immense ingenuity has been expended to eliminate this element from Christianity, without destroying its texture: it is thought that the moral and supernatural can be separated, and that Christianity can be retained while rejecting miracles. We believe this to be a delusion; miracle is so interwoven with the framework of the Bible that the two must stand or fall together, and that colourless compound, which may be extracted from the Scriptures, after all the supernatural is expunged, will never form the basis of a Divine religion.

We use here the terms miraculous and supernatural as synonymous for the sake of convenience, though they are not strictly so. The former is usually restricted to visible and external interference with the course of nature; whereas the latter properly applies to all divine manifestations transcending human experience; and thus some of Christ's sayings and doings may be termed supernatural, or, at least, superhuman, which are not strictly miraculous. But we are chiefly concerned here with the objections urged against the miraculous events, properly so called, related in the New Testament.

One chief reason, we believe, why the philosophic intellect has difficulty in assenting to these statements, besides the one already mentioned, is that so many alleged miracles have been proved historically to be false. All the heathen systems of religion, all the corrupt forms of Christianity, have put forward miraculous claims, most of which appear, at this day, transparently absurd. The Church of Rome has done much to abuse this source of influence. She has traded upon the superstitious element in man's nature to the utmost, and has fabricated so many false miracles, that it is not to be wondered at if hasty generalisers have refused credence to whatever savours of supernatural power.

But hasty generalisation is the fruitful source of many errors, and is, in an especial sense, the stumbling-block of the present day. Men who pretend to be philosophers take hasty glances at human history, and, perceiving well-marked tendencies of the human mind in the direction of superstition, conclude that all belief which transcends human reason must be superstitious. If they would follow the example of great physical

investigators, and seek for reliable facts rather than theories, and refuse to generalise beyond what well-ascertained facts will warrant, they would show more diffidence in pronouncing that all miracle is impossible.

So far as mere a priori reasoning is concerned, we should be disposed to argue that just because the mind of man craves after miraculous attestation, therefore God, in making a revelation, would accredit it by miracle. He would adapt Himself to the laws of man's mind, and bring that evidence before it which was best fitted to satisfy it; and no one who knows anything of psychology will deny that wherever man believes in miracle he instinctively sees the hand of God, and nothing else so effectually awes him into submission to a higher power.

It it be once granted that God has made a revelation at all, it is most natural and fitting that He should attest it by supernatural means; indeed, we know no other way in which a divine religion could be introduced into an unbeliving world-a religion most unpalatable to the human mind, and relying entirely upon moral force for its

diffusion. The miracles of Christ, so far from being out of harmony with His mission, are indeed necessary to give it completeness and credibility. If He indeed came from God, and went to God, as He alleged, and was commissioned to announce new and startling truths hateful to the teachers of the day, was it not most reasonable that He should appeal to His Father in heaven for miraculous confirmation of His authority, and was it not most reasonable that God should answer that appeal? Surely, if the Christian religion is from God at all, it is worthy of being attested by miracles. It has to do with the most vital interests of man, and if God thought it essential for man to know it, why should He refuse that attestation which He could easily give, and without which it would be impossible to secure credence for it among mankind? It appears to us that the repugnance to miracles is closely connected with a repugnance to believe in a personal and living God. Whenever the mind tully receives the idea of God as a living, conscious Being, having a will and affections, as He is represented in the Bible to have, belief in miracles, when properly attested,

naturally follows; for it is impossible to believe that such a God as this would refuse to manifest Himself to man in the way that man's faculties can most surely apprehend Him. The disbelievers in miracles are in a great degree disbelievers in God-probably to a much greater extent than they are aware of, or would admit to be true. The God they believe in is a pantheistic abstraction or a figurative expression for the laws of nature-as Matthew Arnold has lately defined it to be, "the stream of tendency which all things have to fulfil the law of their being." Their idea of God is not very far removed from atheism; He is one who shrouds Himself amid nature's laws, and sits far away, passionless and serene, like the Olympian deities of Homer, who quaffed nectar and feasted on ambrosia, regardless of the sufferings of man. He is, in fact, the slave of nature, not its ruler; for He cannot suspend the laws He has set in motion, He cannot speak to man in audible accents, as that, forsooth, would be a departure from the etiquette of the universe! Better that man should perish than that God should step out of the eternal silence to speak to his immortal