ESSAYS AND REVIEWS.

Colonist, Volume IV, Issue 427, 26 November 1861, Page 3

ESSAYS AND REVIEWS.

PROFESSOR POWELL ON MIRACLES

The refutation of miraculous power, as it is set forth in the Scriptures, was undertaken by the late Baden' Powell, Savilian Professor of Geometry in the University of Oxford. In proceeding to examine his essay, we would desire to deal with it in that spirit of reverent tenderness which is due to one who has passed into that region where the mysteries of creation are all unveiled, and where the spirit can no longer cheat itself by putting Nature in the place of God. This essay is, we believe, the last utterance which this remarkable man gave to the world : and a close persual of it may suggest the idea, that it was written under the pressure of that disease of which he soon after died. It is rambling, inconclusive, and occasionally inconsistent with itself. It is devoted in about equal proportions to the double demonstration—first, that, in the nature of things, there cannot be a miracle; and second, that, however, useful as evidence miracles may have been in former ages, they are no longer adapted to our more philosophical generation. One would think, il the first proposition were proved, the author might have spared himself all trouble as to the second.

The temper, too, which he bring* to the

examination of the question is hardly that of a philosopher; and we see not how it is at all to be distinguished from that bigotry which, with bo much contemptuous pity, he ascribes to the advocates of Christianity. ' We are told,' he says, * that we ought fo investigate such high questions rather with our affections than with our logic, and approach them rather with good dispositions and right motives, and with a desire to find the doctrine true; suggestions which ' —we quite agree with him—' however good in a moral and practical sense, are surely inapplicable if it be made a question of facts.' But, when he comes to state his own views, he says, ♦ The question agitated . . . refers to those antecedent considerations which must govern our entire view of the subject, and which, being dependent on higher laws of belief, must be paramount to all attestation; or, rather, belong to a province distinct from it.'

So it comes to this—one party, on certain grounds, advises the student to overlook the defective nature of the evidence on a given case; the other, on certain other grounds, advises the student to refuse to look at the evidence, and to dismiss it without so much as examination. Between such teachers we cannot see much to choose ; but Professor Powell's verdict on them is that the one is a fool and the other a philosopher.

And what are those • antecedent considerations* which lead to the conclusion, that •an event [a miracle] may be so incredible intrinsically, as to set aside any degree of testimony.' It rests upon the theory, that there is no God in the world, —Nature is all; there is an eternal sequence of physical agents which there is no power in the universe to treat, or reverse, or suspend. In his own language, which it is due to him on such a solemn subject to quote, 'The enlarged critical and inductive study of the natural world cannot but tend powerfully to evince the inconceivableness of imagined interruptions of natural order, or supposed suspension of the laws of matter, and of that vast series of dependent causation which constitutes the legitimate field for the investigations of scientific; whose constancy is the sole warrant for its generalisation, while it forms the substantial basis for the grand conclusions of natural theology.'

On this ground he rejects the very idea of a miracle, which he defines to be something * isolated, unrelated, and uncaused.' This definition of a miracle is, in fact, the key to the Professor's whole argument. Where he got it does not at first sight appear. The Bible, and all Bible advocates, are always careful to represent miracles to be caused directly by God, and closely related to His moral government. This position, however, the Professor does not stop to refute, or even to notice; he wisely passes it by. Whether God created the universe—whether, in fact, there was a creation at all—seems, from some part of the Essay, to have been a doubtful point with him; but he seems to have no doubt at all that, once set in motion, no power, whether human or Divine, can interfere with its resistless course.

No Pagan author ever conceived of a dark inexorable Fate, to whose decrees gods and men must submit, more stern snd pitiless than this • order of Nature,* within whose prison walls, according to Professor Powell, the whole sentient universe is eternally enclosed. Now, no doubt, there is much in the science with which Professor Powell was most versant to favor such a view, when taken by itself. The grand and stately procession of the spheres seems instinctively to suggest that their ' goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.' But a glance into the interior life and economy of our own planet, which holds its place in the system as calm and orderly as if it bore no woes, or distraction, or sin, or misery in its bosom, might tend materially to shake our faith in this monotonous uniformity even of physical law. Before pronouncing on the incredibility of miracles because they involve a violation of the uniform order of nature, it would be well to establish in what uniformity consists. Where is this uniformity to be found ? Certainly not in man or man's life, which is that with which miracles chiefly concern themselves. Far from uniformity, we see nothing but confusion, distraction, conflict. To one man, an organ, a limb, a functional structure, is a source of life-long torture; while to the mass of his fellows the same structure ministers to his highest enjoyment, or is necessary to the full developement of his powers. One man is sickly, another is in high health. Of two children born into the world, one drops directly into the grave, while the other lives on for a century. Is death the uniform law of nature or life,-— health orVlisease ? Will it be said that the existence of both in constant alternation and conflict is the law ? Be it so; but where, then, is the violation of law in the restoration of the diseased to health—of the dead to life ? Changes from health to sickness, or from sickness to health, are matters of daily experience, and as we know them, no miracle at all. A healthy man becomes sick; a sick man becomes healthy. When recovery takes place by ordinary means, we never talk of a violation of the order of nature. Will it be said, then, that when a recovery takes weeks or months to consummate, that is according to the law of nature; but that if the healing be momentary, it is a violation of her laws? 'I hat may be an acceleration of the order and forces of nature, if you will; but acceleiation is a very different thing from violation.

