133. However, the effect of miracles on good people is different from their effect on evil people. Good people have no desire for miracles, but they believe the miracles in the Word. If they do hear anything about a miracle, they think of it only as a minor argument that strengthens their faith, because they base their thinking on the Word and therefore on the Lord and not on the miracle.

It is different for evil people. They can actually be constrained and compelled to faith and even to worship and devotion by miracles. This lasts only a short while, though, because their evils are pent up inside, and the compulsions and gratifications of those evils are constantly working away inside their outward worship and devotion. In the effort to let them break free of this confinement, these people think about the miracle and wind up calling it a sham, a trick, or a natural event, which enables them to return to their evil ways. People who go back to their evil ways after being worshipful profane what is good and true in worship, and the fate after death of people who profane what is holy is the worst of all. These are the people referred to in the Lord's discourse in Matthew 12:43-44, 45, the people whose last state is worse than the first.

Besides, if miracles did happen for people who do not believe in the miracles in the Word, they would be happening constantly where everyone like this could see them. This shows why miracles do not happen nowadays.

130. 1. No one is reformed by miracles and signs, because they compel. I have already explained [103, 119] that we have inner and outer processes of thought and that the Lord flows through our inner thought processes into the outer, this being the way he teaches and guides us. I have also explained [71-99] that it is the intent of the Lord's divine providence that we act in freedom and in accord with reason. Both of these abilities in us would be destroyed if miracles happened and we were forced into belief by them.

We can see the truth of this rationally as follows. We cannot deny that miracles induce faith and that they persuade us convincingly that what the miracle-worker says and teaches is true. To begin with, this conviction takes over the outer processes of our thought so completely that it virtually constrains and bewitches them. However, this deprives us of the two abilities called freedom and rationality and therefore of our ability to act in freedom and in accord with reason. Then the Lord cannot flow in through our inner thought processes into the outer ones; all he can do is leave us to convince ourselves by rational means of the truth of anything that has become a matter of faith for us because of the miracle.

[2] The basic state of our thought is that we look from our inner thinking and see things in our outer thinking in a kind of mirror, because as already noted [104] we can look at our own thinking, which can be done only by a deeper level of thinking. When we look at something in this mirrorlike way, we can turn it this way and that and shape it so that it seems attractive to us. If what we are looking at is something true, we could compare it to a good-looking, vibrant young woman or young man. However, if we cannot turn it this way and that and shape it but only believe it at second hand, influenced by a miracle, then even if it is true it is like a young woman or young man carved of stone or wood, with no life in it. We might also compare it to something that is constantly before our eyes, something that is all we look at, hiding whatever is on either side of it and behind it. Or we could compare it to a sound that is constantly in our ears, robbing us of any perception of the harmony of multiple sounds. This kind of blindness and deafness is imposed on our minds by miracles.

The same holds true for any conviction that is not looked at rationally before it becomes a conviction.