Miracles of Our Lord | Page 9

interposes, saying that science nowadays will not
permit him to believe in such a being, I answer it is not for him I am
now writing, but for such as have gone through a different course of
thought and experience from his. To him I may be honoured to say a
word some day. I do not think of him now. But to the reader of my
choice I do say that I see no middle course between believing that every
alleviation of pain, every dawning of hope across the troubled
atmosphere of the spirit, every case of growing well again, is the doing

of God, or that there is no God at all--none at least in whom I could
believe. Had Christians been believing in God better, more grandly, the
present phase of unbelief, which no doubt is needful, and must appear
some time in the world's history, would not have appeared in our day.
No doubt it has come when it must, and will vanish when it must; but
those who do believe are more to blame for it, I think, than those who
do not believe. The common kind of belief in God is rationally
untenable. Half to an insensate nature, half to a living God, is a worship
that cannot stand. God is all in all, or no God at all. The man who goes
to church every Sunday, and yet trembles before chance, is a Christian
only because Christ has claimed him; is not a Christian as having
believed in Him. I would not be hard. There are so many degrees in
faith! A man may be on the right track, may be learning of Christ, and
be very poor and weak. But I say there is no standing room, no reality
of reason, between absolute faith and absolute unbelief. Either not a
sparrow falls to the ground without Him, or there is no God, and we are
fatherless children. Those who attempt to live in such a limbo as lies
between the two, are only driven of the wind and tossed.
Has my reader ever known the weariness of suffering, the clouding of
the inner sky, the haunting of spectral shapes, the misery of disordered
laws, when nature is wrong within him, and her music is out of tune
and harsh, when he is shot through with varied griefs and pains, and it
seems as there were no life more in the world, save of misery--"pain,
pain ever, for ever"? Then, surely, he has also known the turn of the
tide, when the pain begins to abate, when the sweet sleep falls upon
soul and body, when a faint hope doubtfully glimmers across the gloom!
Or has he known the sudden waking from sleep and from fever at once,
the consciousness that life is life, that life is the law of things, the
coolness and the gladness, when the garments of pain which, like that
fabled garment of Dejanira, enwrapped and ate into his being, have
folded back from head and heart, and he looks out again once more
new-born? It is God. This is his will, his law of life conquering the law
of death Tell me not of natural laws, as if I were ignorant of them, or
meant to deny them. The question is whether these laws go wheeling
on of themselves in a symmetry of mathematical shapes, or whether
their perfect order, their unbroken certainty of movement, is not the
expression of a perfect intellect informed by a perfect heart. Law is

truth: has it a soul of thought, or has it not? If not, then farewell hope
and love and possible perfection. But for me, I will hope on, strive on,
fight with the invading unbelief; for the horror of being the sport of
insensate law, the more perfect the more terrible, is hell and utter
perdition. If a man tells me that science says God is not a likely being, I
answer, Probably not--such as you, who have given your keen,
admirable, enviable powers to the observation of outer things only, are
capable of supposing him; but that the God I mean may not be the very
heart of the lovely order you see so much better than I, you have given
me no reason to fear. My God may be above and beyond and in all that.
In this matter of healing, then, as in all the miracles, we find Jesus
doing the works of the Father. God is our Saviour: the Son of God
comes healing the sick--doing that, I repeat, before our eyes, which the
Father, for his own reasons, some of which I think I can see well
enough, does from behind the veil of his creation and its laws. The cure
comes by law, comes