ts
divine ideals to the physical marvels embedded in the record of its
original promulgation, even conditioning its validity and authority upon
their reality. Such is the false issue which, to the discredit of
Christianity, theology has presented to science. Such is the confusion
of ideas that in the light of modern knowledge inevitably blocks the way
to a reasonable religious faith in multitudes of minds thereby offended.
From this costly error Christian theology at length shows signs that it
is about to extricate itself.[48]

As to the Christian miracles, there can be no reasonable doubt that
"mighty works," deemed by many of his contemporaries superhuman, were
wrought by Jesus. These, whatever they were, must be regarded as the
natural effluence of a transcendently endowed life. Taking place in the
sphere of the senses, they were _a_ revelation of the type seen before
and since in the lives of wonder-workers ancient and modern, in whom the
power of mind over matter, however astonishing and mysterious, is
recognized as belonging to the natural order of things no less than the
unexplored Antarctic belongs to the globe. But _the_ Revelation which he
gave to human thought as a new thing, a heavenly vision unprecedented,
was in the higher realm of the moral and spiritual life. This was the
true supernatural, whose reality and power are separable from all its
environment of circumstances, and wholly independent thereof. The
characteristic ideals of Jesus, his profound consciousness of God, his
filial thought of God, his saturation with the conviction of his moral
oneness with God,[49] his realization of brotherhood with the meanest
human being, still transcend the common level of natural humanity even
among his disciples. As thus transcendent they are supernatural still.
Till reached and realized, they manifest the fact of a supernatural
Revelation in that peerless life as plainly as the sun is manifest in
the splendor of a cloudless day.

In the coming but distant age, when man's spiritual nature, now so
embryonic, shall have become adult, it will doubtless so pervade and
rule the physical and psychical natures which it inhabits that the
distinction between natural and supernatural, so important in the
period of its development, will become foreign alike to thought and
speech. 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, s