CHARACTERISTICS OF MIRACLES.

Miracles in the theological sense. — Spiritism does not perform miracles.

— Does God perform miracles?

— The supernatural and the religions.

MIRACLES IN THE THEOLOGICAL SENSE.

— In its etymological acceptation, the word miracle (from mirari, to admire) means: admirable, an extraordinary, surprising thing.

The Academy defined it in this way: An act of divine power contrary to the known laws of Nature.

In its usual acceptation, this word has lost, like so many others, its primitive signification. From the general meaning it had, it became of restricted application to a particular order of facts. In the understanding of the masses, a miracle implies the idea of an extranatural fact; in the theological sense, it is a derogation of the laws of Nature, by means of which God manifests His power. Such, indeed, is the common acceptation, which has become the proper meaning, so that only by comparison and metaphor is the word applied to the ordinary circumstances of life.

One of the characteristics of the miracle properly so called is that it is inexplicable, precisely because it is accomplished with the exclusion of natural laws; so much is this the idea associated with it, that, if a miraculous fact comes to find an explanation, it is said that it no longer constitutes a miracle, however astonishing it may be.

What, for the Church, gives miracles their value is, precisely, their supernatural origin and the impossibility of their being explained; it has so firmly established itself upon this point, that to assimilate miracles to the phenomena of Nature constitutes for it a heresy, an attack against the faith, so much so that it has excommunicated and even burned many people for not having been willing to believe in certain miracles.

Another characteristic of the miracle is that it is unusual, isolated, exceptional; as soon as a phenomenon is reproduced, whether spontaneously or voluntarily, it is subject to a law and, from that moment, whether or not the law is known, there can no longer be any miracle.

— In the eyes of the ignorant, Science performs miracles every day. If a man, who is really dead, were called back to life by divine intervention, there would be a true miracle, since this would be a fact contrary to the laws of Nature. But, if in such a man there were only the appearances of death, if there remained in him a latent vitality and Science, or a magnetic action, succeeded in reanimating him, for enlightened persons there will have occurred a natural phenomenon, but, for the ignorant common people, the fact will pass for miraculous.

Let a physicist, from the midst of certain fields, launch an electric kite and cause the lightning to fall upon a tree, and certainly this new Prometheus will be held to be armed with diabolical power; 3 had Joshua, however, stopped the movement of the Sun, or rather, of the Earth, we would there have the true miracle, inasmuch as no magnetizer exists endowed with enough power to operate such a prodigy.

The centuries of ignorance were fertile in miracles, because everything whose cause was not known was considered supernatural. In proportion as Science revealed new laws, the circle of the marvelous became restricted; but, as Science had not yet explored the whole vast field of Nature, a large part of it remained reserved for the marvelous.

— Expelled from the domain of materiality, by Science, the marvelous entrenched itself in that of spirituality, where it found its last refuge.

Demonstrating that the spiritual element is one of the living forces of Nature, a force that incessantly acts in concurrence with the material force, Spiritism causes those effects that had departed from the roll of natural effects to return to it, because, like the others, such effects too are subject to laws.

If it is expelled from spirituality, the marvelous will no longer have any reason to exist and only then will it be possible to say that the time of miracles has passed. (no. 18.) n SPIRITISM DOES NOT PERFORM MIRACLES.

— Spiritism, then, comes, in its turn, to do what each science did upon its advent: to reveal new laws and to explain, consequently, the phenomena comprised within the jurisdiction of those laws.

These phenomena, it is true, are connected with the existence of the Spirits and with their intervention in the material world, and this is, they say, that in which the supernatural consists; but, then, it would be necessary to prove that the Spirits and their manifestations are contrary to the laws of Nature; that therein there is not, nor can there be, the action of one of those laws.

The Spirit is nothing other than the soul surviving the body; it is the principal being, since it does not die, whereas the body is a simple accessory subject to destruction.

Its existence, therefore, is as natural afterward as during incarnation; it is subject to the laws that govern the spiritual principle, as the body is to those that govern the material principle; 5 but, since these two principles have a necessary affinity, since they react incessantly upon each other, since from their simultaneous action result the movement and the harmony of the whole, it follows that spirituality and materiality are two parts of one and the same whole, the one as natural as the other, the first not being, then, an exception, an anomaly in the order of things.

