our lord came proclaiming a kingdom of god, a kingdom ordained by god on this earth, the order and beauty of which the unruly and sinful wills of men had deformed, so that disease, and death, and all miseries and disorder, had grown up and destroyed the order of it, and thwarting the perfectly loving will of god.

in asserting this kingdom and this order, our lord claimed (as he must have claimed if indeed he were the son of god) dominion over disease and death. this dominion was lower than that over the human heart and will, but he claimed it as positively. he proved his claim to be good in other ways, but specially for our present purpose by healing the sick, and raising the dead. were these works orderly or disorderly? every one of them seems to me to be the restoring of[233] an order which had been disturbed. they were witnesses for the law of life, faithful and true manifestations of the will of a loving father to his children.

yes, you may say, but he did other miracles besides those of healing. he turned water into wine, stilled the waves, multiplied loaves and fishes. these at any rate were capricious suspensions of natural laws. you say you believe in natural laws which have their ground in god’s will. such laws he suspended or set aside in these cases. now were these suspensions orderly?

i think they were. the natural laws which christ suspended, such as the law of increase, are laws of god. being his laws, they are living and not dead laws, but they are not the highest law; there must be a law of god, a law of his mind, above them, or they would be dead tyrannous rules. christ seems to me to have been asserting the freedom of that law of god by suspending these natural laws, and to have been claiming here again, as part of his and our birthright, dominion over natural laws.

all the other miracles, i believe, stand on the same ground. none have been performed except by men who felt that they were witnessing for god, with glimpses of his order, full of zeal for the triumph of that order in the world, and working as christ worked, in his spirit, and in the name of his father, or of him. if there are any miracles which do not on a fair examination fulfil these conditions—which are such as a[234] loving father educating sons who had strayed from or rebelled against him would not have done—i am quite ready to give them up.