Occasional Papers: Selected from the Guardian, the Times, and the Saturday Review, 1846-1890, Vol. 2Church, R. W. (Richard William)
Religion
Occasional Papers: Selected from the Guardian, the Times, and the Saturday Review, 1846-1890, Vol. 2
Church, R. W. (Richard William)
Christianity; Church and state -- Great Britain; Great Britain -- Church history -- 19th century
It is evident that the effect which the visible order of nature
has upon some minds is, that as soon as they realise what a
miracle is, they are stopped by what appears to them a simple
sense of its impossibility. So long as they only believe by habit
and education, they accept a miracle without difficulty, because
they do not realise it as an event which actually took place in
the world; the alteration of the face of the world, and the whole
growth of intervening history, throw the miracles of the Gospel
into a remote perspective in which they are rather seen as a
picture than real occurrences. But as soon as they see that, if
these miracles are true, they once really happened, what they feel
then is the apparent sense of their impossibility. It is not a
question of evidence with them: when they realise, e.g., that
our Lord's resurrection, if true, was a visible fact or
occurrence, they have the seeming certain perception that it is an
impossible occurrence. "I cannot," a person says to himself in
effect, "tear myself from the type of experience and join myself
to another. I cannot quit order and law for what is eccentric.
There is a repulsion between such facts and my belief as strong as
that between physical substances. In the mere effort to conceive
these amazing scenes as real ones, I fall back upon myself and
upon that type of reality which the order of nature has impressed
upon me."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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