One would have supposed that Lyman Abbott, in pushing forward his theory of evolution, would have stopped when he came to miracles; for of all things that ever took place on earth, these are the farthest removed from the possibility of such a process, being indeed the very antithesis of evolution. But lo! the doughty Doctor plunges head foremost into this absurdity in The Outlook for March 13. He begins by a more formal admission than in his former articles, that some miracles have really been wrought, among them the resurrection of Jesus. Respecting those mentioned in the Bible, he says:

      I believe that some of the events there recorded, and generally regarded as miraculous, did take place; that others there recorded or referred to did not take place; and concerning others there recorded I am by no means certain whether they took place as recorded or not.

      In the second of these classes, those which did not take place, he puts Joshua's miracle of causing the sun and the moon to stand still; he is doubtful about "the wonderful stories in the Book of Daniel," and he also doubts the one in which Peter found the tribute money in the mouth of the fish. Fish stories like this and the one in the Book of Jonah are particularly obnoxious to his way of believing. He has not said what be thinks of the two miraculous drafts made by the disciples at Christ's command.

      Preparatory to his attempt to show that miracles were wrought, when they were wrought at all, by evolution, he repeats and emphasizes his own "point of view," that "God's method of manifesting his eternal presence is the method of growth, not manufacture, by a power [169] of dwelling within and working outward, not by a power dwelling without and working upon nature." If, then, Jesus gave eyesight to the man born blind, he gave it, not by a power dwelling without the man's eye, and working upon it, but by "the method of growth," by a power dwelling within the eye and working outward. So with the loaves and fishes: he did not "manufacture" the additional bread and fish, but he made the fish, though dead and dried, grow by the power dwelling within the fish, and not by working on it from without. The bread, too, was made to grow, though it, too, had been thoroughly baked, after having the life ground out of it by the millstones. I wish he had told us how Jesus made the water grow into wine!

      But, forgetting all this, the Doctor, before getting through, has man regulating evolution after this fashion: "He finds a prairie strewed with grass and wild flowers, and out of that same prairie he evolves this year a cornfield, next year a wheatfield." But how? Does he do it by a power from without? Or does the man get under the ground and push out the corn this year, and the wheat the next? Farmers have an idea that they work on the ground from without, and not from within. Moles work from within, but they don't make the corn grow. If the mole were to publish a newspaper, he would call it The Outlook, for he stays in the ground and looks out.

[SEBC 169-170]