented
from working its full end. In similar ways, God might stop the working
of one law by the intervention of another. Such intervention, if not
understood by us, would be what we call a miracle. Possibly a different
condition of the earth, producible according to law, might cause
everything to fly off from its surface instead of seeking it. The
question is whether or not we can believe that the usual laws might be
set aside by laws including higher principles and wider operations.
All I have to answer is--Give me good reason, and I can. A man may
say--"What seems good reason to you, does not to me." I answer, "We are
both accountable to that being, if such there be, who has lighted in us
the candle of judgment. To him alone we stand or fall. But there must
be a final way of right, towards which every willing heart is led,--and
which no one can find who does not seek it." All I want to show here,
is a conceivable region in which a miracle might take place without
any violence done to the order of things. Our power of belief depends
greatly on our power of imagining a region in which the things might be.
I do not see how some people could believe what to others may offer
small difficulty. Let us beware lest what we call faith be but the mere
assent of a mind which has cared and thought so little about the objects
of its so-called faith, that it has never seen the difficulties
they involve. Some such believers are the worst antagonists of true
faith--the children of the Pharisees of old.
If any one say we ought to receive nothing of which we have no
experience; I answer, there is in me a necessity, a desire before which
all my experience shrivels into a mockery. Its complement must lie
beyond. We ought, I grant, to accept nothing for which we cannot see
the probability of some sufficient reason, but I thank God that this
sufficient reason is not for me limited to the realm of experience. To
suppose that it was, would change the hope of a life that might be an
ever-burning sacrifice of thanksgiving, into a poor struggle with events
and things and chances--to doom the Psyche to perpetual imprisonment in
the worm. I desire the higher; I care not to live for the lower. The one
would make me despise my fellows and recoil with disgust from a self I
cannot annihilate; the other fills me with humility, hope, and love.
Is the preference for the one over the other foolish then--even to the
meanest judgment?
A higher condition of harmony with law, may one day enable us to do
things which must now appear an interruption of law. I believe it is
in virtue of the absolute harmony in him, his perfect righteousness,
that God can create at all. If man were in harmony with this, if he too
were righteous, he would inherit of his Father a something in his degree
correspondent to the creative power in Him; and the world he inhabits,
which is but an extension of his body, would, I think, be subject to him
in a way surpassing his wildest dreams of dominion, for it would be the
perfect dominion of holy law--a virtue flowing to and from him through
the channel of a perfect obedience. I suspect that our Lord in all his
dominion over nature, set forth only the complete man--man as God means
him one day to be. Why should he not know where the fishes were? or
even make them come at his will? Why should not that will be potent as
impulse in them? If we admit what I hail as the only fundamental idea
upon which I can speculate harmoniously with facts, and as alone
disclosing regions wherein contradictions are soluble, and doubts
previsions of loftier truth--I mean the doctrine of the Incarnation; or
if even we admit that Jesus was good beyond any other goodness we know,
why should it not seem possible that the whole region of inferior
things might be more subject to him than to us? And if more, why not
altogether? I believe that some of these miracles were the natural
result of a physical nature perfect from the indwelling of a perfect
soul, whose unity with the Life of all things and in all things was
absolute--in a word, whose sonship was perfect.
If in the human form God thus visited his people, he would naturally
show himself Lord over their circumstances. He will not lord it over
their minds, for such lordship is to him abhorrent: they themselves must
see and rejoice in acknowledging the lordship which makes them free.
There was no grand display, only the simple doing of what at the time
was needful. Some say it is a higher thing to believe of him that he
took things just as they were, and led the revealing life without the
aid of wonders. On any theory this is just what he did as far as his own
life was concerned. But he had no ambition to show himself the best of
men. He comes to reveal the Father. He will work even wonders to that
end, for the sake of those who could not believe as he did and had to be
taught it. No miracle was needful for himself: he saw the root of the
matter--the care of God. But he revealed this root in a few rare and
hastened flowers to the eyes that could not see to the root. There is
perfect submission to lower law for himself, but revelation of the
Father to them by the introduction of higher laws operating in the upper
regions bordering upon ours, not separated from ours by any impassable
gulf--rather connected by gently ascending stairs, many of whose
gradations he could blend in one descent. He revealed the Father as
being under no law, but as law itself, and the cause of the laws we
know--the cause of all harmony because himself the harmony. Men had
to be delivered not only from the fear of suffering and death, but from
the fear, which is a kind of worship, of nature. Nature herself must be
shown subject to the Father and to him whom the Father had sent. Men
must believe in the great works of the Father through the little works
of the Son: all that he showed was little to what God was doing. They
had to be helped to see that it was God who did such things as often as
they were done. He it is who causes the corn to grow for man. He gives
every fish that a man eats. Even if things are terrible yet they are
God's, and the Lord will still the storm for their faith in Him--tame
a storm, as a man might tame a wild beast--for his Father measures the
waters in the hollow of his hand, and men are miserable not to know it.
