CHAPTER XVI.

(SUBJECT CONTINUED.)

Evidence of the Supernatural in Christianity-Results in the History of Christianity-Conclusion.

"The truth which really and only accounts for the establishment in this our human world of such a religion as Christianity, and of such an institution as the Church, is the truth that Jesus Christ was believed to be more than man, the truth that Jesus Christ is what men believed him to be, the truth that Jesus Christ is God."-Canon Liddon.

H

AVING tested the historical statements in Scripture by evidence in other records, having noticed the peculiarity with which prophecy and its fulfilment have invested the Bible, and having traced in the "Natural" the mysterious tokens of a Power working in sovereignty behind its economies, we cannot escape the impression that the same Being who hath introduced into the physical world new conditions of structure and life, and into mental history those ideas which strangely or superhumanly represented future facts, centuries before their realisation, hath also placed in the higher world, -the Mental, the Moral, and the Spiritual,—those historical facts, those miraculous changes, and those doctrinal truths · which lay beyond the reach alike of man's physical and intellectual resources. Physical changes for which no known natural forces can account, and prophecies for which, in the domain of thought, no satisfactory explanation, apart from the Will of God, has ever been offered, constitute of themselves sufficient warrant for receiving the Bible as a divine Revelation, and Christianity with all its miracles as a divine system. Christianity claims to be supernatural. It reveals

truths beyond the range of human thought, and that is supernatural; it records miracles, and they are supernatural. The two are inseparably inwrought with one another,—the miracle of revelation itself, and the miracles which are recorded in the Scriptures. The proposal to accept the Bible without its prophecies, and Christianity alone without its miracles, is to deprive both of almost every vestige of moral value. The traces of the supernatural are so abundant in the Bible, and so distinctly characteristic of it, that to efface them or cut them out would be to render the Book and its system of truth so utterly meaningless, that it would become a piece of useless patchwork, with no trace of connexion whatever with the works of God in Creation, a union in which they have recently become more fully known in the light of accurate science.

The systematic study of Nature alone creates a predisposition to look for, and acknowledge, the Supernatural in any higher system of truth, which might be brought within man's reach, and accordingly the Scriptures are so pervaded by tokens of a controlling presence above all that is merely human, that they harmonise with the evidence in Nature of the Supernatural. That there is development in the life of every individual, and that there is evolution in separate systems or economies, every one admits; but there is not the least evidence to prove, as has been already fully stated, that the one system has been evolved from the other; that the different systems of inorganic bodies, and of organised beings, have been evolved from some very simple beginnings; and that the intellectual and moral nature of man has been evolved from either inorganic matter, or from some mollus

cous creature.

But supposing that both development and evolution. should be found to extend much more comprehensively in

breadth and depth than we yet imagine, the result should not in the least degree affect our confidence in the dispensations of Providence and the means of Grace. There are higher laws than this material frame-work, with its plant and animal existences, can ever exhibit; there is the Sphere of Providence as it regulates individual, domestic, and national histories; but beyond and above it there is the economy of Grace, or the Plan of Redemption, and every student is responsible for mastering its doctrines and its duties.

On turning our attention closely to the Word of God, that the Economy of Grace may be known aright, we naturally expect that the same method of manifesting truth will be exhibited which appears in God's works around us, and we are not disappointed. The Natural and the Supernatural reappear in forms still more distinctly recognisable, and the progressiveness which we have already described as apparent in the adjustments of the globe and in the development of Life-forms, is still more obvious in the development of Revealed truth and in the unfolded means of Grace. At the very commencement of the Bible, there is that profoundly comprehensive prophecy or promise to which reference has already been made,-"I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." All that has transpired in the history of the world is morally an evolution from the twofold truth in that broad announcement.

These facts, at the outset, taken in connexion with what has followed, could not be a natural evolution of human thinking; they must have been supernaturally communicated. The first distinctly recognised element in the revelation of

1 Genesis iii. 15.

truths which lie beyond the grasp of man is supernatural; indeed, all the Facts of Grace must have a supernatural connexion. The Bible carries in its pages abundant evidence of the supernatural, not only in its separate exalted truths, and in prophecies long mysterious, but in the whole foundation and scope of Christianity. The Plan of Redemption is itself supernatural, and the communication of that plan, be the means what they may, was ever dependent on the Mind of a being higher than man. If these views be refused on the plea of the Universality of Law, how account for those facts and movements which have transcended all that has yet transpired within the sphere of the material, the intellectual, and the moral, in any of those lands in which the light of Scripture has never shone? We may fairly challenge an answer here. The review of " Religious Beliefs," which has been commenced, and which, we trust, will be sedulously prosecuted, cannot possibly prove that Christianity, with all its ideas and doctrines, is a mere evolution in the upward struggle of the religious sentiment in man. Its origin is distinctly traceable to a time when, historically, it could not be an evolution; and its character at the present moment is so confounding to all false religions, that they could not possibly give it originating impulse and moulding process. If they did, why are they not now originating, apart from Christianity, a similar, or some other exalted, scheme?

While rejecting the natural development of Religious Belief, some very able Christian writers are evidently much perplexed by the assertion of strenuous opponents, that the suspension of physical laws is inconceivable, and by their repudiating the possibility of Spirit in any way interfering with material processes. Of the mode in which Spirit so influences matter as to produce changes we have no

definite idea, but that Spirit can and does thus work is a Fact. Whenever we raise our arm, we affect that law of matter by which it would hang by our side; whenever we cast a stone into the air, our spirit acts on matter; and so also in a thousand different ways. It does not, in the least, modify this connexion of Spirit with matter, that the human mind controls it in a manner distinct from that in which the Divine Spirit may be supposed to produce changes which are to us miracles in both cases. The mode of action, or the connexion with two distinct existences, is inconceivable. But, in reality, the action of the Divine Spirit in making the iron swim, or in the miracle of walking on the Sea of Galilee, presents in itself no greater difficulties than the action of the human spirit on the body, and, through the body, on the various objects by which it is surrounded.

There is an obvious source of weakness in the concession by Christian writers of too much supremacy to what has been not inappropriately designated the "Reign of Law." It is a mistake to be ever attempting to bring the higher movements of Providence and Grace within the limits of the lower material processes of creation, and it is no less an error to be ever reasoning as if all Nature were stereotyped, fixed, unchangeable, incapable even of modification except by higher or hidden laws, which, in their own sphere, also, must be physical, or conformable in nature to that on which they act. There is, of course, the prevalence of LAW; there is the ORDER of Nature, and we count on its continuance ; what has been, we expect to be. recognition, human life is regulated and utilised; but what has been in the past is not a logical warrant for dogmatically asserting that the past shall be invariably repeated in the future, and that change or reverse is in every form impossible. All that can be held by us as to the future is an expectation.

By this principle, and its