[Selected from RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, D.D.]
The docetic view of the person of Christ—which conceives of his body as permanently exempt from the law of gravitation, and in this way explains the miracle — is a hard and mechanical view, which places the seat of the miracle in the waters rendered solid under his feet. Rather was it the will of Christ which bore his feet triumphantly over those waters; even as it was the will of Peter — that will, indeed, made in the highest degree active and potential by faith in the Son of God — which should in like manner have enabled him to walk on the great deep, and, though with partial and transient failure, did so enable him. It has been already observed that the miracle, according to its true idea, is not the violation, nor yet the suspension of law, but the incoming of a higher law, as of a spiritual in the midst of natural laws, and the momentary assertion, for that higher law, of the predominance which it was intended to have—and but for man's fall it would always have had—over the lower; and with this, a prophetic anticipation of the abiding prevalence which it shall one day recover. Exactly thus was there here a sign of the lordship of man's will, when that will is in absolute harmony with God's will, over external nature.
In regard to this very law of gravitation, a feeble and (for the most part) unconsciously-possessed remnant of his power survives to man in the well-attested fact that his body is lighter when he is awake than sleeping,—a fact which every nurse who has carried a child can attest. From this we conclude that the human consciousness, as an inner centre, works as an opposing force to the attraction of the earth and the centripetal force of gravity, however unable now to overbear it.
