SECTION IX

the miracles of Jesus

We have seen that Christ had decided on a mission in the world which was designed to form a great means of communication (Vermittelung) between the mystery of His glorious spiritual life, and the darkened, sickly, disharmonized world, which was not in a state to bear an unconditional unfolding of His glory. As one special form of this intervention for the purpose of incorporating the power of Christ with the world, we have, last of all, pointed out Miracles. By this reference of miracle to the means of communication, so as to place it under the same point of view as the evangelical parables and the founding of the New Testament kingdom of God, it is distinctly indicated that we apprehend miracles, first of all, on a side which forms a decided opposite to that in which it gives so much trouble to the critics who represent ‘the culture of our age.’ The miracles of Jesus appear, indeed, as very great events, extraordinary, unheard-of, and almost incredible, if we compare them with the course of the old dispensation of the world (alten Weltäon); and this is the common view. But if we measure them according to their number, appearance, and importance, by the infinite fulness of the power of Christ’s life, a saving power which restores the whole sinful world even to the resurrection, we must regard them as indeed small beginnings of the revelation of this living power, in which it comes forth as secretly, modestly, and noiselessly as His doctrine in His parables; and we learn the meaning of Christ’s saying, by which he led His disciples to estimate this misunderstood phase of His miracles, ‘Ye shall do greater works than these’ (Joh 14:12). But Christ’s miracles served in manifold ways to reveal His life-power to the world in subdued forms of operation. When Christ in these separate acts displays His agency, He lets Himself down to the sensuous level of the world, which only by these examples of His deepest universal agency can gain a perception of that agency itself. He places Himself first of all on a line with the wonder-workers, the exorcists of His time, while He has begun the great work of saving the world, and of expelling the evil spirits from the whole world. By healing the feet of a paralytic, He had to prove that He had previously healed his heart by the forgiveness of his sins. By His wonderful single operations, which powerfully affected the souls of men, He gradually aroused the perception of the susceptible for contemplating the great, eternal miracle which appeared in His own life. But for profane minds the Saviour of the world retired behind the wonder-worker. Often has it been attempted to find in the miracles of Jesus an ostentatious display of Christianity. But a time must come when men will learn to regard them as acts of the humility of Christ. Still, much of the wonderful that is from beneath must be set aside, before the wonderful from above is entirely acknowledged as the first interposition of Christ’s eternal life-power for the world. For this power is holy even as the spiritual light of Christ, as His title of Messiah, and as His blessedness in the vision of God; therefore, it veils itself to the captious, while it unveils itself to the susceptible, and even that measure of it which has become manifest in miracle, appears to them as too much. But we must not misapprehend either the one side or the other of the miracles in which this power finds its medium of communication to men.

We might speak of these extraordinary operations of Christ’s life without employing the word miracle to designate them, and in doing so, clear the way to some extent for those who always imagine that the facts of the kingdom of God are dependent on the designations affixed to them, or on the later definitions of these designations. If, for example, we should call them, in accordance with the phraseology of the Gospels, spiritual primordial powers (δυνάμεις) or religious primordial phenomena (τέρατα or σημεῖα), we should have the advantage of representing them with these names in their relation to their living origin, the originator of the new dispensation (Æon), and so have designated them as the natural, necessary, and perfectly rational expressions of a new power. But these facts are still, as to their specific nature, rightly designated by the word miracle (Wunder); namely, when the miracle is regarded as a perfectly novel appearance, which as such calls forth a perfectly novel intuition and state of feeling in the beholders—the highest astonishment and wonder. Now if we have to seek for a developed idea of miracle, it must be almost superfluous to remark, that the Protestant scientific contemplation of the extraordinary facts in the Gospel history, to which the term miracle is applied, cannot be restricted to the definitions of the Church dogmatics. It is confessed that in the course of time these definitions have become more and more unwieldy. But while the free examination must be conducted independently of the maxims of dogmatic science, it must equally be set free from the authority of narrow, worn-out assumptions of natural science, as they have been commonly employed by ‘critical’ theologians against miracles. It is false when dogmatic theology speaks of an absolute removal of the laws of nature, of a sheer suspension of them by miracle;¹ but is equally false when the philosophic culture of the age pretends to a knowledge of absolute laws, which must make a miracle simply impossible.2 Such laws of nature are to be called physical gods, or rather divinities; they are perfect contradictions throughout. A law is from the first conditioned by the sphere in which it operates. Now, since nature is an infinitely delicate complex of the most different spheres, it is exceedingly difficult to recognize and correctly define a law of nature as conditioned by its sphere. How different, for instance, the law of nature relative to propagation in the class of mammals and in that of reptiles! How very differently does the law of gravitation act in the region of the double stars and in the region of the earth! But as the law is conditioned in its outward appearance by its sphere, by its relation to space, so also it is conditioned by the course of time to which it belongs by its æon. Therefore, in reality, it is always conditioned by the spirit and mind of the Lawgiver. Consequently we cannot fail to perceive that the laws of nature are conditioned by the omnipotent Spirit of the Creator. The Creator is the Interpreter of the law of nature. But surely it cannot be denied that the Creator has spoken by the laws of nature, and He cannot contradict Himself. With this remark, the opponents of miracle think they have said something that should settle the question. Certainly there can be nothing more conformable to law than the course of nature, since the eternal clearness and consistency of the divine will are expressed in it, since it is an expression of the Spirit, and not the Spirit itself. The life of nature is in fact its conformity to law. If it were not conformable to law, not faithful to its regulations, not inexorably decided in its course, it could not continue in existence, it could not present the sublime counterpart of the Spirit. Its conformity to law is the mirror of the divine freedom. But the Spirit of God would have for ever bound Himself, and been excluded from His own creation, if He had not from the first conditioned its conformity to law with infinite nicety. He Himself would not be God if nature were absolute in its laws—if it were God. Nature too would be shifted from her own proper ground if that great miracle, the act of creation, which bears her phenomena so conformable to law, could not break forth in her midst, and manifest the peculiar nature of her being in a miraculous efflorescence.

Nature may be contemplated in a twofold sequence: its phenomena may be traced from above downwards, or from below upwards. If we take the first path, we shall continually advance from the regions of more indefinite laws, of fluctuating freedom-like life, into the regions of rigid conformity to law, since we shall be penetrating further into the region of the primal and most general features of nature. The migrating bird may be on some occasions deceived by its instinct; but the lightning is thoroughly certain of its path, and belongs proportionably to a much power region of life. But the further we advance into these low tracts of the most rigid conformity to law, the wider also do the circles of law extend, or so much the more do they bind themselves to fixed conditions, or conceal themselves in the delicate exuberance of variable life. Fire, for instance, is inexorable in its conformity to law; for that reason it generally lies imprisoned in steel and stone. But no sooner do we follow the proper tendency of life in nature, and turn to it from below upwards, than it assumes a quite different form. It appears to us indeed as one of its fundamental laws, that in all its conformity to law it still continues to be nature (Natura), that it is always bringing forth, raising, and potentiating itself;³ and thus from stage to stage it elevates its own laws, forms, and phenomena, and converts them into new ones, and struggles towards glorification in the spirit. It is therefore clear that nature in this direction has throughout a supernatural tendency. She meets on her proud way, as a wonder-worker striving upwards, the wonder-struck theologian, who is as far from free as herself, and performs a miracle entirely the reverse; for he sets aside the laws of the spiritual sphere to seal up the laws of nature by his own gross assumption, since he would make nature the consecrated vehicle of the spirit naturalistic. But nature is also conformable to law, and incessant in the boldness with which he hastens towards the free spirit; she persists in her wonder-working direction. This rests on the simple law, that every power according to its kind can work itself out in nature; that therefore a higher power can break through the sphere of a lower power, set aside its laws, consume its material, and transform life in it. Thus, for example, the lion rushes as a supernatural principle on the gazelle. It appears, mayhap, an event contrary to nature that so delicate a form of nature should be destroyed and annihilated in its noble conformity to law, whenever the right of this higher power, the lion, is lost sight of. The lion devours the gazelle, but in his deed, in his blood and life, the unnatural act becomes a new nature.

Had the believers in miracles not allowed themselves to be so prejudiced against nature by the appeal made against them to the laws of nature, they must have found the idea of miracle and its future as plainly indicated in nature as the idea and future of man. A grain of corn contains a visible and distinct likeness of a miracle. The grain of corn, in its innermost being, in its germinant power, is a principle of life. This principle of life is brought into operation through nature. But no sooner does it begin to germinate, than it operates as a supernatural power in relation to the substance of the grain of corn. This its supernatural property begins gradually to operate against nature; it destroys and consumes the natural material which surrounds it, but it removes this old nature-life in order to exhibit it made young again in a new life. Here all the elements of the idea of miracle are present in a symbolic form. Miracle is indeed the well adjusted irruption of a spiritual life-principle into a subordinate life-sphere, an irruption which in its issuing forth as a principle appears supernatural, in its decidedness of action is antinatural, and in its final issue completes itself in natural development.

The image of miracle borrowed from the grain of corn is in one respect imperfect: the seed moves in the circle of a sphere which always remains the same, though at the same time gently rising, while the idea of miracles can be made quite clear only by a succession of life-spheres. We must have heard the spiritual music of the life-spheres, if we would speak of the idea of law, of freedom, and of miracle; for all these ideas are referable to spherical relations. But as in the religious department, it is said of the righteous man that for him there is no law; so in the general department of life, the same may be said of the higher life-principles in relation to the lower life-spheres. So the first crystallization is a miracle, since it very decidedly conditions, or in a conditional manner dispenses with, the law of gravitation, which in a lower element-sphere, that of water, prevails unconditioned. The form or law of unconditioned gravity is the globular; but crystallization makes sport of this first iron rule of gravitation in a thousand ways, when it forms its delicately constructed mathematical figures. The first plant was a miracle which decidedly changed the world in which it grew. And so it has been correctly said of the animal, that it is a miracle for the vegetable world. Lastly, in Man the whole of subordinate nature is raised and changed into a specifically higher life-form. He himself, therefore, in this relation to the nature that is subordinate to him, is an eternally speaking image of miracle. In him nature has attained her final aim; she has come in contact with spirit, and in her movements is elevated, consumed, and transformed by his free moral life in conformity with her original destiny.

But now the question arises, whether we have reached the top of the scale of life, when we have reached man simply, man who is of the earth. If there is within humanity only one life-sphere, only one elaboration of one life-principle, there may indeed be always phenomena resembling the miraculous which depend on the difference of powers; but this does not establish the existence of such a region of miracles as the Theocracy and especially Christianity delineates, since the deciding new principle is wanting which must form and support it. But if there is really a succession of stages within humanity—if here again a sphere of specifically higher human life towers above the lower sphere, we must here also expect what meets our eye on all the other stages of life, namely, that the new superior principle breaks through the old sphere with wonderful effect, in order to draw it up into its higher life. But Christianity announces this new higher life-stage not only as doctrine, but as fact, and in the idea it finds the completest confirmation of its own. The special characteristic of the first human life in its historical appearance, as it was modified by the fall, was the Adamic discord between the spirit and the flesh, and the predominance of the latter over the former. The special characteristic of the second human life in its historical power, that is, in Christ, is the identity of the spirit and the flesh, and the glorification of the flesh under the supremacy of the spirit. The human spirit itself requires this manifestation of the ideal human life in a distinct and decided principle (Princip.) But it also requires the actings of this principle—its breaking through the sphere of the first human life, therefore its miracles. In these facts must the new life-principle verify itself as the creative organizing power of a new higher world.

When persons are accustomed to regard nature as only one sphere, and to allow the world of men to coincide with this one circle of nature, it excites the conception of a boundless Mongolian steppe, in which nothing more extraordinary can occur than the ever appearing and ever vanishing of the same sights and the same faces. But the more familiar we become with the succession of spheres in nature, and with the heavenly ladder of the æons in the history of the world, the more we shall find in the great central miracle—the life of Christ—the necessity established of the several miracles which form its historical periphery. And the more we can estimate the contrast between the heavenly spiritual glory of the life of Christ, and the shattered, old human world, in all its magnitude, the more we shall expect these miracles of Christ to stand forth in bold relief. Thus, then, the doctrine of the miracles of Christ is most intimately connected with the doctrine of His Person.⁴ Where the former appears mutilated, we may justly infer a mutilation of the latter, and the reverse. The truth of this assertion may be proved from the fact, that the various discrepancies in the doctrine of miracles can very easily be traced back to corresponding discrepancies in the doctrine of the person of Christ. Whoever decidedly rejects the uniqueness of the person of Christ, will not be able to recognize the uniqueness of His works. The difficulty which ‘modern culture’ has with the miracles of Jesus, is connected with a decline in the knowledge of the Son of the Virgin. When the root of the life of Christ is no longer estimated in its wonderful singularity, how can the golden fruit of miracles be sought for on the top of the tree? In fact every one-sidedness in Christology is reflected by a one-sidedness in the theory of miracles. The older orthodox doctrine of Christ did not at all times estimate the full value of His humanity. It often represented His becoming a man as a humiliation, and at the same time lost sight of the individuality of His being. Christ’s humanity often appeared as an organic form, or the more concrete human approach to His divinity. One consequence of this view was, that the miracles were regarded simply as works of divine Omnipotence. On this supposition faith in miracles was, in appearance, infinitely easy. The explanation was always at hand-Christ can do all things because He is God. But not to say that with this view the presence of God in nature was regarded as the sway of an absolute will within the circle of the most exact conformity to law, it was at the same time forgotten that Christ as the Son was aware that His own agency was throughout conditioned by that of the Father (Joh 5:19); moreover, that He communicated to His own disciples the power of working miracles. According to this view, Christ was not perfectly incorporated with humanity; and the same might be affirmed of His miracles, which would thus form only a conservatory of the choicest plants, transplanted from heaven, and delighting us as images of heaven, but never naturalized on earth. They would only attest the one thought that God is omnipotent, and willing to aid us with His omnipotence.

While a one-sided supranaturalism, therefore, makes an exotic conservatory of the miracles of Jesus, the rationalist doctrine of Christ metamorphoses them into a bramble-bush. When Jesus is regarded simply as the son of Joseph, who, at the most, manifested the power of God in a peculiar manner, and fulfilled a mission from God, such a personality is not strong enough to concentrate the miracles of the Gospel history into an overpowering unity, and to make them proceed from Himself as the natural manifestations of the power of His wonderful life. But there they stand; and they must spring forth from the soil of the Gospel history as best they can: from the extraordinary power of Christ; from the ordination of Providence; or even from the favour of chance, from the elements of medical science, from magnetism, from popular credulity, from the embellishments of fiction, and lastly, even from the inaccuracies of the New Testament language. It is natural that such a wonderful soil should bear a thicket of miracles into which the rationalist shepherd is unwilling to lead his flock, since he is afraid they should lose their wool in the bushes, and which therefore he passes by himself as best he can. The spiritualist, alarmed and troubled at the sight of this thicket, warns us, with the looks of honest Eckhart, not to lose our way in the dangerous wood, but rather to adopt a logic which sets the outward and the inward, the letter and the spirit, in eternal contrariety.

But if there is a distinct recognition of the great miracle, namely, the uniqueness of the life of Christ, His separate miracles assume altogether a different aspect. They then form so many branches of a lofty, vigorous tree, and appear quite simply as manifestations of His nature, as His works. When we look at the height of the tree, and keep in our eye the strength of its trunk, its branches appear to us, not as the ponderous crown of an oak, but rather as the cheerful, graceful summit of a palm-tree; they seem to us as towering, slender, waving branches sporting in the wind. Should not the tree of life of the new æon be able to bear this crown without breaking down, and put forth the flowers which adorn it from its own internal vital power? Let it not be forgotten how high the tree rises towards heaven, how deep and wide its roots spread through the life of all humanity! When a young alpine stream, under the impulse of its great destiny, hastens down into the wide world, it shows signs of the region of its origin; waterfalls and passages forced through rocks testify of the original freshness of its power. But when Christianity rushes down from the heavenly heights of the God-man into the low-lying tracts of a human world, nature-enthralled and sunk in misery, and in its first irruption carries away with it the great stone of the sepulchre, here, as in the alpine scenery, the second miracle is not greater than the first; rather is it purely natural in relation to the first. If the understanding is here disposed to take offence, the question must be asked, whether it regards the separate miracles as too little or too great in relation to the central miracle? Many persons who have seen the falls of the Rhine have said that they found them small in relation to their previous conception. These persons, at all events, ascribe something, though erroneously, to the reality; while there are others who cannot imagine the half, at all events the full reality. Everything here depends on the estimate formed of the power which calls a phenomenon into life. The greater the power is thought to be, the easier is the conception of the appearance found to be; but the more highly the appearance is estimated, the less adequate is the power. We have turned in our contemplation to the power. In the centre of the world’s history, the principle of principles, the light of lights, the life of the living, and therefore also the power of powers, has appeared to us; the one miracle, which causes many miracles to appear as the natural utterances of a new and higher life-power.⁵

The miracle of the life of Jesus is one with the miracle of the actual vision (Selbstanschauung) of God. Whoever would explain this miracle to us, must be able to give us the assurance that he is of a pure heart, or that he sees God, or that he surveys the whole world in all its manifoldness as an ideal unity. The saint who beholds God, sees, in the very act of beholding, the nature of His essence; to him the opposition of nature and miracle has become clear in their perfected harmony in God Himself. But whoever has not attained to this elevation, must necessarily regard the nature of God predominantly as a miracle, and accordingly must recognize its miraculous operations as the natural expressions of its essence. The same holds good of the works of Christ, in whom the self-revelation of God has appeared to us. Christ is the miraculous in the centre of nature: out of its relation to Him, even nature is miraculous; but in relation to Him, even miracle is natural. The Christian Gospel miracle must always find its ‘natural’ explanation in the miracle of the life of Christ. Christ Himself exhibits the completed mediation between the unconditioned omnipotence of God and finite conditioned nature-therefore the mediation of miracles.

