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By Joseph Parker

The baptized and tempted Son was now prepared for his mission. There is a very striking and suggestive consistency between the preparation and the work. So much power had been held in restraint for so long a time that it was not to be wondered at that, on its liberation, “mighty deeds should show forth themselves in him.” One of his biographers, as if overpowered by the number and splendor of his miracles, instead of introducing detailed statements of supernatural cures, groups into one impressive mass the beneficent works of many days; and the grouping is the more remarkable as coming at the very beginning rather than at the end of the narrative. If the miraculous mission had been opened leisurely with a cure here, and a storm quieted there, the narrator would probably have given detailed accounts on his first pages, and as the miracles increased he would have summarized towards conclusion. Instead of this leisurely introduction of the miraculous element, we are startled very early with this announcement: “They brought unto him all sick people that were taken with diverse diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatic, and those that had the palsy; and he healed them.” All was as easy as bringing ice into the presence of the summer sun, that it might be melted. The unity of the mystery is again evident. Even in this marvelous statement there is nothing out of harmony with what has preceded. Is there anything to be wondered at, with skeptical wonder, that the Man who conquered the devil in the wilderness should conquer the devil’s works in human nature? The greater involves the less. All true conquest must be fundamental, and to be fundamental it must be moral. To the man who has conquered himself, all other conquests must be easy. Only a man’s bad elements stand between him and the greatest achievements. If the prince of this world [Satan] finds nothing in a man, that man is free of the checks and impediments which limit abnormal human nature.

Miracles can be difficult to accept only according to the low spiritual altitude from which they are viewed. As wonder is a sign of ignorance, so unbelief is a sign of incompleteness. The unlettered man is amazed at language which to the learned man is perfectly simple, just because the learned man has conquered himself by bringing his powers under adequate discipline, whereas the untaught man is ruled by his own ignorance. The novice, in anything, is necessarily impressed with the difficulty of a great work, whereas the adept has overcome all the disturbing sensations which inevitably accompany inexperience. The novice invariably first sees the difficulty; he is conscious of a disparity between the forces at his command and the result to be attained, and soon augments difficulty into impossibility. The man of diminutive faith, a man in whom the self-element is uppermost, is astounded at the miracles of Jesus Christ; while the man of large faith, in whom the self-element is subordinated, attempts them with composure. Christ himself taught the doctrine both negatively and positively, and with incessant urgency, that faith was the nexus binding the natural to the supernatural. In proportion as any man has faith, he is led away from himself; and this brings us to the point just stated, that self-conquest makes all other conquests easy. Christ said that faith even so small as a grain of mustard-seed was more than a match for mountains. Why not? Power is mental rather than physical. It would be a poor thing to be a man if he could not make himself master of the diet on which he lives. But the highest mastery is moral; and if the moral element is wrong, his dominion is of course abridged or upset. Wickedness is weakness. As the intellectual man inhabits a wider region than the man who is ignorant, so the good man has power compared with which the bad man’s rulership is a pitiful travesty of influence. The bad man has the power of destruction, the good man of restoration. Any beast can do mischief. But more on this point presently.

There is nothing in the nature of things to prevent miracles being wrought today as well as they were ever wrought. The Yogis among the Hindus believed that they could acquire perfect mastery over elementary matter. They sought to effect a vital union between the spirit that was in the body, and the spirit that was in nature; and having effected that mystic union, the Yogi was master of the situation, traversing space, raising the dead, rendering himself invisible, and going up to Siva, the spirit and essence of all creation. There is a good deal more in this philosophic dreaming man that our modern notions may be prepared to allow. It was not the mere power of hand which the Yogi sought, but the wider and grander empire of the spirit. What the Yogi sought to effect was a union between spirit and spirit; and this was precisely what Christ sought to effect when he demanded faith as the condition of miraculous healing. Where this union was complete, the working of miracles was as natural and easy as breathing. They were miracles only to the observers, not to the workers; for the workers stood on a moral elevation high above them, and saw their exact relation to God and man. It is not extraordinary that faith which is not strong enough to work miracles should be strong enough to believe that miracles can be wrought, though it may be narrow enough to brand him as a fanatic who affirms their possibility. Man cannot advance to the miracle except through the faith. There can be no doubt that the faith of the world has gone down, and in part this may be accounted for by the intellectual transition through which we are being driven by revived and ambitious science. We have come upon an era which has hardly time to pause and add results; information is arriving so quickly, the messengers throng upon each other so tumultuously, that most of men have taken upon themselves the duties of recorders; and if sometimes they are a little heedless of the punctuation, and by mistaking a comma for a full stop they do now and again speak too soon, the impatience or the suddenness is not difficult to explain. In fact, it is a hint that men are longing for the end. The great suffering human world feels that its day must be approaching sunset. It has been a long, troubled, uncertain day, and men are now sighing for release and rest. The shaking and damaging of faith is a hint of a crisis, and the old words, sad and sigh from the heart, come up with great force— “when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on earth?” There is a touching plaintiveness in the inquiry; he seems to have anticipated but a poor reception for himself; perhaps however, as in the days of his flesh, the faithlessness of those who ought to have been nearest will be counterbalanced by the trust of men now supposed to be afar off.

