NEWMAN ON MIRACLES. [53]

NEWMAN ON MIRACLES. [53]

These essays are here reprinted from the original editions of each, with only the addition of a few bracketed notes, and with some slight emendation of the wording of a few sentences of the text of a merely literary character. For many years, Dr. Newman has been a public man in the English theological world, so much so that, as he himself expressed it, “he is obliged to think aloud.” His writings have passed into the domain of English literature, and are public property. It is not now in his power to withdraw any portion of them, much as he might desire to do so. Under existing circumstances, he has judged it the better course—or, at least, the lesser evil—that they should be republished under his own eye, with such corrections in bracketed notes as will indicate what he would now correct or retract.

These two essays mark very distinctly two stages in the career through which, as he fully explains in his Apologia, Dr. Newman has passed.

The first one, written to defend the miracles recorded in the Holy Scriptures against the attacks of Hume, Gibbon, and other infidels, dates from 1825-26, while he was yet young, and a staunch Protestant, somewhat imbued with evangelical feelings, especially in the matter of Popery. Hence, while ably conducting the exposition and defence of the Scripture miracles, he omits no opportunity of hitting at the other miracles recorded to have occurred in the Catholic Church since the days of the apostles. In fact, he had, as he tells us elsewhere, read the work of Middleton on The Miracles of the Early Church, and had imbibed his spirit. He was guided also by Bishop Douglas, whose Criterion he often quotes.

Seventeen years of continuous study and mature thought produced their fruit in his clear and candid mind. In 1842-43, he wrote the second essay as a preface or introduction to a portion of Fleury’s Ecclesiastical History, then being published in an English translation.

Though still a Protestant, he had entirely changed his views on these ecclesiastical miracles. So much so, that this essay may be read as his own confutation of what he had said against them in his earlier essay. In the present volume, the bracketed foot-notes subjoined to that essay are, for the most part, mere references to the paragraphs of the second essay, in which the immature errors of the first are corrected. With the traditional prejudices of Protestantism then strong in him, he had looked on these ecclesiastical miracles as rivals, and as, in some way, antagonistic to the miracles of Scripture which he was upholding; and he had striven to find points of difference as well in their internal character as in the evidence needed to prove them. All this he fully meets in the second essay. In the second, third, and fourth chapters of it, treating of “The Antecedent Probability of Ecclesiastical Miracles,” of their internal character, and of the evidence in support of their credibility, he shows how the admission of Scripture miracles utterly does away with the ground taken by some against the possibility or probability of ecclesiastical miracles, how the two classes agree in their chief and essential characteristics, and how, in fact, they rather merge into one general class of events, under the moral order of divine Providence, established for man’s salvation—an order distinct from and superior to the physical order of nature. Nothing can be more lucid than his replies to the objections of Douglas, Warburton, Middleton, and other Protestant writers on this subject. He shows, with the utmost clearness, how all that they urge against these ecclesiastical miracles in the Catholic Church can be turned by unbelievers, with equal plausibility, and in the same sophistical spirit, against the miracles of the apostles themselves.

Dr. Newman, in both dissertations, frankly admits—what indeed cannot be denied—that not a few of the Scripture miracles are to be believed by us simply because they have been recorded by divinely inspired writers. We have no other knowledge of them, no other evidence of their having occurred, than that we read them on the inspired page. Such miracles are for us matters of faith, not proofs in evidence. They are themselves proved by Scripture. Whatever they were to those who witnessed the occurrence, they are not now for us historical evidence in support of divine revelation. Writing as a Protestant, Dr. Newman did not advert to another important truth lying further back which Protestant writers generally ignore. Our knowledge of the inspiration and divine authority of the Scriptures as we have them—distinguished, that is, from the numerous other gospels, acts, epistles, apocalypses, and other pretended sacred writings, more or less current among and accepted by the sectaries of the early Christian ages—depends entirely on the decision of the Catholic Church, made after the death of the apostles. Hence, the value of the Scripture testimony as to these miracles, and our duty to recognize and accept it as divinely inspired, and therefore unerring, depend, in the last analysis, on the divine authority and character of the Catholic Church—of that same church which has always claimed that God continues to work miracles within her fold. To say that she errs on this latter point leaves room, to say the least, for the imputation or the suspicion that she may have erred in the other decision likewise; and so those Scripture miracles which lack, as most of them do, other corroborative testimony, would stand without sufficient proof. On the contrary, for the ecclesiastical miracles, because they occurred nearer our own times, there might still remain, as in many cases there does remain, ample historical evidence from contemporary witnesses.

After devoting four chapters to a thorough discussion of the subject of ecclesiastical miracles in general, Dr. Newman proceeds, in the fifth and last chapter, to sum up and discuss the evidences we still have, in nine special cases, held to be miraculous interventions, in the early ages of the church. For a clear and orderly presentation of the evidence, the logical application of the principles established in the earlier chapters, and the happy and often overwhelming retorting of their own propositions on Douglas, Leslie, and other anti-Catholic writers, each one of these cases deserves and will amply repay a special study.

Here, as in his other volumes, Dr. Newman displays that intellectual acumen and that plain common sense which are as characteristic of his writings as is the singular mastery over the English language which has caused him to be recognized as one of the classical writers of our day.

Valuable as this volume is to the careful student for its erudition and acute reasoning, and for the aid it gives in the polemical controversies that rise from time to time with Protestants, it is chiefly valuable, in our eyes, as a well-reasoned and, as it were, practical refutation of that rationalistic or materialistic system of false philosophy which is taught in some of our colleges, and is being spread through the land, and which either leaves God out of sight altogether, or at most acknowledges him only as the Creator and founder of the physical order. Dr. Newman, in discussing what some would term the philosophy of miracles, sets forth strongly and clearly the necessity of recognizing and taking into account the moral order, established by God, equally with the physical order, and superior to it in rank. The world is under both. To leave either out is to take only a partial view. To exclude the moral order from our consideration is to err at the very commencement of our course, and our progress will be but from error to error. The action of both orders may, and often does, coincide—would have always coincided had not sin brought in jarring and confusion. But in point of fact, they are sometimes found in opposition. A wise and good sovereign dies immaturely, leaving his sceptre to a wicked and unscrupulous successor; a good father dies early in life, and his orphans are left to grow up in ignorance and vice; a just and benevolent man dies or is ruined, and debts are left unpaid, and a stream of charity fails at the fount. And if we class the evil actions of men as belonging to this physical order, and the rationalists refuse to class them otherwise, do they not present a continual opposition between the physical and the moral orders? And if the physical order so asserts itself, should we not reasonably look for corresponding, if not greater, manifestations in the moral order?

Divine revelation itself is a fact in the moral order entirely beyond and above the physical order of nature—by its nature, a miracle. It can be proved only by miracles; and miracles are the appropriate accompaniment of its continuance as a dispensation of divine Providence. Hence, in the church—the kingdom of heaven—in which God specially reigns and rules, and in which the moral order is endowed with supernatural force, and interworks with the physical order of nature, we should as readily and as reasonably look for miracles, as, if we may be allowed a trivial comparison, we should expect, when examining a piece of complicated machinery, to find that one set of wheels will control and at times arrest the ordinary action of other wheels, and interpose some result due to their own special action in the general series of results. Not to take account of the moral and supernatural order in God’s ruling the world is not to recognize the highest and greatest of his acts. The rationalist is like a deaf man before an exquisite musical clock. His eye may follow the hands as they move round the dial; but he has closed his ears to the sweet melodies that float around him.