The possibility of miracles is correctly proved in a twofold way: either by an appeal to the divine omnipotence, or to the idea of an accelerated natural process. On the one hand, it is argued, With God nothing is impossible; on the other, God changes every year water into wine, only by a slower process than at Cana. When, therefore, miracle is described as an act of God’s omnipotence, we have named its deepest ground, its possibility; but its actual occurrence is not thereby explained. It is not even explained by representing that the will of the performer of the miracle has become one with the will of God. For our will may become one with the will of God even in the most profound resignation. But in the performance of a miracle, not only does man become one with God in the depths of the divine will in general, but God also becomes one with man in the special act in which man performs the miraculous with supernatural power derived from God. When, therefore, we are confronted by Omnipotence, by the will of the Almighty, and consequently are deeply moved by the infinite great probability of the miracle, the question still returns, Will God perform a miracle which positively encroaches on miraculous nature? On the other hand, a miracle can as little be regarded as a mere extraordinary operation of the performer upon nature, when we speak of an acceleration of nature. There can be no question, indeed, that as, on the one hand, a miracle is rooted in the omnipotence of God, so, on the other hand, it celebrates its appearance in the accelerated process of nature. If therefore we turn to this conception of the accelerated process of nature, we certainly find that nature in its processes performs pure miracles-that it changes water into wine, wine into blood, blood into milk; and this fact shows us how plainly the miracles of the kingdom of God are reflected in similar national phenomena. These thousandfold similarities give us, therefore, again a lively impression of the near possibility of miracles. We think that such a process of nature needs only to be in some degree accelerated, and a miracle will be the result.⁶ But if it should come to this phenomenon of an accelerated process of nature, we must have at any rate the principle of the process, its germ. All processes of nature arise from principles, which in their ultimate grounds must be regarded as the thoughts and operations of God. If now every common process of nature presupposes a principle, much more must such a one exist for an accelerated process: for a miracle of healing, a decisive healing power; for the change of water into wine, the factor of the formation of wine, ‘the vine with its branches.’⁷ Accordingly the idea of an accelerated process of nature, strictly considered, exhibits only the course of a miracle when it is already decided in principle, just as the appeal to the omnipotence of God exhibits only the general power of the miracle, without deciding that the miracle shall actually take place.

We are now, therefore, placed between two possibilities of miracle, and yet not justified in exhibiting these combined as giving us the actual occurrence of the miracle. Between these possibilities, rather, the question still arises respecting the living centre which exhibits the miraculous power of God in the actual miraculous fact, so that it can pass imperceptibly into the accelerated processes of nature.

This centre we found in the life of Jesus. The miraculous reality of His life must, in accordance with its nature, express itself in miraculous operations. In Him the mediation between God and nature has appeared complete and effulgent; therefore He exhibits omnipotence operating in the midst of nature without violating nature in its essence, and exhibits what is conformable to nature in the divine life, without obscuring the divine freedom.⁸

This indissoluble union between the miraculous One and His miracles must be verified in a twofold way: first, because we see in Christ, as well as in His wonder-working, all the elements that make up the conception of a miracle realized in the most powerful form; and also, because in all His miraculous works we plainly find again the christological characteristic, their relation to the life of Christ.

Miracle has above appeared to us as the decided irruption of a mediated (vermittelten) principle of a higher life-sphere into the old form of a lower one, with the tendency to take up this lower sphere into the higher. Now, if we fix our eye on Christ as a principle, He appears to us in this relation as the kingly principle of all universal principles. Every subordinate principle is, no doubt, an original power, a product of God’s creative operation, a marvellous witness of God’s nearness; but Christ as a principle is one with God’s manifestation in the world, with His highest operation, the principle of the creation of a new world. But this principle is in the highest degree conformable to nature, for it is mediated with infinite abundance. Every lesser principle is mediated by some corresponding course of nature; but the life of Christ is mediated by the whole antecedent course of the world. This mediated method of Christ is His nature. Therefore, since the nature of Christ was more mediated or prepared for than any other being, we can discover in His life the genuine stamp of all naturalness, the highest fulfilling of all nature-life. But by nature, according to its power and destiny, is simply the glory or the power of the divine Spirit over all nature-life. His life is therefore so far supernatural in its essence and its operations. It is essentially His destiny to operate supernaturally or metaphysically, to free the creature from vanity, to transform its life of bondage by the life of the Spirit. For this reason, in that antinaturalness by which the higher nature takes up the lower nature, He breaks through the limits of the old course of nature and the world, first of all with the miracle of His peculiar birth, and afterwards by the copious operations of His redeeming power. His life puts to death the life or the nature of the old Adam throughout the world, and especially in this sense are His operations antinatural. These operations have seized human and earthly life in its depths, and in these depths are working out a great regeneration, which is to break forth resplendent from the ashes of the old world. It was in the nature of the case for these operations to disclose themselves in direct, immediate forms; in signs symbolical of Christ’s general agency; in miracles which appeared anti-natural to men, in proportion as the old form of the world was held to be the only normal one, and of eternal validity. But as the life of Christ, notwithstanding its spirituality, or rather in this very spirituality, appears as a perfected, beautiful new nature, so it is also with His miraculous operations. They all issue and complete themselves in quick natural processes, the results of which appear in new, delightful forms of life. Thus His breaking through the old world, by which He advances to the last judgment and the end of the world, will have for its consequences a new world.

All these constituents of the conception of miracle must be more or less prominent in the single miraculous works of Christ. First of all, the constituent of mediation. The need of a miracle is a constituent corresponding to the principle for performing miracles, and is the occasion when Christ receives an intimation from the Father to work in unity with Him creatively, that is, to perform a miracle. Indeed, the constituent for effecting the great saving miracle of the world’s salvation is ever present to the Lord. But the occasions for allowing the fruits of this redemption to make their appearance in special operations, and for the signs of the transforming power of this redemption, the omens of the future glorification of the world, to shine forth, are more rare (Luk 4:25-27; Joh 11:4). There are single moments in which a definite form of the world’s misery and the world’s Redeemer in His historical pilgrimage meet, we might say, one another on so narrow a bridge, and so exactly face to face, that they must fight with one another, or rather the misery must collapse and vanish before the Redeemer.

These constituent elements are therefore mediated equally with the life itself. The most general mediating is the faith of those who need relief. This faith is the peculiar organ of susceptibility for the miraculous power of Christ—the divine token, in fact, by which the occasion of working a miracle is indicated to Him. But if any one is disposed to make this susceptibility the special factor of the relief granted, and thus to account for the miracle by the faith of miracles, in such a case he would ascribe to the sufferer a greater faith and a greater power than to Christ Himself. But faith as such is generally no more than a susceptibility, which is distinguished from fanaticism by its knowing with certainty that it is met by a positive operation of God. If, therefore, it is altogether erroneous to make faith in its isolated position a worker of miracles without the co-operating power of God, it is also perfectly monstrous to pretend that there are believers who beget this miraculous help out of themselves, when they stand supplicating before the Lord, when He answers their confidence, and receives thanks for the help given. Even Christ Himself worked not in an isolated position, though He had within Himself a positive miraculous power, but in conjunction with the Father (Joh 10:41) directing a look of confidence towards Him. But this mediating of miracles appears to us to vanish when we look at the miracles of Christ performed at a distance; likewise in His healing of demoniacs; but, lastly and chiefly, in His miraculous operations on nature. But even here we see traces of mediation gradually emerging from the darkness, as we direct our eye to the inner relations of the world, and estimate them higher than is commonly done in relation to the outward phenomena. When Christ healed the possessed child of the Canaanitish woman, the channel through which the operation reached the child is plainly traceable: it was one of the disposition, sunk deep in the heart of the supplicating mother. Her agitated soul with one hand laid hold of the Lord, and with the other of her child, and thus formed a living affinity—an electrical conductor by which the lightning of healing flashed from the heart of Christ into the heart of her child. In the world of clairvoyance delicate streams of fire and tracks of light have been seen, which were formed between separated human souls, so that they thought of one another vividly, and have been occupied with one another: these are spiritual bridges which love, anxiety, remembrance, and especially intercessory prayer, have thrown across spaces of outward separation, and traverse. These communications correspond entirely with a delicate estimate of the dynamical relations of the world.

But not to insist on these, we cannot, at all events, doubt of the living movement of the mightiest powers between hearts which stand in the most intimate and vital relation to one another. But this movement suffices us as a spiritual pathway for the healing powers of the Lord when they have to act at a distance. Thus the nobleman at Capernaum became a conductor of Christ’s healing power for his son; and the Gentile centurion, with his strong faith, was a mediating organ for his servant. But when our Lord had to deal with demoniacs, this mediation lay in a power which, in diseased persons of this class, is generally active with a morbid development, and a more intense energy—a power of psychical foreboding. Of the nature of demoniacal suffering we do not here speak. But it is a fact which occurs among the nervous and insane of our own time, as well as in the case of the demoniacs in the Gospel history, that in their intensified power of foreboding, they are capable of divining the dispositions and intentions which the persons immediately about them entertain. They are in a morbid state of psychical agitation, and in a closer affinity than healthy persons to the psychical movements of the bystanders. Especially nave they an extraordinary sensitiveness for states of mind which are in contrast to their own. As clairvoyantes can be disturbed by the nearness of impure characters, so demoniacs and insane persons often become excited by the approach of saintly characters. They feel the operation of a power which even at a distance comes into collision with their state, and presses punitively on the secret consciousness of the psychical terror with which commonly their state of mental bondage is connected. Thus the demoniac whom Jesus met with in the synagogue at Capernaum could not endure His presence (Mar 1:23), but cried out against Him. That the demoniacs were the first who proclaimed Him as the Messiah, may be accounted for from the activity and perceptive vigour of their intensified power of foreboding; not simply because this power of foreboding brought them into a peculiar relation with the consciousness of Christ, but because it also formed the same relation between them and the secret thoughts of their times. That Jesus was the Messiah, was the public secret of His time, from the beginning of His ministry. John’s annunciation of Him had already taken place; His disciples indulged distinct hopes of the manifestation of His Messianic glory, and the people were agitated by the fluctuations of foreboding that He was the promised One. But the dark antipathy of the hierarchy hung like a threatening thunder-cloud over against this dawn in men’s minds. No one ventured to commit himself by the public and decided recognition of Christ. The insane naturally took the lead; they proclaimed aloud the obscure mystery which they found in the breasts of their contemporaries. Fools and children speak the truth; so here the acclamations of the children soon followed the cries of the demoniacs. In addition to them, Christ was proclaimed by poor mendicants, who had nothing to lose; and by the people in a mass, who in masses always feel strongly. When, therefore, the demoniacs had an excited feeling and foreboding of the dignity of Christ,—when by their recklessness they anticipated the people in the publication of His name, a mediation was thus formed for the miraculous aid of Christ. As borderers on the kingdom of spirits they were raised above the ban of the Sanhedrim by the peculiar sacredness of their calamitous state; and as confessors of Jesus, they were peculiarly the objects of His compassion.

But no such mediation of the miracles of Christ appears at first sight to be given in the case of the dead whom He restored to life; yet, on carefully considering the circumstances, we shall find that there is a mediation, or rather a double one. The three dead persons whom Christ restored, even when dead were held by strong bonds in the vicinity of life;—the daughter of Jairus, by the loud mourning of the parental house; the young man at Nain, by the inconsolable grief of his mother; and lastly, Lazarus, not merely by the ceaseless yearning with which his sisters waited for the Lord, but also by the unsatisfied expectation with which he himself had sunk into the grave. Even though dead, therefore, these three still experienced the strong attraction towards life on this side the grave. But as spirits, they understood the voice of the Prince of spirits. The modes of mediating the miracles of Christ in His operations on external nature are hardest to discover. Here also the connecting links have been lost for the most part, because sufficient account has not been taken of the co-operation of hearts. This applies especially to the miracles of food and drink which Jesus wrought. How very much has it been the practice to pass over, in these miracles, the mental states of the persons for whom they were wrought! In many a dissertation on the miracle at Cana, the exclamation, ‘They have no wine! no wine!’ meets us at every turn; and some theological treatises upon it handle the whole question after so grossly material a fashion, so utterly without a surmise of the significance of the spiritual transaction in this history, that one would think they were composed in a tavern, or meant to lay the scene of the narrative in a public-house! But how could these miracles have a New Testament power and significance, if they were not performed in the element of emotional life (Gemüthsleben) and of the sphere of faith? We do not intend to enlarge on this remark here, but reserve the development for the sequel. In the stilling of the storm on the lake of Gennesaret, the mediating consisted in this, that first of all the hearts of the disciples, as the firstlings of the new humanity, were laid at rest before the winds and waves were stilled. The cursing of the fig-tree was mediated by that presentiment of the judgment awaiting Jerusalem and the end of the world, which so deeply moved Christ in His last days.

It will be understood that the supernatural, which is operative in all Christ’s miracles, must be always and immediately looked for in His divine life-power. This life-power, in the case where Christ performed a miracle, is identical with the omnipotence of God; for He performed such an act only according to the will of the Father, and in unity with Him. It was the overpowering agency of the sovereign principle which was placed in the centre of the world, in order to destroy its corruption and effect its glorification. But the expressions of the power of Christ, as they differ in different miracles, so also the forms they assume are different. To the leprous Christ presented Himself as positive purity, the absolute power of all purification; to the deaf as the ear-forming word; and, to the dead, as the positive life-giving life. And as Christ in such agency becomes one with the Father, so is the disposition in which He accomplishes His miracle one with Him. His word is the fructifying principle with which the receptive faith takes in the victorious life-power which is destined to effect the miracle in its own life-circle. The believers in miraculous power therefore received, in the moment of the performance of the miracle, by a sympathetic elevation of their disposition, a share in the noble-mindedness of Christ, and in this moment of their highest nearness to heaven the miracle became incorporated with their life.

But in all cases an old naturalness, either a dark form or a fettering limitation, or an evil of the old world which has become nature, is broken through and taken away by the miraculous agency of Christ. At one time, it is the roaring storm; at another time, it is water in the colourless form which it takes as a defect in contrast with the wine; and at a third time, it is the grave. This character of destruction is most prominent in the cursing of the fig-tree.

But, lastly, we also see that all the miracles of Jesus bear the impress of true miracle, because they enter nature with creative, liberating, formative power, and complete themselves as natural processes. The men whom Christ heals or restores to life come forward again, as forms restored to this world, in all their native freshness. To the daughter of Jairus food is given to eat (Mar 5:43). Lazarus soon after his resurrection is found among the guests at a feast. Our Lord causes this subsidence of miracle into natural life to appear even in effecting His own miracles. The blind man whom Christ cured at Bethsaida (Mar 8:22), after Christ’s first operation, exclaimed, ‘I see men as trees walking!’ Visible objects still appear before his eyes in indistinct outline, nor did he perfectly recover his sight till Christ had touched his eyes a second time. The Lord seems carefully to have given prominence to this natural side of the cures He effected, and to have drawn, so to speak, a veil round the strictly miraculous operation by availing Himself more or less of natural operations. Even the word by which He usually effected His work, is not in itself alone to be regarded as a mere unsensuous expression of the spirit. As in its meaning it is a divine thought, so outwardly it is a thunderbolt of the soul’s life—a powerful psychical act, inflaming the hearts and agitating the organs of the susceptible. Such a word of Christ is, in miniature, an image of the creative universal agency of God by which He created the world-that infinite expression of God, which inwardly was altogether His sun-bright thought and will, and outwardly a mysterious, darkly brooding, immeasurably rich fulness of life—that creative basis of the world which now appeared in Him in individual personality. But the nature-side of His miraculous agency was more striking when He touched the sufferers or laid hold of them by the hand. Such contact must have been, in the case of the leprous especially, a revolting operation (Mat 8:3). With such an one Christ placed Himself in the relation of defilement. He exposed Himself thereby to the danger, according to the Levitical law, of being excluded from the congregation as an unclean person; He even hazarded His life for the sake of curing the leprous when He touched them. This moral operation itself, in its living power to touch the soul, was for the diseased like a flash of lightning from heaven. But it is remarkable, that Jesus never went beyond touching. Though, according to the account in Mark’s Gospel (6:13), the disciples of Jesus often anointed the sick with oil, and thus restored them to health, yet we are not warranted by this circumstance to conclude that Jesus Himself used such means. The disciples, with their weaker miraculous power, appear to have depended on a more natural act of healing; as, according to the direction of James, the elders of the Church were obliged to do at a later period. In fact, besides touching, imposition of the hands, or laying hold of the hand of the diseased, in which the complete miraculous power of His holy hand was manifested, Christ only employed one physical means repeatedly, one distinctly individual, a natural bodily means—His spittle. The ancients attribute to the saliva a sure healing power, especially for many disorders of the eyes; an opinion which is still held in our own times.⁹ But Christ appears to make this means the vehicle of a higher power. If the personality of Christ is regarded according to its peculiar significance as the life-giving life, as positive healthfulness, we may venture to expect that every bodily substance or quality which has proved itself elsewhere in any degree curative, will be found again in His life in the highest potency, and, as an expression of that life, will exhibit the highest healing efficiency. But Jesus applied the same means in different ways. He healed (according to Mar 7:33) a deaf and dumb man by putting His fingers in his ears, and then, after spitting on His finger, touching his tongue.¹⁰ In the case of the blind man at Bethsaida, the spittle seems to have been directly applied to the eyes of the blind, and followed by the imposition of hands (8:22). When He cured the man born blind at Jerusalem (John 9), He spat on the ground and made a paste, with which He anointed the eyes of the blind, and ordered him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam. We have here again an advanced application of the spittle: the paste which He spread on the eyes of the blind, as something more than a momentary application, and the time spent in going to the pool at Siloam, during which it remained, constituted this advanced use of it. The washing in the pool of Siloam, which the afflicted man had to perform, seems to have been only a symbolical act in which, with his faith, his cure was to be completed. At all events, it was otherwise with the spittle. The repetition of its application plainly shows that it was used as a means; and although its application does not do away with the miraculous character of the cures in which Jesus made use of it, yet it shows how He was inclined to conceal, in a degree, His miraculous acts,—to soften the sublime abruptness of their direct operation by a connection with some form, more or less known, of the extraordinary art of healing.¹¹ It was a little thing, an act of condescension, for Him to perform these single miracles; while the people were astonished at them as the highest expressions of His life. This induced Him to make His healing operations approach a natural form, and to clothe them in poor, flat, and strange forms, in order to bring the exalted power that revealed itself in Him into communication with the life of the world. Yet He could not have given His miracles this form, if He had found in it no healing power whatever. For this very reason, this form of Christ’s miraculous cures, the application of His spittle, was peculiarly suited to make what was miraculous in His opperations appear as natural, and what was natural in His life appear as miraculous.¹² This nature-side of His miraculous power meets us most strikingly in the history of the woman suffering from the issue of blood, who was healed by the believing touch of His garment. The Lord had not conversed with her; yet He was aware that He had been touched, and that by this contact a cure had been effected, for He declared that ‘virtue had gone out’ of Him (Luk 8:46). Does not the healing power of Christ here appear almost in a pathological form as a suffering? Offence has been taken at this narrative. And yet it only manifests the most delicate feeling for life in a personality most rich in life. The same Master of psychical life, who had a perfectly developed sense for every sympathy and antipathy that approached Him, could not help perceiving the agitation or hurried respiration of a sufferer who touched Him under the highest excitement of pain, and at the same time of confidence, as one needing aid; and when He blessed in His Spirit the sufferer without knowing her as an individual, the contact and the miraculous aid perfectly coincided. It is not said that He did not freely part with this healing power, that He had been robbed of it; for as soon as the Lord felt Himself touched by a suffering, He freely entered into it with His sympathy.¹³ But when He wished to cause the woman who had been cured to come forward openly on her own account, He rightly declared that virtue had gone out of Him. It was needful to make the matter public: hitherto the cure had been as it were a stolen one, and the woman remained at least suffering from false shame. At all events, Christ’s language informs us that the virtue which proceeded from Him, was to be regarded as a virtue connected with the nature of His life. Hence by this passage we are led to consider a question which in modern times has been often agitated, namely, How far the miraculous cures performed by Christ are akin to the cures effected by animal magnetism. Some have attached great importance to this affinity; others have been apprehensive lest by this similarity the agency of Jesus should be brought too near the profane; others, again, have admitted a greater or less analogy between the two methods of healing. Thus much is certain: if in general the power of magnetism belongs to the flesh and blood of human nature, then Christ also has appropriated this power. But if, on the other hand, all flesh and blood has attained in Christ’s person its complete spiritualization, this also is true especially of magnetism, and of the application of its power. If we have first learned to estimate the ascending lines of powers (over against the descending line of ideas) in the world, and found that these same powers reappear in all the stages of life, but in ever new transformations and higher potencies, then also the relation of Christ’s healing power to magnetism must gradually be made clear. The very term Animal Magnetism expresses that gradation; it marks especially the power of the magnet, as it re-appears in a more elevated form in the animal kingdom. If we follow the hint which lies in these terms, we shall be led to the contemplation of a scale of magnetic power, of which the lowest degree lies deep in the elements, and the highest must be revealed in the power of Christ’s nature. The light of the atmosphere seems to reappear in the earthly elements as electricity. Electricity is no doubt an elevated power in the magnet. Then magnetism comes forward in the animal sphere as a power working soul-like, of which the operations border on magic. Now, when this power appears elevated again in the human region as a peculiar talent in the life of certain individuals, this is no longer mere animal magnetism, but is exalted into the human. But this power experiences a new consecration in the free spiritual activity of a devout worker of miracles, or of a prophet who acts under a sense of the eternal. Lastly, if it comes again to view in Christ, it must appear in His life according to its nature, not only with the greatest fulness, but in perfect unity with the operations of the Divine Spirit. It also appears here altogether as nature, but as completely ideal, as a pure agency, as a perfect vehicle of the Spirit. Thus, then, in Christ the powers of all the stages of nature are elevated and glorified. He is not only in a metaphorical, but also in a dynamic sense, the light of the world; the lightning which hereafter at His appearing will shine from the east even to the west; the unity of those four divergent forms of life or animal images which symbolically represent the great model-forms of life; the Man in whom humanity is concentrated, and therefore in whom every human endowment appears in its fairest bloom; the prophet who stands and acts in the fulness of the powers of God; finally, He Himself, the God-man, who performs a miracle as little as any other man when God has not indicated it, but also then with the complete certainty with which God Himself works it. Thus, then, the healing power with which Christ accomplishes His work is a power related to, and brought into combination with, the innermost life of nature in all its stages, and therefore verifies itself in its operations as the healing power of the diseased human world; and its product is a new nature.

