the reality of a communication from himself of truths beyond the criterion of reason, should not make the evidence simple and complete, because, the doctrines proper to such a revelation not being appreciable from internal evidence, it is obvious that the external testimony for them—if it is to be of any use—must be unmistakable and decisive. The evidence which is actually produced, however, so far from satisfying these legitimate anticipations, lacks every one of the qualifications which reason antecedently declares to be necessary. Miracles are not distinctive of Divine power but are common to Satan, and they are admitted to be performed in support of falsehood as well as in the service of truth. They bear, indeed, so little upon them the impress of their origin and true character, that they arc dependent for their recognition upon our judgment of the very doctrines to attest which they are said to have been designed.
Even taking the representation of miracles, therefore, which divines themselves give, they are utterly incompetent to perform their contemplated functions. If they are superhuman they are not super-satanic, and there is no sense in which they can be considered miraculously evidential of anything. To argue, as theologians do, that the ambiguity of their testimony is deliberately intended as a trial of our faith is absurd, for Reason being unable to judge of the nature either of supernatural fact or supernatural doctrine, it would be mere folly and injustice to subject to such a test beings avowedly incapable of sustaining it. Whilst it is absolutely necessary, then, that a Divine Revelation should be attested by miraculous evidence to justify our believing it the testimony so called seems in all respects
unworthy of the name, and presents anomalies much more suggestive of human invention than Divine originality. We are, in fact, prepared even by the Scriptural account of miracles to expect that further examination will supply an explanation of such phenomena which will wholly remove them from the region of the supernatural.
CHAPTER II. MIRACLES IN RELATION TO THE ORDER OF NATURE
Without at present touching the question as to their reality, it may be well to ascertain what miracles are considered to be, and how far, and in what sense it is asserted that they are supernatural We have, hitherto, almost entirely confined our attention to the arguments of English divines, and we must for the present continue chiefly to deal with them, for it may broadly be said, that they alone, at the present day, maintain the reality and supernatural character of such phenomena. No thoughtful mind can fail to see that, considering the function of miracles, this is the only logical and consistent course.(1) The insuperable difficulties in the way of admitting the reality of miracles, however, have driven the great majority of continental, as well as very many English, theologians who still pretend to a certain orthodoxy, either to explain the miracles of the Gospel naturally, or to suppress them altogether. Since Schleiermacher denounced the idea of Divine interruptions of the order of nature, and explained away the supernatural character
of miracles, by defining them as merely relative: miracles to us, but in reality mere anticipations of human knowledge and power, his example has been more or less followed throughout Germany, and almost every expedient has been adopted, by would-be orthodox writers, to reduce or altogether eliminate the miraculous elements. The attempts which have been made to do this, and yet to maintain the semblance of unshaken belief in the main points of ecclesiastical Christianity, have lamentably failed, from the hopeless nature of the task and the fundamental error of the conception. The endeavour of Paulus and his school to get rid of the supernatural by a bold naturalistic interpretation of the language of the Gospel narratives, whilst the credibility of the record was represented as intact, was too glaring an outrage upon common sense to be successful, but it was scarcely more illogical than subsequent efforts to suppress the miraculous, yet retain the creed. The great majority of modern German critics, however, reject the miraculous altogether, and consider the question as no longer worthy of discussion, and most of those who have not distinctly expressed this view either resort to every linguistic device to evade the difficulty, or betray, by their hesitation, the feebleness of their belief.(1) In dealing with the