— During its incarnation, the Spirit acts upon matter by means of its fluidic body or perispirit, the same occurring when it is not incarnated.

As a Spirit and in the measure of its capacities, it does what it did as a man; only, since it no longer has the carnal body for an instrument, it makes use, when necessary, of the material organs of an incarnate being, who comes to be what is called a medium.

It proceeds then like one who, being unable to write by himself, avails himself of a secretary, or who, not knowing a language, has recourse to an interpreter. The secretary and the interpreter are the mediums of an incarnate being, in the same way that the medium is the secretary or the interpreter of a Spirit.

— The medium in which the Spirits act and the modes by which they act no longer being the same as in the state of incarnation, the effects are different, which seem supernatural solely because they are produced with the aid of agents that are not those we make use of; but, since these agents are in Nature and the manifestations occur by virtue of certain laws, there is nothing supernatural, or marvelous.

Before the properties of electricity were known, electrical phenomena passed for prodigies among certain people; once the cause became known, the marvelous disappeared.

The same occurs with the Spiritist phenomena, which are no more aberrant from the natural laws than the electrical, acoustic, luminous, and other phenomena, which served as the foundation for an immensity of superstitious beliefs.

— Nevertheless, it will be said, you admit that a Spirit can lift a table and keep it in space without a point of support; is there not therein a derogation of the law of gravity? — Yes, of the known law; but are all the laws known?

Before the ascensional force of certain gases had been experienced, who would have said that a heavy machine, transporting many men, could triumph over the force of attraction? To the common people, would not this seem marvelous, diabolical?

He who had proposed, a century ago, to transmit a message to 500 leagues away and to receive the reply within a few minutes, would have passed for a madman; if he did it, they would have believed the devil to be at his orders, since, then, only the devil was capable of traveling so fast; today, however, not only is the fact recognized as possible, but it seems most natural.

Why, then, would an unknown fluid lack the property of counterbalancing, in given circumstances, the effect of gravity, as hydrogen counterbalances the weight of the balloon? It is, effectively, what happens, in the case in question.

(The Mediums' Book, 2nd Part, Chap. IV.)

— Since they are within the framework of those of Nature, the Spiritist phenomena have been produced in all times; but, precisely because they could not be studied by the material means at the disposal of common science, they remained much longer than others in the domain of the supernatural, from which Spiritism now draws them.

Based on unexplained appearances, the supernatural leaves free course to the imagination which, in wandering through the unknown, engenders superstitious beliefs. A rational explanation, founded on the laws of Nature, leading man back to the terrain of reality, fixes a stopping point to the wanderings of the imagination and destroys superstitions.

Far from enlarging the domain of the supernatural, Spiritism restricts it down to its extreme limits and snatches away its last refuge.

If it is true that it causes belief in the possibility of some facts, it is no less true that, on the other hand, it prevents belief in various others, because it demonstrates, in the field of spirituality, after the example of Science in that of materiality, what is possible and what is not.

Nevertheless, since it does not nourish the pretension of having said the last word on anything whatsoever, not even on that which is within its competence, it does not present itself as the absolute regulator of the possible and leaves aside the knowledge reserved for the future.

— The Spiritist phenomena consist in the different modes of manifestation of the soul or Spirit, whether during incarnation, or in the state of erraticity.

It is by the manifestations that it produces that the soul reveals its existence, its survival, and its individuality; 3 it is judged by its effects; the cause being natural, the effect is so too.

It is these effects that constitute the special object of the researches and the study of Spiritism, in order to arrive at a knowledge as complete as possible, both of the nature and the attributes of the soul, and of the laws that govern the spiritual principle.

— For those who deny the existence of the independent spiritual principle, who deny, consequently, that of the individual and surviving soul, all Nature is in tangible matter; 2 all the phenomena that concern spirituality are, for these deniers, supernatural and, therefore, chimerical; 3 not admitting the cause, they cannot admit the effects and, when these are evident, they attribute them to the imagination, to illusion, to hallucination, and refuse to delve deeply into them; 4 hence, the preconceived opinion in which they entrench themselves and which renders them incapable of judiciously appreciating Spiritism, because it starts from the principle of negation of everything that is not material.

