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burning coals, making statues to talk, and dogs of brass or stone to bark,”—but in doing so, common-sense people, I imagine, will think that his powers of discrimination and of instituting comparisons, to say the least, cannot be of the very highest order.1 Such legendary miracles proceeding from the wonder-loving spirit of the times, of which Renan speaks, may serve to show the character of the miracles which would have been ascribed to Jesus had His character of thaumaturgus, like that of Simon the magician, been but an imposition, or had His miracles been more the work of the people than of Himself," as Renan says they were; but beyond this no legitimate use can be made of them. They are thus, by a fair and legitimate deduction arising from the character of those legendary wonders which were ascribed to the magicians of the time, plainly calculated to demonstrate the genuineness, the reality, and the super

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natural character of the miracles of our Lord.

1 Dr. Carpenter has evinced the same surprising lack of discrimination in a paper which recently appeared in the Contemporary Review.

CHAPTER VIII.

MIRACLES.

MIRACLE, in the Scripture sense, is an event or

effect produced by the direct agency of almighty

power, contrary to the established constitution and ordinary course of things a palpable deviation from the known laws of nature, for the accomplishment of some specific purpose. In effecting the establishment of a religion professing to have come from God, such miraculous interposition is manifestly indispensable. And to such, therefore, the institution of the Law and the Gospel appealed for confirmation, and by such has God been pleased to ratify and establish the Divine origin of the revelations made to the world through His inspired servants at the commencement of each dispensation. Miracles were thus to be regarded as a seal of their Divine commission to make known the will of God to men, and as such they were appealed to by our Lord Himself: "Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see. The works that I do in my Father's name, they bear witness of me." These works were necessarily of a nature contrary to ordinary experience, or there would have been no use in appealing to them as attestative of His Divine commission. Contrary to ordinary experience they must be, and contrary to such experience they were. Christ did not, in appealing to them as a witness of His Divine commission, enter upon any laboured argument

or specious train of reasoning with a view to convincing His auditory that they were really miracles, because they needed nothing of the sort. In the self-consciousness of His own spotless integrity, and of the Divinely-confirmatory character of His miracles, He simply appealed to them as plain and indubitable facts. And so also did the Apostles, when speaking of the miracles they performed in Jesus' name.

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Obvious and Divinely sustained as it was, however, M. Renan is pleased to call into question their supernatural endowment, and remarks, with his usual sagacity: "For nearly a century the Apostles and their disciples dreamed only of miracles." A long dream indeed, we would remark. Wonder they didn't wake up, ere that time had elapsed, to a consciousness of the fact that it was only a "dream!" "We do not say," he further observes, "that miracles are impossible." No; for if he did he would be an Atheist, because to deny the possibility of a miracle is, in effect, to deny the existence of God.

As the subject of Atheism has been incidentally introduced, and the writer has proved from personal intercourse that this class of moral phenomena is not yet wholly extinct, since the special design of this work is general usefulness, the reader will, doubtless, not take it amiss if I indulge myself in a few observations on the subject in this connection-not exactly as to the mental character of the Atheist, for in this King David has, happily, anticipated me (see the first clause of Psalm xiv.), but rather as to the folly of those who, denying or questioning the existence of the Almighty as an intelligent, living, personal Being, exalt inanimate nature and clothe it with the attributes which can belong alone to intelligent Deity. To those of my readers, especially the young, who may be thrown into the company of 1 Page 191.

such as are of Atheistic principles, and who may be in danger of being contaminated by them, I would say, that while the eternal existence of the Supreme Being, as the infinite, uncreated Source of all else that exists, is a revealed fact that must ever remain an incomprehensible mystery to finite beings-on the Atheistic hypothesis that there is no such eternal, uncreated, intelligent First Cause, the mystery of existence is not removed, nor in the least degree lessened; for, on the supposition that there is no God, the mystery of finite existence, animate and inanimate, intelligent and unintelligent, is but transferred from a supreme intelligent Cause to blind forces existing in connection with what we call " nature," which leaves the question, Whence originated this "nature?" still unanswered and unanswerable. Instead of removing the mystery, it really increases it by making it twofold-first, the inexplicable mystery as to the origin of nature, and next the mystery as to how this thing called "nature," to which intelligence, wisdom, and power, in their individual distinctiveness, are not attachable as attributes, could have originated thinking, intelligent beings. The diversity of being, the continued existence and harmonious working of natural law throughout the universe, are quite explicable on the admission that there is an infinite Being upholding, sustaining, and regulating the laws of natural existence, which His omniscience and omnipotence had primarily originated; but discard the idea of an intelligent Creator and Preserver, and the diversified phenomena, the changeless beauty, and continued order of nature become at once an inexplicable riddle-a mystery that is second only to its primary origin; thus giving rise to a mystery in duplicate, one of which is quite, equal to the mystery of the Divine existence, and the other scarcely

second to it in its mysterious, unintelligently, yet orderly and systematically-controlled operations and developments. But the language of reason no less than of revelation, in reference to the origin, continued preservation, and order of nature, is, "Thou, even Thou art Lord alone; Thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth, and all things that are therein, the seas, and all that is therein, and Thou preservest them all."1

Natural law, although operating throughout the universe, is in itself but an inanimate, involuntary thing. It cannot comprehend itself, nor any of the results of its action. It acts by a perpetual constraint; nor can it of itself ever vary its action or cease to act. Such is natural law, to which, in connection with inanimate matter, as the ultimatum or final cause, the Atheist would trace all animate and intelligent existence; which is simply to make a lifeless, involuntary, unintelligent thing originate a something incomparably superior to itself—a living, intelligent being, capable of thought, feeling, indefinite knowledge, and voluntary action!

The palpable manifestations of design in the mechanism of the universe, and the beautiful and exact adaptation of one part to the other exemplified in the mechanism and arrangement of all the varied works of nature, together with the unvarying order and harmonious working of the laws which operate throughout the entire system of universal nature, necessarily bespeak for it an intelligent and Divine Original. It is a principle, which to a rational being can never be other than axiomatic, that every effect in nature must necessarily be traced to an adequate cause; and that Cause, in relation to the combined and complicated effects of nature—evincing as they do indubitable marks of the most perfect contrivance and design-must necessarily be intelligent.

1 Neh. ix. 6.

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