And this leads me, too, to the character of the miracles; which, as Mr. Mill says, ought to be characterized by what suits the law (character) of the author of them. Let us consider them in this view.
Christianity views man as guilty and lost by sin, and while recognizing the law as the just measure of what was required from man, yet (none having fulfilled it) purports to be the revelation of God in sovereign goodness to save what was thus lost. Now, Christ's miracles and those of His disciples were not merely signs of power, but all of them of goodness as well as power. There is but one absolute exception, and the accessory of another. The cursing of, the barren fig-tree, a usual figure of the Israelitish nation, that is, of man under the old covenant. This is finally judged, and it was never to bear fruit. The other was the case of the swine, when the miracle itself was a striking and mighty act of delivering goodness, and a sufferance thereupon of the demons showing themselves such as they were: a sad picture of what happened to the Jews when they rejected Christ, as the Gadarenes had. The allowance of the manifestation of the reality of these evil spirits is a remark of one of the old fathers so-called.
With these exceptions, all the miracles of the Lord were the expression of goodness present in power, that man might be won back to confidence in God. Every outward effect, of sin, all the evil that was in the world, was removed and set aside when met, by the power that wrought in goodness amongst men. This did not change man's heart, but it did reveal God's; and this was what man wanted. God came into the midst of sinful men showing that love flowing from His own thoughts and nature was greater than the sin and evil that was in the world. For what we have in Christianity is what never was before. God came out in grace revealing Himself in goodness when man was a sinner, and man gone in, in righteousness, into the divine glory; so that God's love and God's righteousness should be revealed to sinners far from Him. Now, no one can show that one miracle of Christ's, or of those sent by Him, was not thus power displayed in a way suited to the present need and sorrow of man. Moses' miracles, though partly the glorious deliverance of. a people and the proof of governmental care, were not always this. They were judicial wonders suited to the position of the people when God was hid behind the veil and the people placed under the law and tested there. To be exact, I should add one temporary judgment pronounced by Paul on Elymas, a sad picture of the state of the Jews resisting grace, and after all, the means of far better blessing to the pro-consul, before whom the question of the truth of Christianity was raised.
The miracles of Christ were then not only perfectly suited to God's nature and character, but perfectly suited to man and the purpose of Christ's mission, and the expression of it where man's heart could feel and understand it. His birth (if God was to be thus manifested, so that man should learn God's nature, and feel His profound interest in him) was exactly what it must have been, a true real man, born of a woman, but perfectly sinless; such was the faulted temple for God as near to man as God could be, and yet God near to him. As to the resurrection, having become capable of dying to accomplish the work of redemption, and having accomplished that work, there was the recognition of its effectual value for the justification of every one that believed. God had accepted it, and inseparably from this, a—to us—new life, and a new state of it beyond the effects of sin, in a people of which He was the first-born and head. And thus mark that all His miracles were an essential part of an immense scheme of truth, the only key to man's state in connection with God's righteousness and mercy, and the only fall and real revelation of what He is which exists in the world.
The infidel may condescend to have to say to God, provided He keeps far enough away from him for them to have nothing to do with one another; but this is a revelation, when man, beyond all controversy, is in sin and misery and degradation, as a fact, if there be no revelation—a revelation of God having to do with him in grace and love, and yet maintaining His holy and righteous nature, no trace of which is found anywhere else.
But, further, while miracles were a confirmation of the word, which was the proper and express revelation of God's mind, they were also a testimony in and of themselves; for they told not simply of power, but of goodness, of God working in goodness in the midst of sorrow and misery, and that in the most definite and distinct way. “He had compassion on the multitude.” Still there was distinctly and definitely a testimony to the person and truth, or, to speak again as Scripture speaks, the grace and truth which came by Jesus Christ, and word and works were a like testimony to it. Hence, too, both belonged specially to the person of the Lord and His immediate followers, whose part after His death I will speak of just now Thus, in John 10:87, 88, we read, to the world, “If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not; but if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works, that ye may know and believe that the Father is in me and I in Him.” To the disciples (John 4:10, 1110Jesus answered and said unto her, If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water. 11The woman saith unto him, Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep: from whence then hast thou that living water? (John 4:10‑11)),'“ Believest thou not that I am in the Father and the Father in me? The words that I speak unto you, I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, He doeth the works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me: or else believe me for the very works' sake.” I add what follows for another point that will come before us. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also, and greater works than these shall he do, because I go to my Father.” Again, 15:22, “If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin: but now they have no cloak for their sin. He that hateth me hateth my Father also. If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin, but now they have both seen and hated both me and my Father.”
