Eight Lectures on Miracles : Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1865 on the Foundation of the Late Rev. John on Canon of Salisbury (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Eight Lectures on Miracles: Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1865 on the Foundation of the Late Rev. John on Canon of Salisbury

HE difficulty which attaches to Miracles, in the period of thought through which we are now passing, is one which is concerned not with their evidence, but with their intrinsic credibility. There has risen in a certain class of minds an apparent perception of the impossibility of sus pensions of physical law. This is one peculiarity of the present time: another is a disposition to maintain the dis belief of miracles upon a religious basis, and in connexion with a declared belief in the Christian revelation.

The following Lectures, therefore, are addressed mainly to the fundamental question of the credibility of Miracles; their use, and the evidences of them, being only touched on subordinately and collaterally. It was thought that such an aim, though in itself a narrow and confined one, was most adapted to the particular need of the day.

The recent movement of thought in the direction of physical explanation of the Gospel miracles or the reference of them to unknown laws of nature, has exhibited more of philosophical senti ment than philosophical discrimination. The movement has origin ated in a wish to meet scientific objections to miracles as isolated and anomalous facts and the aim has been to reconcile miracles, or to shew that we have a right to expect and look forward to their reconciliation, with the claims of science. With this aim it was necessary that when writers spoke of the possibility of miracles being reconciled with the laws of nature, they should distinctly understand that they meant a reconciliation with the laws of nature 'in the scientific sense, - those laws which scientific men mean when they use this phrase. Unless there is a clear understanding on this point the whole labour of such an enquiry is thrown away. For how could the objections of physical science be met by even proving ever so clearly the possible consistency of miracles with natural law in a different sense from that in which physical science understands it? But though it was so necessary that those who aimed at some reconcilia tion of miracles with the laws of nature, in order to meet the objections of science, should keep the scientific sense of natural law distinctly in their minds, this has not been done but the expression law of nature has been constantly used without any accurate or distinct meaning, and the result has been a considerable waste of speculating power. There has been the feeling that something must be done on this head, a general desire to satisfy scientific tests, and a disposition to give a guarantee that miracles if accepted shall only be accepted as in some way or other coming under natural law, and being instances of it. But when this wish came to reason when it came to deal with the question how this reduction of miracles to natural law was to be made out, there was a large interval between the desire felt, and the argumentative satisfaction of it; and the speculative aim issued in much confusion and obscurity.

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