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graphies is, Are they real? Do they belong to the category of historical verities? Had these things ever a visible, tangible being in space and time? What evidence have we for them? Really, they are not to be taken up too easily. Faith is not to go quite as a matter of course. All this supernaturalism is an enormous demand, when one thinks of it, upon the believing power: if we do not so feel it, it can only be because we are used to it. We do not believe any other miracles than these. All religions have miracles; all ancient histories (all modern histories too, till printing came in) have miracles but we do not believe them. The old world is all miracle together: we believe not one particle of it. Herodotus relates miracles: we do not believe them. Livy relates miracles: we do not believe them. Tacitus relates miracles: we do not believe them. All early history-Greek, Roman, Hindoo, Egyptian, Gothic, Celtic-is charged with miracles: we do not believe them. The old Hebrew history is full of miracles, beginning with talking serpents and charmed trees : we do not more than half believe these, Hebrew though they are. The early Christian church, and the church of the middle ages, and the modern church of the Catholic world, are all full of miracles: we believe not one iota of the whole. And why not? Why, because all our experience is against miracles; while our experience is not against the tendency of mind, at a certain point of its progress, to believe miracles and make miracles. We reject all these things as a matter of course; without taking the trouble even to look at them; with a clear, quiet confidence exactly proportioned to the extent and depth of our knowledge. We cannot help this unbelief; our experience and knowledge legitimate it-force it upon us. Every step we take in science is a step away from supernaturalism. The more we see of the wonderful world we live in, the more we see that it is a world of Law. The belief in miracle is itself a thing of law; rises at certain points of mental progress, and declines at certain other points of mental progress-the one as regularly as the other. To ignorance, the world is all miracle: to knowledge, the world is all law. Philosophy is built upon law. The physical world is a world

of law, and so we have a physical philosophy: the moral world is a world of law, and so we have a moral philosophy. Reason demands uniformity in the legislation of Providence; and Providence, so far as we can see-the more conspicuously the further we see-responds to the demand. 'As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end'is the programme of the world of our knowledge, all nature answering in one everlasting Amen.

It is a hard thing to believe in miracles, unless it be in some particular miracles which one has always been used to believe in. I say nothing of impossibility in such a matter; we do not very clearly know what impossibility is: but improbability, unlikelihood, unlikeness to all that we see and know, contradiction to laws that have all the appearance of immutability—this is a thing we can both understand and feel. On the whole, we may say of a miracle, that it needs an extraordinary distinctness and fulness of evidence to put us in a condition even to suspend our opinion about it. And any belief, which any quantity or quality of evidence may induce, will still be of a somewhat provisional character. We believe in the meantime; but let any one shew us a flaw in the evidence, and the mind instantly rebounds, as from a constrained and artificial posture, back to the only faith that needs no evidence—the faith in nature, and in laws of nature which, like their Author, are without variableness or shadow of turning.

It needs evidence to make a miracle credible; evidence of a singularly definite and stringent sort. Now, what evidence have we for the miracles of the gospel histories? (for the present I except the Resurrection, which will require to be considered apart.) Who vouches for the walking on the water, the healing of the sick, the raising of the dead? Who are they that speak to us across the chasm of centuries, asking us to believe that the physical and organic laws of nature were not laws in their time? We do not quite know who they are. Actually, we do not know; and the learned cannot tell us. The evidence is anonymous; the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John being prefixed to our records we know not

by whom, or on what authority. And the internal character of these books is as questionable as the external circumstance of their authorship. They are of a very mixed nature. They have very much the look of being compilations; made up of heterogeneous materials, taken partly from written documents, partly from second or third-hand traditions-traditions from different localities, of different dates, sometimes even of antagonistic theological bearings-all mixed confusedly together, in a confusion out of which it is a regular branch of theological science (and none of the easiest) to make something like harmony. These books of the four gospels have beauties rich and rare: but historical clearness and congruity-all that makes matter-of-fact reliableness—are not among those beauties. They do not look as if they came from men favourably posited for giving facts, and intelligently scrupulous about giving only facts. Take them singly, or take them together -and they strike one as loosely written. Two of them are prefaced with stories of an utterly preposterous and incredible character, enough to put the mind in a state of scepticism about all that follows; another (Mark's) is distinguished by a pervading tone of embellishment and exaggeration; a fourth is tinctured, from one end to the other, with the opinions and phraseology of a particular theological school—gives chapter after chapter of discourses as Christ's, which it is morally impossible that the Christ of the other gospels ever should have uttered: and all of them, taken together, exhibit discrepancies and anachronisms that perplex and dash the maturest counsels of the evangelic harmonist.