Or let us proceed to a more startling miracle still. On what grounds is it said that the raising of the dead to life is a violation of the order oi' nature ? Living men die; why should not dead men live ? The analogies of nature are in favor of such a supposition. For observe, thecourssof human life is not a downward series of gradual but constant deteiioiation, The contrary in

often the case. A delicate and sickly chilahood is occasionally succeeded by a vigorous manhood, protracted into a green old age. A man recovers many times from his ailments for the once that he dies of them. Life is, in fact, a series of alternations between health and disease; restoration maintains a constant and desperate struggle with decay down to the very verge of the grave; what philosophical reason is there for imagining that the conflict ends there ? As the sick man occasionally returns to health, why should not the dead man occasionally return to life? True, we know they do not, but that is a matter of subsequent observation ; where, we want to know, is the antecedent incredibility ?

We do not wonder at the uncertainty and confusion that prevailed in the Pagan world, as to the order and plan of life, which presented to observation a tangled maze of contradictions, and mu3t often have raised the doubt whether life or death, evil or good, were the more potent force in the world. In this view the order of nature is an unmeaning phrase ; there is no order no uniformity,—all is confusion, distraction, alternation. And yet not wholly a 'maze without a plan.' Everywhere there are signs of order and of beneficent pmpose; but that order is continually broken in upon, that beneficent purpose thwarted. The rule seems to be the furtherance of man's happiness; but then it is subject to numerous, and in some cases, terrible exceptions. So Paley forcibly puts it, on arguing the same question from another point of view. 'Evil no doubt exists, but is never, that we can perceive, the object of contrivance. Teeth are contrived to eat, not to ache; their aching now and then is incidental to the contrivance, perhaps inseparable from it, or even, if you will, let it be called a defect iv the contrivance, but it is not the object of the contrivance.' No! but what man wants to know is, why should the contrivance be so defective? Is it from the incompetency of the contriver, or the jarring of the machine ? Suppose now that in this state of perplexity a being appears in the world, and announces in a tone of authority, that all this disorder proceeds from a moral cause, which it is his mission to set right. Suppote he explains that the true order of nature is not that blurred and partly effaced and often twisted line of things which men now see; that the rule as originally laid down stood out sharp and clear in the direction of beneficence; that, though man has violated the rule, he could not evade the penalty of his violation; that the laws of nature still held on their sublimely equable way, buffeting and wounding, and finally crushing him, as he 'kicking against the pricks,' vainly attempted to resist or arrest them in their calmly majestic sweep. Suppose this same personage announced that he has come to restore man to harmony with those laws he is fighting against, to relieve him from that yoke of bondage into which his violation of those laws has brought him, and the disorders., moral and material, which it inflicts upon him—that all power on earth is committed to him for that endthat during his short sojourn on earth he should, by way of specimen both of his purpose and his power, publicly profess to bring the diseased into harmony with the laws of health, the demoniacally possessed into harmony with the laws of a 'right mind,' the dead into harmony with the laws of life; and, as the root and foundation of all other harmonics, to restore the sinner to harmony and communion with his God. What is theie in professions like these to make a man—on purely philosophical grounds—we do not say deny their truth, that is quite another question; but what is there to induce him to say that there is such antecedent incredibility in them as to make the evidence for their existence not worth examination?

Our position is, that so far from their having any ground for saying that the laws of Nature are inviolable, there is evidence all round us they are now suffering violence. Their beneficent action is under restraint, of which the jarring disorders, woes, and miseries that afflict humanity are the consequences. We are told that Paul spoke as a philosopher no less than a theologian when he described the present condition of things as unnatural, distorted, and strained from the original divine harmony, and declareth that • the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.' Professor Powell might deny the bondage; he might refuse to recognise the dislocation ; he might insist that the very apparent confusion is but the mode of working of the law. But on that supposition his own argument falls to the ground; for where so many diverse forces appear to be at work, how can he single out one which may but iarely, or even once, appear to have been manifested, and say that that is contrary to the order of nature ? The introduction of a moral element unto this chaos gives the clue, as we believe, to the labyrinth where he has lost himself. In spite of his sneer, we hold with Paley,— * Once believe in a God, and all is easy.' For, if we once admit the existence of an Omnipotent Governor over the universe both of mind and matter, the idea of miracles assumes a totally new phase from the dry and barren, • isolated, unrelated, and uncaused' phenomena of Professor Powell. They will then appear in what we believe to be their true character —not as violations or reversals of the order of nature, even as is known to us, but at most as modifications. We believe them renovations of the processes of that law, quickening its action, lifting us up to contemplate its working in a higher region, as it rules without a check in a more orderly and perfect kingdomaffording us glimpses and foreehinings of that land where the order of nature is known as another name for the perfect expression of the Divine will, and heralding the advent of the day when that * will shall be clone on earth even as it is done in