Thus both the word and the works give testimony to all the expression of the perfectness of the Person Who was there—of God's living dealing with men. As to the word, this is the force of John 8:2525Then said they unto him, Who art thou? And Jesus saith unto them, Even the same that I said unto you from the beginning. (John 8:25)—τὴν ἀρχὴν ὅτι καὶ λαλῶ ὑμῖν— principle and wholly what I also say to you. His words were the expression of Himself. He was the truth, and the truth thus expressed, was the revelation of Himself and so of the Father. This gives a distinct character to His words and miracles, and the difference between His and all others. None could be in themselves a similar testimony. The fact that the apostles, and probably some on whom they had laid their hands, wrought miracles, and more and greater works than Christ Himself, may seem a contradiction to this.
A few words here may be called for. It was a necessary consequence of the truth as to Christ. As to His life He was the necessary and natural witness to Himself. But this manifestation of God in grace in the world was only half the truth. If He as God descended here in love, becoming a man, as man He is gone up into heaven, the righteousness of God being so revealed to men through the Holy Ghost sent down. For of this the Holy Ghost, speaking and acting in men sent oat by Christ, was the witness. “Greater works than these shall ye do because I go to my Father.” But the testimony was still to Jesus alone; the apostles disclaimed all glory for themselves. The miracles were all for the establishing of Christ's religion upon earth, and belonged entirely to that testimony, either as to His coming here from on high, or to His being gone up on high as man. NO miracles of wandering Jews or. Christians in subsequent times can be compared to them; and he who can compare warnings to grateful lionesses and demons riding on cows' backs, done to the honor of thaurnaturgs, must have lost every trace of moral sense and divine apprehension. The infidels must remember that the judgment we form on things is sometimes a test of the state of our minds: The state of the church fell with the departure of the apostles, and even in their time. All, says the apostle, seek their own, not the things of Jesus Christ; and John and Jude both testify that the failure was come in their days.
The history of the church shows it utterly fallen in doctrine and practice at once, as all that had been entrusted to man ever had. It is all very well to talk of the primitive church, with those who know nothing about it. But the doctrine and practice were such as are not fit to put upon a drawing-room table for common reading; and that is what was read in the churches forty or fifty years after John's death: one hundred years after this, corruption was general. That superstition and spiritual ignorance governed the “Fathers” minds, there is not the smallest doubt. Milner in his Church History admits that not one oven held the fundamental doctrine of justification by faith. I should go further, but let that suffice. It became quite early the practice to get drunk in the churches in honor of the saints whose memorial had taken the place of that demigod on the same site. In Africa Augustine tried to put a stop to it, and was nearly stoned for his pains; he excuses “the primitive church” by saying, they thought it better to get drunk in honor of a saint than in honor of a demon. But more of this in detail hereafter.
The disposition of the Jews to believe all sorts of signs and wonders is insisted on by infidels, as in the book entitled Supernatural Religion, referring to Lightfoot, and Schoetgen, and Gfrörer, quoting the Talmud, etc. Now this is freely admitted. But such infidels forget that the Jews as a body did not. receive Jesus as the Christ. Light had come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light. John the Baptist claimed repentance without miracles; those whose consciences were reached received the Lord's testimony, but none else. They might rejoice in the miracles for present comfort, but did not believe; so that the faith in Christ was exactly in contrast with this superstitious temper of the Jews. One would think that these wise men had forgotten that Christ was crucified—rejected—and that the Jews' wonderful love of the marvelous failed to reconcile them to the light, perhaps helped to darken their eyes. At any, rate the argument is worse than nothing, because they did not believe, because of the truth that came with the miracles, but rejected Him that wrought them, ascribing them to Beelzebub—anything rather than receive the truth; and the judgment they were warned of came upon them.
I should not demand better evidence of the difference of the human mind and the divine as communicated in the Gospels than for a person to read the spurious gospels, if he has patience to get through them, and compare the senseless fatuities of what was not written by inspiration in those days and the four Gospels; and if he cannot find out the difference, he is quite fit to be an infidel author. Christ when a child was making little mud, birds and ponds, and it was the Sabbath, and a big boy came and broke his ponds: the birds took flight and went away, and Christ said, As you have dried my ponds, may you be dried up! So be dried up and died, In this kind of way He became the means of the death of so many that His mother had to keep Him at home in the house. He maltreated the master that taught Him His letters in a like way.
Let me remark here, on the other hand, that Scripture gives perfectly and soberly according to God, what there are legendary traditions of, or the truth of God's ways in connection with Himself, where man's imagination has invented a mass of false statements to impose on man's fears or love of the wonderful. Thus take the book of Tobit, the expression so far of Talmudical and Jewish ideas when they had not present revelation, and the Scriptural account of the service of angels, and see how the last is worthy of God and comfortable to us. The denial of these things, as if it was a settled point, and sober men had given it all up, is all very well for infidels and those who are afraid of them; but they must know that men, as sober and as sound as they, fully believe in the scriptural statements of angelic administrations and demoniacal power. The Saddnman denial of a world of spirits is prejudice not sober judgment, as if power (because it was not visible and material) could not exist.