120 LECTURES AND ESSAYS fl 



attest that the miracle-worker is a divinely commissioned 

 ambassador of God. Miracles, in short, are, in common 

 with prediction, the criteria of revelation. 



Thus viewed, miracles have merely an apologetic 

 function. And yet it may be questioned whether they 

 have not given far more trouble than assistance to 

 apologetic theology. We propose to use the miracles 

 recorded in Scripture as one link in the proof of the 

 paramount authority of Scripture ; but we are con 

 fronted with the objection that a book relating such 

 occurrences cannot possibly be trustworthy. And as 

 this argument is generally based by recent objectors on 

 the moral, not on the metaphysical, difficulties of a belief 

 in miracle, we can meet the objection fairly only by 

 showing that miracles have more than a mere adventitious 

 importance in Christianity. 



That this is really the case is obvious from a glance 

 at the greatest of all miracles the incarnation and 

 resurrection of our Lord. These are not events of a 

 mere apologetic value, they are the central facts of 

 Christianity. And these events are only the culminating 

 point of a long miraculous history. The miracles of 

 Scripture are not isolated facts but a connected chain 

 running onwards from the fall, and so interwoven with 

 the history of redemption, that that history evacuated of 

 miracles would be absolutely meaningless. Now the 

 current apologetic teaches us only that the scheme of 

 redemption required to be supernaturally made known 

 and attested to men, it takes no account of the fact that 

 redemption was miraculously worked out among men. 

 And hence arises the vast disadvantage that while the 

 idea of the supernatural must always remain the key of 

 our Christian position, which we must defend at all 

 hazards, that idea has on the current view no intrinsic 

 value to correspond to its strategic importance. The 

 fate of the whole citadel depends on a single outwork. 



Let us look a little more closely at the neglected fact 



