NATURALNESS OF THE SUPERNATURAL.
THE common ground taken by skeptics in reference to the Christian religion is, that Christianity is unreasonable because it teaches the supernatural. And the doubts that come unforbidden to Christians spring chiefly from the supernatural features of Christianity. Of course there must be something mysterious about the supernatural, but yet this mysteriousness may not at all diminish its reasonableness. On the contrary, the supernatural in Christianity may be, and is, one of the most philosophical and reasonable things in the world. For illustration, let us suppose that all the creatures which God has made had been gifted with reason and intelligence, and, if you please, with a language common to all. An oyster lies in the depth of the ocean, so grown to a rock that it cannot possibly liberate itself. All around it are its companions, rock-bound like itself. From their birth they have never moved from their place, and we will suppose that they have never seen such action. It is, therefore, natural to them to live without power of locomotion. Suppose now that it were to be told those oysters that there were elsewhere other animals much larger than themselves that lived wholly out of water, and were able to move about from place to place for great distances.149 The oyster replies, “I cannot believe this. It is natural for us to live here in the water, and firmly fastened to the rock, and it would be supernatural for an animal to live out of the water, and to move about here and there, and it is unreasonable, because supernatural.” But then we know that whilst it would be supernatural to an oyster to do so, it is perfectly natural to an ox. Again, suppose that an ox, which had never seen anything of the kind, were told that there were goodly sized animals able to rise from the ground by their own efforts, ascending to great hight in the air, where they moved about at their pleasure, as an ox may move upon the ground. The ox would reply that this would be supernatural, and therefore unreasonable. He would say, “When I leap into the air I immediately fall back again to the ground, through the laws of attraction, and to suppose that an animal having weight could arise and remain suspended in the air would be to believe in the supernatural.” But though supernatural to an ox to do so, it is perfectly natural to a bird to thus fly through the air. In other words, an ox can do naturally what would be supernatural to an oyster, and a bird can do naturally what would be supernatural to an ox. Let us go a step higher. Man is created a grade above the ox. Suppose it were told an ox that a man can talk with his fellow-men three thousand miles away. The ox replies, “This would be supernatural. I have heard the voice of men, and their voices are no louder than mine, and I make myself heard only a comparatively short distance.” He sees a man sit down to a telegraph table, who makes a motion with his fingers, and the ox hears a slight sound, and says, “I can hardly hear that sound three rods away, and surely one three thousand miles away can hear nothing of this.” But then that man is talking intelligibly to his friend three thousand miles away, and he is doing this naturally, though it would be supernatural to an ox to do so. Thus step by step we have seen that what is perfectly natural to an animal of one grade is supernatural to an animal of a grade below. Let us go one step further. If God be only as much superior to us as an ox to an oyster, then those things which belong to his superiority must, in the nature of the case, be supernatural to us; and it is just as reasonable in us to believe in these things of God which are supernatural to us as it is for us to believe that an ox may be supernatural to an oyster, or ourselves to an ox. Indeed, we would have the best of reason for distrusting the superiority of God, if his works were not supernatural as compared to ours. Take the case of Thomas. He doubted the physical presence of Christ in that room, because, the doors being closed, he thought a physical body could not enter. And this would have been true of a physical body controlled by a human soul. But then it might be as natural for a superior soul, as that of Christ, to have taken its physical body through those closed doors, as it would be for Moses to take his physical body through an open door. What would be supernatural to a spirit of the grade of Thomas might be perfectly natural to a spirit a grade higher. Thus the supernatural of Christianity becomes perfectly natural. We have been led to this train of thoughts by a sentence in the Philosophy of Salvation, “Is there anything unnatural in the supernaturalness of Christianity?”—Exchange.