feels itself justified in adhering. That the criterion of the miracle must be sought in itself, and that, where it cannot be definitely traced, the effect of the miracle as a proof is destroyed, is only the application to this department of evidence of the universal rules of probability. An argument must consist in its own light; and according as that light is feeble or strong, the argument is weak or conclusive. If a man should come to us, professing to be a messenger from God, and produce no clearer credentials than such effects as Cudworth has enumerated the walking upon the water, the suspending of a stone in the air, or the cleaving of a whetstone by a razoreffects which might unquestionably be produced by higher laws suspending or hold in check the lower-we should feel no more difficulty in rejecting him, than in rejecting a pretended syllogism with two terms, or a prevaricating witness. His pretensions might be true; but we should quote to him the maxim, "De non apparentibus et non existentibus, eadem est ratio."

When we turn to the miracles of the Bible, with a few trifling exceptions, which are redeemed from suspicion by their connection with the others, as doubtful testimony may be confirmed by corroborating circumstances, when we turn to the miracles of the Bible, we feel intuitively that they are of a character in themselves and on a scale of magnitude which render the supposition of secondary causes ridiculously absurd. The scenes at the Red Sea, the cleaving of the waters, the passing over of the Israelites on dry land between the fluid walls, the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night; the daily supply of manna from the skies, effects like these carry the evidence of their original on their face. There is no room for doubt. And so, in the New Testament, the conversion of water into wine, the stilling of the tempest, the raising of the dead, the instant cure, without means or appliances, of inveterate diseases; the feeding of thousands with a few loaves, which involves the highest possible exercise of power, that of creation; and, above all, the resurrection of Jesus himself: cases like these have nothing of ambiguity in them. They reveal, at a glance, the very finger of God. The supernatural and the contranatural are so flagrant and glaring, that he that runs may read. We may not be able to say what a devil or an angel can do; but there are some things which we can confidently say that he cannot do; and these are the things from which the miracles of our religion have been chosen.

We have insisted upon this point at some length, because the neglect of the distinction has been at the bottom of all the frivolous evasions which have had no other tendency than to weaken our faith in the divine authority of the miracle.

The place, consequently, which we are disposed-as the reader may already have collected-to assign to the miracle, is the very front rank in the Christian evidence. We cannot understand how the question of a revelation or a divine commission can be entertained at all, until the credentials are produced. Mr Trench laments the stress which has been laid upon them by modern apologists, and thinks it has contributed to obscure or to weaken the spiritual power of the gospel. We are not prepared to deny that many have been strenuous advocates of the miracles, who were strangers to the life of Christianity. It is one thing to believe in miracles, and quite another to believe in the Saviour of mankind. Faith in the divine authority of our religion is not necessarily faith in Christ. We admit all that he has said of the beauty, and glory, and self-evidencing light of the doctrine, and subscribe fully to the sentiment contained in the passage of Calvin's Institutes, to which he has referred us. That passage asserts, what all the creeds and confessions of the reformed churches, and the creeds and confessions of martyrs and saints in all ages of the world have always asserted, that true faith in Jesus is not the offspring of logic or philosophy; it is no creature of earth, but the gift of heaven, the production of God's holy Spirit. We would detract nothing from the inward light and power of the gospel, or from the need of supernatural grace. Neither, again, do we complain that Mr Trench has signalized the ethical value of the Christian miracles, as being at once types and prophecies of greater works upon the soul. He has made an important contribution to our literature, by the successful manner in which he has illustrated this principle in his rich and valuable notes. We agree, too, that the appearance of such a being as Jesus would have been wanting in consistency, if nature had not been made to do homage to his name. An incarnate God could hardly walk the earth without unwonted indications of his presence. Such a wonder must needs draw other wonders after it; and Mr Trench has strikingly displayed this aspect of the importance of miracles. But still, it does not follow that because miracles are graceful compliments of the mission of Christ, that their only use, or their chief use, is their typical relations to grace, and their harmony with the character and claims of the Saviour. We maintain, on the contrary, that their principal office is to guarantee an external, objective revelation, by which we can try the spirits, whether they be of God. They are the criterion by which a real is distinguished from a pretended revelation; the mark by which we know that God has spoken, and discriminate His word from the words of men. An external, objective, palpable test, is the only one which can meet the exigencies of the

case.

If men are thrown upon their intuitions, impulses, and emotions, their pretended revelations will be as numerous and discordant as the dialects of Babel. Each man will have his doctrine and his psalm. The necessity of such a test has been universally acknowledged. The Catholic feels it, and appeals to a visible, infallible society, which is to judge between the genuine and spurious: the Protestant feels it, and appeals to his Bible; the Bible bows to the same necessity, and appeals to MIRACLES: these, it triumphantly exclaims, distinguish my doctrines from those of every other book, and seal them with the impress of God. Here then is a standard, fixed, stable, certain, with which the experience of men must be compared. To the law and to the testimony; if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. A religion of authority is the only bulwark against fanaticism on the one hand, and a dead naturalism on the other hand.