— From the fact, however, that Spiritism admits the effects, which are a corollary of the existence of the soul, it does not follow that it admits all the effects qualified as marvelous and that it proposes to justify them and give them credit; 2 that it makes itself the champion of all the reveries, of all the utopias, of all the systematic eccentricities, of all the miraculous legends; one would have to know it very little, to think thus.

Its adversaries believe they oppose to it an unanswerable argument, when, after having made erudite researches on the convulsionaries of Saint-Médard, on the fanatics of the Cévennes, or on the religious of Loudun, , they have come to discover evident facts of imposture, which no one contests; but, will these stories be, perchance, the Gospel of Spiritism?

Have its adherents ever denied that charlatanism has exploited some facts to its own profit; that the imagination has created them; that fanaticism has exaggerated them enormously?

It is as solidary with the extravagances committed in its name, as Science is with the abuses of ignorance and true religion with the abuses of fanaticism.

Many critics judge Spiritism by the fairy tales and by the popular legends, fictions of those tales. It would be the same as judging History by historical novels or by tragedies.

— The Spiritist phenomena are most often spontaneous and are produced without any preconceived idea on the part of the persons with whom they occur and who, as a rule, are those who think least about them; 2 there are some which, in certain circumstances, can be provoked by the agents called mediums; 3 in the first case, the medium is unconscious of what is produced through him; in the second, he acts with knowledge of the cause, hence the classification of conscious mediums and unconscious mediums.

These latter are the most numerous, and are frequently found among the most obstinate unbelievers who, thus, practice Spiritism without knowing it, or wishing it.

For this very reason, the spontaneous phenomena are of capital importance, since the good faith of those who obtain them cannot be suspected.

Here occurs what occurs with somnambulism which, in certain individuals, is natural and involuntary, while in others it is provoked by magnetic action. n

But, whether or not these phenomena result from an act of the will, the primary cause is exactly the same and does not depart a single line from the natural laws.

The mediums, therefore, produce absolutely nothing supernatural; consequently, they perform no miracle; 9 the instantaneous cures themselves are no more miraculous than the other effects, given that they result from the action of a fluidic agent, which plays the role of a therapeutic agent, whose properties do not cease to be natural for having been unknown until now.

Wholly improper, then, is the epithet of thaumaturges that criticism ignorant of the principles of Spiritism has given to certain mediums.

The qualification of miracles lent, by comparison, to this kind of phenomena, can only induce error regarding their true character.

— The intervention of occult intelligences in the Spiritist phenomena does not render them more miraculous than all the other phenomena due to invisible agents, because these occult beings that people the spaces are one of the forces of Nature, a force whose action is incessant upon the material world, as much as upon the moral world.

Enlightening us concerning this force, Spiritism affords the elucidation of an immensity of things unexplained and inexplicable by any other means and which, for this reason, passed for prodigies in times gone by; 3 like magnetism, it reveals a law, if not unknown, at least ill understood; or, better said, the effects were known, because they were produced in all times, but the law was not known and it was the ignorance of this that engendered superstition.

This law being known, the marvelous disappears and the phenomena enter into the order of natural things.

This is why the Spiritists perform a miracle when they cause a table to move by itself, or the dead to write, just as the physician performs a miracle when he causes a dying person to revive, or the physicist, when he causes the lightning to fall.

He who claimed, with the aid of this science, to perform miracles would be either ignorant of the subject, or a deceiver of fools.

— Since Spiritism repudiates all pretension to miraculous things, will there be, outside of it, miracles, in the usual acceptation of this word?

Let us say, first of all, that, of the facts reputed miraculous, occurring before the advent of Spiritism and which still occur in the present, the greater part, if not all, find an explanation in the new laws that it came to reveal; these facts, therefore, are comprised, although under another name, in the order of the Spiritist phenomena and, as such, have nothing supernatural about them.