It is a mistake to imagine that faith has anything to fear from science. Wherever science stops, faith must begin. Science has in many things altered the standpoint or extended the domain of faith, but has never rendered faith unnecessary. It has enlarged the faith of childhood into the faith of manhood, but every hint of light which it has discovered has pointed out a great gloom beyond. It was intended that Credo (doctrine) should be succeeded by Scio (knowledge); yet knowledge is valuable, not only for what is in itself, but as showing how much there yet remains to be known, and by so much as it does this it actually increases the sphere of faith.

One of the most persuasive features of the Christian miracles is that they were associated with a true human compassion on the part of Jesus Christ. They were not displays of mere power. They made a heavy drain upon his sympathy and love. When he saw blind, deaf, insane, tormented men, he had compassion on them. His emotional nature was profoundly stirred. Christ’s was not dry power—huge, unsympathetic strength. As in all great characters, there was much womanliness in Christ. The tear was never far to fetch. Having one human parent only, it seems as if the full force of his mother’s tender nature was reproduced in him. When Omnipotence weeps, we should consider the meaning which lies behind the tears. It has been pointed out that the Olympian gods contrived to keep themselves free from the pains and cares of the mortals whom they ruled. For them it was enough to govern—it was too much to suffer.

But Christ’s life was not without grief; his word of power was spoken with a tenderness which the world will remember forever. It is not difficult to see the consonance of the mystery here. The man who came to be a Savior, and to found a monarchy upon himself, should be possessed of the finest and most accessible sensibilities; for monarchs can be monarchs only so long as they hold the hearts of men. Monarchy, in its last analysis and highest application, is really a double-sided term, meaning not only rulership, but rulership by consent. Men cannot be permanently held by mere power; they will fear it, admire it, and then throw it off. Everything tires but love. Prophecies fail, tongues cease, love alone is immortal. The monarchy of Christ was founded upon the heart, upon love; and therefore, with a consistency which is too profound to be accidental, he had compassion upon all who trustfully invoked his power. He wanted the healed man afterwards. The client was to become the ally. Gratitude was to become loyalty, and on this deep base the worldwide kingdom was to be established.

