B. CHRIST’S MIRACLES WROUGHT UPON MATERIAL NATURE.

§ 107. These exhibit Supernatural Power most obviously.

We pass now to a consideration of the miracles which Christ wrought upon material nature, in which the supernatural exhibits itself in the highest possible degree, as an intermediate psychical agency is, by the very nature of the case, excluded.

Apart from individual cases, it is certain that a power of controlling nature is one of the marked features of the image of Christ given to us in the evangelical tradition. He had fully impressed men’s minds with a belief of this. And in deciding upon the individual cases themselves, every thing depends upon the conception of Christ’s character as a whole, with which we set out. Were such a narrative of the acts of an ordinary man handed down to us, even though we might be unable to separate the actual course of fact from the subjective dress given to it in the account, we should yet be inclined to suppose that the man had wrought some mighty influences upon the minds of his contemporaries, and that they had involuntarily transferred these to nature, which is so often made the mirror of what passes in the mind of man.

But if we set out in our investigation of the Gospel narrative with a just idea of the specific difference between Christ and any, even the greatest, of mere men; if we set out with a full intuition of the God-Man, we shall find no difficulty whatever in believing that he operated upon the most secret powers of nature as no other could have done, and, by the might of his Divinity, controlled nature in a way which finds no parallel among men.