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. It is, therefore, not incredible that some of the mighty works
of Jesus, which still transcend the existing limits of knowledge and
power, and so are still reputed miraculous, and are suspected by many as
unhistorical, may in some yet remote and riper stage of humanity be
transferred, as some have already been, to the class of the
non-miraculous and natural.

Dr. Robbins, Dean of the General Theological Seminary, New York, after
remarking that "the word _miracle_ has done more to introduce confusion
into Christian Evidences than any other," goes on to say: "To animals
certain events to them inexplicable are signs of the presence of human
intelligence and power. To men these miracles of Christ are signs of
divine intelligence and power. But how is miracle to be differentiated
from other providential dealings of God? Not by removing him further
from common events. Abstruse speculations concerning the relation of
miracles to other physical phenomena may be safely left to the
adjustment of an age which shall have advanced to a more perfect
synthesis of knowledge than the present can boast."[29]

The truth to which such considerations conduct is, that no hard and fast
line can be drawn between the miraculous and the non-miraculous. To the
untutored mind, like that of the savage who thought it miraculous that a
chip with a message written on it had talked to the recipient, the
simplest thing that he cannot explain is miraculous: "_omne ignotum pro
mirifico_," said Tacitus. As the range of knowledge and power widens,
the range of the miraculous narrows correspondingly. Some twenty years
since, the International Sunday-school Lessons employed as a proof of
the divinity of Christ the reputedly miraculous knowledge which he
evinced in his first interview with Nathanael of a solitary hour in
Nathanael's experience.[30] Since then it has been demonstrated[31] by
psychical research that the natural order of the world includes
telepathy, and the range of the miraculous has been correspondingly
reduced without detriment to the argument for the divinity of Christ,
now rested on less precarious ground.

Under such conditions as we have reviewed a miracle