Thus, as on the one hand the genuine miracle is to be recognized in all the works of Christ as well as in His life, so on the other hand the christological stamp is found in all His miracles, and again especially in the miraculous momenta of His life itself.

The miraculous momenta in the life of Jesus present themselves as a pure linked succession of stages in the unfolding of His christological glory. In His wonderful birth of the Virgin, first of all, life existed as a positive life-power, as pure power; that is to say, an individuality which in its flesh and blood exhibits the completed harmony with the universe, which is born of the Spirit and is one with the Spirit, and, as the power of the Spirit, has power over life. His self-comprehension in human development begins this life of power, and reaches at length the climax of perfect spirit-consciousness with the baptism in the Jordan. Here His individual unfolding in spirit was completed. But, after that, the capability of this life unfolds itself in the soul-life of Christ, and the bloom of this festivity of the soul bursts forth at the transfiguration. Lastly, by the fact of the resurrection the corporeity of Christ was borne aloft out of the region of the old nature and the realm of death into the imperishable; the body was borne aloft in the power of the Spirit, and made thoroughly spiritual and spirit-like, while its life-power and vitality is not only maintained, but perfected in its spiritualization. The ascension is, in the first place, not so much a new miracle as the full verification of the miracle of the resurrection, the highest evidence of glorification or of completed spiritualization to which the life of Christ has been elevated. It becomes a new miracle as it introduces and represents the session of Christ at the right hand of God. But this again manifests itself in three momenta, which run parallel with the momenta of the individual glorification of Christ while they exhibit His universal glory. With the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, Christ gains a universal consciousness in His Church. This universal power of the Spirit over the earth will one day bring its constantly regenerating operation in the souls of men into festive manifestation, when the Church of Christ attains to the full spiritual beauty of His kingdom. After that, His individual resurrection will unfold itself finally in the glorification of the world which ensues on the world’s judgment at the general resurrection. The first moment (moment) of this universal unfolding of the glory of Christ, consists, therefore, in the revelation of His dominion over the spiritual life of humanity; in the second appears His dominion over the souls of men, the completion of the victory of Christ’s sympathy over the sympathy of evil, which is evinced in a great Christian inspiration of humanity; the third moment reveals His power over all flesh.

It is undeniable that all the momenta of miracles in which the life of Christ is unfolded are throughout christological; that is, they perfectly correspond to the conception of the life of Christ and its significance for the world.¹⁴ When, therefore, we have represented the miraculous acts of Christ as the natural emanations of His miraculous nature, it is evident that they must disclose the same christological nature. And so we find it. In fact, they generally present the most distinct correspondences to the separate christological stages in the development of Christ’s life. It is our business to point out these correspondences, and to render as conspicuous as possible the general ideas which lie at the basis of the miracles of Jesus.

If now, with this view, we refer the different kinds of Christ’s miracles to the different stages of His life’s development, it cannot be supposed that Christ performed a peculiar class of miracles only in a particular form of the development of His power; rather it is implied that in every miracle the whole life of Christ was active when we designate them all generally as christological. But the matter in question here is, that we contemplate the general christological nature of the miracles of Jesus in the sharp distinctness of their type, and that we therefore contemplate them as phenomena belonging to the progressive development of His life and work.

It is a radical evil of the old æon, that nature has circumvented the spirit of man through his guilt, has gained the upper hand, and stands over him like a menacing giant. According to the ideal relations of the world, it ought to be otherwise. In a life of innocence, the spirit would prove its harmony with nature and its power over it. Instinct, like a prophet, announces this mastery of the spirit over nature, as it appears with a beautiful living constancy in animal life. But for along time fallen man appears to give the lie to these prophecies. The dog falls into the water and swims; but a man falls in and is drowned. But he is drowned, not by his bodily weight, not by the natural relation of his body to the water, but by the consternation which misleads him to sink into destruction by a morbid excitement, instead of balancing himself on the waves in victorious self-possession.

When, therefore, Christ walks on the stormy sea, the quintessence of the miracle consists in the perfect divine equanimity of His spirit. He is, first of all, quite free from that corrupt act of swimming practised by the natural man. But His pure vital courage in the water is connected with the vital feeling of His organism, which is the crown of all human organisms. The relation of bodies to the water is infinitely various. There are some swimmers that sink deep, and others that hold themselves high.

The Prince by birth of land and sea walks through the waves with His whole figure erect above them. But when man once comes into harmonious reciprocal action with an excited element, his movement in it becomes rhythmical. And so a jubilant feeling must have unfolded itself in Christ’s heart on the exulting waters; and with this feeling those hidden powers of life must have been disengaged and become active, which also are said to appear in the life of the magnetically excited, so that such persons cannot sink in water, but are borne up by it.¹⁵ But Christ’s walking on the water, in the co-working of this perfect consciousness of God and His imperturbable repose—of this elevation of soul in the feeling of harmony with the agitated element-and of this rhythmically borne and noblest corporeity,—exhibits the unity of the new human life in the spirit as it attains dominion over nature. In this miracle the Man of the spirit, in His world-historical importance, is borne out of the water of nature-life. It is a symbolical fact which has gained a natural position in an extraordinary rich history of New Testament operations. The more man regains the full consciousness of the sovereignty of his spirit over nature, the more he regains power over the natural feelings of his life,—the more does the dread of nature vanish from his path, and he resumes the full dominion over its forces.

But this discrepancy with nature into which man has fallen by his guilt is further manifest in distinct evils with which man is afflicted, particularly in his infirmities and sicknesses. These evils are characteristic marks of the deep corruption of the old æon; they are united most intimately with sin. It would indeed be hyper-Jewish if we were disposed to lay as a burden on the individual, his peculiar infirmity as his desert. Such a view can be regarded only as a popular superstition. It is an insult to the spirit of the Hebrew religion to charge it with maintaining it. And if any one would ascribe it to Christ, it would be in opposition to His most explicit declarations.¹⁶ Yet, on the other hand, we must also mark it as hyper-heathenish, if the general connection of all sin with all evil, and the general appointment of all evils to be the punishment of all sins, and if, lastly, the spectacle that a thousand times individuals pay for their individual transgressions, should be denied. Only materialism in morals can wish to dissever the bond of connection between sin and punitive evil. Now, among the people of Israel the feeling of this connection was developed in a very high degree, and partially to a morbid excess. They had experienced God’s chastisements under the discipline of the law, and often had bowed under His strokes with slavish dread. The miserable mental state of the unfortunate was aggravated by the harshness with which they were condemned by their more fortunate pharisaically-minded brethren. And at the time of Christ’s advent almost all the fruits on the tree of human misery in Israel appeared to be ripened. The chronic diseases which are indigenous in Palestine, and countries of a similar climate, such as blindness, leprosy, paralysis, and nervous disorders, were very widely spread. Christ found Himself in the fulness of the Spirit placed in the presence of this misery. He met with many sufferers, who were at once in need of salvation and of bodily healing. By means of the latter, the sense of the former was ripened; and, in their desire for salvation, the state of mind was produced which fitted them for receiving bodily relief, that is, faith in the possibility of miraculous aid. In the fulness of the Spirit and of the peace of God lay the power of Christ to forgive the sins of those who felt their need of salvation, and, by the assurance of the grace of God, to animate their hearts with the glow of a new life. With an impulse of that positive confidence in God which He possessed, He could transport, by His consolations, to a heaven of divine joy those souls that felt themselves cast down to the gates of hell. How could Christ have cherished in His spirit this power to forgive sins in an abstract form; that is, only a power over the spirits of men, and not at the same time a power over their souls and bodily organisms? It was in accordance with His concrete victorious power over evil, that when it met Him in individual cases, He steadily regarded it from the root to the summit. But so also would the diseased, who, under Israelitish discipline, were trained to exercise faith in His aid, expect from Him, according to their entire view of the world, concrete aid, both spiritual and bodily.¹⁷ According to the prophetic promises, the Israelite expected in his Messiah a Saviour who would work miracles; therefore the Jew who was anxious for salvation could not have received and retained so firmly the consolation of the forgiveness of sins from the lips of Jesus, if it had not been confirmed to him by bodily aid. It is difficult for the penitent sinner to retain absolution in pure spirituality. The Christian finds the seal of his reconciliation in the renewed peace of his society (Sozietät), especially in the sacrament, by which he becomes one with the Church and with the Lord of the Church. The temporary sacrament with which the contrite Israelite received his absolution from the lips of Jesus, was the miracle. Although this connection between the outward and inward healing was not in all cases equally apparent and marked, yet even in those wherein it was faintest it existed in some measure, so that those who needed bodily aid did homage to the Lord as the Messiah; and Weisse has justly remarked, that faith in the forgiveness of sins, and the effect of it, is to be regarded as a prominent feature of the cures performed by Christ.

The case of the paralytic at Capernaum (Mat 9:1) appears to us the most striking example of this agency of Christ. First of all, he received from Christ the assurance of the forgiveness of his sins. But the pharisaical spirits wished to despoil him of this inestimable gift by pronouncing the absolution to be blasphemy; upon which our Lord ratified it with a heavenly sacrament which they could not gainsay, by saying to the sick man, ‘Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house!’

The words of Jesus, therefore, penetrated as a ray of vital power the hearts of those who believed in His miracles, operating with creative energy, and imparting a healthy vitality to every part of the frame. There is a class of diseases which may be regarded as an exhaustion of the fulness and freshness of the organism, namely, hereditary bodily infirmities. Now it lies in the nature of the case, that such infirmities must soonest give way to Christ’s vital ray which penetrates the life-root of the infirm through their organism. The cure of a man born blind may appear more difficult within the range of common experience than the cure of one who has become blind, but in relation to the conception of miracle it may be considered as the easier. The sun with its fresh rays can most easily stimulate the stunted growth of a plant. The solar ray, which somehow was wanting to the bodily stunted in the very beginnings of their life, now darts suddenly into the root of their life, and completes their first birth with the beginning of the second. Also the lame and deformed appear to stand in a nearer relation to the psychico-electrical powerful agency, to the lightning flash of the miraculous word of Jesus.¹⁸

Fevers form another kind of suffering.¹⁹ Their cure shows how positive repose and heavenly tranquillity can be communicated with healing power to the sick; or how the fiery conflict of fever against evil can be instantaneously rendered victorious by the warm stream of life which proceeds from Christ.

The healing of lepers belongs to the most important²⁰ cures effected by Jesus. The leprosy seemed to seize inexorably on the whole living substance of the sufferer, and to have doomed him to death. But this fearful disease, which in general was so fatal, was sometimes capricious. It would strike out on the surface of the body, and pass off in a white eruption on the skin. This natural process of cure corresponded entirely to Christ’s method of cure; His healing operations proceeded from within outwards.

The demoniacs of the New Testament history are, on the one hand, classed by the Evangelists with the other sick; but on the other hand, they are distinguished as a peculiar class from the common sick. That first of all they were considered and treated as sick persons, is evident. They appear as such, according to the symptoms of their malady as nervous, epileptic, insane, raving, and the like. Matthew speaks of the sick who were affected with various distempers and plagues, and then divides these into three classes: ‘those possessed with devils, and those which were lunatic, and those that had the palsy’ (Mat 4:24). But they are distinguished again from the common sick. Mark says, ‘Jesus healed many that were sick of divers diseases, and cast out many devils’ (1:34). By these distinctions with which, on the one hand, the Evangelists represent the demoniacs as sick, but on the other, as afflicted by a demon, their conception of the mysterious phenomenon goes beyond the opposition between the supernaturalist and the rationalist views. According to the first, it is asserted, these sufferers were possessed by demons, therefore they were not naturally sick. Then on the other side it is said, they were naturally sick, therefore not possessed by demons. The arguing on both sides may be thus represented: One party maintains, the wind blows into the chamber, therefore the window is not open; the other asserts, on the contrary, the window stands open, therefore the wind does not blow into the chamber.

Here we must revert to the doctrine we have stated above, of the infinitely delicate operation of ethical powers. As it is applicable to the doctrine of angels and of devils, so also to that of demons. The popular view of the material, plastic lodgment of one demon or more in the body of a possessed person is sensuously coarse; but hardly so much so as the opposite supposition, that a man is afflicted with a natural nervous disorder, and on that account does not lie under demoniacal influences. There are hereditary nervous disorders, mysterious obstructions of the psychical life; strange dissonances and disturbances enter into the course of life which have this common quality, that they more or less affect the freedom of man’s ethical life. If he could be healthy in this want of freedom, he would go back to the pure instinct of animal life. But such a normal human-animal life would be, in its very naturalness, a frightful monstrosity. Sure enough, man without freedom must become in his untuned, irritable nerve-life, more or less a football of ethical influences, as necessarily as an ֶÆlian harp placed in a current of air must receive and return every wandering gust of wind. But the irritability of such a morbid nerve-life, according to the nature of this life, must be simply boundless. Fortunately, under the category of those who were afflicted with divers diseases, the lunatics are found between the possessed and the paralytic. The nature of this complaint may give us the key for the solution of the whole problem respecting the demoniacs. The lunatic is so excitable in his nerve-life, that even the influence of the returning moon irritates him and aggravates his malady. He is, in short, possessed by the moon, inasmuch as he is possessed by its influence. We will not here inquire what power the spirit of the earth (Erdgeist) exerts over the healthy man in his sleep, but so much is a fact of very ancient experience, that the moon exerts an irritating influence on a certain class of nervous sufferers. With this remark the whole question is in fact already decided. If the moon can exert so strong an influence on these morbidly excitable chords, which in the normal man are designed to return the pure impression of all heaven, we must much more expect that they will be exposed to the strongest influences and invasions of psychical moods, powers, and intentions. The sick youth whom the Lord cured at the foot of the Mount of Transfiguration was at once epileptic, demoniac, and lunatic; therefore, a person disordered in his nerves, disturbed by the influence of the moon as well as by that of demons.

