THERE is nothing more characteristic of the instability of modern scholasticism than its effort to find an explanation of the miracles which shall be at once rational and yet consonant with the Nicene definition of the Trinity. The old scholasticism suffered from no such hesitations; its theology was as full-blooded as its manners. It explained the omnipotence of God as the ability of the creator to reverse His own laws, regardless of the fact that such a theory made pandemonium perpetual. It insisted that divine omniscience was inseparable from a knowledge of evil, entirely careless that this made evil eternal; while in making God manlike, instead of man godlike, it circumscribed infinity and clothed Spirit in matter. The reign of harmony, in short, was to be expressed in a paradisiacal condition in which the only consciousness of disorder, evil, and material limitation was to be confined to an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent God!
To any one who questioned all this, the old scholasticism replied that truth was a mystery, discernible only by those participating in that eternal life, which, in turn, could only be enjoyed by those who had experienced death. If, unsatisfied with this answer, curiosity showed an indication to probe the mystery, scholasticism became alarmed. It rang its bell, painted its "sanbenitos," or prepared its branding-irons; while it placed on the statute-books its acts "de heretico comburendo," or such modification of this as the "test" and "corporation" acts. Intolerance, if it had made nothing else in the gospels its own, had at any rate imbibed to the full the argument of the Pharisees, when, unable to shake the evidence of the man born blind, they, to translate the Greek text a little more literally, flung him out.
In spite, however, of this blatant expression of "the countercheck quarrelsome," the cry of the blind man has come echoing down the centuries, and little by little the world too has exclaimed falteringly, "I see" —see something impenetrable to the materialistic gaze of the Aristotelian schoolmen, something undreamed of in the philosophy of Torquemada, of Laud, or even of Cotton Mather, namely, the true meaning of substance; and with that perception the true significance of the miracles stands revealed.
