And Moses answered and said, But, behold, they will not believe me, nor hearken unto my voice: for they will say, The Lord hath not appeared unto thee. And the Lord said unto him, What is that in thine hand? And he said, A rod. And he said, Cast it on the ground. And he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it. And the Lord said unto Moses, Put forth thine hand, and take it by the tail. And he put forth his hand, and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand: That they may believe that the Lord God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath appeared unto thee. Even in the wildest flights of his fancy the common man is almost always primarily interested in the prosaic consequences. If he believes in fairies he is not likely [p119] to imagine them as spirits inhabiting a world apart, but as little people who do things which affect his own affairs. The common man is an unconscious pragmatist: he believes because he is satisfied that his beliefs change the course of events. He would not be inspired to worship a god who merely contemplates the universe, or a god who created it once, and then rested, while its destiny unfolds itself inexorably. To the plain people religion is not disinterested speculation but a very practical matter. It is concerned with their well-being in this world and in an equally concrete world hereafter. They have wanted to know the will of God because they had to know it if they were to put themselves right with the king of creation. Those who professed to know God’s will had to demonstrate that they knew it. This was the function of miracles. They were tangible evidence that the religious teacher had a true commission. “Then those men, when they had seen the miracle (of the loaves and the fishes) that Jesus did, said, This is of a truth that prophet that should come into the world.” When Jesus raised the dead man at the gate of the city of Nain, “there came a fear on all: and they glorified God, saying, That a great prophet is risen up among us; and, That God hath visited his people.” The most authoritative Catholic theologians teach that miracles “are not wrought to show the internal truth of the doctrines, but only to give _manifest_ reasons why we should accept the doctrines.” They are “essentially an appeal to knowledge,” demonstrations, one might almost say divine experiments, by which men are enabled to know the glory and the providence of God. [p120]