wonders in this like the wonders of ordinary nature, as distinguished from those which accompany a new in-coming of power, that they are under a law which we can anticipate; that they conform to an absolute order, the course of which we can understand;-but not therefore the less divine.* How meanly do we esteem of a Church, of its marvellous gifts, of the powers of the coming world which are working within it, of its Word, of its Sacraments, when it seems to us a small thing that in it men are new-born, raised from the death of sin to the life, of righteousness, the eyes of their understanding enlightened, and their ears opened, unless we can also tell of more visible and sensuous wonders. It is as though the heavens should not declare to us the glory of God, nor the firmament show us his handiwork, except at some single moment such as that when the sun was standing still upon Gibeon, and the moon in Ajalon.

sine miraculis fuisse conversum.) Cf. De Civ. Dei, 22, c. 8, § 1. And on the relation of the helps to faith, the witnesses of God's presence in the midst of us which we have, and which the early Church had, he says (Serm. 244, c. 8): Apostoli Christum præsentem videbant: sed toto orbe terrarum diffusam Ecclesiam non videbant: videbant caput et de corpore credebant. Habemus vices nostras: habemus gratiam dispensationis et distributionis nostræ: ad credendum certissimis documentis, tempora nobis in unâ fide sunt distributa. Illi videbant caput, et credebant de corpore: nos videmus corpus, et credamus de capite.

* Gregory the Great (Hom. 29, in Evang.): Sancta quippe Ecclesia quotidie spiritaliter facit quod tunc per Apostolos corporaliter faciebat. Nam sacerdotes ejus cùm per exorcismi gratiam manum credentibus imponunt, et habitare malignos spiritus in eorum mente contradicunt, quid aliud faciunt, nisi dæmonia ejiciunt? Et fideles quique qui jam vitæ veteris secularia verba derelinquunt, sancta autem mysteria insonant, Conditoris sui laudes et potentiam, quantùm prævalent, narrant, quid aliud faciunt, nisi novis linguis loquuntur? Qui dum bonis suis exhortationibus malitiam de alienis cordibus, auferunt, serpentes tollunt. Et dum pestiferas suasiones audiunt, sed tamen ad operationem pravam minimè pertrahuntur, mortiferum quidem est quod bibunt, sed non eis nocebit. Qui quoties proximos suos in opere bono infirmari conspiciunt, dum eis totâ virtute concurrunt, et exemplo suæ operationis illorum vitam roborant qui in propriâ actione titubant, quid aliud faciunt, nisi super ægros manus imponunt, ut bene habeant? Quæ nimirum miracula tantò majora sunt, quantò spiritalia, tantò majora sunt, quantò per hæc non corpora sed animæ suscitantur.... Corporalia illa miracula ostendunt aliquando sanctitatem, non autem faciunt: hæc verò spiritalia, quæ aguntur in mente, virtutem vitæ non ostendunt, sed faciunt. Illa habere et mali possunt; istis autem perfrui nisi boni non possunt.... Nolite ergo, fratres carissimi, amare signa quæ possunt cum reprobis haberi communia, sed hæc quæ modò diximus, caritatis atque pietatis miracula amate; quæ tantò securiora sunt, quantò et occulta; et de quibus apud Dominum eo major fit retributio, quo apud homines minor est gloria. See too on these greater wonders of the Church AUGUSTINE, Serm. 88, c. 3; and Origen (Con. Cels., 1. 2, c. 48) finds in them, in these wonders of grace which are ever going forward, the fulfilment of the promise that those who believed should do greater things than Christ him. self. (John xiv. 12.) Cf. BERNARD, In Ascen. Dom., Serm. 1.

While then it does not greatly concern us to know when this power was withdrawn, what does vitally concern us is, that we suffer not these carnal desires after miracles, as if they were necessarily saints who had them, and they but ordinary Christians who were without them, as though the Church were incomplete and spiritually impoverished which could not show them, to rise up in our hearts, as they are ever ready to rise up in the natural heart of man, to which power is so much dearer than holiness. There is no surer proof than the utterance of feelings such as these, that the true glory of the Church is hidden from our eyes-no sadder sign that some of its outward trappings and ornaments have caught our fancy; and not the fact that it is all glorious within, taken possession of our hearts and minds. It is, indeed, ill with

us, for it argues little which we ourselves have known of the miracles of grace, when they seem to us poor and pale, and only the miracles of power have any attraction in our eyes.

CHAPTER V.

THE ASSAULTS ON THE MIRACLES.

1. THE JEWISH.

A RIGID monotheistic religion like the Jewish, left but one way of escape from the authority of miracles, which once were acknowledged to be indeed such, and not mere collusions and sleights of hand. There remained nothing to say but that which we find in the New Testament the adversaries of the Lord continually did say, namely, that these works were works of hell: "This fellow doth not cast out devils but by Beelzebub, the prince of the devils."* (Matt. xii. 24; cf. Mark iii. 22—27; Luke xi. 15-22.) We have our Lord's own answer to the deep malignity of this assertion; his appeal, namely, to the whole tenor of his doctrine and his miracles-whether they were not altogether for the overturning of the kingdom of evil—whether such a lending of power to him on the part of Satan would not be wholly inconceivable, since it were merely and altogether suicidal. For though it would be quite intelligible that Satan should bait his hook with some good, should array himself as an angel of light, and do for a while deeds that might appear as deeds of light, that so he might the better carry through some mighty delusion—

