soul! If the Bible tells us anything at all, it tells us that God is above nature and apart from nature, and it proves this in the only way which could ever have carried conviction to the ordinary human mind, viz., by miraculous interposition. It has always appeared to us an unaccountable fact that men of intelligence and moral worth should hold that the Christian religion is in some sense divine, and yet reject all that savours of the miraculous. There are many who go to the New Testament for moral teaching, and allow that Jesus Christ revealed more of God's mind than any prophet the world has seen, and yet regard as fabulous all His claims to supernatural power and all the miraculous doings recorded of Him. We hold that it is utterly impossible to separate the historical veracity of the New Testament from its moral and spiritual teaching : they are interwoven in so close an embrace that they cannot be severed without mutual destruction. Mankind would never submit to the life of self-denial imposed by Christ if they were to think that He claimed powers that were fictitious; the sanction of His authority would be gone, the spell would be dissolved in an instant that taught men to die for His religion, the whole domain of revelation would be relegated to the limbo of uncertainty, and all efficient motive withdrawn to a life of holiness. The absolute truthfulness of Christ is a first condition to the reception of His teaching, and not merely His absolute truthfulness, but the sanction of His divine authority: it is the feeling that He speaks with the voice of God, and will one day be the Judge of men, which triumphs over man's inclination to evil. Those know little of the struggles and self-denial that a life of faith imposes, who think that it can be sustained by a Christ who was full of illusions and errors. When He requires that we should pluck out our right eye and cut off our right hand rather than let them offend us, who would listen to the injunction, if the voice that spoke was that of an commands us to run currents of our nature, erring mortal? When He counter to the strongest who would have grace to obey if none believed the Teacher to be divine? His teaching would be less weighty than that of Socrates and Seneca, indeed infinitely less; for they laid claim to no imaginary powers they delivered their message with much weight of learning and with undoubted sincerity of aim; but Christ did not deign to avail Himself of human learning at all, and, according to this monstrous theory, enforced His teaching by pretended miracles, or, at least, by conniving at those who did so. To our mind, a more impossible theory was never imagined than that of a teacher charged with the most weighty truth, loving the souls of men even to the death, and yet fighting with the weapons of grossest deception. But some allege that Christ was Himself the victim of deception. He imagined He had miraculous power, and the ready credulity of the age ratified the claim. We are asked to contemplate the great Teacher, whose words penetrated the depths of man's nature, so weak as to suppose that He raised the dead and walked on the waves, while yet He was innocent of any power beyond what a spiritualist lays claim to now-a-days. The proposition needs only to be stated to be scouted with disgust; it outrages, not merely all Christian feeling, but all reverence for truth that abides in the human breast. The only theory that deserves to be seriously examined, is that which denies that Christ ever did or claimed to do anything miraculous, and that all the miracles recorded in the New Testament are the accretions of a later age that have gathered round the central figure. We are invited by this school to conceive of an ideal Christ, who taught moral truth, and exerted such influence by the purity of His life that His followers canonised Him, and surrounded Him, in after ages, with a corona of miracle, and put into His lips language He never uttered. This theory finds favour with many who have never weighed the excessive improbabilities it involves, or who shut their eyes to these improbabilities because they are blinded by prejudice. We venture to say that if they were to take the New Testament in their hand, and run the pen through every passage that would need to be cxpunged or altered on this theory, they would be astonished to find the consequences it involved them in, and if they would go further and re-write |