In
Holy Writ the Reformers found full authority for believing in the
existence of evil spirits, possession by devils, witchcraft, and divine
and diabolic interference by way of miracle generally; and they
consequently acknowledged the possibility of the repetition of such
phenomena in the times in which they lived--a position more tenable,
perhaps, than that of modern orthodoxy, that accepts without murmur all
the supernatural events recorded in the Bible, and utterly rejects all
subsequent relations of a similar nature, however well authenticated.
The Reformers believed unswervingly in the truth of the Biblical
accounts of miracles, and that what God had once permitted to take place
might and would be repeated in case of serious necessity. But they found
it utterly impossible to accept the puerile and meaningless miracles
perpetrated under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church as evidence
of divine interference; and they had not travelled far enough upon the
road towards rationalism to be able to reject them, one and all, as in
their very nature impossible. The consequence of this was one of those
compromises which we so often meet with in the history of the changes of
opinion effected by the Reformation. Only those particular miracles that
were indisputably demonstrated to be impostures--and there were plenty
of them, such as the Rood of Boxley[1]--were treated as such by them.
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