Yet it is a consideration of great weight, that the excitability of these nervous patients was a consequence of a deeply seated discordance, and therefore was a morbid, gloomy excitability. Hence an elective affinity was formed between this susceptibility and the impure influences of impure spirits. The prophets, as the elect of God, were in the highest degree susceptible for the revelations of the world of light; the demoniacs, on the other hand, presented an inverted prophetic order, which attained its disastrous maturity in the days of the deepest degeneracy of the Jewish nation, when their psychical susceptibility for evil influences was complete. And, accordingly, they were pervaded and domineered over by unclean spirits, by the psychically powerful influences of an evil nature—by demons; but, according to their declaration and the popular notion, they were possessed by them. This condition, therefore, has three factors, which must be estimated conjointly: first of all, the natural substratum of possession, the morbid state of the nerves; then the aggregate power of the influences to which the patient is subjected; lastly, and thirdly, his notion of his own sufferings, which was closely connected with the general popular notion of such sufferings. That natural foundation of possession, the morbid state of the nerves in demoniacs, has many forms and stages. We find, for example, one demoniac like a seer proclaiming the Messiah, while another is unable to utter a word. Sometimes this disorder appears as a stupid frenzy, impelling to self-destruction; the demoniac throws himself now into the fire, now into the water: at another time it is a spectral illusion; the demoniac is so excited that he believes himself identified with a legion of evil spirits. But as the irritability was constituted, the influences corresponded to it. The Gadarene might, therefore, be really forced in his irritability to exhibit a thousandfold different operations of evil. These influences, according to their nature, might proceed from spirits of all kinds, as far as they could exercise an overwhelming influence on his psychical life by a powerful psychical influence, by violent approximation, by vigorous attack, by a peculiar affinity between their power and the susceptibility of the sufferer. The demoniac influences might therefore proceed from devilish spirits, from deceased men, or even from living, powerful, and sinister characters; for in this case everything depends on the power and nature of the influences. Further, they might differ in their degree: disturbances, superficial, transitory and constant, weak and strong, distant and near, or in absolute contact. If there are fallen devilish spirits, as we have found to be natural, we are led to expect that the lower class among them busy themselves in producing disturbed phenomena in the region of human misery. If, moreover, earthly and worldly-minded deceased persons strive to return to a life on earth, it is by no means inconceivable that they should seek to put themselves again in connection with the world they have lost through the organisms of those who are not free. The Jews generally recoiled with horror from Sheol. This aversion to the kingdom of the dead was especially rife in the time of Christ, when the chiliast extravagance was at its height. The degeneracy of the times might show itself also in this particularly, that the boundary line between this side the grave and the other had vanished in a most fearful manner, since the living were in part fallen to the kingdom of the shades, while the demons swarmed in unsatisfied craving for life about the hearths of the living, so that a kind of marsh-land was formed between this world and the next, in which the deformed of both regions mingled together. The demons, indeed, in their influence on the sufferers, could traverse from the most remote distance to the closest proximity. But it is difficult to determine to what degree the oppression of the sufferers by the demons might rise. Yet we cannot get rid of all spirits from the other world, without losing the notion of possession. And characters of an evil tendency belonging to this world might operate injuriously on the life of men psychically diseased. But these evils were carried to their height by the popular superstition. The doctrine of possession was completed in the popular dread. The consequence was, that those who personally experienced demoniacal influences soon surrendered themselves with dismay to their power, and then exhibited it plastically with all the energy of a spectre-haunted soul. If insanity is contemplated in its simplest form, it shows here the characteristic that the insane person makes his fixed idea the demon of his consciousness, and speaks out, not from his rational consciousness, but from this demoniacal one. There is no difficulty, therefore, in conceiving that demoniacs in general speak from the consciousness of the spirits that torment them. But from such a phenomenon, it by no means follows that the foreign spirit in them has lodged itself between their own consciousness and their body, and thus as a stranger speaks out of a strange house. Rather, we only see that the demoniac has slavishly surrendered himself to the influence that torments him. As the prophet, in the most elevated, luminous, and free ecstasy, announces the word of the Lord, without distinguishing it from his own—probably not because his own consciousness has vanished, but because it is identical with the Spirit of the Lord, and acts in subserviency to it—so also is it with the demoniac, in his enslaved and gloomy ecstasy. He himself speaks, though he has made over his Ego and his consciousness to the spirits who rule him. His consciousness has identified itself with the demoniacal influence which he has imbibed from them, and exhibits it plastically and imitatively in a constrained visionary mood. Only from this state of things can the dark but powerful feeling of deranged life be explained, as is shown by the violent excitement of the demoniacs in the presence of Christ. If the consciousness of a demon itself had been fully active in the organism of the demoniac of which it had taken possession, such symptoms could not have been exhibited; and as little could they have been shown if the patient had not really had the feeling, as if a strange spirit stood before the Lord.

It is very evident from the nature of this condition, that it must be distinguished altogether from those cases in which a man gives himself up to evil in conscious and specific acts of his own inner life. The Gospel history marks the distinction in the most decisive manner, since, as we have seen, it treats the demoniacs as sick persons, and even as irresponsible, which is plainly shown, among many other things, by the representation of their irregularities as acts which the demons performed with them. The early Church also made a marked distinction between reckless sinners and possessed persons: the former they excommunicated, for the latter they employed exorcisms. The mingling of these ethical characters, as it appears in the most offensive excess, when exorcism was connected with baptism, and as it still often occurs in theological treatises on the condition of demoniacs, serves most decidedly to obscure our discernment of the ethical deterioration of man into the devilish as well as of demoniacal possession. Olshausen has felt the existence of the distinction, but has not clearly carried it out (Comment, i. 269, ed. Clark). ‘The condition of demoniacs must always presuppose a certain degree of moral culpability; yet so that the sin committed by them does not take the form of absolute wickedness (that is, a voluntary consent to the infused evil thoughts), but appears more as predominant sensuality (especially unchastity), which was always indulged with a resistance of the better self.’ Nothing can be made of these distinctions. Of the practical offences of the demoniacs we know nothing, and are not in the least justified in charging, for example, the daughter of the Canaanitish woman with sins of that class. Although it cannot be denied that the condition of demoniacs might originate in individuals from personal offences, from irregularities which opened the door for the demon into the psychical life; yet these sick persons, taken at an average, form a poor little group, which in part even from childhood found themselves under a psychical ban. And so it was with the demons by whom they were tormented. They were regarded by the Jews as inferior devils, or impure spirits that had been forfeited to Beelzebub, since they cherished the notion that they might be expelled by the help of Beelzebub. The most different states and characters are also confounded, when the spheres of demoniacal suffering and of demoniacal acting are not kept distinct. But in order to hold fast this distinction, we must take care to observe that many symbolical expressions are found in the Gospel history, which are borrowed from the sphere of demoniacal suffering, to designate purely ethical relations. To this class apparently belongs the language which John uses of Judas, after he had received the sop from Jesus at the Passover, that ‘Satan entered into him’ (Joh 13:27). We might also be disposed to adduce here the account given of Mary Magdalene, that the Lord cast seven devils out of her (Mar 16:9), since it is not probable that we are to reckon literally seven distinct demoniacal possessions or psychical enthralments, and from such a reckoning draw a precise and definite conclusion. Add to this, the number seven denotes in a significant manner, not only the extreme generally, but also the extreme of self-activity.²¹ The seven unclean spirits remind us, by contrast, of the seven spirits of God. And as these spirits denote the one Holy Spirit in His fulness and agency, so the seven devils may denote the impure spirit of the world in its collective power and activity. And as Christ, by having the consecration of the seven spirits, is distinguished as moving freely in the life of the Holy Spirit, so the possession of seven demons might distinguish the ethically culpable, and therefore metaphorical, possession of an erring soul that was completely under the power of the spirit of the world. According to the Evangelist Luke (8:2), the Lord was accompanied in His journeys by ‘certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils (δαιμόνια ἑπτὰ), and Joanna the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered to Him of their substance.’ If into such a group of females, containing one, or several, whom Jesus had freed from demoniacal suffering, a convert entered whom Jesus had rescued from the heavy curse of sin, it is very probable that, in accordance with the prevalent Jewish notions, she would express her gratitude by saying that He had cast seven devils out of her.²² This explanation is confirmed by Christ’s parabolic discourse, in which He represents to the Jews the condition in which they were as most perilous, by the phenomena of demoniacal suffering (Mat 12:43, compared with Luk 11:24). ‘When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest and finding none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first. Even so shall it be also unto this wicked generation.’

This discourse, if we look at the connection, seems to be neither wholly figurative, nor wholly literal. Jesus had just before cast out a demon from a sick man (Mat 12:22). But when the Pharisees reproached Him as casting out devils by Beelzebub, that demon seemed to come back with seven others and insolently to confront Him, as if in mockery of His former victory. Jesus found in this an image of His whole ministry in Israel. Everywhere He expelled the single demon of psychical suffering from among the people; but everywhere it returned again with the seven demons of blaspheming unbelief.²³ The demon appears here with the number seven, and therefore as the demon of free conscious culpability, of the vilest depravity. It is highly significant, and quite in accordance with the Gospel history, to represent those direful demoniacal sufferings as sevenfold less than the wretchedness of demoniacal criminality.

From this metaphorical mode of speaking, with which Christ treated of demoniacal relations, it does not follow that He adopted by way of accommodation the general opinions of His time respecting the true demoniacal nature of the sufferings of the possessed. That He shared in these opinions, His whole treatment and estimate of these phenomena testifies, which always remained the same in the private conversations He held with His disciples respecting them (Mat 17:21). Strauss therefore is quite justified in ascribing these opinions to the Lord (2:7). But from this we are not justified in affirming, that Jesus shared in the sensuous representations of the people respecting the corporeal nature of these demoniacal possessions, as the same writer also maintains. The very connection of the phenomena of demoniac suffering with those of demoniac action, as the Lord understood it, proves that in the possessions He had recognized the psychical element, the relation between suffering and ethical self-activity. We may draw, however, the same conclusion in a special manner from His mode of healing.

As far as we can trace and judge of the moral state in the obscure circumstances of the possessed, the chief feature that strikes us is the moral despondency, the abject flinching and trembling before the assailing hostile power, whether this arose from the demoniac fixed ideas of the sufferers, or from individual demoniacal influences. This abject bearing cannot avoid showing itself in some way or other, so as to afford a glimpse of the moral state of the soul, even in cases where the demoniac is born in the soul-slavery of a disordered state of the nerves. At all events, it appears as the first step in healing the demoniacs, that Jesus crushed at a blow this despondency of the demonized consciousness. He crushed it, namely, by the manner in which He addressed the demon. He set spiritual power against spiritual power, the stronger against the weaker. With a lion’s spring He made Himself master of His prey. With one divine, determined wrench, He released the captive soul from its thrall. But this, according to the nature of the case, could only take place by the impartation of His own power to it. His power was shed upon the sufferers when He threatened the demons by His crushing rebuke. The style in which Christ addressed men had always a tone of kingly decision; it was the expression of heavenly power and certainty. By the forcible impression which these brief winged words of command uttered by the Lord made on the souls of men, they have fixed themselves in the Gospel tradition with unchangeable freshness. But it is obvious that Christ, in this method of throwing fire with His words into the soul, made a specific difference between the sorrowful and the despairing. The sorrowful He consoled with all the miraculous tone of a heavenly sympathy: the burdened sinner, for example, He consoled with the words, ‘My son! thy sins are forgiven thee!’ the woman suffering from the issue of blood with, ‘Be of good cheer, My daughter!’ Mary Magdalene with the exclamation, ‘Mary!’ and others in different ways. And here it must be remarked, that the modern philanthropic but enervated treatment of souls has made a great mistake, in placing the despairing in the same category with the sorrowful, and attempting to revive them by consolations. They require a very different treatment: they must be roused to regain their self-possession by words of severity; they need the influences and quickening utterances of glowing, impassioned power. The thunder and lightning of a saintly soul, which can rebuke them as with the flames of divine wrath, restores to them that power which feebler addresses could never give. Indeed, only the pure spirit of Christ can properly discharge this office of rebuke.²⁴ Christ was the Master also in this art of curing souls. Not only did He in this manner restore demoniacs, but all who either temporarily or constantly were unmanned by dejection. Thus He rebukes the disciples when they lost their self-command in the storm; He rebuked the fever of Peter’s wife’s mother (Luk 4:39); and exclaimed in the synagogue to the woman bowed down by a spirit of infirmity, ‘Woman! thou art loosed from thine infirmity’ (Luk 13:12),—He dispersed immediately her despondency, the spirit of her weakness, by His word, and then, by laying His hands on her, healed her bodily infirmity. This last example leads us to consider the manner in which Jesus especially treated demoniacs. How glorious the royal Prince of spirits appears among them with these master-words of rebuking love! ‘He cast out the spirits with a word,’ says Matthew (8:16). ‘He straitly charged them,’ says Mark, ‘that they should not make Him known’ (3:12). To the possessed in the synagogue at Capernaum He cried out, ‘Hold thy peace and come out of him.’ Probably the command, ‘Come out!’ was re-echoed in the soul, as the Lord in such cases injected it as a divine power into the consciousness of the sick man, and the first act of his reawakened freedom consisted precisely in this, that he repeated the word in his own soul, ‘Come out!’ In this state of captivity the possessed was one with the demon, and spoke out of the consciousness of the demon; therefore the Lord also addressed the demon that was in him. But in the moment of his release he became one with the Lord, and the word which the Lord thundered against the demon he himself addressed to him. If we rely on the exactness of the order of the particulars in the account of Mark (5:7) and of Luke (8:29), the memorable case here occurred, that the demoniac was was not at once healed after the Lord had spoken the decisive word. Christ had said to him, ‘Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit!’ The demoniac consciousness in this man was now indeed shaken to its foundations; but as he felt himself possessed by a legion of evil spirits, the demoniacal within him was not quite reached by the address in the singular. Christ saw at once how the cure was to be completed. He asked him for his name. ‘What is thy name?’ He answered, ‘My name is Legion, for we are many.’ But from this insolent raving of his demoniac consciousness the contradiction already glanced forth: the prostration of spirit which had shown itself in the very circumstance of his running to meet the Lord. The demons now asked permission to go into a herd of swine, of which we shall speak hereafter. Matthew’s word, ‘Go!’ seems to have been here the authentic and decisive word of the Lord, which echoed in the soul of the possessed, ‘Go!’ The rebuke with which Christ met the crowd, who were waiting for Him at the foot of the Mount of Transfiguration, is very characteristic. Here was a spiritual battle to be won again, which His disciples had lost from a want of a more rigorous self-discipline in prayer and fasting. The spirit of despondency which had mastered the whole circle by the unexpected failure, was to be expelled. The Lord was sensible of this psychical obstruction, and removed it by a powerful rebuke. He then made a path for the communication of His miraculous power by strengthening the heart of the father of the unfortunate youth. Then followed the healing word of power. In the crisis of such a cure, the most violent change came over the sufferer in an instant. His consciousness sprang up, so to speak, from the abyss to the heights of heaven. It was natural for the cure to end in a final dreadful paroxysm. The sick man at Capernaum cried out aloud when the divine voice of deliverance pealed like thunder through his soul. In the instance before us, the sufferer became fearfully agitated and fell to the earth as dead; a second miracle was needed, which Christ performed when He took him by the hand and lifted him up.

It is scarcely necessary to call attention to the fact, that all these narratives of miraculous cures bear a decided impress of individuality and the noblest stamp of internal truth.

But in what degree these cures were complete, we see from the language of the restored Gadarene. When his countrymen desired Jesus to depart out of their coasts, he requested that he might be allowed to accompany Him. Though a legion of evil spirits had before haunted him, his consciousness was now firmly fixed in free devoted surrender to the one Spirit of light, whose power had rescued him and become master of his soul.

The whole category of the Lord’s miraculous cures serves to exhibit the dominion of His Spirit over the flesh, since their effect was to re-establish the dominion of the human spirit over morbid corporeity, and its victory over the influences of the powers of evil. The liberation of human spirits, and their restoration to health by the blessing of the Spirit, as it goes on to the end of the world, and has its basis in the power of Christ’s Spirit and in His victory, exhibited its first blossoms in the miraculous cures. But we now enter on a new circle of miracles. We see the first signs of the spiritual glory of Christ, which is to transform the earthly sphere of this lower world. To this class belong, as the clearest and most distinct signs, the great miracles which Christ performed on the mental states of men. As such, we consider most decidedly the miracle at Cana and those of feeding the multitudes. The key to these truly heavenly facts is wanting when the mental state of the guests of Jesus is left unnoticed, and as much attention is lavished on the elements as if we had merely to do with bread-baskets and wine-jars. When Jesus made provision for a circle of friends, or for thousands of His adherents, the question is of the highest importance, What influence He exerted on their souls? Now we know He was never disposed to gain adherents by violent or over-persuasive urgency. The Son makes those free whom His Spirit takes captive. He could only by slow degrees establish the heavenly kingdom of Christian dispositions, because He mingled His life with the life of the world through the medium of the holiest tenderness, or through the tenderest holiness. But a heavenly kingdom of states of feeling He could at once call forth, by virtue of that captivating spiritual power with which His personality operated on susceptible souls. Such souls, by the power of His divine Spirit which inspired them, and by the glow of sympathy which ravished them when once touched, He could raise for some moments to heaven, and transport into a common frame of divine joy, peace, and love, in which life appeared as new, and the world as transformed. Such foretastes of heaven make their appearance throughout the whole Gospel history. But the difference must be lost sight of between transient moods and permanent dispositions, between occasional flights of excited feeling and the constant soaring of the Spirit, when it is thought strange that many of those whom Christ had borne upwards in a favourable hour should relapse into common or even evil tendencies,—that the majority, or even all, at times should fall away. And it would argue ignorance of the spirit of Christ, if we were to expect that He would not venture so boldly to call forth the flowers of the new life, because He knew that these flowers would for a long while have no fruits. But we find sufficient indications of the miraculous elevation of men’s souls in events of this kind, and of the connection of these miraculous transactions with these miraculous states of mind. On the occasion of the marriage at Cana, for the first time in the history of the world a Christian assemblage for festive purpose took place in the presence of Christ. The mother of Jesus is full of great and anxious, and yet joyful forebodings; she communicates her state of mind to the servants of the family, who are imbued with the greatest confidence in the words of Jesus. They fill the water-pots—they bring the beverage at His bidding with perfect readiness. Meanwhile the company are so occupied with their conviviality, that they know not what has transpired outside. But the wine they are now drinking at the height of the feast is pronounced, even by the governor of the feast, to be as good as, or better than, what had been drunk before. In the element of a singular state of mind, in which the wedding guests had become one as branches with the true vine, with Christ as the principle of the world’s transformation, the water becomes changed for them into wine. We have here to do with the operations of a higher ethical ecstasy—with the operations of a very beautiful but extraordinary state of mind, in which the festive Jews find themselves transported, by the power of Christ’s Spirit, from the beginnings of the world to the heights of the transformed world. The drink which they quaff in this state of mind, being blessed to them by the presence of Christ, is to their taste the choicest wine. Thus they enjoy it not in mere spiritualistic fancy, but with the most real gust.²⁵ But how it was with the supply of wine outside of the highly vitalized sphere of the feast, would be a question of the same kind as what transformation (Verklärung) remained in the consecrated bread outside the holy sphere of the actual celebration of the Supper. Also the miracle of feeding a multitude, which, without prejudging, we here consider as having occurred twice, was evidently effected by a state of mind allied to His own in the guests of Jesus. The confidence with which He announced that He was about to feed the thousands, and even the thought of this feeding, was so new a revelation of the kingdom of love and confidence, that the souls of those who had once followed Him as His adherents into the wilderness, were elevated by this event far above their ordinary state of feeling. They sat down at His word, and their doing so indicated an exceedingly high and powerful elevation of their feelings. But it is an acknowledged fact, that impassioned expectation and joy can be propagated electrically and with augmented force among thousands. After the first miracle of feeding, those who had partaken of the food wished to make the Lord king,—a proof that they had celebrated a feast in the highest pitch of theocratic enthusiasm. In those moments the heavenly power of Christ could feed its thousands miraculously. His word alone had already strengthened them afresh, to say nothing of the word in connection with the natural means. Thus the feeding so as to satisfy them is explained,—but not the overplus, the baskets-full of fragments. On this point it makes a great difference, whether we are inclined to see an Old Testament feast of loving omnipotence, or a New Testament one of omnipotent love. This remark requires further explanation. That among the guests of Jesus many were destitute of food, is certain, and the whole multitude were in danger of suffering the pains of hunger. But it appears incredible, if we take into account the Jewish method of travelling and making pilgrimages, that many of these pilgrims should not have carried with them a supply of provisions, greater or less. On these supplies, indeed, the Lord would not wish first of all to reckon. The miracle of feeding and of satisfying which He undertook, was quite independent of such supplies. But it could as little on that account be His concern to fill a multitude of baskets with fragments, over and above what was eaten. Now if such provisions are presupposed, we may be inclined to take the following view of the transaction. Christ feeds the thousands exclusively with the substance of His own bread. But those among these thousands who really had provisions, would hold them absolutely in reserve for themselves. Their hearts therefore remained closed, their private property remained like a fixture by their side; while Christ gives up everything, and the poor among them take their share of the distributed bread. Even in collecting the fragments, their gifts in bread do not add to the amount. Evidently, on such a supposition, the power of Christ is glorified at the cost of the operation of His love; and the dark miracle of the unheard-of, selfish reserve of the multitude hanging on the lips of Jesus, confronts the direct, exalted miracle of benevolent omnipotence. But if we are desirous of commemorating the founding of a New Testament feast, a heavenly bloom of social life, in the miraculous feeding, we must above all things feel how the hearts of the guests of Jesus thawed under His festive invitation and thanksgiving—how they were rendered great, warm, free, and brotherly, so that no one would keep his bread for himself, while he enjoyed likewise that of his brother. Thus we gain two splendid miracles of omnipotent love, which in the warmth of the moment form one—Christ feeds thousands with His little stock by an operation of heavenly power.²⁶ But this feeding, as an operation of love, opens their hearts, and forms a pre-celebration of the final transformation of the world in the blessedness of Christian brotherly love-a pre-celebration of the Christian voluntary community of goods; and thus the second miracle takes place, the miracle of superabundance among the thousands of the poor people in the wilderness.

