have any weight. Antecedently, then, it is admitted that personality is a limitation which is absolutely excluded by the ideas of the Deity, which, it is asserted, the constitution of our minds compels us to form. It cannot, therefore, be rationally assumed. To admit that such a conception is false, and then to base conclusions upon it, as though it were true, is absurd. It is child's play to satisfy our feeling and imagination by the conscious sacrifice of our reason. Moreover, Dr. Mansel admits that the conception of a Personal Deity is really derived from the revelation, which has to be rendered. credible by miracles; therefore the consequence already pointed out ensues, that the assumption cannot be used to prove miracles. It must be allowed that it is not through reasoning that men obtain the first intimation of their relation to the Deity; and that, had they been left to the guidance of their intellectual faculties alone, it is possible that no such intimation might have taken place; or at best, that it would have been but as one guess, out of many equally plausible and equally natural." The vicious circle of the argument is here. again apparent, and the singular reasoning by which the late Dean of St. Paul's seeks to drive us into an acceptance of Revelation is really the strongest argument against it. The impossibility of conceiving God as he is, which is insisted upon, instead of being a 1 Bampton Lectures, 1858, p. 68. * Sir William Hamilton says: "True therefore are the declarations of a pious philosophy. A God understood would be no God at all.' 'To think that God is as we can think Him to be is blasphemy.' The Divinity, in a certain sense, is revealed; in a certain sense is concealed: He is at once known and unknown. But the last and highest consecration of all true religion must be an altar-'Ayvwστw →ew—' To the unknown and unknowable God.'" Discussions on Philosophy, 3rd ed., Blackwood and Sons, 1866, p. 15, note. reason for assuming his personality, or for accepting Jewish conceptions of him, totally excludes such an assumption. This "great religious assumption" is not suggested by any antecedent considerations, but is required to account for miracles, and is derived from the very Revelation which miracles are to attest. "In nature and from nature," to quote words of Professor Baden Powell, "by science and by reason, we neither have nor can possibly have any evidence of a Deity working miracles;-for that we must go out of nature and beyond science. If we could have any such evidence from nature, it could only prove extraordinary natural effects, which would not be miracles in the old theological sense, as isolated, unrelated, and uncaused; whereas no physical fact can be conceived as unique, or without analogy and relation to others, and to the whole system of natural causes. Being, therefore, limited to Reason for any feeble conception of a Divine Being of which we may be capable, and Reason being totally opposed to the idea of an order of nature so imperfect as to require or permit repeated interference, and rejecting the supposition of arbitrary " 2 1 Dr. Mozley, however, does not overlook the peculiarities of the case, and he condemns the class of writers who speak of miracles as though they stood on a par with other events as matters of credit, and were accepted upon the same testimony as ordinary facts of history. Against such a theory he says: “But this is to forget the important point that a miracle is on one side of it not a fact of this world, but of the invisible world; the Divine interposition in it being a supernatural and mysterious act that therefore the evidence for a miracle does not stand exactly on the same ground as the evidence of the witness box, which only appeals to our common sense as men of the world and actors in ordinary life; but that it requires a great religious assumption in our minds to begin with, without which no testimony in the case can avail." Bampton Lectures, 1865, p. 128. 