Then, what would the gospel miracles prove, if real? It is worth while asking that. Why, they would prove that to be true which we have evidence in our own hands for proving to be not true. They would prove that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah of Hebrew prophecy: and Jesus of Nazareth was not the Messiah of Hebrew prophecy. The gospel miracles say, if they say anything, that the mission of Jesus was a realisation of certain Old-Testament predictions: and the mission of Jesus was not a realisation of those Old-Testament predictions. That is all. It is a simple question of fact.

Look at the predictions, and look at the realities-- and say if they agree together. Jeremiah predicted the perpetuation of the levitical priesthood and the throne of David: it never came to pass: the levitical priesthood and the throne of David are sunk deep down, ages ago, in the bottomless pit of nothing. Ezekiel predicted a new David, king and shepherd of all Israel-the ten tribes and the two tribes reunited, and dwelling together as one people in the land upon the mountains of Israel: it never came to pass: the ten tribes are gone no man knows where; and the two tribes are, some of them, over here in London. Isaiah predicted a new Age of Gold, new heavens and a new earth, an Eden-like peace of nature with herself and her children, a millennium of knowledge, love and joy: it never came to pass: we are still waiting for our golden age as a just possible thing in the far future. No part of all this goodly prophetic vision is realised yet. Men thỏught it was coming true in the Christ and his kingdom: but it did not come true; the throne of David was not restored, the house of Israel was not gathered together, but scattered abroad-it all broke to pieces. There are these two things -the expectations of Hebrew seers and the realities of the life of Jesus — they do not agree. They will not join on at all. There is a great gulf fixed between them; with no possible passing from the one to the other, except by the bridge of spiritualising, accommodating interpretation, of the sort of which we have so many specimens in Paul's epistles. Christ's own predictions did not come true either. He said (if we may trust his reporters), 'The sign of the Son of Man shall appear in heaven, and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory; and he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the one end of heaven to the other;'- Christ prophesied this, with a 'Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away till all these things be fulfilled:' well, that generation has passed away, and many more since that, and these things are not fulfilled, not any one of them. To square prediction with fulfil

ment, we must spiritualise new meanings into Christ's prophecies, as Paul did into Isaiah's prophecies. Now who can think of miracles here? The Christian miracles would be the pledge, the unredeemed pledge of Providence, for the coming true of prophecies about the throne of David and the advent of the Son of Man, which prophecies did not come true. We should have to suppose that Providence said supernaturally what it has unsaid naturally, authenticated a human mistake by a divine miracle.

Such are the general bearings of the anti-supernaturalist argument, in its relation to the Christian miracles. That argument resolves itself into three elements:-first, the antecedent improbability attaching to the notion of miracle at all; secondly, the loose, uncertain character of the evidence for the New-Testament miracles; and thirdly, the false position in which these miracles would place us, in regard to matters of historical fact and literary interpretation. This is the essence of the argument against the Christian miracles.

Many things are urged in defence of these miracles. It is said that miracle was necessary, just at that point of the world's progress, to carry on the moral education of humanity; to give men a faith, a religion; that nature had failed, had been tried and found wanting; and that it was worthy of Providence to interpose with a new and more impressive mode of teaching. Very well; but now miracles have failed too, for all who do not believe them; that is, for the majority of cultivated men throughout Christendom. We ought by this rule to have new miracles, miracles again and again, to verify the old ones, and vindicate Providence from the charge of having interposed in vain- specially exerted itself, actually gone out of its way, only to encounter the humiliation of defeat. If ever there was an age in which men wanted a faith, surely that age is now:-yet no miracles come to give the faith; none but the one eternal miracle of the heavens and the earth, life and the world-silent, serene, majesticday unto day uttering speech, and night unto night shewing knowledge. We get no other miracle than this: yet I am