and clearness facilitating the pursuit and destruction of the foe, then you would hear that the "stars in their courses" fought against Sisera, or that in the day of Beth-horon the Lord Himself sent down hailstones upon the enemy and stopped the sun at the prayer of Joshua:—
"The sun and moon stood still in their habitation;
At the light of thine arrows as they went,
At the shining of thy glittering spear."[1]
All these materials, expressed in terse poetic phrase, you, as a historian, would have to amplify into prose. Is it not easy to see how, in the process, without any fraud or conscious exaggeration on your part, you would transmute the natural into the miraculous?
To go through the whole of the miracles in the Old Testament and to attempt to shew how in almost every case the miraculous part of the story may have crept in without intention to deceive, would be a task far above my powers; and it would require a book not a letter. If you were to study with care the articles in the Encyclopædia Britannica on the books of the Old Testament they would give you a good deal of light on this subject. But the problem is complicated by the fact that the causes that originated the miraculous element are not always the same. For example the seven miracles of Elijah and the fourteen miracles of Elisha (the latter number being exactly the double of the former in order to fulfil the prayer of Elisha for a "twofold" portion of the spirit of his master) cannot be explained in the same way as the miracles of the Wanderings or as those in the life of Samson. The eminent Hebraist to whom we are indebted for the Articles above-mentioned would confer on all students of the Bible a very great benefit, if he would give us a separate treatise on the Old Testament miracles. Meantime I must content myself with shewing how some
- ↑ Habakkuk iii. 11.
