Father Vaughan on Miracles

New Zealand Tablet, 19 March 1914, Page 13

Father Vaughan on Miracles

Speaking in the East End of London on Sunday, January 23, Father Vaughan said that during the week he had received quite a number of letters from all sorts and conditions of men wanting to know what he thought of magic and miracles. Magic, he thought, except in connection with lantern slides, had best be given a wide berth. It was wicked, as well as stupid, to play with farces over which one had no more control than over the volcanic eruption of Sakurashima. With miracles it was different. They were wrought, when wrought, by the power of God. Man could not draw down a lever and work a miracle. He might be used as an instrument in God's hands for working a miracle, but a miracle always had God for its author, and he might define it as something done which was beyond the range of natural causes. The chief questions put him by his correspondents were two—

(1) Were Miracles Possible ?

and (2) Were" they actual? No sane man, believing in a personal God, could deny the possibility of miracles. God was no constitutional monarch, with limitations to His power. He was Master of His own house, creation, and He made laws of nature, but" was no more subject to them Himself than the father of a family who made for his children rules of conduct was himself bound by them. It was argued by some of his inquirers that miracles were an interference with the regular working of the laws of nature. It was nothing of the kind. Miracles no more interrupted the laws of nature than did the footballer, the golfer, the Alpine climber, or the rower up stream. What man could do, that at least God might accomplish. Miracles did not interfere with the regular working of God's laws any more than sailing in an aeroplane interfered with the laws of gravitation. An asbestos curtain was let down in a Detroit theatre and stopped the onrushing fire: and a blanket which he had helped to hold in slumland broke the fall of a child from the window of a house on fire. Surely what man could do with an asbestos

curtain or a blanket God might accomplish without either by will power. But did miracles really happen? Well, he firmly believed they did, even to-day. Granted God had the power, no one could venture to say He never had the will to make a miracle. It was a question of evidence in each particular instance. What surgeons with the knife, and physicians with their prescriptions, could do for the broken limb or the ailing heart, that God without knife or medicine could do when He willed. Once he was asked if lie believed that Jonah could have been swallowed by a whale, and he had answered that if only evidence was forthcoming he would even believe that Jonah had himself swallowed the whale, and a shoal of other fishes also. That was where the miracle came in. Man could not do what he liked. God could do what He willed—anything that did not involve a contradiction.