James Morris Whiton

“ This rising tide of reflection has compelled resort to higher ground, to the inward evidences in the nature of mind that are more secure from the doubt to which all that is merely external and historical is exposed. A clear distinction has been discerned between the real resurrection of Jesus—his rising from the mortal state into the immortal, and his phenomenal resurrection—the manifestations of his change that are related as having been objectively witnessed. ”

“ In the New Testament a reputed miracle is not any sort of wonderful work upon any sort of occasion, but an act of benevolent will exerted for an immediate benefit, [28] and transcending the then existing range of human intelligence to explain and power to achieve. The historic reality of at least [77] some such acts performed by Jesus is acknowledged by critics as free from the faintest trace of orthodox bias as Keim: "The picture of Jesus, the worker of miracles, belongs to the first believers in Christ, and is no invention." ”

“ To seek the evidence of divine activity in human affairs and to ground one's faith in a controlling Providence in sporadic and cometary phenomena, rather than in the constant and cumulative signs of it to be seen in the majestic order of the starry skies, in the reign of intelligence [32] throughout the cosmos, in the moral evolution of ancient savagery into modern philanthropy, in the historic manifestation throughout the centuries of a Power not our own that works for the increase of righteousness, is a mode of thought which in our time is being steadily and surely outgrown. ”

“ As moral nature is supernatural to the psychical and the physical, so is its consummate bloom of spiritual Religion to be ranked as such, relatively to the religions which more or less dimly and blindly are yearning and groping toward the light that never was on sea or land. Thus defining the word according to the nature of the thing, supernatural Religion, with its corollary of supernatural Revelation not as an apparition from without, but as an unfolding from within, is both a fact and a factor in the development of spiritual man. ”

“ Looking from the derived and finite life of the world, visible only in the signs of its presence, but in its reality no more visible than him "whom no man hath seen, nor can see," up to the life underived, aboriginal, infinite, we recognize God and Life as terms of identical significance. How superficial the notion of miracles as "the personal intervention of God into the chain of cause and effect," in which he is the constant vital element. ”

“ On the other hand, we must believe that the goal of progress is a flying goal; that human attainment can never reach finality unless men cease to be. And so all widening of human knowledge and power must ever disclose further limitations to be transcended. ”

“ Doubtless, Religion of whatever grade outranks all other human activities by its distinctive aspiration to transcend the bounds of space and time and sense, and to link the individual to the universal ”

“ Moreover, the divine sonship of Jesus in a purely ethical view rests on ground not only higher but incontestable. And so in our time theologians prefer to rest it on foundations that cannot be shaken, on his moral oneness with God, the divineness of his spirit, the ideal perfectness of his life. The strength of this position being realized, the world begins to hear from Christian thinkers the innovating affirmation that belief of the miraculous birth can no longer be deemed essential to Christianity ”

“ Miracles, legitimately viewed as the natural product of extraordinary psychical power, or, to phrase it otherwise, of an exceptional vital endowment, belong not to the Hebrew race alone, nor did they cease when the last survivor of the Jewish apostles of Christianity passed away at the end of the first century. This traditional opinion ought by this time to have been entombed together with its long defunct relative, which represented this globe as the fixed centre of the revolving heavens. Miracles have the same universality as human life. ”

“ But until the making of man in the image of God is complete, when the spiritual element in our composite being, now struggling for development, shall be manifest in its ultimate maturity and ascendency as the distinctive and proper nature of humanity, it is of supreme importance for the Christian teacher, who would point and urge to the heights of being, to free men's minds of error as to what the real supernatural is. ”

“ The Anglicized Latin word, "miracle," indiscriminately used in the Authorized Version, denotes the superficial character of the act or event it is applied to, as producing wonder or amazement in the beholders. The terms commonly employed in the New Testament (sēmeion, a sign; dunamis, power; less frequently teras, a portent) are of deeper significance, and connote the inner nature of the occurrence, either as requiring to be pondered for its meaning, or as the product of a new and peculiar energy. ”

“ Now it is precisely in the progress of moral development that supernatural Religion manifests itself as a reality. Religion, indeed, is as natural to man as Art. But there is religion and Religion, as there is art and Art—the sexual religion of the primitive Semites, the animistic religion of China, the spiritual Religion that flowered on the Mount of the Beatitudes, embryonic religion and Religion adult ”

“ As Professor Drummond says, "If God appears periodically, he disappears periodically." It is precisely this view of the subject that really banishes God from his world. Those who thus define miracle regard miracles as having ceased at the end of the Apostolic age in the first century. Except, therefore, for the narrow range of human history that the Bible [31] covers in time and place, God has not been personally in the chain of natural causes and effects. Thus close to an atheistic conception of nature does zeal for traditional orthodoxy unwittingly but really come. ”