Another feature of the mighty works, coincident with the compassion which they expressed, is their unselfishness. The worker is everywhere not powerful only, but good. Once indeed he gave an intimation, incidentally, of what would happen if he were to let loose his power in all its terribleness; the damning word fell upon a fruitless tree, and to the very roots it withered away. What if the same annihilating word had fallen upon useless men? It was well, no doubt, to leave one such memorial of mere power, that society might see how short a distance lay between life and death. It has been pointed out by a recent writer as a curious circumstance, that men should hazard so much open, contemptuous, and even violent opposition to a man who carried such resources of power. They did not stand in awe of him, but contradicted him to his face, and took up stones to stone him. This does seem contradictory to the general expectation which such circumstances naturally excite. Looked at from this distance of time, and under the conditions of our ordinary life, it is impossible to believe that men should be so insane as to take up stones against a man who had just shown that he could open the eyes of the blind, cleanse the virus from the blood of the leper and reanimate the dead. They had not heard of his doing so, but had actually seen him. If they believed their own senses, they could have no doubt about the fact of Christ’s unexampled power; yet they took up stones to stone him: it was worse than attempting to stone the lightning—madder than throwing dust in the face of a storm! Yet they did it. The explanation of this circumstance lies deeper probably than has been recently suggested. In one view of the case, the action of taking up stones to stone such a man was, on the part of the Jews, not only natural, but, considering their traditions and circumstances, rather admirable than otherwise. They were Old Testament men, and all Old Testament men believed in stones. They would in a moment answer an idea with a stone; cleave down erratic thinkers with the edge of the sword. But the action of the Jews was admirable rather than otherwise, on the ground they showed how religious conviction lay deeper than all fear of mere power. The Jews were religious men; they had sacred historic documents to refer to, with many traditional legends; the man before them laid claims to dignities which they could not harmonize with interpretations of the oracles; and though he seemed to be able to do as he willed with the universe, yet in the very face of his stupendous and never-baffled power they took up stones to stone him. Their action was really a grand tribute to the force of religion in the heart of men. Their theism was arrayed against this Christ-ism, and with little of physical power they opposed a man whom they believed to be a blasphemous and mendacious talker. This probably goes nearer to the reality of the case than some recent theories, though they too are not without value. It is quite true that Christ had always used his power beneficently: “not to destroy men’s lives, but to save them,” was written on all he did; the fear which his works were calculated to excite was not alarm, but religious awe; his power was constructive, not destructive. This view was strengthened by Christ’s own method of meeting those who took up stones to stone him; for in his turn he showed the power of deep religious conviction on human life. He did not lay them at his feet as dead men, nor did he even send upon them temporary blindness or any kind of physical distress. What he could have done! When they stooped to take up stones, he might have fastened them in their stooping attitude, and left them as warnings to the whole progeny of scoffers. Instead of this he reasons with them, cites the good works as he has done and asks them to point out the particular one for which they stone him. He calls them to calm consideration. He shows no fear of the stoning, does not even care to condemn it—probably he was touched by their zeal for God; that was something to begin with and to work upon and he could not witness it without feeling more and more the depth of human nature and the importance of its restoration. They believed in one side of his own nature, had they but known it! “Ye believe in God, believe also in me,”—only an “also” between God and Christ! The boldness of his scheme, too, considered in a purely human view, is the more apparent by his first appearing among a people who knew and revered the true God. He did not try to impose upon an idolatrous or ignorant people, but began under the very light of the Shekinah, among the people whose prophets had heard the voice of the Eternal. His operated upon the oldest and ripest theism of the world. This was dangerous work for a fanatic. He must be not an impostor, but a madman, who challenges heaven and earth in the interest of a lie. Having to encounter a theism so advanced, because so true and simple, Christ could well understand how the Jews would be indignant at any dishonor put on God; and this indignation, which at first sight was a great hindrance, was the natural expression of a fact which would one day be turned to the best account. They seemed to feel themselves safe from his power while they rested upon God of their fathers, and so made a claim upon the practical resources of the pre-Christian theology which would not shrink from comparisons with the boldest confidence which men can repose in Christ’s own promises. Fearing God, they were lifted above all other fear. The ancient songs of trust were repeating themselves in their souls— “God is our refuge and our strength,” “The Lord is my light and my salvation: whom shall I fear?” On the other hand, Christ also showed the power of the divine element in man. He was alone, or if not literally alone, his companionships were such as to constitute a bitter satire upon his claims to be considered Messiah, Redeemer, King. His companions made him look ridiculous in the eyes of the ruling classes. yet with so little visible background, he talked and worked with the consciousness of a man who could not be put down and could not even be stoned. On both sides, mere power was shown to be useless as a moral agent. The battle must be fought with different weapons. Spiritual results must be attained by spiritual process. Still the mighty works, bearing, as they did, a constructive aspect, were auxiliary to the main end. They certainly called attention to the worker, and as certainly they made a powerful appeal to the persons who were benefited by them. One of those persons, for example, made a trenchant and powerful defense of Christ before the Pharisees. Like a common-sense man, he took his stand upon the simple facts of the case; despising all the cajolery of the baffled and incredulous critics, he said, with the charming and unanswerable frankness of an honest and thankful man, “Whether he be a sinner or not, I know not; one thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see.” Christ had thus, by his miraculous power, made a marked advance upon the man’s nature—he had established “one thing” in his convictions, and thus prepared the way for further conquest. Accordingly we find this to be the case, for the man afterwards “worshiped him.” The mighty Worker was admitted through the body to the soul. We have only to take this instance as a specimen, and to multiply it by the number of the mighty works, to obtain a comparative view of the value of constructive miracles in the propagation of Christian faith. Not only upon the clients themselves, but upon thoughtful observers, the miracles produced very helpful impressions, as may be seen from the confession of a ruler of the Jews, who candidly said, “Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God; for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him.” This was a conclusion of a reasoner who did not examine effects in the light of religious prejudices, but who considered them in relation to adequate causes. He had seen displays of human power, and he knew the general range of human ability; but these particular miracles of the despised Rabbi went far beyond all that he had seen, far beyond all he had imagined, and compelled the conclusion, willing or not willing, that this man was at least a co-worker with God, carrying keys of power such as he had never seen on the girdle of the strongest man.

