Very emphatically what has just been said about nature or God being law-free, or about _the_ law being infinite, or not analogous in form or substance, in spirit or letter, to any thing in positive knowledge, is no argument for the Jonah story or even for the miracle of the wine at Cana's wedding feast; and yet time and again people who apparently should have done enough thinking to know better, to the great satisfaction of thousands have used the infinity of [p.053] nature's or God's lawfulness, which is to say the only partial and tentative character of all human knowledge of law, as a clinching proof of all the miracles in the Bible. Can they not see that like what is lawless in general, the miraculous must be in the premises only relative to the experience of the time? Even chance is not less so. The spiritual meaning of those miracles may persist, for the miraculous we must always have with us; but if even our relative, imperfect knowledge stands for anything, if it be even a tentative knowledge, a working standpoint, the literal truth of most, or even all of them, disappeared long ago. Miracles, like laws, come and go; only the miraculous, like _the_ law, goes on forever.
And this leads to something else, to something also very common, perhaps the reverse of the foregoing. With what an unaccountable delight many of us have accepted naturalistic explanations, for example, of the sun standing still, or of the retreat of the waters of the Red Sea, or of the Immaculate Conception, or of any of the many other marvels in either the Old or the New Testament, and have thought that so our old beliefs are to be preserved. I have myself heard honest and earnest men, even members of an academic community, appeal to parthenogenesis as a fact in nature which would at least make the miracle of Christ's birth scientifically plausible as well as spiritually significant; but such an appeal, besides being, in my opinion, positively irreverent, is as blind religiously as it is ignorant scientifically. Cannot such men appreciate, and cannot all others who do as they do also appreciate the fact that naturalistic explanation of [p.054] any miracle, if really a genuine explanation, may prove the fact, but must in just so far destroy, I do not say the miraculous, which is indestructible, but the particular miracle?