But let it be well understood that we refer to authentic facts and not to those which, under the denomination of miracles, are the product of an unworthy trickery, with the aim of exploiting credulity; nor do we refer to certain legendary facts that may have had, originally, a basis of truth, but which superstition has enlarged to the point of absurdity. It is upon these facts that Spiritism projects light, furnishing means of separating truth from error. DOES GOD PERFORM MIRACLES?

— As for miracles properly so called, God, since nothing is impossible to Him, can perform them. But, does He perform them? Or, in other words, does He derogate the laws that emanated from Himself?

It is not for man to prejudge the acts of the Divinity, nor to subordinate them to the weakness of his understanding. Nevertheless, in the face of divine things, we have, as the criterion of our judgment, the very attributes of God.

To sovereign power He unites sovereign wisdom, whence it must be concluded that He does nothing useless.

Why, then, would He perform miracles? To attest His power, they say; but, does not the power of God manifest itself in a much more imposing manner through the grandiose ensemble of the works of Creation, through the wise foresight that this Creation reveals, both in the most gigantic parts and in the most minute, and through the harmony of the laws that govern the mechanism of the Universe, than through some little and puerile derogations that all the conjurers know how to imitate?

What would be said of a skillful mechanic who, to prove his ability, dismantled a watch constructed by his own hands, a masterpiece of science, in order to show that he can take apart what he had made? Does not his knowledge, on the contrary, stand out much more from the regularity and the precision of the movement of his work?

The question of miracles is not, then, within the jurisdiction of Spiritism; 7 but, considering that God does nothing useless, it emits the following opinion: Miracles not being necessary for the glorification of God, nothing in the Universe is produced outside the scope of the general laws.

God does not perform miracles, because, His laws being, as they are, perfect, it is not necessary for Him to derogate them.

If there are facts that we do not understand, it is because we still lack the necessary knowledge.

— Admitting that God had at some time, for reasons that escape us, accidentally derogated laws established by Him, such laws would no longer be immutable; 2 but, even though such a derogation be possible, one will have, at least, to recognize that He alone, God, disposes of this power; without denying to the Spirit of evil omnipotence, one cannot admit that it is granted to him to undo the divine work, operating, on his side, prodigies capable of seducing even the elect, since this would imply the idea of a power equal to that of God; this is, nevertheless, what they teach.

If Satan has the power to suspend the course of the natural laws, which are the work of God, without the permission of the latter, he is more powerful than God; therefore, God does not possess omnipotence 4 and if, as they claim, He delegates powers to Satan, in order more easily to induce men to evil, He lacks sovereign goodness.

In both cases, there is the negation of one of the attributes without which God would not be God.

Hence the Church distinguishes the good miracles, which proceed from God, from the bad miracles, which proceed from Satan; but, how to differentiate them?

Whether a miracle be satanic or divine, there will always be a derogation of laws emanating solely from God; 8 if an individual is cured by a supposed miracle, whether it be God who operates it, or Satan, the cure will not on that account have failed to occur.

One is compelled to form a very poor idea of human intelligence to claim that such doctrines can be accepted in the present day.

The possibility of some facts considered miraculous being recognized, one must conclude that, whatever be the origin attributed to them, they are natural effects of which disincarnate or incarnate Spirits can make use, as of everything, as of intelligence itself and of the scientific knowledge they may possess, for good or for evil, according as goodness or perversity predominates in them.

Availing himself of the knowledge he may have acquired, a perverse being can do things that pass for prodigies in the eyes of the ignorant; but, when such effects result in some good, it would be illogical to attribute to them a diabolical origin.

— But, religion, they say, rests upon facts that are neither explained, nor explicable.

Unexplained, perhaps; inexplicable, is quite another question.

What does man know of the discoveries and the knowledge that the future holds in reserve for him? Without speaking of the miracle of Creation, the greatest of all without possible contestation, already belonging to the domain of the universal law, do we not see reproduced today, under the empire of magnetism, of somnambulism, of Spiritism, the ecstasies, the visions, the apparitions, the perceptions at a distance, the instantaneous cures, the suspensions, the oral communications and others with the beings of the invisible world, phenomena which have been known since time immemorial, held formerly to be marvelous and which it is presently demonstrated belong to the order of natural things, in accordance with the constitutive law of beings?

