MIRACLE 



MIRAGE 



227 



certain results. To affirm that these results are 

 either impossible in themselves, or necessarily viola- 

 tions of natural law, is to pronounce a judgment on 

 imperfect data. We can only say that, under an 

 impulse which we must lielieve proceeds from the 

 Divine will, in which all law subsists, the phenomena 

 which we have l>een accustomed to expect have not 

 followed on their ordinary conditions. But from 

 our point of view we cannot affirm that the question 

 as to /('/ this happens is one of interference or 

 violation ; it is rather, probably, one of higher and 

 lower action. The miracle may be but the expres- 

 sion of one Divine order and beneficent will in a new 

 shape, the law of a greater freedom, to use the 

 words of Trench, swallowing up the law of a lesser. 

 Nature being but the plastic medium through 

 which God's will is ever manifested to us, and the 

 design of that will lieing, as it necessarily must be, 

 the good of His creatures, that theory of miracle is 

 certainly most rational which does not represent 

 the law of nature and the will of God as separate 

 and op|King forces, but which represents the Divine 

 will as working out its highest moral ends, not 

 against hut through law and order, and evolving 

 from these a new issue, when it has a special bene- 

 ficent purjMise to serve. 



The evidence for the Christian miracles is of a 

 twofold kind external and internal. As alleged 

 facto, they are sup|x>seil to rest upon competent 

 testimony, the testimony of eye-witnesses, who 

 were neither deceived themselves, nor had any 

 motive for deceiving others. They occurred not in 

 privacy, but for the most part in the open light 

 of day, amidst the professed enemies of Christ. 

 They were not isolated facts, nor wrought ten- 

 tatively, or with difficulty, but the repeated, the 

 overflowing expression, as it were, of an apparently 

 supernatural life. The gospel miracles, moreover, 

 are supposed in themselves to l>e of an obviously 

 Divine character. They are miracles of healing, 

 of beneficence, in which the light equally of the 

 Divine majesty and of the Divine love shines. 



Spinoza strongly controverted the possibility of miracles, 

 explaining by natural causes the events recorded as such. 

 The English Deists also rejected them, and explained the 

 tradition of them as due to mistaken allegory, ' enthusi- 

 asm,' or even conscious fraud on the part of the narrators. 

 Home's famous argument was that miracles are incap- 

 able of proof, because they rest on testimony, and no 

 testimony can be so strung and convinc.ng as our own 

 experience of the uniformity of nature ; this was 

 answered in Campbell's Dutertation on Mirarln ( 1702 ). 

 The German rationalists of the school of Paiilus explained 

 the miracles as exaggerations or misapprehensions of 

 quite ordinary events. Strauss (q.v.) caustically criti- 

 cised these so-called explanations and brought forward his 

 ' Mythical Theory,' according to which the gospel miracles 

 originated in the fixed conviction that the Mruuh would 

 perform certain wonders ; and the faithful, intent on see- 

 ing in Jesus a complete fulfilment of the Old Testament 

 prophecy, allowed the ' mythopceic instinct ' to invent the 

 fulHhncnt,arid ascribe to Jesus as miracles what were really 

 the symbolisations of abstract ideas. The Positive philo- 

 sophy expressly excludes miracles, many of the representa- 

 tives of natural science (Huxley, Tyndall, Spencer) and 

 historical investigators (Ruckle, Lecky) treat belief in 

 them as pure superstition. The literature is very exten- 

 sive. See the manuals of Dogmatics by Schleiermacher, 

 Rothe, Auberlen, Schenkel, .Schweitzer, \Veisae, Lipsius ; ! 

 the special German works on miracle by W. lieyschlag 

 (1863), F. Nitzsch (1865), H. Cremer (1865), Fliigel 

 (1869), Bender ( 1871 ), Lommatzsch on Schleiennacher's 

 conception (1872), J. Kreyher (1880), K. Kubel (1883), 

 and Uloatz ( 18Hli ) ; Bushnell's Nature and the Super- 

 natural ( New York, 1858); M'Cosh, The Supernatural 

 in gelation to the Natural ( 1862 ) ; the Duke of Argyll's 

 Rtvinnf La\c(\W>\; andJ. Lias, An Mirai-les Credible' 

