ABBOTT, EDWIN ABBOTT

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II OUGHT PREPOSSESSION TO INCLUDE MIRACLES? This inferential prepossession, be it noted, relates to spiritual not to material power. The mind looks back to the prophets of Israel promising a future forgiveness, which they could not themselves impart. Then it regards John the Baptist as proclaiming its advent in Jesus. Lastly it is prepossessed with a readiness to believe that Jesus may have felt this power within Himself?this strange faculty of forgiving and of enabling others to forgive. It is divine and may be called supernatural, above our powers. Or it may be called preternatural, beyond our present natural powers and yet not above them. In any case, the power of forgiving sins is not what is commonly called miraculous. Quibble and quarrel as we may about the definitions of miracle, we all recognise the distinction between the supernatural act of instantaneously withering up sin, and the miraculous act of instantaneously withering up a tree. It is very easy to be misty about miracles, with a mistiness of speech resulting (it is always to be hoped) from nothing worse than mistiness in thought. I will do my very best to be clear, at all events in speech. Friends, or critics, have asked me why I am so perverse, and obstinate, and given up to a fixed idea, in rejecting miracles. Do I reject them, they ask, merely as violations of the laws of nature or also as counteractions of the laws of nature ? It is not in either aspect that I reject them. Nor do I profess myself able to reject miracles as a whole in any aspect.The use of abstract terms and general propositions, in connexion with miracles, leads, as it seems to me, sometimes to misunderstanding, sometimes to endless and fruitless controversy, and sometimes to a sort of wriggling, or evasion, t...

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