  | PAGE | | Introductory | 13 | | The Argument | | | I | | The gradual narrowing of the miraculous element in the Bible by recent discovery and discussion.—The alarm thereby excited in the Church.—The fallacy which generates the fear.—The atheistic conception of nature which generates the fallacy.—The present outgrowing of this conception. | 25 | | II | | | The present net results of the discussion of the miraculous element in the Bible.—Evaporation of the former evidential value of miracles.—Further insistence on this value a logical blunder.—The transfer of miracles from the artillery to the baggage of the Church.—Probability of a further reduction of the list of miracles.—Also of a further transfer of events reputed miraculous to the domain of history. | 37 | | III | | | Arbitrary criticism of the Biblical narratives of the raising of the "dead."—Facts which it ignores.—The subject related to the phenomena of trance, and records of premature burial.—The resuscitation in Elisha's tomb probably historical.—Jesus' raising of the ruler's daughter plainly such a case.—His raising of the widow's son probably such.—The hypothesis that his raising of Lazarus may also have been such critically examined.—The record allows this supposition.—Further considerations favoring it: 1. The supposition threatens no real interest of Christianity.—2. Enhances the character of the act as a work of mercy.—3. Is independent of the belief of the witnesses of the act.—4. Is coherent with the general conception of the healing works of Jesus as wrought by a peculiar psychical power.—Other cases.—The resurrection of Jesus an event in a wholly different order of things.—The practical result of regarding these resuscitations as in the order of nature. | 47 | | IV | | | A clearer conception of miracle approached.—Works of Jesus once reputed miraculous not so reputed now, since not now transcending as once the existing range of knowledge and power.—This transfer of the miraculous to the natural likely to continue.—No hard and fast line between the miraculous and the non-miraculous.—Miracle a provisional word, its application narrowing in the enlarging mastery of the secrets of Nature and of life. | 75 | | V | | | Biblical miracles the effluence of extraordinary lives.—Life the world's magician and miracle-worker; its miracles now termed prodigies.—Miracle the natural product of an extraordinary endowment of life.—Life the ultimate reality.—What any man can achieve is conditioned by the psychical quality of his life.—Nothing more natural, more supernatural, than life.—The derived life of the world filial to the self-existent life of God; "begotten, not made."—Miracle as the product of life, the work of God. | 85 | | VI | | | The question, old and new, now confronting theologians.—Their recent retreat upon the minimum of miracle.—The present conflict of opinion in the Church.—Its turning-point reached in the antipodal turn-about in the treatment of miracles from the old to the new apologetics.—Revision of the traditional idea of the supernatural required for theological readjustment. | 95 | | VII | | | Account to be made of the law of atrophy through disuse.—The virgin birth and the corporeal resurrection of Jesus, the two miracles still insisted on as the irreducible minimum, affected by this law.—The vital truths of the incarnation and immortality independent of these miracles.—These truths now placed on higher ground in a truer conception of the supernatural.—The true supernatural is the spiritual, not the miraculous.—Scepticism bred from the contrary view.—The miracle-narratives, while less evidential for religion, not unimportant for history.—Psychical research a needed auxiliary for the scientific critic of these. | 107 | | VIII | | | The cardinal point in the present discussion the reality not of miracles, but of the supernatural.—Fallacy of pointing to physical events as essential characteristics of supernatural Revelation.—The character of a revelation determined not by its circumstances, but by its contents.—Moral nature supernatural to physical.—Nature a hierarchy of natures.—Supernatural Religion historically attested by the moral development it generates.—Transfer of its distinctive note from moral ideals to physical marvels a costly error.—Jesus' miracles a revelation, of a type common with others before and after.—The unique Revelation of Jesus was in the higher realm of divine ideas and ideals.—These, while unrealized in human life, still exhibit the fact of a supernatural Revelation.—The distinction of natural and supernatural belongs to the period of moral progress up to the spiritual maturity of man in the image of God.—The divine possibilities of humanity, imaged in Jesus, revealed as our inheritance and our prize. | 131 |
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