Then, too, as already hinted, the miracles bore a special relation to the devil himself. The miracles were polygonal; one side looked towards suffering men, another towards observers, a third toward doubters, a fourth towards the devil, and so on. Christ’s struggle with the tempter was only begun in the wilderness; it was continued to the very end of his earthly course. No devil would have meant no Christ. Peter put the case concisely and strikingly, when he talked to Cornelius: speaking of Jesus Christ, he said, “He went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil.” The works of the enemy were on every hand; they must be thrown into contrast by the works of the Son. They must be distinctly charged upon the enemy, and the responsibility must be publicly and immovably fixed upon him. No doubt must be left on men’s minds as to the source of all evil and suffering. The two workers were thus brought, as it were, face to face before society, and each was openly identified with a particular course. On the one hand there was destruction, on the other restoration. Men thus had an opportunity of seeing that Christ’s opposition to the devil was the controversial aspect of his love for man; and opportunity which owed much to the miraculous works which immediately appealed to the physical senses and the common instinct of the observers. The opportunity would not have been marked by the same commanding breadth if Christ had confined himself entirely to teaching; the core of the body being more easily appreciable as an introductory step rather than a direct attempt at the illumination of the mind. Every miracle was a challenge to a comparison of powers. Every healed man was Christ’s living protest against death. The mere fact of the miracle was but a syllable in Christ’s magnificent doctrine of life. Christ’s mission may be summed up in the word Life; the devil’s mission in the word Death; so that every recovered limb, every opened eye, every purified leper, was a confirmation of his statement, “I have come that they might have life.”

The limitation of miraculous peer was twofold. There was, first, the limitation which came from the unreceptive condition of the people; and there was the limitation necessitated by the difference between the outward and the inward, the material and the moral. At one place Christ could not do many mighty works, because of the unbelief of the people, the utmost he could do was to lay his hands upon a few sick folks and heal them. The electric current was incomplete, the inhabitants were self-involved; no tendril of the heart was putting itself forth in search of protection; all the fibers were knotted in impenetrable selfishness: Christ himself had no power there. He must have faith as a starting-point, otherwise no miracles in harmony with his moral purpose could be wrought. Miracles of mere power he could have performed anywhere, but such miracles were not included in his plan of life. His omnipotence was the agent of his mercy, and consequently it was the province of mercy to determine where the services of omnipotence should be offered; and where mercy was rejected, omnipotence was held in abeyance.

