That large portion of the Gospels, the miracles, is scarcely worth a thought from M. Renan. He dismisses the whole question of miracles with a _bon mot_. 'Many people followed Jesus into the desert. Thanks to their extreme frugality, they lived there. They naturally believed they saw in that a miracle.' Now is not that wonderful! The circumstantial relation of the miraculous feeding is supposed to be satisfactorily explained by people 'naturally believing' that _frugality_ was 'a miracle'! But the great miracle of all, the miracle which seals the story, which gives ground of hope and faith to all Christian men, that miracle, without which they have always felt the Gospel would be preached in vain, that grand consummating and awful miracle, which flashed brightness into the sepulchre, which shot the light of immortality athwart the darkness of Death, and gave mortal man a sure grasp on immortality, that great crowning miracle, the resurrection of our Lord, on which so much depended, which so many jealous eyes were watching, which was so early asserted on the very spot where it claims to have occurred--this M. Renan treats as unworthy serious refutation. It is not even necessary to try to disprove it. It is simply sufficient for him to mention 'the strong _imagination_ of Mary Magdalene,' and to exclaim so _beautifully_!--'Divine power of love, sacred moments in which the passion of a hallucinated woman gives to the world a resurrected God!'
There it is! The _doctrine_ of the resurrection, and all that clings around it for humanity, the doctrine preached always as one of the foundations of the faith ('because he preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection'), and the _fact_ of the resurrection, the fact always put forth as the clinching argument, the justification of the whole story, thrown into the face of Jew and Greek as a perpetual challenge--this doctrine and this fact are disposed of by a bit of sickly sentiment!
Now, this sort of thing may be very rhetorical, and very beautiful, when done up in approved, sentimental French, but it is certainly neither logical nor philosophical. We have a right to insist that M. Renan shall come with no theory which compels him to reject half the facts unexamined, and to garble and misuse half the rest. Those facts stand on the same ground as all the others. The same authority which tells us that Christ lived at Nazareth, tells us also that He fed five thousand with five loaves and two small fishes. M. Renan accepts the first statement, without examination, and denies the second, without examination. He does this because he has made up his mind beforehand that _prima facie_ a miracle is impossible. But that carries us out of the line of historical investigation altogether. That is a question of metaphysics. M. Renan's decision of the question is not admitted by an means universally, not even frequently. The truer decision as well as the more philosophical is that, _prima facie, all things are possible_, except contradictions.