nd_ with the legend of the voyage of "Brute the Trojan." 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. The elimination of the
indefensible, the setting aside of the legendary, the transference of
the supposedly miraculous to the order of natural powers and processes
so far as vindicable ground for such critical treatment is discovered,
is the only way to answer the first of all questions concerning the
Bible: How much of this is credible history? Thus it is not only
thoroughly reasonable, but is in the interest of a reasonable belief
that divine agency is revealed rather by the upholding of the
established order of Nature than by any alleged interference therewith.
With what God has established God never interferes. To allege his
interference with his established order is virtually to deny his
constant immanence therein, a failure to recognize the fundamental fact
that "Nature is Spirit," as Principal Fairbairn has said, and all its
processes and powers the various modes of the energizing of the divine
Will.

A third net result now highly probable is a still further reduction of
the list of reputed miracles. The critical process of discriminating
the historical from the legendary, and the natural from the non-natural,
is still so comparatively recent that it can hardly be supposed to have
reached its limit. Nor can it be stayed by any impeachment of it as
hostile to Christianity, whose grand argument appeals to its present
ethical effects, not to ancient thaumaturgical accompaniments. There is,
however, a considerable class of cases in which the advancing critical
process is likely even to gain credibility for the Biblical narrative in
a point where it is now widely doubted--the resuscitations of the
apparently dead. Among all the Biblical miracles none have more probably
a secure historical basis.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] 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 amaze