It has been justly observed, that in these miracles we may descry a foreshadowing of the Holy Supper. Certainly the guests of Jesus were communicants as to the state of their feelings, though not in developed and ripened Christian insight. In the communion, wine is always poured out for those who partake of it, which has the power and significance of His blood, and bread is broken, which is received and experienced as the life and action of His body. But in the consecrated circle of the communion a thousand mysterious experiences occur, experiences of strengthening and refreshment, and even of exaltation to heaven, which are intimately allied to those miracles of the Lord which affected men’s states of mind, and allied not merely in reference to their special origin, the living power of Christ’s heart, but also in reference to their final aim, the transformation of the world. Those miracles, as well as the permanent blessings of Christ in the Holy Supper, may be regarded as foreshadowings of the coming transformation of the world.

Attempts have been made to throw suspicions on the miracle at Cana by designating it ‘a miracle of luxury.’ Criticism resolves to do anything for the sake of gaining its object, even to put on pietist airs. But the spirit of Christ is perfectly self-consistent when it treats the higher modes of want—as, for example, the worrying perplexity of a new-married couple, whose wedding is likely to end in ridicule and vexation for lack of wine—with the same sympathy as the lower modes. The anointing which Mary performed at Bethany in honour of the Lord, of whose departure she had a presentiment, also appeared a work of luxury; but the Lord protected His female disciple against the attacks of those disciples who thought that the cost of the ointment should rather be given to the poor. Christianity will never allow itself to be changed into a mere hospital or alms-house, but in its spirit and aim always tends to the pure luxury of freeing and transforming the life, apart from the beautiful festive ideal manifestation of the spirit. A sickly spiritualism can accommodate itself only to the coarse natural constitution of the present phenomenal world; the entire new world, on the other hand, which is to bloom forth from the living power of Christianity, and more especially the resurrection of the dead, appears to it as an extravagant luxury of Christian hope. But the Christian spirit cannot despair of the eternal unity between the idea and the life, and therefore expects that all Christian principles will one day celebrate their appearance in the reality, in the full splendour of the idea; and it descries the foreshadowings of this future transformation in the ‘miracles of luxury,’ as they meet it, not merely in the marriage feast at Cana, or in the miraculous feeding of the multitude, but also in that quelling of the storm which Jesus effected, and in the miraculous draught of fishes which He caused.

In the history of the kingdom of God there is one class of miracles which may be called miracles of theocratic parallelism,-those, namely, in which the inner relation between the life of the earth and the life of humanity is exhibited in the most striking manner. Those persons who have not perceived, or who deny, this parallelism in the development of the corporeal and spiritual side of the current æon, and the coincidence of the great phases of development both inward and outward, should not venture to say anything about the supremacy of the idea, and about the ideality of the world. The Theocracy corrects their dualism. The majority of the miracles in the Old Testament history belong to this class of parallel miracles. A great phase in the history of the earth or the universe coincides with a great phase in the history of the kingdom of God; and indeed the former is subservient to the latter, just as reasonably as the earth is subservient to man, or as the history of the universe is subservient to the history of spiritual life. Thus, for example, the plagues of Egypt coincide with the event of the redemption of Israel from Egyptian bondage; and the moment in which Israel, pursued by Pharaoh, reached the shores of the Red Sea, was the same in which a singular natural phenomenon dried the bed of the sea. The theocratic spirit justly explains the coincidence of these events as proceeding from God’s ordination; it marks it in true dignity of spirit as an operation, a fruit and consequence of its faith. But like the prophetic spirit, before the moment of the miracle arrived in which ‘the stars in their courses fought’ for Israel, it had an inspired presentiment of it, and therefore announced it beforehand. It need not in the least perplex us when those miracles of parallelism come forward in giant forms. Nature always confronts man as a giant power, and yet bends before his spirit and becomes subservient to him with all her powers. It is a tacit, eternal miracle, that man, this naked, defenceless creature, bound to the earth, shivering in the blast, trembling in the water, dissolving in the heat, standing defenceless amidst a thousand armed warlike hosts of the brute creation,—this child that ‘plays on the hole of the asp, and puts his hand on the cockatrice’s den’ (Isa 11:8),—this Daniel in the lions’ den,—that he in the power of the spirit gains even a more decided ascendancy over nature, even releases it from its own captivity, since he brings its essence to light, and compels its action into the service of the spirit. This silent miracle has its great festive hours—world historical Sundays—on which the giant spirit of Nature comes in a critical moment to the aid of the embarrassed divine man as an elephant to its master’s child,-when the course of Nature unfolds the consecrated, holy tendency of its movements, its silent concurrence with the course of the kingdom of God, in clear, grand signs. It is the triumph of Revelation that it has explained these signs, and with their explanation has declared the unity of the course of the world in its successive æons in the life of Nature and of man. These parallel miracles also reappear more strikingly in the history of the apostles; the young Church needed the service of the giantess, Nature, who recognized in the former the beginning and pledge of her own glorification. In the history of the life of Jesus the parallel miracles are less conspicuous, because in Him perfected life was manifested, and therefore the glorification of Nature by the Spirit; the elevation of the parallelism between the life of Nature and the life of the Spirit into a living unity. Besides the wonderful events at the death and resurrection of Jesus, which we shall notice in the sequel, we may regard the stilling of the storm on the Sea of Galilee as a miracle in which that parallelism appears and finds its solution. We cannot estimate too highly the world-historical importance of that hour, when the whole New Testament Church in its embryo life, the entire living power and spiritual quintessence of the Old Testament theocracy, after being rescued from a thousand perils by great miracles—in which therefore the hopes of humanity were enclosed in a paltry fishing-boat on the Galilean sea-were in the greatest danger of being swallowed up by the waves. Here also nature seems to have presented her dark side—she seemed to rave like a demon savage, and to aim at swallowing up the noblest life—life absolute. But Christ did not take the storm on this side: the awful agitation alarmed Him not; it rocked Him to sleep. And when the alarm awoke Him, He found it necessary, first of all, to rebuke the storm in the hearts of His disciples.²⁷ Storm against storm: He rebuked them till they were ashamed; deeply calmed in spirit, they looked on the storm with new eyes. With this alteration in the state of their minds, the storm must at once have seemed to them greatly to abate its fury. Then He rebuked the wind and the sea. But the wind and the waves are not hostile spiritual powers in His presence; so that what He uttered was not so much an address as a prophetic annunciation, and a mysterious symbolic act. The proximate cause of the stilling of the wind and waves lay in the atmosphere; and so far was the miracle a parallel one, and the rebuking word of Jesus prophetic. But the ultimate cause of the extraordinary hushing of the elements lay in the life and feelings of the God-man. To Him it was certain that the apparently monstrous independence thus confronting the human spirit exhibited only an apparent outbreak, in which the actual outbreak of man was reflected and punished; that therefore this independence of Nature must be abolished in His spirit-life, and must be abolished for the world. This abolition He carried into effect by a symbolical act, the essence of which is a mystery of His deepest life. From the depths of His divine consciousness, of His eternity, He caused the fact to come forth in a miracle, that the spirit of solemn repose in His life put an end to the morbid agitations of Nature. He represented in a symbolical act this quiet operation of the Christian life of humanity, the ripe product of which is to be unfolded in the sabbatical peace of the new world.28 The miraculous draughts of fish which the disciples made twice by the direction of the Lord (Luk 5:11 and Joh 21:1-11), pre-suppose in them neither an omniscience on the part of Christ, nor a universal sciolism (allwisserei) disturbing the divine unity of His life. The means of putting into exercise the extraordinary knowledge which He displayed on these occasions, lay in the hearts of the men who were attached to Him. Would He not notice from a distance the deep, bitter dejection which darkened their souls on account of the total failure of their night’s toil? Nothing in the world could more deeply interest Him than the state of those souls in which He was desirous of implanting His own heavenly life. But when, full of sympathy, He saw (as it were) through their eyes, and sought after the fish, he was certainly a sagacious fisherman who could detect the traces of the fishes in the play of shadows on the watery mirror, or by similar signs, if we are not disposed to admit that He became aware of their existence by the electrical action of an immense living shoal crowded together. A modern poet expresses the thought, that if man ever corresponded to his idea, the birds of heaven would fly to him in flocks. Did the poet fetch this thought from the Gospels, and only believe that he must change the fishes to birds? That fishes are less intelligent than birds, does not incapacitate them for experiencing influences which are beyond our calculation; rather, indeed, for that very reason they are taken more readily by the slightest impression, especially as their life has less of individuality. So there are, for example, kinds which are enticed and taken at night by the shining of a light. The myth of the effect of the harp of Arion on the dolphin points, at all events, to some actual fact,—to an extraordinary movement of fish which was occasioned by the magic of human influence. Yet we are not going to start the question, whether perhaps, in both the instances to which we refer, the fish had made an irregular movement towards the shore on which Christ was standing. At all events, the Lord was certain of His word when He staked His whole authority with these men on the one draught which they were to make; and the less clearly we can understand whence He obtained this certainty, the more sublime do the life-depths appear of the man, as He must be, the God-man, ‘under whose feet (according to Ps. 8) were placed the fishes of the sea.’

Among the facts recorded in the Gospels which especially harmonize with the transformation of the world by Christ, must be reckoned the capture of the fish which Peter had to make in order to satisfy the persons who demanded the temple-tax of Jesus and himself.²⁹ The account of this miracle has been considered the most perplexing in the whole Gospel history. Some have imagined that they have detected the narrator in a palpable contradiction, when they have asked how the fish could bite the hook with a stater in its mouth. Criticism, in raptures at this discovery, has bitten more daringly than usual the hook of this narrative; no temple-tax in its mouth has made it too difficult. Though, according to the structure of a fish’s mouth, the difficulty in question is not so very great, yet it is not said that Peter would find the stater exactly between the teeth in the mouth of the fish. The opening of the mouth may here be supposed to signify the means of getting down to the lower part of the throat. For a fish to have a piece of money in its mouth is by no means wonderful; for ‘there are accounts elsewhere of finding fishes that had coins and other valuables in their body.’³⁰ Nor would it be wonderful if Peter had accidentally taken such a fish with a stater in its body. The wonder (or miracle) lies in this, that Jesus distinctly assured Peter beforehand of such a fortunate capture. We need not call to mind the powerful action of metals as experienced by clairvoyants, in order to render this miracle in some measure conceivable with all its obscurity; and in order to conjecture how Jesus knew this epicure of a fish that gulped down gold, and was so ready to take the bait. When Jesus found Himself reduced to the sheerest necessity, and when a stater was needed to fulfil an obligation, He learned in the mirror of God’s Spirit where it was to be found. He needed only to feel in the depths of the sea in order to obtain the requisite piece of money. But here also too much attention has been paid to the outside of the miracle, and so an obscurity has been cast on the motive. The Lord was reminded by the officers of the temple, through Peter, of the temple-tax. This demand seemed likely to produce a collision, as we may infer from the conversation of Jesus with Peter. According to His essential relation to the temple, He was identical with the spiritual meaning of it; the temple was only a faint outline of that habitation of God which His life exhibited. Or, according to the Israelitish law, the temple was God’s fortress, the palace of His Father, and He was the child of the palace. But as His father’s child, He was, of course, free from the tribute which the liege-subjects had to pay to His residence. If, then, Christ paid the temple-tax, He would not only deny the consciousness of His right relation to the temple, but He might confirm these Israelites in the false assumption that He owed tribute to the temple like a Jew who needed the Levitical sacrifice and atonement. Yet, if He did not pay the tribute, He might seem to the officers as if He slighted the law; thus they might either be set against Him or against the law, to their own injury. Therefore they would be offended not only by the non-payment of the tax, but even if Jesus had paid it without hesitation. Neither on this occasion was a loan or a borrowing of friends to be thought of.³¹ It is said, ‘Lest we should offend them, go thou to the sea,’ and then further directions are given; as if it had been said, Let us adopt this expedient. Now the stater, in a literal sense, was neither more nor less than a stater though found in the jaws of a fish. The moral effect of the payment would be just the same. But even this Jesus seemed desirous of avoiding. This inner motive of the history is as it were its soul, and must determine its interpretation. Jesus wished, then, to discharge the temple-tax in a shape which allowed its payment to appear as a purely voluntary act. This he attained by presenting a natural object to the tax-gatherers, which with wonderful certainty He had caused to be taken fresh from the sea. According to this view, the expression, ‘As soon as thou openest the mouth of the fish, thou shalt find a stater’, may be poetical, and mean, ‘As soon as thou hast taken the fish off the hook, thou shalt obtain for it the amount which they expect for Me and thee.’ This interpretation would be quite impossible if it were said, ‘Thou shalt find a stater in its mouth.’ These, however, are not the words. But though this interpretation is possible, it is very forced, since the expression of opening the fish’s mouth is a singular one, if it only means taking it off the hook. Moreover, it is said, ‘When thou hast opened its mouth, thou shalt find a stater.’ At all events, thus much is clear, that Jesus could not have intended that Peter was to catch as many fish as would fetch a stater in the market, and then give the amount to the tax-gatherers.³² The disciple, with the first fish he caught, was to have the value of a stater; it might consist in catching a very large fish, or a rare and valuable one, or, lastly, one with a coin in its mouth. In either case the miracle remains the same. It was precisely the design of Jesus to exhibit His free power by the miraculous form of the deed. It was needful, therefore, for this form to appear to the tax-gatherers as a miracle, which it would if Peter informed them in what extraordinary manner he obtained the stater. But the transaction would be more striking and free if he gave them a fish that was worth a stater, and informed them that he had drawn it out of the sea for them at the Lord’s command. The serene energy and the miraculous insight with which Jesus instantly unravelled a complication of legal and moral difficulties—the majesty with which He laid His hand on the great treasury of Nature, that in voluntary love He might pay a tax—make this ‘fabulous specimen of stories about the sea’ appear as the brightest, most delightful gleam of a world of love, of the most peaceful and calm adjustments, and of the richest blessings,—of a world such as Christ found by His Spirit, and as it is destined to appear in the transformation of the earth.

