ject all these logical distinctions and investigations as worthless:
they have helped to render clear our conceptions and ideas, and they still
help. But a deeper investigation of the idea of miracles and its relation
to a scientific knowledge of the world may perhaps finally lead our more
developed reflection back to the fact that we find the quintessence and the
nature of miracles only where the pious people of the Bible found it. And
this quintessence of miracles consists precisely in their _teleological
nature_, and not at all in the fact that they cannot be explained
physically: it consists in the fact that miracles are _signs_ through which
God manifests himself and his government over man, and actually shows the
latter that _he_ wishes to bring him to the pursuit of perfection by the
way of redemption. Ritschl, in an essay which appeared in the "Jahrbuecher
fuer Deutsche Theologie," as early as 1861, pointed out this decidedly
teleological character of Biblical miracles and the indifference shown by
pious men in the Bible as to the question whether these deeds and signs can
be explained naturally or not.

The profit which we derive from this reverting to the Biblical conception
of the idea of miracles is by no means small.

In the first place, we help to establish the full recognition of that
direct religious consciousness and sensation which is not only
characteristic of the pious men of Scripture, but which yet characterizes
all genuine religiousness; and this consists in the fact that the religious
man sees {364} _miracles of God in all that turns his attention to God's
government_,--in the sea of stars, in rock and bush, in sunshine and storm,
in flower and worm, just as certainly as in the guidance of his own life
and in the facts and processes of the history of salvation and of the
kingdom of the Lord. In this idea of miracles, the essential thing is not
that the phenomena and processes are inconceivable to him--although
certainly in all that comes into appearance there is still an
incomprehensible and uncomprehended remainder. For a form of nature,
_e.g._, which turns his attention to a creator, is of course a miracle,
even if he is able to look upon it with none other eye than that of the
unlearned: but it even then remains a miracle,--nay, it is increased to a
still greater miracle, if he has learned to contemplate and investigate it
with all the auxiliary means of science. A hearing of his prayers remain