Miracle, a term commonly applied to certain marvellous works (such as healing the sick, raising the dead, changing of water into wine) ascribed in the Bible to some of the ancient prophets, and to Jesus Christ and his followers. It signifies simply that which is wonderful—a thing or a deed to be wondered at, being derived directly from the Latin miraculum, 'a thing unusual'—an object of wonder or surprise. The same meaning is the governing idea in the term applied in the New Testament to the Christian miracles, teras, 'a marvel,' 'a portent;' besides which, we also find them designated dynameis, 'powers,' with reference to the power residing in the miracle-worker, and sêmeia, 'signs,' with a reference to the character or claims of which they were assumed to be the witnesses or guarantees. Under these different names the one fact recognised is a deed acknowledged by the common judgment of men to exceed man's ordinary powers; in other words, a deed supernatural, beyond the common powers of nature, as these are understood by men.
In the older speculations on the subject, a miracle was generally defined to be a violation or suspension of the order of nature. While, on the one hand, it was argued that such a violation or suspension was absolutely impossible and incredible, it was maintained, on the other, that the Almighty, either by His own immediate agency, or by the agency of others, could interfere with the operation of the laws of nature, in order to secure certain ends which without that interference could not have been secured, and that there was nothing incredible in the idea of a law being suspended by the Person by whom it had been made. The laws of nature and the will or providence of God were, in this view, thus placed in a certain aspect of opposition to each other, at points here and there clashing, and the stronger arbitrarily asserting its superiority. Such a view has, with the advance of philosophical opinion, appeared to many to be inadequate as a theory, and to give an unworthy conception of the Divine character. The great principle of Law, as the highest conception not only of nature, but of Divine Providence, in all its manifestations, has asserted itself more dominantly in the realm of thought, and led to the rejection of the apparently conflicting idea of 'interference,' implied in the old notion of miracle. Order in nature and a just and uncapricious will in God were felt to be first and absolutely necessary principles. The idea of miracle, accordingly, which seems to be now most readily accepted by the advocates of the Christian religion, has its root in this recognised necessity.
All law is regarded as the expression, not of a lifeless force, but of a perfectly wise and just will. All law must develop itself through natural phenomena; but it is not identified with or bound down to any necessary series of these. If we admit the mainspring of the universe to be a living will, then we may admit that the phenomena through which that will, acting in the form of law, expresses itself, may vary without the will varying or the law being broken. We know absolutely nothing of the mode of operation in any recorded miracle; we only see certain results. To affirm that these results are either impossible in themselves, or necessarily violations of natural law, is to pronounce a judgment on imperfect data. We can only say that, under an impulse which we must believe proceeds from the Divine will, in which all law subsists, the phenomena which we have been accustomed to expect have not followed on their ordinary conditions. But from our point of view we cannot affirm that the question as to how this happens is one of interference or violation; it is rather, probably, one of higher and lower action. The miracle may be but the expression of one Divine order and beneficent will in a new shape, the law of a greater freedom, to use the words of Trench, swallowing up the law of a lesser. Nature being but the plastic medium through which God's will is ever manifested to us, and the design of that will being, as it necessarily must be, the good of His creatures, that theory of miracle is certainly most rational which does not represent the law of nature and the will of God as separate and opposing forces, but which represents the Divine will as working out its highest moral ends, not against but through law and order, and evolving from these a new issue, when it has a special beneficent purpose to serve.
The evidence for the Christian miracles is of a twofold kind—external and internal. As alleged facts, they are supposed to rest upon competent testimony, the testimony of eye-witnesses, who were neither deceived themselves, nor had any motive for deceiving others. They occurred not in privacy, but for the most part in the open light of day, amidst the professed enemies of Christ. They were not isolated facts, nor wrought tentatively, or with difficulty, but the repeated, the overflowing expression, as it were, of an apparently supernatural life. The gospel miracles, moreover, are supposed in themselves to be of an obviously Divine character. They are miracles of healing, of beneficence, in which the light equally of the Divine majesty and of the Divine love shines.
Spinoza strongly controverted the possibility of miracles, explaining by natural causes the events recorded as such. The English Deists also rejected them, and explained the tradition of them as due to mistaken allegory, 'enthusiasm,' or even conscious fraud on the part of the narrators. Hume's famous argument was that miracles are incapable of proof, because they rest on testimony, and no testimony can be so strong and convincing as our own experience of the uniformity of nature; this was answered in Campbell's Dissertation on Miracles (1762). The German rationalists of the school of Paulus explained the miracles as exaggerations or misapprehensions of quite ordinary events. Strauss (q.v.) caustically criticised these so-called explanations and brought forward his 'Mythical Theory,' according to which the gospel miracles originated in the fixed conviction that the Messiah would perform certain wonders; and the faithful, intent on seeing in Jesus a complete fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecy, allowed the 'mythopoeic instinct' to invent the fulfilment, and ascribe to Jesus as miracles what were really the symbolisations of abstract ideas. The Positive philosophy expressly excludes miracles; many of the representatives of natural science (Huxley, Tyndall, Spencer) and historical investigators (Buckle, Lecky) treat belief in them as pure superstition.—The literature is very extensive. See the manuals of Dogmatics by Schleiermacher, Rothe, Auberlen, Schenkel, Schweitzer, Weisse, Lipsius; the special German works on miracle by W. Beyschlag (1863), F. Nitzsch (1865), H. Cremer (1865), Flügel (1869), Bender (1871), Lommatzsch on Schleiermacher's conception (1872), J. Kreyher (1880), R. Kübel (1883), and Gloatz (1886); Bushnell's Nature and the Supernatural (New York, 1858); McCosh, The Supernatural in Relation to the Natural (1862); the Duke of Argyll's Reign of Law (1866); and J. Lias, Are Miracles Credible? (1883). See also Trench, Notes on the Miracles (1846); Mozley's admirable Eight Lectures on Miracles (1865); and the expository books on our Lord's miracles by Godet (1867), Steinmeyer (Eng. trans. 1875), Taylor (New York, 1880); and Laidlaw (1890); and for the relation of the scriptural to the ecclesiastical miracles, Conyers Middleton's Free Inquiry (1748) on the one side, and Newman's Two Essays (1870) on the other. Protestants hold that miracles ceased with or soon after the apostolic age; the Catholic Church holds that the gift of miracles is a permanent possession, manifested from time to time. While the scriptural miracles must be accepted without doubt, as resting on Divine faith, the ecclesiastical miracles are not the object of this faith—they must be tested, and Catholics are not bound to believe in any miracle not in Scripture. See CANONISATION, STIGMATISATION, LOURDES, KNOCK, &c., also CONVULSIONARIES; on the evidences generally, the article APOLOGETICS; and for another aspect of miracles, see A. R. Wallace, On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism (1876).