But as the first glorification of Christ was connected with the prospect of His crucifixion, so the first glorification of the earth must precede the judgment of the world. We therefore now inquire after that miraculous sign by which the judicial power of Christ’s Spirit was directly made known. But though for all the other constituents of His universal agency we find a multitude of signs, yet for this great and awful constituent only one is given—the cursing of the fig-tree. We need not say a word to show that it could never enter the Lord’s thoughts to punish a fig-tree, or to vent His displeasure upon it. The Evangelists, also, were so far from entertaining such a thought, that it could as little occur to them to guard their account against the misrepresentations of a criticism which would rather find here the anger of an undisciplined child than the symbolical significant act of the Saviour of the world. That the act must have had a symbolical meaning, cannot fail to strike us. W. Hoffman justly remarks, ‘Let us read in Matthew and Mark what subject chiefly occupied Jesus at that time—what He said in the temple on the very day of the miracle: it was an announcement of the final destruction of the Jews, who had remained an unfruitful tree. Whether or not Jesus had already spoken of it on the way, the cursing in any case remains a symbolic act. It signified that, as certainly as the green leafy tree withered at the word of the Lord, so certainly would all the divine threatenings against Israel be fulfilled, though it appeared at that time to stand in such luxuriant growth.’³³ In those days Jesus foretold unheard-of judgments—how they would come on Jerusalem, on the land of Judea, and indeed on the whole earth—how they would come in His name, in retribution of their wanton rejection of Him, but also as a necessary purification of the world before the event of the resurrection. As the Prophet of judgment, He walked with profound sorrow among His disciples, filled with the thoughts of the coming judgments, while they could not give up the expectation of a transformation of the world without the preliminary terrors and sentences of judgment. They needed, therefore, a sign. Elijah might have devoted for the purpose part of the city of Jerusalem; Christ selected a tree. Criticism in vain assumes here the air of a forester or a gardener, and declaims about the injury done to the tree. With equal right the Lord might be made accountable for the destruction of Jerusalem. No curse is fulfilled without the co-operation of the sovereign God with the foretelling prophet. The Lord was hungry, and the tree seemed to invite Him by its abundant foliage. He went up to it, if perchance He might find some fruit, if only a single fig, upon it; but in vain: there was nothing but leaves. For it was not a good year for figs.³⁴ Then Jesus uttered the words, ‘Let no fruit grow on thee henceforth for ever.’ The next day the tree was found withered. This miracle was a prognostic of that melancholy drought through the land which began some ten years after, during which the palmtrees disappeared, the fig-trees withered, and the springs were dried up. But how did Christ effect this miracle? When, at a later period, Peters rebuke fell on Ananias like a flash of lightning, the explanation is obvious-that it struck the conscience of Ananias with deadly energy. But by what medium could this word of Christ pass through the tree and blast it in all its parts? In order to form a correct view on this point, we must bring before our minds the general judgment in all its significance. In the general judgment the æonian administration of the Father coincides with the result of the æonian agency of the Son; in other words, the ripeness of the present world for judgment, the ripeness of the earth for the harvest, coincides with the ripeness of the Church. For this reason the Father retains in His own power the time and hour of the end of world; and as He is now controlling the cosmical side of the end of the world as He judged Judea, especially in its relation to the history of the world, so here also He brought to view the first phenomenon of the incipient withering of the glory of Judea. God Himself, therefore, caused the tree to wither; but this was done with a reference to the judgment of Christ, His life and His language. The Father and the Son, therefore, performed this symbolical act in the most living unity. The word of Christ killed the tree, since, having been uttered by the operation of God, it appealed to God’s operation, and accordingly with that penetrated destructively through the nature-sphere of the tree. It was a word from the eternal depths of Christ’s life, in which the Son felt Himself altogether one with the Father. That lightning which will one day blaze from the east to the west, and set on fire all the old world, here blasted a perversely pretentious barren tree, and in its withering formed a prognostic of the final judgment. But to the disciples—who in the future could meet with no greater destruction than the outward, secularized Mount Zion, the barren pretentious Judaism—t gave the promise, that at their word of faith ‘this mountain’ (at all events, a mountain to which He pointed) ‘should be removed, and cast into the sea.’ The Lord, by a symbolical prognostic on a small scale, brought before their eyes that great judgment which was impending over Israel, when its national glory would be broken up and scattered among the nations (like the mountain cast into the sea). The disciples were thus taught that God met their faith in His judicial glory, and by His wonderful judgments would prepare the way for them as His own people to the glory that would be completed at the resurrection. Besides this miracle of the fig-tree, the darkening of the sun at the crucifixion, and the earthquake at the death of Christ, served to reveal the nature-side of the future judgment in awful omens. It was perfectly in keeping with the relation of Christ to the sphere of nature in the old world, that this sphere should be convulsed and darkened by the first presentiment of its future transformation at the hour when He sank in death. As all the operations of Christ first appeared in distinct single miracles, and then expanded their life in great and deep mediations, and finally were consummated in world-historical miracles, so was it with these miraculous signs which announced the last judgment. Their mediation lies in an operation of the Spirit of Righteousness upon the earth, during which more critical phenomena of the last world’s curse are continually appearing; we might say, during which the combustibleness of the earth, and the fermentation in the depths of its life, are evermore unfolding their adaptation for a metamorphosis.

But here we are contemplating the judgment of the world only as an introduction to the resurrection, with which it is closely connected, just as the individual resurrection of Christ was introduced by His death, in which He had experienced the judgment of the world in Himself. The final aim of Christ’s work is the resurrection-the introduction of the whole Church of God into an incorruptible and manifested life, penetrated from eternity by the Spirit (1 Cor. 15.) That resurrection finds its deepest ground, the principle which makes it an organic certainty, in the individual resurrection of Christ. This resurrection of the Lord is unceasingly perpetuated in the Church as a living energy. The life of Christ operates according to its nature in the world, awakening, invigorating, healing, and restoring, since it is essentially eternal life, or positive vivifying life. It is therefore not to be thought something merely figurative, and to refer simply to spiritual awakenings, when the resurrection of Christ is regarded as an awakening of humanity victoriously continued and pervading the history of the world. In the same real comprehensive manner in which He combats sin, He combats death; and with the same superiority which He displays in conquering sin, He completes His victory over death. He vivifies life, since He restores to it its intensive value; He conserves life, since He weakens the powers of death; He lengthens life, since He draws it always nearer the tree of life—nearer to a state conformable to the Spirit and to nature; He renews life, since He imparts to the inner man the power of the resurrection. Now, where do we find the first blossoms of this immeasurable agency of Christ? We find them in the three miracles which He performed, of restoring the dead to life.

The restoring of the dead to life is in itself so difficult a miracle that we cannot receive the instances of it unhesitatingly unless we are previously satisfied about the resurrection of Christ. If we are certain of Christ’s resurrection, we have gained the superior principle, of which these miracles are to be regarded as easy developments.

In the miracle of restoring the dead to life we must hold fast as the principal point, that Christ, as the Prince of life, rules dynamically over the kingdom of the dead—that His voice can reach and penetrate the departing spirit in the slumber of its transition to another world, in the obscure depth of life through which it falls into the bosom of God. We experience every day the enigma, the apparent contradiction, that a person asleep, and so far not a hearer, can hear a person calling, and we know that he hears quickest when his own name is called. Sharper voices and sounds of alarm can even exert an awakening power on those who are soundly asleep or quite stupified. But no human lamentation awakens the dead. But how intensely powerful, how deeply penetrating and all-pervading, Christ’s awakening voice must be, measured by the uniqueness of His person, by the decidedness of His will, by the certainty of His trust in God, and by the relationship of His life to the innermost life of the deceased! But where do we find the organic medium through which Christ’s voice reaches the spirit of the dead? Thus much is clear, that the body of the deceased in its first state is very different from a mummy or mouldering corpse. There is, so to speak, a fresh-paved way between the corpse and the spirit that has forsaken it. Science also has already arrived at the conjecture, that the last tones of life in the corpse die away much more slowly than has been commonly represented. The corpse is still full of the remembrance of life; hence also, in general, the features of the deceased reappear in plastic beauty, the reflection, so to speak, of that healthfulness which strove against the crisis of disease, and gained the victory at the cost of sacrificing the life, a prognostic of the future life. But when so obscure a track seems to show itself on which Christ reaches the dead with His voice, the question arises, How can the departed return into the dead organism? But the power with which the spirit returns, with which it flies back into the organism in its unity with the power of Christ’s word that called it, is to be regarded as the ray of life which again restores the organism. We must also here recollect that Christ did not resuscitate many dead persons without distinction in this miraculous manner, but only the individuals whose resuscitation was indicated to Him by the Father. Those who have supposed that Christ could not resuscitate the dead without regarding them as means for other objects, and encroaching on their already decided destiny, seem to have proceeded on the assumption that He performed His miracles without reference to the will of His Father. In this case the same remark might be made respecting His miraculous cures of the sick. But it was included in the destiny of the sick, that they were to be cured by Him (Joh 9:3); so also it belonged to the destiny of the dead, that He was to resuscitate them (Joh 11:4). In the successive steps by which these resuscitations of the dead follow one another, the power of Christ appears progressively more exalted.³⁵ First of all, He restores the maiden on her death-bed; then the young man on the bier; and lastly, Lazarus in the sepulchre.

But we see how in all these cases the Lord first of all combats the lamentations for the dead made by those who were around them,—how He quells the psychical desponding mood which surrounded the dead as if to ward off the approach of life, and then makes His way clear to the spirit of the deceased. ‘Fear not! only believe!’ He says to Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue. Then He makes a selection of those persons who were to be present at the resuscitation, namely, the disciples Peter, James, and John, and the parents of the child. Then He enters the house of mourning, and says to the people who were lamenting the dead, ‘Why make ye this ado, and weep? the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth (Mar 5:39). And they laughed Him to scorn.’ But He put them all out; and thus by alarming the living, made the field free from the alarm of death. The call, ‘Damsel, arise!’ impressed itself so suddenly in its original form, Ταλιθὰ κοῦμι, on the disciples, that Mark, who had a keen sense of the exciting, could not help inserting it in his Gospel. At the resuscitation of the young man at Nain, this preliminary combat of the life-restorer was shown by two signs ‘Weep not!’ He said to the mourning mother, and thus not merely consoled, but raised her into the bright circle of His own state of mind. Then He came nearer and laid hold of the bier,³⁶ and the bearers stood still (Luk 7:14). This demonstration, of which the energy is reflected in the narrative, stopped the advancing procession of the mourners; and then followed the joyful resuscitation. At the resurrection of Lazarus, Jesus sought first of all to raise the dejected heart of Martha. But when Mary and the Jews (the friends of the family) met Him weeping, ‘He groaned in spirit, and was troubled.’³⁷ With mighty indignation He set Himself against the waves of despondency which beat upon her breast; and without delay betook Himself to the grave. Once more there was a strong internal movement of His soul to repel a fresh attack of despondency. All the words which He uttered afterwards had the same design, to prostrate death first in the hearts of the bystanders. This striving serves to explain the form of the prayer which Jesus offered at the grave, and which some have thought strange and repulsive, because they have not taken notice of the internal conflict which of necessity preceded the act of resuscitation, and occasioned the Lord’s uttering aloud His address to the Father. The moment is difficult, serious, and decisive. Jesus cries with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come forth!’ The Evangelist, with the most vivid remembrance of the scene, selects the strongest terms, in order to exhibit the striking effect of that awakening call of Christ.

Although the Lord recalled the dead whom He resuscitated to the present life without transporting them to an imperishable life, yet these restorations constitute the miracles by which He most decidedly displayed His majesty. In significance they are of the same order as His own resurrection, and with the future resurrection of the dead. They reveal the power of the Prince of life to abolish death, that is, to bear aloft all individual life according to its innermost nature and destiny from the depths of nature-life into His own ideality, and to exhibit it in that. For as far as the tide of death breaks over individuality with the appearance of destruction, death seems to pollute man in his sacred individuality. Wherefore it is said, ‘Thou wilt not suffer Thy Holy One to see corruption,’ and the resurrection of Christians is one with His own glorification. In the miracles of raising the dead, Christ unfolds the boundlessness of His might over individuals, and of individuals over the change to dust; they are the crown of His miracles.

Besides the miraculous acts of Jesus reported by the Evangelists, He appears generally,³⁸ and especially at Capernaum,³⁹ to have performed many other wonderful works. But yet He was very far from allowing His miracles to appear with the profusion of everyday events. He decidedly set Himself against the craving for miracles. The opinion so commonly entertained, about the fondness of that age for miracles, has little to support it. Had it been prevalent in Israel, the people would hardly have reverenced as a great prophet,⁴⁰ a man without the gift of miracles, John the Baptist. But as to their conduct towards Jesus, the case was different. As soon as the Jews believed that they had discovered in Him Messianic features, as soon as He gave any sign whatever, the craving for miracles which had faintly glimmered in their breasts burst forth into a flame, and they were ever longing for new and greater signs. The modern shyness for miracles has sought with great eagerness after those expressions of Jesus in which He checked the craving for miracles, in order to prove from them that He wrought no miracles, or at least that He regarded them as of little importance. But such a forced interpretation of the words of Jesus may be safely left to the impression it gives of its utter worthlessness. It is very clear from the Gospel history, that the Lord shaped His conduct in the spirit with a constant reference to the belief in miracles prevailing in His time, that is, He treated every particular case according to its peculiar character. But in this unrestricted diversity of treatment, three methods are distinctly prominent in His conduct. In those cases in which He could reckon on unlimited confidence, in the persons who needed His help, He rendered aid without any hesitation; indeed, He often brought them aid quite unexpectedly. But when He found that they were in danger of apprehending the miracle superstitiously, of losing sight of His own personality in the astonishment excited by the fact, or of seeking the miracle only as a common outward help, then He kept Himself aloof, and blamed them. ‘Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe’ (Joh 4:48). But if this tendency to bring His miracles into the service of selfishness was decidedly apparent, He entirely refused to gratify such expectations. He would not allow Himself to be taken for a bread-king (Joh 6:26), nor a court performer of miracles (Luk 23:8); and as little would He satisfy the chiliastic Pharisees when they demanded of Him a miraculous sign in accordance with their views of the world. It was in the spirit of diametric opposition between His christological world and theirs, when to meet their desire that He would accredit His mission by a chiliastic sign of the Messiah suited to their notions, He made a reference to the sign of His death (Joh 2:18-19). The sign with which His Messianic kingdom was to come into the world was His cross; while they were under the delusion that the Messiah must immediately begin His universal sovereignty under a cosmical sign.⁴¹ He always pointed to this sign of His death whenever they demanded from Him the cosmical sign of the new æon.⁴² He declared that only one sign should be given them, the sign of the prophet Jonah. From this declaration it cannot follow in the least, that He had done no miracle, or that His adversaries had never been present at such an act; for the question about which He was treating was the sign which, according to the Jewish chiliastic preconceptions, must at once satisfy the nation that the Messiah was come. The Evangelist Mark explains this declaration of Christ as equivalent to there shall no sign at all be given them. On the other hand, in Luke, Jonah himself, with his preaching, is regarded as the true sign for the Ninevites. But Matthew gives the thought in full. ‘For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly, so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth’ (Mat 12:40). The three Evangelists have preserved the different sides of the interpretation of a mysterious saying. Mark gives prominence to the negative in the language of Jesus: He would grant no sign to His adversaries in the sense they attached to it. Luke specifies the reason: they ignored the great sign from heaven that was continually exhibited before their eyes in His life; although the heathen Ninevites were awakened to repentance by Jonah, a poor foreigner; and although an Arabian queen was attracted from a distance to Jerusalem by the wisdom of Solomon. But Matthew has preserved the words which occasioned our Lord to speak precisely of the sign of Jonah. Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the fish, apparently beyond recall, and lost to Nineveh and the world: so also shall it be with the Son of man. The Jews required a sign from heaven, but a sign from quite an opposite quarter was to be given them: one rising from the depths of the earth, from suffering and death, from reproach and neglect; first of all in the history of Jesus Himself, then in the world-historical course of His Church. This is the sign of the Christian æon, the crucifixion of Christ, as through the resurrection it has been proclaimed to the world. But this sign is to be a critical one for the world-to many, a sign of death, and to many, a sign of life and redemption. The crucifixion of Christ in connection with His resurrection has become the great sign of the new Christian æon; a sign before which all single miracles appear inconsiderable, like the hillocks at the foot of a lofty mountain. As soon as we are certain of the fact of Christ’s resurrection, we find in all miracles only a gentle prelude to this great hymn of ideal reality. Hence it is evident that we who find ourselves under the living operation of the resurrection, in the midst of the life-stream proceeding from it, in the natural unfolding and expansion of the greatest of all miracles, cannot possibly expect to witness such miracles in detail as Christ performed before His resurrection. Since the Spirit of Christ is in the most vigorous action, making all the blind to see, and removing bodily blindness in its root, He can no longer expend His power in performing a few single miracles of this kind. And so it is with the other miracles of Christ. In the miracle of the reconciliation of the world, which He accomplishes, He lays the foundation for its resurrection. From what has been said, it is also evident that everywhere on the border territory where Christianity comes into sharp conflict with the pre-Christian earthly life, events resembling miracles, or actually miraculous, may make their appearance. Thus the disciples received from the Lord the gift of performing miracles; this gift consisted in a preponderance of the Christian spirit, especially of the confidence of faith, which raised them above the despondency and bondage to nature belonging to their times. By His blessing their faith, He placed them in such a relation to His own miraculous Power, that they could cast out demons in His name (Mat 10:1; Luk 10:17). By their miraculous deeds, they extended the circle of the first direct operation of Christ upon the world. Also, in the vast extension of Christianity in the middle ages, not merely extraordinary, but even miraculous operations of Christian power, made their appearance, though not invested with the glory of the original Christian spiritual life. And so also the miracles of Christ must return, when the passage of the new Christian æon through the old is completed with the final outburst of the spirit at the end of the days. Then too Christ will give His adversaries the Messianic sign from heaven which they formerly demanded; but at the sight of it, all the tribes of the earth shall mourn. But in proportion as the great miracle of the new world unfolds itself as the effect of Christ’s life, it must become manifest, that His single miracles, not only as immediate evangelical facts, but as the subjects of evangelical announcement, were only single, gentle modes of bringing His divine power into communication with the life of the world.