2 Study of the Evidences of Christianity, "Essays and Reviews," 9th ed. p. 141 f. suspensions of Law, such a conception of a Deity as is proposed by theologians must be pronounced irrational and derogatory. It is impossible for us to conceive a Supreme Being acting otherwise than we actually see in nature, and if we recognize in the universe the operation of infinite wisdom and power, it is in the immutable order and regularity of all phenomena, and in the eternal prevalence of Law, that we see their highest manifestation. This is no conception based merely upon observation of law and order in the material world, as Dr. Mansel insinuates,' but it is likewise the result of the highest exercise of mind. Dr. Mansel" does not hesitate" to affirm with Sir William Hamilton "that the class of phenomena which requires that kind of cause we denominate a Deity is exclusively given in the phenomena of mind; that the phenomena of matter, taken by themselves, do not warrant any inference to the existence of a God." 2 After declaring a Supreme Being, from every point of view, inconceivable by our finite minds, it is singular to find him thrusting upon us, in consequence, a conception of that Being which almost makes us exclaim with Bacon: "It were better to have no opinion of God at all than such an opinion as is unworthy of him; for the one is unbelief, the other is contumely."3 Dr. Mansel asks: "Is matter or mind the truer image of God?" But both matter and mind unite in repudiating so unworthy a conception of a God, and in rejecting the idea of suspensions of Law. In the words of Spinoza: "From miracles 1 Aids to Faith, p. 25. 2 Ib., p. 25. Cf. Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics, vol. i. 3 Bacon's Essays, xvii. ed. Whately, p. 183. • Aids to Faith, p. 25. we can neither infer the nature, the existence, nor the providence of God, but, on the contrary, these may be much better comprehended from the fixed and immutable order of nature;" indeed, as he adds, miracles, as contrary to the order of nature, would rather lead us to doubt the existence of God.2 Six centuries before our era, a noble thinker, Xenophanes of Colophon, whose pure mind soared far above the base anthropomorphic mythologies of Homer and Hesiod, and anticipated some of the highest results of the Platonic philosophy, finely said : "There is one God supreme over all gods, diviner than mortals, Whose form is not like unto man's, and as unlike his nature; But vain mortals imagine that gods like themselves are begotten, So if oxen or lions had hands and could work in man's fashion, He illustrates this profound observation by pointing out that the Ethiopians represent their deities as black with flat noses, while the Thracians make them blueeyed with ruddy complexions, and, similarly, the Medes and the Persians and Egyptians portray their gods like 1 "Nos ex miraculis nec Dei cssentiam nec existentiam, nec providentiam posse intelligere, sed contra hæc longe melius percipi ex fixo atque immutabili naturæ ordine." Tract. Theolog. Polit. c. vi. § 16, ed. Tauchnitz. 2 Ib., vi. § 19. 3 Clement of Alexandria, who quotes the whole of this passage from Xenophanes, makes a separation here from the succeeding lines, by kal Táλ; but the sense is evidently continuous, and the fragments are generally united. Cf. Clem. Al. Strom., v. 14, § 110. 4 Εἷς θεὸς ἔν τε θεοῖσι καὶ ἀνθρώποισι μέγιστος, 1 themselves. The Jewish idea of God was equally anthropomorphic; but their highest conception was certainly that which the least resembled themselves, and which described the Almighty as "without variableness or shadow of turning," and as giving a law to the universe which shall not be broken.2 3. NONE of the arguments with which we have yet met have succeeded in making miracles in the least degree antecedently credible. On the contrary they have been based upon mere assumptions incapable of proof and devoid of probability. On the other hand there are the strongest reasons for affirming that such phenomena are antecedently incredible. Dr. Mozley's attack which we discussed in the first part of this chapter, and which of course was chiefly based upon Hume's celebrated argu ̓Αλλὰ βροτοὶ δοκέουσι θεοὺς γεννᾶσθαι Τὴν σφετέρην δ' ἐσθῆτα ἔχειν, φωνήν τε δέμας τε. * Η γράψαι χείρεσσι, καὶ ἔργα τελεῖν ἅπερ ἄνδρες 1 Τοὺς μὲν γὰρ Αιθίοπας, μέλανας καὶ σιμους γράφειν ἔφησε τοὺς οἰκείους θεοὺς, ὁποῖοι δὲ καὶ αὐτοὶ πεφύκασιν· τοὺς δέ γε Θρᾷκας, γλαυκούς τε καὶ ἐρυθροὺς καὶ μέν τοι καὶ Μήδους, καὶ Πέρσας σφίσιν αὐτοῖς ἐοικότας· καὶ Αἰγυπτίους ὡσαύτως αὐτοῖς διαμορφοῦν πρὸς τὴν οἰκείαν μορφήν. * Ps. cxlviii. * Theodoret gives a different version of these two lines, not unsupported by others. ̓Αλλ' οἱ βροτοὶ δοκοῦσι γεννᾶσθαι θεοὺς, Καὶ ἴσην αἴσθησίν τ' ἔχειν, φωνήν τε δέμας τε. We have preferred the reading of the latter line, and have translated accordingly, instead of adopting ἐσθῆτα. |