s a
miracle, whether or not he is able to perceive the natural connection of
the process in which he sees his prayers answered, or even to trace it back
to the remotest times which preceded his prayers. The events and facts of
the history of salvation remain miracles to him, whether the history of
nature and the world offers to him auxiliary means of explaining them or
not. The pious man, therefore, does not find the essential characteristic
of miracles in their relative inconceivableness, but in the fact that they
refer him to a living God who stands above this process, whether perceived
or unperceived in its relative causal connection, and unites it with the
course of things in order to reach his ends and to manifest himself to man.
Now, in our attempt at a scientific reproduction of the idea of miracles,
if we return to that Biblical conception, we see no longer in this just
{365} mentioned religious conception of miracles a pious sophistry which
avoids the difficulty of the idea, or a child-like _naivete_ worthy of
being partly envied and partly pitied, which does not at all see the
difficulties and remains on the child-stage of Biblical conceptions; but we
only perceive in it a confirmation and fulfilment of that profound and
beneficent word of our Lord: "Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not
receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein."
Of course, piety as well as science makes _distinctions_ among miracles.
The former separates the _mere products and processes of nature_ which,
through what is explicable as well as what is inexplicable in their
qualities and processes, point to an almighty and all-wise Creator, and
thereby become miracles to the religious view of the world, from the
_historical events_ which, by their newness and uniqueness, and by their
pointing toward divine ends, manifest God and his teleological government
to man, and calls them miracles in a still more specific sense than science
does. And among historical events, piety as well as science assigns the
name miracle, in the most pregnant sense, to those events which belong to
the _history of salvation_, and, by their newness and uniqueness, introduce
new stages into it, render legitimate its new instruments, or bring new
features of redemption to our knowledge. Our religiousness has the greatest
and deepest interest in this history: for it is the history of the leading
back of man into communion with God by the wa