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Notes

1. A distinct progression in the dogmatic development of the conception of miracle may be observed, which appears accompanied by an increasing obscuration of it. The biblical designations, σημεῖα, δυνάμεις, τέρατα, and ἔργα, jointly rest on the most living, most immediate contemplation, and the most correct estimate of the facts. Miracles as σημεῖα point to the one fundamental power of the principle from which they proceed, and they are referable to it, because they are mediated by a higher nature—a higher spirit-life—a divine revelation of which they testify. But since they extend themselves as δυνάμεις, as so many rays of the original δύναμις from which they are produced, they appear as overpowering, supernatural principles, which, in conformity to their power, display themselves in their irruption through a lower sphere of nature. But this irruption is effected by breaking through the wonted limits, circles, and presuppositions of the old nature-life as τέρατα, as agitating, unheard-of events. But by their course, their operation and results, they prove themselves to be the noblest works of the Spirit, or of pure love. Every miracle has all these sides and designations; but, according to the varieties of susceptibility, some persons see more of one side, and some of another. The heathenish superstitious mind stops short at the τέρας; the strangeness of the miracle frightens him, and when he begins to doubt, the relative anti-naturalism irritates him. The believing Israelitish mind sees in a miracle the σημεῖον, the mediated sign of the forthcoming kingdom of God. The firmly established Christian mind beholds in these miracles the powers that unfold themselves from the divine power of Christ, δυνάμεις, as they begin overpoweringly in their first vigorous operations to form a new world in the old; the perfected Christian mind (like John) sees in them simply the works of Christ, the ἔργα, as they appear to him perfectly natural, and the life-manifestations of Christ’s glory, transforming nature. In Augustin’s times, the opinion that miracles were contrary to nature already existed, but was impugned by Augustin. To him all things were a miracle as far as they proceeded from God’s omnipotence, and all things were nature as far as they were constituted by the will of God, who created nature. But he distinguishes in life itself between miracle and nature, since he contrasts the extraordinary with ordinary nature. ‘Omnia portenta contra naturam dicimus esse, sed non sunt. Quomodo est enim contra naturam quod Dei fit voluntate, quum voluntas tanti utique conditoris conditæ rei cujusque natura sit. Portentum ergo fit non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura—quamvis et ipsa quז in rerum natura omnibus nota sunt, non minus mira sint essentque stupenda considerantibus cunctis, si solerent homines mirari nisi rara.ʼ—De Civit. Dei, xxi. 8. Augustin has at the same time a distinct feeling of the mediation by which miracle is effected, namely, the resurrection and ascension of Christ. ‘Legebantur enim prזconia prזcedentia prophetarum, concurrebant ostenta virtutum, et persuadebatur Veritas nova consuetudini, non contraria rationi, donec orbis terrז, qui persequebatur furore, sequeretur fide.ʼ—De Civit. Dei, xxii. 7. The schoolmen elevated the conception of miracle, since they distinguish between mirabilia and miracula. By a miracle, properly so called, Thomas Aquinas understood what goes beyond the order of all created nature, in which sense God alone performs a miracle. In this definition the supernatural in miracle is brought to its strongest expression, but yet the conception is not overstrained; it only wants the satisfying mediation. Aquinas gives, indeed, a kind of mediation, by connecting the contemplation of mirabilia with the definition of miracula. ‘Non sufficit ad rationem miraculi, si aliquid fiat prזter ordinem alicujus naturז particularis, sic enim aliquis miraculum faceret lapidem sursum projiciendo; ex hoc autem aliquid dicitur miraculum, quod fit prזter ordinem totius naturז creatז quo sensu solus deus facit miracula. Nobis non est omnis virtus naturæ creatæ nota, cum ergo fit aliquid præter ordinem naturæ creatæ nobis notæ per virtutem creatam nobis ignotam, est quidem miraculum quoad nos, sed non simpliciter’ (Summa Theol. lib. i. qu. 110, art. 4). On these definitions, through which the ideal contemplation of the object, though obscure, is sufficiently discernible, the Lutheran theologians especially proceeded at a later period, when they raised the relative anti-naturalism of a miracle to absolute anti-naturalism, and then made this overstrained moment the only definition of the conception of a miracle. Besides the definition quoted from Buddeus, that from Quenstedt may prove this: ‘Miracula vera et proprie dicta sunt, quæ contra vim rebus naturalibus a deo inditam, cursumque naturalem, sive per extraordinariam dei potentiam efficiuntur’ (Systema Theol. p. 471. Compare Hase, p. 202; Hahn, Lehrbuch des chr. Glaubens, p. 23). To this view the philosophy of Leibnitz forms a counterpoise, since it defines a miracle as ‘aliquid cursui naturæ ordinario non autem essentiæ illius entis, in quo contingit (quoniam absolute impossibilia fieri nequeunt) contrarium’ (Dissert. prœlim. ad Theodic. &c., § 2, 3. Compare Rixner, Handbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie, iii. 179). In modern times, some Church theologians have attempted to maintain the conception of miracle by dropping the strictly miraculum and retaining only the mirabile. Among these, J. Müller especially reckons Schleiermacher. Certainly Schleiermacher, in his Glaubenslehre, § 47, has made the assertion, that every absolute miracle must disturb the whole framework of nature; on the other hand, he also remarks, that ‘since our knowledge of created nature is contained in its progressive manifestation, we have the less right to hold anything whatever to be impossible.’ The tortuous and obscure expressions of Schleiermacher on this subject proceed from this—that, on the one hand, he recognized Christ as ‘the summit of miraculous agency,’ while, on the other hand, the Spinozist or naturalistic conception of the monotonous rigid sphere of nature confronted him. What Schleiermacher has advanced with special cogency, is the entrance of miracle into nature—its appearance in a natural course; and this is a decided gain, for by it the last element of the conception of miracle is firmly fixed. And if we look back, we find in its history the actual unfolding of all its component parts, though charged with one-sidedness and extravagance in the views taken of it. Augustin advocates the mediation of miracle; Aquinas its supernaturalness; Quenstedt its anti-naturalness; and, lastly, Schleiermacher its new nature. Weisse (i. 369) makes a distinction between wonders and miracles, and understands by the former, exertions of Christ’s power which ‘may be referred to the conception of a peculiar organic endowment,’ and by the latter, such acts of which the conception would be ‘the purely negative of going beyond the common course of nature, of breaking through the laws of this course of nature.’ These miracles—for example, those of feeding the multitudes—must have arisen from a mere misunderstanding of the parabolic discourses of the Lord. This view rests on the ignoring of the new æon, which we have already sufficiently characterized.⁴³

2. Göthe has contemplated and exhibited with the greatest admiration the ascending scale which is presented in the life of nature, though he wished also to recognize the scientific designation of nature in an ascending movement; as the passage quoted by Tholuck from Göthe’s Doctrine of Colours expresses it: ‘As on the one hand experience is boundless, since it can always discover something new, so are the maxims throughout, since they cannot stiffen nor lose the capability of expanding and embracing a plurality, and even of consuming and losing themselves in a higher view.’

3. As the attenuation of the conception of miracle is connected on the one hand with the attenuation of the doctrine of the person of Christ, so is it on the other hand with the attenuation of the eschatology. Those who, from their narrow dogmatic system, which has been contracted under the influence of philosophy, have rejected the æonian yonder world of space and time, the heavens and the new world-to whom, therefore, the idea of the future transformation of the world is wanting-have with it lost the general Christian view of the universe which alone is suited to prepare the way for the conception of miracle.

4. The human hand is the twofold organ of those activities of the spirit which are exercised and developed in the sphere of ordinary life, and of its dynamico-mysterious activities. It acts as an organ of the psychico-somatic operations of this kind in the function of the magnetizer; as an organ of pneumatico-psychical operations in ordination; lastly, as an organ of the pneumatico-psychical-somatic operations in the whole energy of the life of the God-man in Christian miracles. The physical basis of these operations has in all probability become known by a new discovery. In a work entitled, Ueber die Pacinischen Körperchen an den Nerven des Menschen und der Säugethiere von J. Henle und A. Kölliker, Zurich, bei Meyer und Zeller, 1844 (On the Pacinian Corpuscles in the Nerves of Man and the Mammalia, by J. Henle and A. Kölliker), the important discovery made by Pacini, a physician of Pistola, almost contemporaneously with others, is described and scientifically examined. Pacini discovered first of all, in the sensible nerves of the hand, small elliptical whitish corpuscles; also in the nerves of the soles of the feet. He began to prosecute the discovery in the animal kingdom; but found none in the dromedary, and few in the ox. So far as the discovery has been followed out by the editors of the above-mentioned work, these corpuscles are found (besides in men) in all the domestic mammalia hitherto examined; they are wanting in all birds, amphibia, and fishes. In particular cases some of these corpuscles are found in men, scattered in the nerves of the arms and legs, and in the region of the abdomen. They are found in the greatest number and with the most regular recurrence in the human extremities, and in cats in the diaphragm. In the human extremities, according to the drawing, they adorn the ramifications of the nerves of the skin, as fruit the branches of a tree. This is not the place for a more minute description of the corpuscles. From their general appearance, Pacini has been induced to compare them to the electrical organs of the torpedo, and to describe them as animal magneto-motors, and to refer them as organs to the phenomena of animal magnetism. The authors of the work above quoted make the following remark on Pacini’s discoveries: ‘It must not surprise us if the adherents of animal magnetism, who are not altogether extinct with us, seize hold of these statements with eagerness and turn them to account. Only let us beg them to extend their manipulations to the epigastric region of cats, which, by reason of their ample magnetic apparatus, promise very interesting facts.’ But we need only to recollect the difference between the flesh of cats and human flesh to perceive that this remark is only a joke. This distinction has indeed been firmly maintained in the mediæval fantastic relation between cats and witches, and the new discovery may perhaps contribute to its explanation. It is perfectly natural that the magnetism of the cat should be there for the sphere of the feline vocation, and perhaps serves for the purpose of its holding the magic-bound mouse outside its hole and playing with it. How far below the cat is the torpedo, since with its electricity it immediately strikes and benumbs its victim! This is indeed the rudest first trace of animal magnetism. The magnetizer, on the contrary, stands in the dignity of humanity incalculably higher than the cat in the application of his power, though even in his case the operation on the susceptible is obscure and magical, and the connection of the magnetized with him remains more or less a case of natural attraction (Gebundenheit). Magnetic connections of this kind are indeed, under the more general form, present in life in a thousand different modes, and may form themselves, especially in particular circumstances. But when the same power appears again in the prophetic region, it is transformed by the consecration of the ethical spirit, and operates only as a heavenly power, not disposing to sleep, but awakening,—not bewitching, but setting at liberty. The elementary flash, which even in the life’s manifestation of the torpedo leads to death, is here changed throughout into a vivifying operation of life. The authors of the above-mentioned works find themselves induced to regard these corpuscles ‘as a kind of electrical organs.’ But it is obvious in such a case, that the human electrical organs, in their nature and operation, must contain and exhibit the specifically human in its whole extent. It is in this respect to be carefully noted that these corpuscles are not found in all individuals in equal number and strength. This diversity in their allotment may indeed be considered as the foundation of the most different endowments. As to what concerns furnishing the sole of the human foot with these electrical organs, we are reminded by them not merely of the rhythmical structure of the human body, especially the feet, and the ecstatic dances as they occur among enthusiasts, of the not sinking of somnambulists in water, or of their ability to use the soles of their feet as organs of perception, but also of the ancient miraculous art of healing by means of the soles of the feet. Tacitus, after mentioning the fact that the Emperor Vespasian was applied to by a blind man in Alexandria to cure him by means of his spittle, reports that another sick person (prompted like the former by the god Serapis) requested that he might cure his diseased hand by contact with the sole of his foot; and so it really came to pass. It is unquestionably of great significance that these corpuscles, which have been compared to the Voltaic pile, have been discovered exactly in those parts of the human organism which, from a remote age, have been regarded as the life-points of a mysterious magical power.

5. In reference to the Demonology of the ancients, we have to make the following remarks. The conception of δαίμων or of δαιμόνιον (a word in which the impersonal, substituted for the demon, the demoniacal influence is indicated) embraces generally the representation of spirits belonging to the other world, as far as they make themselves known in this world by operations, fatalities, appearances, and living forms (while altogether opposite, the genius seems to denote the light-image of the other world, the ideal, life-image reflecting itself in the style of the other world, of an appearance of this world, of a man or a place). Also, the peculiar innermost nature of man can consequently come forward demoniacally when it exhibits itself in a dark power which breaks through its everyday life-form, so that the man himself in these moments stands there as a stranger. But when the ideal of his life comes so powerfully into visible manifestation, in this case the conception of demon and genius coincide; although here the genius maintains a peculiar relation to the Spirit of God sending or placing him; the demon, on the contrary, holds a special relation to the breaking of the innermost life through the form of the common life. Now it is not altogether a correct assertion, that the Greeks reckoned among the demons generally only departed human spirits, manes, lemures, and the like. The Greeks had also a superhuman dark kingdom of demons. Göthe has brought this forward in the second part of his Faust, and at the same time given the reason why the Grecian spirit placed these dark spirits, the Lamiæ and Gorgons, in the background of its mythology—‘Phœœbus, beauty’s friend, drives away into holes these births of night, or restrains them.’ As this is the manner of the sunny day, so it was also of the Grecian sense of the Beautiful. Yet certainly the Greeks, ‘especially when they spoke of possessions, connected the notion of departed human souls with the words δαίμων and δαιμόνιον.’ (See Riegler, Leben Jesus Christus, i. 836.) As with the Greeks departed souls predominated among the demons, though superhuman demons were not wanting; so with the Jews the fallen angels predominated among the demons, though there was an intermixture of departed souls. That merely the souls of the giants, which probably from the narrative in Gen. 6 have been considered as the children of fallen angels, and the great transgressors before and immediately after the flood, were in this manner numbered with the angel-demons (see Strauss, Leben Jesu, ii. 12), cannot be admitted, since among the Jews the doctrine of the kingdom of the dead (Isa 14:9), the injunction not to interrogate the dead (Deu 18:11), and the assumption of the possibility of their return, were expressed without that limitation (1Sa 28:8; Isa 29:4; Mat 14:2). That Josephus in his views attached himself to what predominated in the Grecian view, since he speaks of (De Bello Jud. vii. 6, 3) the demons as the spirits of wicked men, proves, at all events, that this theory did not in the least contradict the Jewish consciousness. The opinion that they were the souls of deceased men, has also been expressed by the earliest fathers who have treated of the subject of demons, namely, Justin Martyr and Athenagoras. ‘Tertullian appears to have been the first who took a different view, since he maintained that fallen spirits or devils falsely pretended in possessed persons that they were the souls of men deceased.’ Since among the Greeks it was the popular opinion that ‘the souls of those who died a violent death were demons,’ so Chrysostom endeavoured, especially in order to redeem the honour of the martyrs, to destroy the old popular representation. (See Riegler, i. 850.) The New Testament does not express itself more precisely respecting the nature of demons. That they are considered as belonging to the household of Satan (Mat 12:25), does not in the least decide that it does not include the souls of deceased wicked men among the demons. At all events, according to Joh 8:44, the children of the devil belong as such to his household, although they were found among living men. If we carefully examine the Old Testament view, as it precedes the New Testament, and that of the early Church as connected with it, it is in the highest degree improbable that the Evangelists could mean by demons exclusively either evil angels or wicked deceased men.

6. When the cures of demoniacs as effected by Christ are termed ‘conjurations,’ the difference has not been observed between the agency of a master-mind who effects the expulsion of demons by the energy of his nature with fresh and free words of life, and the agency of a contracted exorcist who is bound to a traditionary hypothesis, to the expectation of the co-operation of higher spirits, and to an unbending formula. Between conjuration and the Christian casting out of devils there is a similar difference, wide as the poles asunder, as between a common anecdote and the facts of the Gospel history.

7. Strauss (ii. 181) collects the outward similarities in the miracles of the sea that are so characteristically different, called by him sea-anecdotes. ‘After they are set in order, each one is connected with the following by a common feature. The narrative of the calling of the fishers of men (Mat 4:18) opens the series; with this the narrative of Peter’s draught of fishes has in common the saying respecting fishers of men, but the fact of the draught of fishes is peculiar to it. This latter recurs in John 21, where, in addition, there is the standing of Jesus on the shore, and the swimming to it of Peter. This standing and swimming appear parallel to the walking on the sea (Mat 14:22, &c.)’ The author has forborne to complete his explanation of the significance of these similarities, as the connection of his work required. A gigantic sea-myth seems to have floated before him—a real sea-serpent—which perhaps was not delineated, because the Galilean sea seemed too small for such a mythic monster of the ocean.

8.⁴⁴ Mainly with reference to Dr F. Krummacher’s review in his ‘Palm-blättern’ (March, 1845) has it become imperatively necessary to discuss the question, whether, according to the rigid supernaturalism of the present day, Christ’s human nature must be regarded as amalgamated with and lost in His divine nature, or whether the modern free-believing theology has a right to assert the distinction of the two natures in Christ, and is justified in indicating the human element as co-operating with the divine in His miracles. Krummacher seems from the first to proceed entirely on the monophysite theory, though quite unconsciously and without any heterodox design. When I speak of the accompaniment of a magnetic fluid (more correctly a super-magnetic power), a spiritual-corporeal affinity (Rapport), and of a plastic human spirit in the miraculous works of Jesus, Krummacher asserts that the immediate and creatively interfering power of God must be entirely passed by. It would be as logically inferred that, by admitting that the Son of God is come in the flesh, the divinity of Christ is denied. Dare we and should we speak of the reality of His flesh and blood, yea, of eating His flesh and blood? It is at least our right, and indeed, even more, our duty, to keep in view the distinctive qualities of His human nature in their union with the great self-determinations of His divine creative power as they appear in the miracles. Or must the article of our faith, that the Word became flesh, remain for all time unopened, undeveloped? Must the human with the divine form a contradiction even in the life of Christ the God-man?

