The real shortcoming of orthodox Christian teaching has always been the great gulf which the introduction of the supernatural element has placed between theory and practice. Exactly what this means is brought out, with almost startling crudity in an address, recently delivered in Oxford, by the Dean of St. Paul's. Dr. Inge was speaking of miracles, and of miracles more particularly in relation to the decay of faith, and he put his dilemma in his own direct, if somewhat startling way. He described the morning of the resurrection, as the story is told in the Gospels, and he then proceeded to comment on it. as thus: "Having seen all this, would you say, Thank God, my faith is now established on an absolutely sure basis; Christ was certainly God? Or would you feel that somehow these precious doctrines had lost some of their value for you by being reduced to banal, brute fact? If you will face this question fairly, I think it will take you to the heart of the problem about miracles, though not, alas! to the solution of it."
Every one probably will agree that the Dean's comment has brought him no nearer the solution of the question of miracles. The regrettable thing is that it has highly complicated a very simple question. Dr. Inge knows perfectly well the difference between Jesus and Christ, and what is contained in that problem. Again, no one knows better than he does that his audience could not be present in the flesh at the tomb on the resurrection morning, but that they could be present in the spirit, and gain the full understanding of the occasion. Moreover, does he dare to say that what the Greek of the New Testament calls a scientific knowledge of God is well described as a "banal, brute fact"? A fact, Dr. Inge well knows, is a truth, and this being so, the fact of the resurrection is just as much a fact in the twentieth as in the first century, and no more banal and no more brutal to the spiritual understanding of men now than to the spiritual perception of men then. For let the Dean remember this, that the only people to whom the resurrection could ever have appeared as a brute fact were those gross materialists the Roman soldiers, under whose very eyes it took place without their seeing it, or the Pharisees in whose day it took place without their believing it.
Now the truth about the matter is that the fundamental difference between a puzzled faith and a scientific knowledge is the difference between impotence and power, between ignorance and demonstration, and exactly which of these Christ Jesus intended his followers to manifest he made clear in every word of his teaching. He did not say, You shall puzzle over the fact and remain impotent; he said: "If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." He did not say that faith was only faith when it was ignorant: on the contrary, he said, "He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father." The "banal" fact, if Dr. Inge will have it so, is that by means of a perversion of the words translated miracle, people have been educated into regarding a scientific demonstration of the power of Principle as a supernatural display. The "brute" fact, supposing Truth ever to be brutal, is that there is no difference at all between raising the dead, healing the sick, or feeding the multitude in the year 1920 or the year 30. What orthodoxy revolts from is accepting the responsibility for this now as then. Mrs. Eddy puts this very clearly on page 410 of Science and Health, where she says: "The Scriptures say, 'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,' showing that Truth is the actual life of man; but mankind objects to making this teaching practical."
