The correspondent whose letter was recently published in...

The correspondent whose letter was recently published in your paper seems to have the very haziest idea of what constitutes a miracle. More than this, he seems to think that a miracle is something of the nature of the feats performed by Hindu conjurors; and finally, he seems to regard it as positively outrageous to suppose that there is a God who ever answers prayer. His humor leads him to put it this way: that if he is out of coal and he prays, he will see coal dropping into his cellar, or that if he has no breakfast and he prays, his breakfast will drop through the ceiling. To be quite candid, his idea of prayer is almost as ludicrous as his idea of a miracle, and that is saying a good deal. He reminds one of nothing so much as the elderly lady in the story who, having prayed all night that the mountain opposite her house should be removed, got up in the morning and pulled up the blind with the remark, "I knew it wouldn't be." At the same time, the question of what constitutes a miracle is a distinctly interesting one, and perhaps those of your readers who do not think it consists of automatic supernatural deliveries of coal or bacon, may be intelligently interested in the matter.

The word miracle is derived, of course, from the Latin miraculum, a word which means simply "wonder," and which was adopted by the pagan philosophers to denote their experiments. It had not, until such a meaning was foisted on to it, any supernatural significance, and it never played any part in theology until its first appearance in the later writings of Jerome. Its introduction came about in this way:—

In the Greek Testament there are two words which in the King James version are translated "miracle." The first is dunamis, which means simply an "act of power"; the second, semeion, which means simply a "sign." These are common words in the New Testament, and are by no means always translated "miracle," even by the King James revisers. Sometimes, for instance, as in the famous passage in the last chapter of Mark, the word semeion is translated "sign,"—And these signs [not miracles] shall follow them that believe;" and sometimes the word dunamis is translated "power,"—"And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias." As a matter of fact, dunamis is translated not only "power" and "miracle," but "authority" and even "meaning"; while semeion is translated not only "miracle" and "sign," but also "portent." It is clear, therefore, that the rendering of miracle is purely arbitrary.

Now when Jerome was making the great translation known as the Vulgate, he retained the normal meaning of the Greek text in the Latin words signis and virtus. Later, certainly, he made use, in other writings, of the Latin word miraculum, or wonder, but that was already in the fifth century. Much had happened in the interim. Constantine had taken the Christian church under his protection. No longer was that religion confined to the shops of the cobblers and the wooldressers; it had infected the legionaries and spread to the patricians. The curious thing, however, was that the healing of disease as a sign or act of power was steadily disappearing. In the first three centuries it had been commonly alluded to in the writings of Polycarp and Justin Martyr; of Irenæus, of Tertullian, and of Clement of Alexandria; of Origen and Lactantius. Now there was a significant silence. Still, even then it was monastery to which the sick naturally turned. The guestern house, the hospice or hostel, was always open to them. It is from this we arrive at the English term hospital and the French Hotel Dieu. Gradually but quite steadily the separation widened; the hotel was built in one street, the Hotel Dieu in another; the hostel and the hospital became vastly different in their functions. The church had found the divine command to preach the gospel easier to obey than the corollary to heal the sick, but it still held the medical profession in its grasp, and when Henry VIII was king, every physician was compelled to pass an examination before the bishop of the diocese. By this time there was no pretense of Christian healing. It was healing by tying red rags to bedposts or dosing patients with powdered crickets. Unable to account for the awkward texts in the Bible, the church had surmounted the difficulty by teaching that Jesus was God, and the act of power, the sign or miracle, entirely supernatural. The remarkable part of all this was that the laymen had got so used to permitting the churches to think for them without question, that they accepted this view of healing as contentedly as they did the geography of flat earth or the astromony of a circling sun. The physician almost as suspect as the philosopher, and the argument of the rack and the stake kept both in their right place. So acute did the mesmerism become that, late in the nineteenth century, an unbeliever like David Hume could seriously define a miracle as a violation of a natural law by a divine interposition of the Deity.

That was too much for the colossal common sense of Thomas Huxley. A law, he grimly explained to Hume, which had been violated, had been proved to be not a law; that was all about it. If I met a centaur in Piccadilly, he said, I should not shout miracle; I should realize that my views on anatomy were in need of correction. If I saw a lump of lead suspended in the air without support, I should not exclaim supernatural; I should conclude I was in the presence, not of a violated law, but of a hitherto unsuspected law, and endeavor to find the explanation. This was precisely what Mrs. Eddy had already done, when healed of the effects of an accident regarded by her physician as hopeless. "I knew," she writes on page 109 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," "the Principle of all harmonious Mind-action to be God, and that cures were produced in primitive Christian healing by holy, uplifting faith; but I must know the Science of healing, and I won my way to absolute conclusions through divine revelation, reason, and demonstration."

Never once in the whole course of the New Testament record did Jesus lay claim to do a miracle in a supernatural sense any more than to be the Son of God; he speaks of "my Father, and your Father," and he did teach humanity to pray, "Our Father which art in heaven." Just so he declared that "these signs shall follow them that believe," and "he that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also." Thus he made the miracle not supernatural, but in the words of Mrs. Eddy, "divinely natural" (Science and Health, p. 591 ).

What, to a race of shepherds and fishermen brought up in the dense materiality of the Jewish faith, would the miracle have been but an act of power? What, to the educated materialism of the scribes and Pharisees, would it have been but a sign of the truth of the fulfilment of the law? Jesus came, preaching, on the hillsides of Galilee and in the cities of Judæa, the gospel of good news of the new commandment, and when the sensuality and animality of his hearers shrank from the very spirituality of his theology, or doctrine, he fell back on the miracle or proof, declaring if they could not accept this gospel for the word's sake, they must accept it "for the very works' sake." Thus he made the miracle the object-lesson of Christianity, not only in the healing of sickness, but in the overcoming of sorrow; not merely in dominion over matter, but in the destruction of sin. "Now, as then," Mrs. Eddy writes, "signs and wonders are wrought in the metaphysical healing of physical disease; but these signs are only to demonstrate its divine origin,—to attest the reality of the higher mission of the Christ-power to take away the sins of the world" (Science and Health, p. 150 ).