Krummacher is disposed indeed to gather from my representation of the gradual unfolding of Christ’s human nature, that I do not acknowledge His eternal divinity. The way and manner in which he arrives at this result I will here expose, in order to give a sample of his critical report on my theology, and with that I shall here close the discussion. I believe that in my work I have shown that the incarnation of God which was historically fulfilled in Christ Jesus, was an eternal one, of which the future completion in Christ was revealed and objectively presented to the Old Testament seers in the Angel of the Presence. From this Krummacher draws the conclusion (p. 155): ‘Lange’s Christ existed before the foundation of the world only as an idea in God, not as a person with God.’ And further on he identifies this Christ with the Son of God, that he may then say, ‘He knows nothing of the Son of God begotten before all time, as the personal image of God.’ Krummacher is very confident in this assertion, for he goes on to say, ‘The expression of our Lord Himself, “Before Abraham was, I am,” is then to be explained in the following manner: “I was before I was an I (ein Ich), already regarded as the Son of man in God, as becoming the Son of God in the ardent longing of men.” ’ In passing, I must here beg the reviewer to be on his guard against the thoughtless use of marks of quotation. Every reader who is familiar with their use would believe that the reviewer, with the words ‘I was before I was an I,’ &c., had quoted an assertion of mine; but he would be quite mistaken. I beg the courteous reader to read my explanation of the passage quoted by Krummacher, Joh 8:58—an explanation which had been in print long before I had seen the exposition thrust upon me by the reviewer—and then judge how far he proves himself to be a trustworthy reporter of the meaning of my Christology. In my Dogmatics I teach most decidedly the essential Trinity in opposition to the economical and Sabellian. Krummacher himself derives his information from passages in which the eternity of the Son is plainly enough taught (i. 37, ii. 45, &c.) How comes he then to maintain that I know nothing of the eternal Son of God? I regret to say it: it is because he does not distinguish between the idea of the historical, or, generally speaking, of the personal Christ, and the idea of the Son of God. In all my writings I teach and assume the eternity of the Son of God; but with that I do not teach that the personal Christ has existed from all eternity as such. For He it is who in the fulness of time appeared as the God-man, or the Son of man anointed with the fulness of the Godhead. But Krummacher thinks that I must teach this in order to be orthodox, and does not surmise that in doing so I must go further in heterodoxy than the ancient Archimandrite Eutyches. Indeed, in speaking of a personal Christ, any one would be mistaken if he were inclined to designate the pre-historical Christ, who certainly is ideal, as merely ideal, and ignore His substantial existence. This would be sheer Nestorianism, from which I know that I am most decidedly free. Krummacher indeed asserts, that what stands written in Joh 17:5 of the glory of the Lord must be taken, according to my view, in an ideal and not in an ontological sense. But from this he absolves me on the next page by the remark, that the unfolding (werden) of the christological life under the Old Covenant, was, according to me, not merely formal, but at the same time substantial. Or what difference should there still exist between the ontological and the substantial sense, in opposition to the conception of the merely ideal on the one hand, and of the historical on the other? It is only needful to be tolerably familiar with my christological view to find that I speak of the ideal Christ as contradistinguished from the historical; but that I hold the eternal ontological being of Christ with a totally different emphasis from that of those theologians who, after the fashion of the older Dogmatic, see in the Angel of the Presence simply a super-earthly peculiar individuality in which the predicates Angel and Uncreated Essence are to be connected in a mysterious manner. But if Krummacher was not familiar with the distinctions between the substantial and the historical Christ, and between the conceptions Christ and Son of God, he must, as a reporter respecting christological investigations of the present day, fall into misunderstandings and misrepresentations. It is to be wished that he had spared himself the pain which must result from such public unfairness. The details I must reserve for a special answer to his attack. In the meantime I consider him responsible for all the scandal which may arise from the controversy thus forced upon me. I do not mean that I was troubled by his announcement, that he would assist the reader to determine whether ‘Lange’s book is to be deemed a step forwards or backwards in theology.’ I could wish with all calmness, for his sake and my own, and more than all for the sake of the subject which the book advocates in a defective manner, that he would clear up this question. But the conflict in which I find myself engaged with a genial, bold, and long-loved preacher of the Gospel, pains me much, not only on personal considerations, but such as relate to the Church. Yet perhaps this controversy is one of the preliminary skirmishes, occurring here and there, of that warfare which the believing, scientific theology must wage with the mass of monophysitic (abstract supranaturalistic) representations in our Church before the way of the future is again quite cleared for the confession of the Church. May our warfare be carried on Christianly and nobly under the inspection of the Lord, and lead to a blessed result!

1) Buddeus terms miracles ‘operationes, quibus nature leges, ad ordinem et conservationem totius hujus universi spectantes, re vera suspenduntur.’ See Hahn, Lehrb. d. chr. Gl., p. 24.

2) According to Spinoza, God and nature are not two but one; the laws of the latter are the will of the former in its constant realization. Therefore, could anything happen in nature which contradicted its universal laws (as staying the course of the sun, walking on the sea, &c.), this would contradict the nature of God Himself ; and to maintain that God does anything against the laws of nature, is the same as maintaining that God acts contrary to His own nature.’—Strauss, die Christl. Glaubenslehre, i. 229.

3) [See a passage in Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, p. 199, 7th ed. TR.]

4) [See Note 8.]

5) Neander, p. 138. [‘Since Jesus was verily an incarnation of the Godhead, miraculous works in His life were only becoming and natural.’—Young’s Christ of History, p. 267. Similarly, and quite logically, almost all modern defenders of the miracles. This argument is but the more accurate statement and amplification of one of Augustine’s suggestive utterances: ‘ Mirum nonesse debet a Deo factum miraculum; . ... Magis gaudere quam mirari debemur.’—In Joan, Tract. xvii. 1.—ED.]

6) See Hase, Leben Jesu, p. 109; Olshausen, Commentary on the Gospels, iii. 368. The latter appeals to the expression of Augustine—Ipse fecit vinum in nuptiis, qui omni anno hoc facit in vitibus. Ilud autem-non miramur, quia omni anno fit ; assiduitate amisit admirationem.

7) Strauss has justly required for the change of the water into wine at Cana, the factor of the vine; but when he supposes that this vine must be a vegetable one, his thoughts wander among the vineyards of the nature-von, while here we have to consider the action of the vine in the spirit-æon.

8) J. Müller, in his programme De miraculorum Jesu Christi naturé et necessitate, p. 8, &c., impugns the views of the older theologians of the Evangelical Church, according to which the miracles of Christ were deduced from His divine nature. He justly draws attention to the passages in which our Lord appeals to the Father in His performance of miracles in order to impugn the explanation of miracles from a onesided activity of the omnipotence of God in Christ. But when he remarks, ‘neque ad rem quidquam interest horum scriptorum nonnullos humane proxime Christi nature miracula assignare; per communicationem idiomatum enim hujus divine virtutis participem factam illam esse yolunt;’ and further, ‘quod autem miracula factitavit, id ei certo tempore concessum est singulari dei dono, quo ad provinciam Messianam administrandam instructus est,’—he strikes into another direction which has been successfully pursued by Nitzsch, Twesten, Neander, Ullmann, and others, for the solution of the problem of miracles. See Nitzsch, System of Christian Doctrine, p. 83 (Clark) ; Twesten, Dogmatik, vol. i. p. 880; Neander and Ullmann, in the passages quoted above. Also, might there not be a propriety in receiving with Christ a singulare Dei donum? When the author further shows that God stands in presence of nature in absolute majesty and freedom, he has admirably described the principle of miracles ; and it requires only to give prominence to the incarnation of this God, in order to give to the principle described its concrete form. [Scripture gives us to understand that the Spirit is the agent of all divine operations, When, therefore, it is pressed, as in the present day it is too frequently and exclusively pressed, that the miracles were wrought by the Spirit, it should be kept distinctly in-view that this Spirit is the Spirit of Christ Himself, the Spirit proceeding from the Father and from the Son. Correct views of the immediate power by which the miracles of Christ were wrought, introduce into the apologetic argument from miracles a modification which will be felt by any one who undertakes the argument. Very instructive on this point is Owen, On the Spirit, ii. 3, 4—ED.]

9) See Fleck, die Vertheidigung des Christenthums, p. 150; Tacitus, Hist. iv. 81 ; Suetonius, Vesp. vii.

10) The ears appear to have been touched with one hand and the tongue with the other simultaneously; and this operation seems to mark a peculiar influence.

11) [Ewald (Christus, p. 224, 4th ed.) notices in this connection how our Lord sometimes inquired into the symptoms of the bodily disease. All these forms of ‘ mediation’ prove to his mind ‘that His human acting was bound to the universal laws of the divine order, and that this He would in no wise arrogantly violate.’ —ED.]

12) Considering the means of cure objectively, we must at all events distinguish between the animal healing power residing in the saliva and the psychical healing power communicated through the intention of the worker of the miracle, perhaps through His breath. If the ancients, embracing both these elements in their concrete unity, contemplated the miraculous element as the decisive one, it does not follow that they denied the natural one.

13) This narrative gives no support to the supposition of ‘ involuntary healings.’ The passages which Strauss has adduced (Matt. xiv, 36 ; Mark iii. 10, vi. 56 ; Luke vi. 19), with the remark that Jesus in these instances did not expend self-active powers, but must have involuntarily allowed them to have been carried off, expressly assert the contrary. ‘They besought Him that they might touch if it were but the border of His garment ; and as many as touched Him were made whole’ (Mark vi. 56).

14) [This is the idea of Westcott’s suggestive little book, Characteristics of the Gospel Miracles. ‘The miracles of the Gospel are not isolated facts ; they are not vain repetitions. In meaning, as well as in time, they lie between the incarnation and the ascension. . . . Each (kind of miracle) is needful for the complete representation of the life of Christ,’ &c., pp. 6-9. The book is full of most valuable aids towards grasping the miracles as a whole, and is pervaded by the sober and reverent spirit which characterizes all the productions of this useful writer.—ED.]

15) ‘As often as they wished to bring her (the seeress of Prevorst) in magnetic circumstances to a bath, a most wonderful phenomenon appeared,—all her limbs, with her chest and abdomen, were seized with a peculiar jerking motion, with perfect elasticity, which always raised her out of the water.’—Extract from the ‘Schcrin von Prevorst.’ See Tholuck’s Glaubwiirdigheit der evang. Geschichte, p. 100.

16) Strauss (ii. 75) finds, first-of all, in the expressions of Jesus (Matt. ix. 1) a reference to the ‘Jewish’ view, that evil, and especially the sickness of the individual, is the punishment of his sin, His subsequent remark is at variance with this, that Jesus expressly declared of the case proposed to Him (John ix. 1, &c.), that ‘this special evil was not owing to the criminality of the individual, but was founded on higher divine signs.’ Thus the ‘ higher educated’ author of the fourth Gospel seems to have allowed Jesus to reject the former view ; yet, on the other hand, according to John v. 14, ‘infirmity as a punishment of sin’ is announced to the man cured at the pool of Bethesda. But this must relate to ‘sinning generally,’ so that the meaning of Jesus was, that if that man only sinned again generally, he would again be afflicted with disease. The passage in Luke xiii, 1 ought to confirm the view of the connection between sin and misfortune in every individual (whence it would follow, that the eighteen men on whom the tower of Siloam fell, according to the Lord’s views, were all equally guilty). Along with this ‘vulgar Hebrew’ view of sickness and evil, Jesus must have been burdened with the opposite Essene-ebionitish ‘ view,’ according to which the righteous in this won are the suffering, the poor, and the sick. Such are the contradictions which are here cast as reflections on the clear mirror of the ethical consciousness of Jesus.

17) [So Ewald, while he maintains that Jesus satisfied all the deepest, godliest longing in Israel, says (p. 219 of his Geschichte Christus), ‘The kingdom of the perfect, true religion must break the power and the destructive consequences of sin ; but all human ills are so connected with sin, that even those which are bodily only through it become thoroughly dangerous and radically obstinate, and therefore even those are the proper objects of the deeds of might of the genuine King.’—ED.]

18) Cures of the blind are mentioned or narrated in Matt. ix. 27, xii. 22, xv. 30, xx. 380, xxi. 14 ;—of the paralytic, to whom as a particular class the lame and the maimed belong, Matt. iv. 24, viii. 6, ix. 2, xi. 5, xii. 16, xv. 30; Luke vi. 6, xiii. 11; John v. 1;—the healing of the woman with the issue of blood, Matt. ix, 20;—the cure of a man with the dropsy is narrated Luke xiv. 2, Many cures are repeated in the parallel passages.

19) See Matt, viii, 14 ; John iv, 52

20) Matt, viii, 2; Luke xvii, 12.

21) Compare Matt. xviii. 21.

22) Hence tradition has more weighty reason for regarding this Mary as the great sinner (Luke vii. 36-50), than the cireumstance that the woman who anointed the Lord at Bethany is also called Mary. According to Winer, the designation of ‘the woman who was a sinner’ as Mary Magdalene arose from confounding the history in Luke vii. 86 with John xii. 1.

23) That the Lord, by the words (Luke xi. 23), ‘He that is not with Me is against Me,’ &c., designed to point out the cures of the common Jewish exorcists as merely apparent, which rather injured than promoted the kingdom of God, as Neander thinks, is not supported by the connection. For Christ had no conflict with the exorcists, but with the blasphemers who stood before Him. These came against Him as His enemies, as sevenfold possessed, who wished to annihilate His work. The Lord also could not well dispute the genuineness of the cures performed by the Jewish exorcists, as far as they were viewed in their psychical limitation, at the very instant, when He appealed to them.

24) [See Isaac Taylor's Saturday Evening, Essay xv., The Power of Rebuke.—TR.]

25) We can represent to ourselves Christ's agency which changed water into wine in successive stages, From the history of Somnambulism, it is known that in the high degrees of the magnetic rapport, all the sensations and tastes of the magnetizer are repeated in the person who is psychically affected by him. Now at Cana there was no circle of magnetized persons assembled round the Lord, but a circle of souls whom His presence had raised to ecstasy in their festivity. What therefore in the department of magnetism may appear as a fact, might here recur with intensified power, and in a more vitalized form (as, for example, the constrained morbid clairvoyance of the somnambulist in the free healthy clairvoyance of the prophet). When therefore Christ calls forth in Himself the intuition (Anschauung) of wine with fresh creative power, when Christ drinks good wine, the others drink it also by means of the psychical connection. But the company that surrounds the Lord is not a mere circle of passive, receptive beings. His companions are by faith brought into active harmony with Him. As the branches do not merely receive the sap which the vine conveys to them, but form the wine out of it and with it, so these festive guests, at the moment of their union with the Lord, infused all their plastic life-power in order to complete the change. This is the first stage of the immediate operation of Christ. But the second goes into the elements of the beverage which they enjoy. And here we would call to mind the taste of magnetized water, only to indicate again how, in a higher life-circle, the same phenomenon may be repeated in a higher key. ‘The taste of magnetized water,’ says Fr. Fischer (Der Sonambulismus, p. 235), ‘is said to be exceedingly various; sometimes bitter, sometimes sweetish, sometime sourish like Seltzer water, sometimes strong and vinous, sometimes burning, sometimes tart like suphur and ink, sometimes saltish. But it shows a certain constancy in one and the same magnetizer.’

26) It will be evident that the explanation of the miracle here given, refers to the natural explanation which Dr Paulus has given (Leben Jesu, ii. 162). But those who rightly apprehend our explanation, cannot fail to perceive the difference between it and the natural explanation. We regard the miracle of feeding and satisfying in its whole integrity as an operation of the power of Christ, which converts the existing means of feeding into the medium of a divine living power. In that case, the secondary miracle of the overplus is kept in view, and explained as above. We shall notice in the sequel the expressions in the Gospels which, according to Strauss (Leben Jesu, ii. 197), militate against this view.

27) The Evangelist Matthew seems to us to have reported the event in the correct succession of its several parts, since he places the rebuking of the disciples before the stilling of the storm. Mark and Luke adopt the reverse order.

28) Strauss finds in the scene of Jesus sleeping in the storm so remarkable a picture, that he thinks, ‘If it be so, that what in one instance perhaps really happened, in nine instances must be formed from legends, we must be prepared mere rationally for the possibility, that we have here one of these nine instead of that one instance.’ We should not venture nine to one in order to gain a mere ‘possibility’ of winning. And yet the game is a scanty one; the evangelical view can be played without impradence ; a thousand to one may be hazarded for the conviction that here that which is full of meaning (das Sinnvolle) is not legendary but reality; for Christ is unique among millions.

29) According to Exod. xxx. 18, every Israelite was to give a half-shekel for the support of the tabernacle. According to Winer, this half-shekel originally (according to the standard of the sanctuary) was not quite four groschen, Josephus in his time valued the whole shekel at four drachms (above 21 groschen). The half-shekel is demanded in the Gospel as a double drachm ; and two persons would therefore have to pay four drachms or one stater. [About three shillings and threepence of English money, according to Smith’s Dict. of Antig.; but, according to Jahn, two shillings and sevenpence.]

30) Strauss, Leben Jesu, ii. 182.

31) It can hardly be imagined that in the whole circle of the friends of Jesus at Capernaum go small a sum could be wanting; and if it were there, it would no doubt be at His service without the necessity of borrowing. It is below the dignity of New Testament life when one expositor protests that it would be unbecoming our Lord to borrow the amount from His friends, and when another thinks that there is no difficulty in admitting such a thing. It is the same poverty-struck region which a third has before his eyes, who supposes that Christ took possession of the twelve baskets of fragments as His own private property. What a picture! On the one side, the disciples go off with twelve full bread-baskets, and the Master ‘at their head; and, on the other side, he satisfied people depart without carrying away a fragment of the miraculous meal.

32) As Dr Paulus explains the passage (Leben Jesu, I. ii. 17), the exposition of the words, As soon as thou openest the mouth of the fish, thou shalt find a stater, as he has given it, might be accepted without denying the miracle.

33) [‘Not in the display of arbitrary power, for He had silenced the solicitations of the tempter ; not in the pressure of personal need, for this was forgotten at the wellside of Samaria ; but in terrible justice He spoke the words of condemnation. As He entered into Jerusalem, parable and miracle were combined in one work of judgment.’ Westcott, Miracles, p. 24.—ED.]

34) ‘Of figs, which were an important article of food, three kinds were known in the East : (i.) the early fig, which was ripe at the end of June (perhaps still earlier about Jerusalem); (ii.) the summer-fig (Kermoos), which ripens in August ; (iii.) the winterfig, a late Kermoos which ripens after the tree has shed its leaves, and in mild weather hangs till the spring.’—Winer, R. W. B. Mark's expression, οὐ γὰρ ἦν καιρὸς, may mean either it was not the time of the year for figs, or it was not a favourable year for figs. Taken in the former sense, it perhaps intimated not there was no reason to expect figs on the tree, but it was hardly to be expected. At all events, the second construction gives a better sense. Symbolically, all bad trees were punished in this one bad tree, and even the bad season.

35) [Ewald sees something of the same progress in all Christ's works. Chrislus, 226. ED.]

36) Ἤψατο τῆς σοροῦ: He seized, took possession of the bier.

37) From the close connection in which Christ’s state of mind appeared to be with that of the mourners, the meaning of these words (John xi. 38) can be more precisely explained, than would be possible without a reference to this connection.

38) John xxi. 25.

39) Luke iv. 23.

40) Neander, Life of Christ, p. 140 [Bohn].

41) The greatness and importance of this contrast leads to the correct interpretation of John ii. 18, 19, that is, it confirms John's exposition.

42) Compare Matt. xii. 28-42; Luke xi. 29-31; Matt. xvi. 1-4; Mark viii. 12.

43) [Upwards of forty definitions of miracle by the highest authorities are collected in the Appendix to Alexander's Christ and Christianity. More recently the subject has been taken up by Baden Powell (Essays and Reviews); and in answer to him, from different points of view, by Mansel, Heurtley, Lee, and Davies. On the interruption of the regular course of nature by a power extraneous to it, see Mill's Mythicat Interpretation, p. 81, and Bushnell’s Nature and the Supernatural.—ED.]

44) [This note forms the larger portion of the preface to the third volume of the original. ED.]