 (1883 ). See also Trench, Note* on the Miracle* ( 1846 ) ; 

 Mozley" admirable Eiyht Lectures on .Miracles (1865); 

 and the expository books on our Lord's miracles by Godet 

 (1867), Stein merer (Eng. trani. 1875), Taylor (New York, 



1880) ; and Laidlaw (1890); and for the relation of the 

 scriptural to the ecclesiastical miracles, Conyers Middle- 

 ton s Free Inquiry ( 1748 1 on the one side, and Newman's 

 Tifo Essays (1870) on the other. Protestants hold that 

 miracles ceased with or soon after the apostolic age ; 

 the Catholic Church holds that the gift of miracles is 

 a pernianriit possession, manifested from time to time. 

 While the scriptural mirac es must be accepted without 

 doubt, as resting on Divine faith, the ecclesiastical 

 miracles are not the object of this faith they must be 

 tested, and Catholics are not bound to believe in any 

 miracle not in Scripture. See CANONISATION, STIGJIATI- 

 SATION, LOURDES, KNOCK, &c., also CONVL-LSIONARIES ; 

 on the evidences generally, the article APOLOGETICS ; and 

 for another aspect of miracles, see A. R. Wallace, On 

 Miraclei and Modern Spiritualism (1876). 



Miracle Plays. See MYSTERIES. 



Mirage. The density of the air generally 

 diminishes with the height ; rays of light proceed- 

 ing obliquely upwards from an object then become 

 more and more nearly horizontal, but generally 

 pass away into space. Assume the density to 

 diminish with the height with unusual rapidity, 

 as when the air is cooler the nearer it is to the 

 earth ; the obliquely ascending rays may become 

 quite horizontal and then bend down towards the 

 earth, reaching it at a distant point. The observer 

 at that point sees distant objects at an unusual 

 elevation, or sees above the true horizon erect 

 images of objects which may or may not be beyond 

 the horizon. This is what the sailors generally 

 call looming, and it causes us sometimes to see 

 distant coasts with unusual distinctness, or to see 

 from a mountain top a double horizon, such as is 

 regularly seen in the autumn mornings from the 

 Colorado foot-hills across the prairies. If the layer 

 of air near the earth, say 50 or 100 feet thick, lie 

 uniformly dense, as in the cold air over a frozen, 

 sea, and a warmer stratum lie above it in which, 

 the density rapidly diminishes, so that the rays 

 are brought back to the earth as above, we find, 

 on tracing the path of the rays reaching the 

 olwerver from the top and the bottom of the 

 distant object respectively, that these rays have 

 crossed one another in the hot stratum ; the 

 olwerver therefore seems to see the object suspended 

 in the air, magnified and upside down ; and this may 

 happen while the observer sees the object itself by 

 direct vision through the lower air. An intermedi- 

 ate stratum between a cold ground-stratum and a 

 warm upper stratum gives nse to more than one 

 image, inverted or erect, or both, according to 

 positions. In the mirage of the Sahara and other 

 arid deserts the conditions are reversed ; the air is 

 hottest nearest the hot sand ; skylight rays descend- 

 ing become bent upwards ; the eye receives an 

 impression resembling that produced by the re- 

 flection of skylight from water ; the illusion is 

 rendered more perfect by the flickering due to 

 convection currents, which causes an appearance 

 like a breeze playing over the illusory water. 



The phenomena of mirage are frequently very 

 strange and complicated, the images being often 

 much distorted and magnified, and in some in- 

 stances occurring at a considerable distance from 

 the object, as in the case of a tower or church seen 

 over the sea, or a vessel over dry land, &c. Loom- 

 ing is very frequently observed at sea, and a most 

 remarkable case of this sort occurred on the 26th 

 of July 1798, at Hastings. From this place the 

 French coast is 50 miles distant ; yet from the 

 seaside the whole coast of France from Calais to 

 near Dieppe was distinctly visible, and continued 

 so for three hours. In the Arctic regions it is no 

 uncommon occurrence for whale-fishers to discover 

 the proximity of other ships by means of their 

 images seen elevated in the air, though the ships 

 themselves may be below the horizon. Generally, 