For himself, I repeat, his faith is enough; he sleeps on his pillow nor
dreams of perishing.
On the individual miracles of this class, I have not much to say. The
first of them was wrought in the animal kingdom.
He was teaching on the shore of the lake, and the people crowded him.
That he might speak with more freedom, he stepped into an empty boat,
and having prayed Simon the owner of it, who was washing his nets near
by, to thrust it a little from the shore, sat down, and no longer
incommoded by the eagerness of his audience, taught them from the boat.
When he had ended he told Simon to launch out into the deep, and let
down his nets for a draught. Simon had little hope of success, for there
had been no fish there all night; but he obeyed, and caught such a
multitude of fishes that the net broke. They had to call another boat to
their aid, and both began to sink from the overload of fishes. But the
great marvel of it wrought on the mind of Simon as every wonder tends to
operate on the mind of an honest man: it brought his sinfulness before
him. In self-abasement he fell down at Jesus' knees. Whether he thought
of any individual sins at the moment, we cannot tell; but he was
painfully dissatisfied with himself. He knew he was not what he ought to
be. I am unwilling however to believe that such a man desired, save, it
may be, as a passing involuntary result of distress, to be rid of the
holy presence. I judge rather that his feeling was like that of the
centurion--that he felt himself unworthy to have the Lord in his boat.
He may have feared that the Lord took him for a good man, and his
honesty could not endure such a mistake:
"Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord."
The Lord accepted the spirit, therefore not the word of his prayer.
"Fear not; from henceforth thou shalt catch men."
His sense of sinfulness, so far from driving the Lord from him, should
draw other men to him. As soon as that cry broke from his lips, he had
become fit to be a fisher of men. He had begun to abjure that which
separated man from man.
After his resurrection, St John tells us the Lord appeared one morning,
on the shore of the lake, to some of his disciples, who had again been
toiling all night in vain. He told them once more how to cast their net,
and they were not able to draw it for the multitude of fishes.
"It is the Lord," said St John, purer-hearted, perhaps therefore
keener-eyed, than the rest.
Since the same thing had occurred before, Simon had become the fisher of
men, but had sinned grievously against his Lord. He knew that Lord so
much better now, however, that when he heard it was he, instead of
crying Depart from me, he cast himself into the sea to go to him.
I take next the feeding of the four thousand with the seven loaves and
the few little fishes, and the feeding of the five thousand with the
five loaves and the two fishes.
Concerning these miracles, I think I have already said almost all I have
to say. If he was the Son of God, the bread might as well grow in his
hands as the corn in the fields. It is, I repeat, only a doing in
condensed form, hence one more easily associated with its real source,
of that which God is for ever doing more widely, more slowly, and with
more detail both of fundamental wonder and of circumstantial loveliness.
Whence more fittingly might food come than from the hands of such an
elder brother? No doubt there will always be men who cannot believe
it:--happy are they who demand a good reason, and yet can believe a
wonder! Associated with words which appeared to me foolish, untrue, or
even poor in their content, I should not believe it. Associated with
such things as he spoke, I can receive it with ease, and I cherish it
with rejoicing. It must be noted in respect of the feeding of the five
thousand, that while the other evangelists merely relate the deed as
done for the necessities of the multitude, St John records also the
use our Lord made of the miracle. It was the outcome of his essential
relation to humanity. Of humanity he was ever the sustaining food. To
humanity he was about to give himself in an act of such utter devotion
as could only be shadowed--now in the spoken, afterwards in the acted
symbol of the eucharist. The miracle was a type of his life as the life
of the world, a sign that from him flows all the weal of his creatures.
The bread we eat is but its outer husk: the true bread is the Lord
himself, to have whom in us is eternal life. "Except ye eat the flesh of
the Son of man and drink his blood ye have no life in you." He knew that
the grand figure would disclose to the meditation of the loving heart
infinitely more of the truth of the matter than any possible amount
of definition and explanation, and yet must ever remain far short of
setting forth the holy fact to the boldest and humblest mind. But lest
they should start upon a wrong track for the interpretation of it, he
says to his disciples afterwards, that this body of his should return to
God; that what he had said concerning the eating of it had a spiritual
sense: "It is the spirit that giveth life; the flesh profiteth
nothing"--for that. In words he contradicts what he said before, that
they might see the words to have meant infinitely more than as words
they were able to express; that not their bodies on his body, but their
souls must live on his soul, by a union and communion of which the
eating of his flesh and the drinking of his blood was, after all, but a
poor and faint figure. In this miracle, for the souls as for the bodies
of men, he did and revealed the work of the Father. He who has once
understood the meaning of Christ's words in connection with this
miracle, can never be content they should be less than true concerning
his Father in heaven. Whoever would have a perfect Father, must believe
that he bestows his very being for the daily food of his creatures. He
who loves the glory of God will be very jealous of any word that would
enhance his greatness by representing him incapable of suffering. Verily
God has taken and will ever take and endure his share, his largest share
of that suffering in and through which the whole creation groans for the
sonship.
