f miracle generally; and they
consequently acknowledged the possibility of the repetition of such
phenomena in the times in which they lived--a position more tenable,
perhaps, than that of modern orthodoxy, that accepts without murmur all
the supernatural events recorded in the Bible, and utterly rejects all
subsequent relations of a similar nature, however well authenticated.
The Reformers believed unswervingly in the truth of the Biblical
accounts of miracles, and that what God had once permitted to take place
might and would be repeated in case of serious necessity. But they found
it utterly impossible to accept the puerile and meaningless miracles
perpetrated under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church as evidence
of divine interference; and they had not travelled far enough upon the
road towards rationalism to be able to reject them, one and all, as in
their very nature impossible. The consequence of this was one of those
compromises which we so often meet with in the history of the changes of
opinion effected by the Reformation. Only those particular miracles that
were indisputably demonstrated to be impostures--and there were plenty
of them, such as the Rood of Boxley[1]--were treated as such by them.
The unexposed remainder were treated as genuine supernatural phenomena,
but caused by diabolical, not divine, agency. The reforming divine
Calfhill, supporting this view of the Catholic miracles in his answer to
Martiall's "Treatise of the Cross," points out that the majority of
supernatural events that have taken place in this world have been, most
undoubtedly, the work of the devil; and puts his opponents into a rather
embarrassing dilemma by citing the miracles of paganism, which both
Catholic and Protestant concurred in attributing to the evil one. He
then clinches his argument by asserting that "it is the devil's cunning
that persuades those that will walk in a popish blindness" that they are
worshipping God when they are in reality serving him. "Therefore," he
continues, consciously following an argument of St. Cyprianus against
the pagan miracles, "these wicked spirits do lurk in shrines, in roods,
in crosses, in images: and first of all pervert the priests, which are
easiest to be caught with bait of a little gain. Then work they
miracles. They appear to men in divers shapes; disquiet them when they
are awake; trouble them in their sleeps; distort their members; take
away their health; afflict them with di