“ Demonstration of the actual fact past all controversy being out of the question, all that can be offered for the attempt to rate the narrative at its proper value, either as history or as fiction, is hypothesis. The choice lies for us between two hypotheses. Surely, that hypothesis is the more credible which is based on a solid body of objective facts, and meets all the conditions of the case.
Will it be replied to this that the critics [57] can show for their hypothesis the admitted fact of the human proclivity to invent legends of miracle? ”

“ Men have disbelieved the incarnation, because told that all there was of it was in Christ; and they reject what is presented as exceptional to the general way of God. They must be told to believe more; that the age-long way of God is in a perpetually increasing incarnation of life, whose climax and crown is the divine fulness of life in Christ."—From a discourse by the present writer on "Life and its Incarnations," in the volume, New Points to Old Texts. ”

“ In popular thought, religious and irreligious alike, the natural is supposed to be something that runs itself without any internal guidance or external interference. The supernatural, on the other hand, if there be any such thing, is not supposed to manifest itself through the natural, but by means of portents, prodigies, interpositions, departures from, or infractions of, natural law in general. The realm of law belongs to the natural, and the natural runs itself. ”

“ It is one of those "idols of the tribe" whose power alike over civilized and uncivilized men is broken less by argument than by the ascent of man to wider horizons of knowledge.
It is for the gain of religion that it should be broken,—of the spiritual religion whose God is not a tradition, a reminiscence, but a living presence, inhabiting alike the clod and the star, the flower in the crannied wall and the life of man. So thinking of God the religious man may rightly say, [10] "If it is more difficult to believe in miracles, [33] it is less important. ”

“ Within the memory of living men theologians have been compelled to ask themselves: What if the geologists should establish facts that contradict our Biblically derived doctrine that the universe was made in a week? Again have they been constrained to put to themselves the question: [96] What if the evolutionists should supersede our doctrine that the creation is the immediate product of successive fiats of the Creator by showing that it came gradually into existence through the progressive operation of forces immanent in the cosmos? ”

“ Miracle as a divine intervention in the natural order, a more close and direct divine contact with the course of things than is the case in ordinary experience, they regard as the inseparable and necessary concomitant and proof of a divine Revelation. ”

“ Regarding miracle as the natural product of exceptionally endowed life, there is no source from which more light can be shed on its Biblical record than in those studies of the exceptional phenomena and occult powers of life which are prosecuted by the Society for Psychical Research, whose results are recorded in its published Proceedings. For those familiar with this record the legendary element in the Bible tends to shrink into smaller compass than many critics assign it. ”

“ One may reasonably believe that Jesus healed a case of violent insanity at Gadara, and reasonably disbelieve that the fire of heaven was twice obedient to Elijah's call to consume the military companies sent to arrest him. Cultivated discernment does not now put all Biblical miracles on a common level of credibility, any more than the historical work of Herodotus and that of the late Dr. Gardiner. To defend them all is not to vindicate, but to discredit all alike. ”

“ Biology studies all the various forms that the world shows of it, and affirms [90] that life, though multiform, is one. This embryology attests, showing that the whole ascent of life through diverse forms from the lowest to the highest, during the millions of years since life first manifested its presence on this globe, is recapitulated in the stages of growth through which the human being passes in the few months before its birth. ”

“ And here the Church also in its embryonic spiritual life, in its proneness to externalize religion in forms of rite, and creed, and organization, has thought to find it. Jesus' reproof, "Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe," is still pertinent to those who will not have it that the supernatural Revelation—spiritual though it be—can be recognized or believed in apart from an acknowledgment of attendant miracles, wrought in physical nature by an intervention of God. ”

“ To discover that ancient experiences, once supposed to be miraculous raisings from real death, may reasonably be classed with well attested experiences of to-day, better understood as resuscitations from a deathlike trance, should be welcomed by unprejudiced historical critics, as redeeming portions of the ancient record from mistaken disparagement as legendary. That further study may accredit as facts, or at least as founded on facts, some other marvels in that record cannot, except by arrant dogmatism, be pronounced improbable. ”

“ The term supernatural Religion has been rightly applied to that system of religious conceptions, ideals, and motives, whose effective culture of the moral nature is attested historically by a moral development [139] superior to the product of any other known religion. Whether the greatest saints of Christianity are all of them whiter souls than any that can be found among the disciples of any other religion, may be matter for argument. ”

“ It has already been noted that a considerable number of the then reputed miracles of Jesus, particularly his works of healing, do not now, as then, transcend the existing range of knowledge and power, and accordingly are no longer reputed miraculous. And one cannot reasonably believe that a limit to the understanding and control of forces in Nature and mind that now are more or less occult has been already reached. ”