Follows at once the equally wonderful story of his walking on the sea to
the help of his disciples. After the former miracle, the multitude would
have taken him by force to make him their king. Any kind of honour they
would readily give him except that obedience for the truth's sake which
was all he cared for. He left them and went away into a mountain alone
to pray to his Father. Likely he was weary in body, and also worn in
spirit for lack of that finer sympathy which his disciples could not
give him being very earthly yet. He who loves his fellows and labours
among those who can ill understand him will best know what this
weariness of our Lord must have been like. He had to endure the world-
pressure of surrounding humanity in all its ungodlike phases. Hence even
he, the everlasting Son of the Father, found it needful to retire for
silence and room and comfort into solitary places. There his senses
would be free, and his soul could the better commune with the Father.
The mountain-top was his chamber, the solitude around him its closed
door, the evening sky over his head its open window. There he gathered
strength from the will of the Father for what yet remained to be done
for the world's redemption. How little could the men below, who would
have taken him by force and made him a king, understand of such
communion! Yet every one of them must go hungering and thirsting and
grasping in vain, until the door of that communion was opened for him.
They would have made him a king: he would make them poor in spirit,
mighty in aspiration, all kings and priests unto God.
But amidst his prayer, amidst the eternal calm of his rapturous
communion, he saw his disciples thwarted by a wind stronger than all
their rowing: he descended the hill and walked forth on the water to
their help.
If ignorant yet devout speculation may be borne with here, I venture
to say that I think the change of some kind that was necessary somehow
before the body of the Son of Man could, like the Spirit of old, move
upon the face of the waters, passed, not upon the water, but, by the
will of the Son of Man himself, upon his own body. I shall have more to
say concerning this in a following chapter--now I merely add that we
know nothing yet, or next to nothing, of the relation between a right
soul and a healthy body. To some no doubt the notion of a healthy body
implies chiefly a perfection of all the animal functions, which is,
on the supposition, a matter of course; but what I should mean by an
absolutely healthy body is, one entirely under the indwelling spirit,
and responsive immediately to all the laws of its supremacy, whatever
those laws may be in the divine ideal of a man. As we are now, we find
the diseased body tyrannizing over the almost helpless mind: the healthy
body would be the absolutely obedient body.
What power over his own dwelling a Saviour coming fresh from the closest
speech with him who made that body for holy subjection, might have, who
can tell! If I hear of any reasonable wonder resulting therefrom, I
shall not find it hard to believe, and shall be willing to wait until I,
pure, inhabit an obedient house, to understand the plain thing which
is now a mystery. Meantime I can honour the laws I do know, and which
honest men tell me they have discovered, no less than those honest
men who--without my impulse, it may be, to speculate in this
direction--think such as I foolish in employing the constructive faculty
with regard to these things. But where, I pray them, lies any field so
absolutely its region as the unknown which yet the heart yearns to
know? Such cannot be the unknowable. It is endless comfort to think of
something that might be true. And the essence of whatever seems to a
human heart to be true, I expect to find true--in greater forms, and
without the degrading accidents which so often accompany it in the brain
of the purest thinker. Why should I not speculate in the only direction
in which things to me worthy of speculation appear likely to lie? There
is a wide may be around us; and every true speculation widens the
probability of changing the may be into the is. The laws that are
known and the laws that shall be known are all lights from the Father
of lights: he who reverently searches for such will not long mistake
a flash in his own brain for the candle of the Lord. But if he should
mistake, he will be little the worse, so long as he is humble, and ready
to acknowledge error; while, if he should be right, he will be none the
worse for having seen the glimmer of the truth from afar--may, indeed,
come to gather a little honour from those who, in the experimental
verification of an idea, do not altogether forget that, without some
foregone speculation, the very idea on which they have initiated their
experiment, and are now expending their most valued labour, would
never have appeared in their firmament to guide them to new facts and
realities.
Nor would it be impossible to imagine how St Peter might come within the
sphere of the holy influence, so that he, too, for a moment should walk
on the water. Faith will yet prove itself as mighty a power as it
is represented by certain words of the Lord which are at present a
stumbling-block even to devout Christians, who are able to accept them
only by putting explanations upon them which render them unworthy of
his utterance. When I say a power, I do not mean in itself, but as
connecting the helpless with the helpful, as uniting the empty need with
the full supply, as being the conduit through which it is right and
possible for the power of the creating God to flow to the created
necessity.