"Win men with honest trifles, to betray them
In deepest consequence,"

just as Darius was willing that a small portion of his army should perish, that so the mighty deceit which Zopyrus was practising against Babylon might succeedf-yet a lasting, unvarying, unrelaxing assault

* They regarded him planum in signis (TERTULLIAN, Adv. Marc., 1. 3, c. 6; cf. Apolog., c. 21). This charge is dressed out with infinite blasphemous additions in the later Jewish books. (See EISENMENGER's Entdeckt. Judenth, v. 1, p. 148, seq.) HERODOTUS 1. 3, c. 155,

on his kingdom is unintelligible as being furthered by himself: his king dom thus in arms against itself, could not stand, but hath an end. He who came, as all his words and his deeds testified, to destroy the works of the Devil, could not have come armed with his power, and helped onward by his aid. It is not a pact with the Evil one which this tells of, but of one mightier than that Evil one having entered with power into his stronghold, and who, having bound him, is now spoiling his goods. Our Lord does in fact repel the accusation, and derive authority to his miracles, not on account of the power which they display, however that may be the first thing that brings them into consideration, but on account of the ethical ends which they serve. He appeals to every man's conscience whether the doctrine to which they bare witness, and which bears witness to them, be not from above and not from beneath: and if so, then the power with which he accomplished them could not have been lent him from beneath, since the kingdom of lies would never so contradict itself as seriously to help forward the establishment of the kingdom of truth. *

There is indeed at first sight a difficulty in the argument which our Saviour draws from the oneness of the kingdom of Satan-namely, that it seems the very idea of this kingdom, that it should be this anarchyblind rage and hate not merely against God, but each part of it warring against every other part. And this is most deeply true, that hell is as much in arms against itself as against heaven; neither does our Lord deny that in respect of itself that kingdom is infinite contradiction and division: only he asserts that in relation to the kingdom of goodness it is at one: there is one life in it and one soul in relation to that. Just as a nation or kingdom may embrace within itself infinite parties, divisions, discords, jealousies, and heart-burnings; yet if it is to subsist as a nation at all, it must not, as regards other nations, have lost its sense of unity; when it does so, of necessity it falls to pieces and perishes. To the Pharisees he says: "This kingdom of evil subsists; by your own confession it does so it cannot therefore have denied the one condition of its existence, which is, that it should not lend its powers to the overthrowing of itself that it should not side with its own foes; I am its foe, it cannot therefore be siding with me."

This accusation against the miracles of Christ, that they were done by the power of an evil magic, the heathen also sometimes used: but evidently having borrowed it from the Jewish adversaries of the Christian faith. Yet in their mouths, who had no such earnest idea of the king.

* Eusebius (Dem. Evang., I. 3, c. 6) makes much of this argument. †See a curious passage, Origen, Con. Cels., 1. 1, c. 68; cf. also 1. 1, c. 6 ; 1. 2, a.

dom of God upon one side, and the kingdom of evil on the other, and the fixed limits which divide the two, who had peopled the intermediate space with middle powers-some good, some evil, some mingled of both the accusation was not at all so deeply malignant as in the mouth of a Jew. It was little more than a stone which they found conveniently at hand to fling, and with them is continually passing over into the charge that those works were wrought by trick-that they were conjurer's arts; the line between the two charges is continually disappearing. The heathen, however, had a method more truly their own of evading the Christian miracles, which is now to consider.

2. THE HEATHEN. (CELSUS, HIEROCLES, PORPHYRY.)

A religion like the Jewish, which, besides God, and the angels who were in direct and immediate subordination to him, left no spirits conceivable but those in rebellion against him, the absolutely and entirely evil; this, as has been observed, allowed no choice, when once the mir acle was adjudged to be not from God, but to attribute it to Satan. There was nothing between; it was from heaven, or if not from heaven, from hell. But it was otherwise in the heathen world, and with the "gods many" of polytheism. So long as these lived in the minds of men, the argument from the miracles was easily evaded. For, what did they prove at the uttermost with regard to the author of them? What but that a god, it might be one of the higher, or it might be one of the middle powers, the daíuoves, the intermediate deities, was with him? What was there, men replied, in this, which justified the demand of an absolute obedience upon their parts? Wherefore should they yield exclusive allegiance to him that wrought these works? The gods had spoken often by others also-had equipped them with powers equal to or greater than those claimed by his disciples for Jesus; yet no man therefore demanded for them that they should be recognized as absolute lords

49; 1. 8, c. 9; Augustine, De Cons. Evang., 1. 1, cc. 9-11; Jerome, Brev. in Psal., 81, in fine; Arnobius, Adv. Gen., 1. 1, c. 43, who brings in this as one of the calumnies of the heathen against the Lord: Magus fuit, clandestinis artibus omnia illa perfecit: Ægyptiorum ex adytis angelorum potentium nomina et remotas furatus est disciplinas; cf. also c. 53. This charge of fetching his magical skill from Egypt, which Cel. sus in like manner takes up, (Origen, Con. Cels., 1. 1, cc. 28, 38; see also Eusebius, Dem. Evang., 1. 3, c. 6,) betrays at once the Jewish origin of the accusation. It is evermore repeated in Jewish books. Egypt, say they, was the natural home of magic, so that if the magic of the world were divided into ten parte Egypt would possess nine; and there, even as the Christian histories confess, Jesus resided two years. (EISENMENGER'S Entdeckt. Judenth, v. 1 pp. 149, 166.)