We have no doubt that if the miracle should be reduced to an obscure or subordinate position in the scheme of Christian evidences, the result would eventually be, that an authoritative, external revelation would be totally discarded. This was the progress of criticism in Germany. Those who prevaricated with miracles prevaricated with inspiration, we suspect those among ourselves who are offended at the latter, have as little relish for the spirit of the gospel, except when it happens to chime with the breathings of their own minds. We have never had apprehensions of any other species of rationalism in this country, but that which obtains in the school of Schleiermacher. We think that there are symptoms in various quarters, that it is insinuating itself into the minds of those of our scholars and reflecting men, who have not thoroughly studied the grounds of his philosophy. It invites by its warmth, and ardour, and it gives a significancy to the history of Jesus which falls in with the pensive longings of a meditative spirit; it speaks of redemption, and pardon, and holiness, and sin; it employs, except in relation to the resurrection, the very language of piety; and seems to put on a broad and permanent foundation, the holy catholic church and the communion of the saints. But as it has no external standard of truth, it must repudiate all precise dogmatic formulas, and reduce the doctrine to a general harmony of feeling or pervading uniformity of sentiment. Religion must be a life without a creed. But as the understanding must have something to feed on, each man will be tempted to analyze the operations of his own consciousness of God, and reduce to the precision of logical representation, the inspirations of his own soul. And when it is seen that the religion is supported by a philosophy essentially pantheistic, that the differences betwixt holiness and sin

are stripped of all moral import; and that a stern necessity underlies the whole constitution of things, we may well tremble at the results, should this scheme be introduced in place of an authoritative Bible. It is because we feel that the tendency of every disparaging remark in relation to miracles, is to set aside the Bible in the aspect of authority, that we are so earnest to rebuke it. We love spiritual religion, but we abhor fanaticism. We detest bigotry, but we love the truth; and we believe that there is a truth in regard to God and to ourselves, which ought to be embraced in the form of definite propositions, and not apprehended as vague sentiments. There are truths which are powerful in proportion as they are clear and articulate, and worthless unless they are distinctly understood.

3. We come now to the last point which remains to be discussed the credibility of miracles; and here we enter into the very citadel of the controversy between the friends and opponents of divine revelation. Here the question is fairly encountered, can God stand to man in the attitude of a witness to the truth? Can He declare to other intelligent beings, the creatures of His own power, facts which He knows, as one man can communicate knowledge to another? Or, if we admit the possibility of individual inspiration, in conformity with the laws of our mental constitution, can God authenticate that inspiration to a third party? Can He enable others to prove a commission from him? To answer in the affirmative, is to admit the credibility of miracles. There are certainly no natural laws by which we can recognise any communications as authoritatively from heaven. Whether the miracles be visible or invisible, a supernatural operation upon the mind, producing an immediate consciousness of the divine voice, or supernatural phenomena addressed to the senses, producing the conviction of the divine presence: no matter what may be the process-it must be evidently miraculous, as out of and against the ordinary course of nature.

It would be obviously impossible to show, by any direct processes of argument, that there is anything in the mode of the divine existence, which precludes the Deity from holding intercourse with his creatures, analogous to that which they hold with each other. We can perceive nothing in the nature of things which would lead us to suppose that God could not converse with man, or make man the messenger of His will.

Analogy, on the contrary, would suggest that, as persons can here communicate with each other-as they can be rendered conscious of each other's existence-as they can feel the presence of one another, and interchange thoughts and emotions, the same thing might be affirmed of God. It is cer

tainly incumbent upon the rationalist to shew how God is precluded from a privilege which, so far as we know, pertains to all other personal existences. Capacity of society and converse seems to be involved in the very nature of personality, and it cannot be demonstrated that there is anything more incomprehensible in the case of a divine than of a human testimony. How one man knows that another man, another intelligence, is before him-how reads the thoughts and enters into the emotions of another being, are problems as profoundly inscrutable as how a man shall know that God talks with him, and imparts to him truths which neither sense nor reason could discover. It deserves further to be considered, that as all worship involves a direct address of the creature to the Deity, as man must talk to God as well as obey his laws, must love and confide in Him as well as tremble before Him-it deserves to be considered how all this is practicable, if the communications are all to be confined to the feebler party. Religion necessarily supposes some species of communion with the object of worship, some sense of God; and if this is possible, we see not why the correspondence may not be extended into full consistency with the analogy of human intercouse. Certain it is that the moral nature of man which leads him to converse with God, has in all ages induced him to hope and expect that God would converse with him. Every age has had its pretensions to divine revelations-there have always been seers and prophets. Many have been false-have had nothing intrinsic or extrinsic to recommend them-and yet they have succeeded in gaining a temporary credit, because they addressed themselves to the natural belief that a revelation would indeed be given. Whence this natural expectation-whence this easy credulity-if the very conception of a direct communication from God involved a contradiction and absurdity?

Arguments of this sort are certainly not without their weight. They never have been and they never can be answered in that way of direct refutation. The approved method is to set them aside by the sweeping application of the principle upon which the Sadducees set aside the resurrection of the dead. Revelation and its proofs are equally supernatural, and whatever is supernatural must be false. "No just notion of the true nature of history," says Strauss, "is possible, without a perception of the inviolability of the chain of finite causes, and of the impossibility of miracles." The first negative canon, which this remarkable author prescribes, for distinguishing betwixt the historical and fabulous, is, "when the narration is irreconcileable with the known and universal laws which govern the course of events." He affirms that