When the Lord got into the boat, the wind ceased, "and immediately,"
says St John, "the ship was at the land whither they went." As to
whether the ceasing of the wind was by the ordinary laws of nature, or
some higher law first setting such in operation, no one who has followed
the spirit of my remarks will wonder that I do not care to inquire: they
are all of one. Nor, in regard to their finding themselves so quickly at
the end of their voyage, will they wonder if I think that we may have
just one instance of space itself being subject to the obedient God, and
that his wearied disciples, having toiled and rowed hard for so long,
might well find themselves at their desired haven as soon as they
received him into their boat. Either God is all in all, or he is
nothing. Either Jesus is the Son of the Father, or he did no miracle.
Either the miracles are fact, or I lose--not my faith in this man--but
certain outward signs of truths which these very signs have aided me to
discover and understand and see in themselves.
The miracle of the stilling of the storm naturally follows here.
Why should not he, who taught his disciples that God numbered the very
hairs of their heads, do what his Father is constantly doing--still
storms--bring peace out of uproar? Of course, if the storm was stilled,
it came about by natural causes--that is, by such as could still a
storm. That anything should be done by unnatural causes, that is, causes
not of the nature of the things concerned, is absurd. The sole question
is whether Nature works alone, as some speculators think, or whether
there is a soul in her, namely, an intent;--whether these things are
the result of thought, or whether they spring from a dead heart;
unconscious, yet productive of conscious beings, to think, yea,
speculate eagerly concerning a conscious harmony hinted at in their
broken music and conscious discord; beings who, although thus born
of unthinking matter, invent the notion of an all lovely, perfect,
self-denying being, whose thought gives form to matter, life to nature,
and thought to man--subjecting himself for their sakes to the troubles
their waywardness has brought upon them, that they too may at length
behold a final good--may see the Holy face to face--think his thoughts
and will his wisdom!
That things should go by a law which does not recognize the loftiest
in him, a man feels to be a mockery of him. There lies little more
satisfaction in such a condition of things than if the whole were the
fortuitous result of ever conflicting, never combining forces. Wherever
individual and various necessity, choice, and prayer, come in, there
must be the present God, able and ready to fit circumstances to the
varying need of the thinking, willing being he has created. Machinery
will not do here--perfect as it may be. That God might make a world to
go on with absolute physical perfection to all eternity, I could easily
believe; but where the gain?--nay, where the fitness, if he would train
thinking beings to his own freedom? For such he must be ever present,
ever have room to order things for their growth and change and
discipline and enlightenment. The present living idea informing the
cosmos, is nobler than all forsaken perfection--nobler, as a living man
is nobler than an automaton.
If one should say: "The laws of God ought to admit of no change,"
- I answer
- The same working of unalterable laws might under new
circumstances look a breach of those laws. That God will never alter
his laws, I fully admit and uphold, for they are the outcome of his
truth and fact; but that he might not act in ways unrecognizable by us
as consistent with those laws, I have yet to see reason ere I believe.
Why should his perfect will be limited by our understanding of that
will? Should he be paralyzed because we are blind? That he should ever
require us to believe of him what we think wrong, I do not believe;
that he should present to our vision what may be inconsistent with our
half-digested and constantly changing theories, I can well believe. Why
not--if only to keep us from petrifying an imperfect notion, and calling
it an Idea? What I would believe is, that a present God manages the
direction of those laws, even as a man, in his inferior way, works out
his own will in the midst and by means of those laws. Shall God create
that which shall fetter and limit and enslave himself? What should
his laws, as known to us, be but the active mode in which he embodies
certain truths--that mode also the outcome of his own nature? If so,
they must be always capable of falling in with any, if not of effecting
every, expression of his will.
There remains but one miracle of this class to consider--one to some
minds involving greater difficulties than all the rest. They say the
story of the fish with a piece of money in its mouth is more like one of
the tales of eastern fiction than a sober narrative of the quiet-toned
gospel. I acknowledge a likeness: why might there not be some likeness
between what God does and what man invents? But there is one noticeable
difference: there is nothing of colour in the style of the story. No
great rock, no valley of diamonds, no earthly grandeur whatever is hinted
at in the poor bare tale. Peter had to do with fishes every day of his
life: an ordinary fish, taken with the hook, was here the servant of the
Lord--and why should not the poor fish have its share in the service
of the Master? Why should it not show for itself and its kind that they
were utterly his? that along with the waters in which they dwelt, and
the wind which lifteth up the waves thereof, they were his creatures,
and gladly under his dominion? What the scaly minister brought was
no ring, no rich jewel, but a simple piece of money, just enough, I
presume, to meet the demand of those whom, although they had no legal
claim, our Lord would not offend by a refusal; for he never cared to
stand upon his rights, or treat that as a principle which might be
waived without loss of righteousness. I take for granted that there was
no other way at hand for those poor men to supply the sum required of
them.
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