On one occasion, indeed, Christ’s power operated in a direction that was merely destructive. A legion of devils implored him to let them enter into a herd of swine (a terrible illustration of the intolerableness of life in hell), and on obtaining permission the whole herd, to the number of 2,000, ran into the sea, and was destroyed. Much has been said against the people who urged Christ to leave their coasts on finding their swine destroyed; they have been charged with sordidness, selfishness, and low ideas of the value of human amelioration. Though we may steal a cheap reputation for magnanimity at the expense of those unfortunate people, yet they were right after all in desiring such a man as they took Christ to be to depart from their midst. Their request was the expression of a great principle in the human constitution, implanted there by the Creator. Men cannot be benefited by mere power, but they are necessarily reduced to a meaner manhood by the presence of a power that is destructive. The history of despotism proves this. To have in the city or nation a power that is uncontrollably destructive is to live in perpetual fear, and fear can never train a noble and generous manhood. People never beg thunder and lightning to continue amongst them, but they often wish that summer would never go away. The Jews, therefore, who lost their swine, showed what would have been the result if Christ had given full scope to his power and destruction; men would have been overshadowed by a great apprehension, and in the darkness of such a horror would have dwindled into a pitiable dwarfishness. Besides, as said before, there is nothing so common and so vulgar as destructive power. The meanest insect can destroy the loveliest flower: the coarsest lips can utter defamatory and injurious words. All destructiveness—individual, social, national—lies in the same direction, and the beginning and end of that direction is the devil. The constructiveness of the Christian miracles is a most emphatic confirmation of Christ’s claim to be the Savior of the world. They are consonant with the natal song—“good-will to men;” they are opposed to the unchanging diabolic policy under which the world has endured so much, and they prepare men to accept the promise of a higher salvation than that of the body.

We have said that there is nothing in the nature of things to prevent miracles being wrought today. This is true abstractly, yet miracles are practically superseded by the dominion of the Spirit. The working of miracles in a purely spiritual dispensation would be an anachronism. Miracles were quite in accordance with the personal superintendence of the visible Christ, but now that Christ is no more known after the flesh the system of objective demonstration has gone up with him. What, then, is in harmony with the rulership of the Spirit? Not miracles, certainly, but science probably. Intellect is now summoned to a new and critical position. Creation has apparently exhausted its period of reticence and now seems, using figurative language, to be prepared for a frank communication of its secrets; or better, man has been educated, so far by Christian agencies as now to be master of the right method of holding intercourse with the laws which have been the problem and even the dread of many ages. Humanity has been carried forward by the mystery which began in Christ—forward from the material to the spiritual, from the miraculous to the moral. Thus reason, which has been so long reviled, is no longer necessarily the corrupt and misleading agent that it as, but an honorable, because divinely appointed, guide. This is the inevitable result of a spiritual dispensation. The visible Christ made appeals to the natural senses; the Spirit does the inward and vital work of conviction. The Holy Spirit, as becomes his nature, stands in the line of the intellectual faculties, elevating them, purifying and strengthening them, and giving them new power of investigation and appliance. Distinctively, then, this is the dispensation of the Spirit, the age of mind, the era of reason. It does not follow, however, that Reason has completed her education; and by so much as Reason is incomplete it must be carefully distinguished from Understanding. The danger which some persons apprehend from what is termed rationalism arises from a confusion of terms. Reason is an instrument, Understanding is a result. In proportion as reason is educated, a prudent hesitation marks all its processes. Philosophy is more tolerant than ignorance. He who knows most of the strength of the human mind knows most of its weakness. Truth has nothing to fear from rationalism, but from irrationalism. The era of reason is preliminary to the age of understanding. The greatest reasoner in the apostolic church always kept this in view: he said, “I know in part;” “I see through a glass darkly;” afterwards, under the inspiration of a splendid hope, he added, “but then shall I know.” The world never could have been reared by understanding, only by promise; this is in keeping with the whole constitution of things. The child of the philosopher is not permitted to begin where his father ended, but is driven back to start with the child of the unlettered peasant, as if his father had not made one attainment in learning. In this way society in all its breadth is carried through the same experiences, and educated to a common sympathy. Promise, then, not knowledge, has been the great stimulant of human education; and as for understanding, that lies far beyond this initial sphere. Early in the world’s history it was shown that knowledge was out of place, except under such conditions as required the presence of hope to inspire and impel mankind. The knowing man, consequently, was sent out of the sphere which he had desecrated, and a flaming sword was made to show that knowledge might be bought too dearly.

The Holy Spirit presides over the intellectual development of man, leading him, as Christ promised, into all truth—the truth of the body, the truth of nature, as well as the truth of religion specially so-called. The miraculous is now set back in distant history as one phase of divine revelation, which may yet teach us more of power combined with mercy; but the spiritual sheds its penetrating luster over the future, charming men into deeper investigation than was possible to the ages which have been trained by symbol, and enigma, and miracle. What function Christ assigned to the Holy Spirit will, however, be considered more in detail in another chapter.