The sacred books are full of facts of this kind, qualified as supernatural; but, since others analogous and even more marvelous are found in all the pagan religions of Antiquity, if the veracity of a religion depended on the number and the nature of such facts, one would not be able to say which one ought to prevail. THE SUPERNATURAL AND THE RELIGIONS.

— To claim that the supernatural is the foundation of all religion, that it is the keystone of the Christian edifice, is to sustain a dangerous thesis; 2 to base the truths of Christianity exclusively upon the foundation of the marvelous is to give it a weak foundation, whose stones easily come loose.

This thesis, of which eminent theologians have constituted themselves defenders, leads straight to the conclusion that, in a short time, there will no longer be any religion possible, not even the Christian, once it comes to be demonstrated that what was considered supernatural is natural, seeing that, however many arguments be accumulated, one will not succeed in sustaining the belief that a fact is miraculous, after it has been proven that it is not; 4 now, the proof exists that a fact does not constitute an exception to the natural laws, as soon as it can be explained by those very laws and that, being able to be reproduced through any individual whatsoever, it ceases to be the privilege of the saints.

What religions need is not the supernatural, but the spiritual principle, which they are wrongly accustomed to confuse with the marvelous and without which no religion is possible.

Spiritism considers the Christian religion from a more elevated point; it gives it a more solid base than that of miracles: the immutable laws of God, which both the spiritual principle and the material principle obey; this base defies time and Science, since time and Science will come to sanction it.

God does not become less worthy of our admiration, of our gratitude, of our respect, for not having derogated His laws, grandiose, above all, by the immutability that characterizes them.

The supernatural is not needed, in order that the worship due to Him be rendered to God; is not Nature in itself so imposing, that it dispenses with anything being added to it to prove the supreme power?

The fewer unbelievers will religion encounter, the more reason sanctions it on all points.

Christianity has nothing to lose by such sanction; on the contrary, it has only to gain.

If anything has harmed it in the opinion of many persons, it was precisely the abuse of the supernatural and of the marvelous.

— If we take the word miracle in its etymological acceptation, in the sense of an admirable thing, we shall have miracles incessantly under our eyes; we breathe them in the air and we tread them underfoot, because everything then is a miracle in Nature.

Do they wish to give the people, the ignorant, the poor in spirit an idea of the power of God? Let them show it in the infinite wisdom that presides over everything, in the admirable organism of all that lives, in the fructification of plants, in the appropriation of all the parts of each being to its needs, in accordance with the environment where it is placed to live; 3 let them show them the action of God in the shoot of a shrub, in the flower that blooms, in the Sun that vivifies all; 4 let them show them His goodness in the solicitude that He dispenses to all creatures, however infinitesimal they may be, His foresight, in the reason for being of all things, among which not one useless is counted, in the good that always flows from an apparent and temporary evil.

Let them make them understand, principally, that real evil is the work of man and not of God; 6 let them not seek to terrify them with the picture of eternal punishments, in which they end by no longer believing and which lead them to doubt the goodness of God; rather, let them give them courage, by means of the certainty of being able one day to redeem themselves and to repair the evil they may have committed; 7 let them point out to them the discoveries of Science as revelations of the divine laws and not as works of Satan; 8 let them teach them, finally, to read in the book of Nature, constantly open before them; in that inexhaustible book, on each of whose pages are inscribed the wisdom and the goodness of the Creator; 9 they, then, will understand that a Being so great, who occupies Himself with everything, who watches over everything, who foresees everything, necessarily disposes of the supreme power.

The farmer will see Him, while furrowing his field; and the unfortunate one, in his afflictions, will bless Him saying: If I am unhappy, it is by my own fault.

Then, men will be truly religious, rationally religious, above all, much more than by believing in stones that sweat blood, or in statues that wink their eyes and shed tears. [1]

[In the original (Chap.

I, no. 18.)]

[2] The Mediums' Book, 2nd Part, Chap. V. — Spiritist Review, December 1865: How Spiritism comes without being sought — Young peasant girl, unconscious medium; Idem, August 1865: Father Dégenettes, medium.