Although we see evidence that God's love and power have frequently broken in upon the ordinary course of human affairs, our caution in declaring this is reinforced by our justifiable disapproval of chroniclers who take the easy way out and use divine miracles as a short-circuit of a causal explanation that is obviously, or a least defensibly, naturalistic. We must not use history as a storehouse from which deceptively simple moral lessons may be drawn at random.


-Leonard J. Arrington, Adventures of a Church Historian (pg. 237)

"One of the four cardinal sins in the monastic order of the Buddha--after unchastity, theft, and killing--was laying claim to miraculous powers. it is related that Kakyamuni once dismissed as of small consequence a feat of levitation on the part of a disciple, and cried out in pity for a yogin by the river who had wasted twenty years of his human existence in learning how to walk on water, when the ferryman might have taken him across for a small coin."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 158)