of the destinies of men. Esculapius performed wonderful cures; Apol. lonius went about the world healing the sick, expelling demons, raising the dead; Aristeas disappeared from the earth in as marvellous a way as the author of the Christian faith: yet no man built upon these wonders a superstructure such as that which the Christians built upon the

wonders of Christ.*

Thus Celsus, as we learn from more than one passage in Origen's reply, brings forward now the mythic personages of antiquity, now the magicians of a later date, though apparently with no very distinct purpose in his mind, but only with the feeling that somehow or other he can play them off against the divine Author of our religion, and undermine his claims to the allegiance of men. For it certainly remains a question how much credence he gave himself to the miracles which he adduced;t and whether, sharing the almost universal skepticism of the educated classes of his day, he did not rather mean that all should fall, than that all should stand together. Hierocles, again, governor of Bithynia, who is accused of being a chief instigator of the cruelties under Diocletian, and who, if the charge be just, wielded arms of unrighteousness on both hands against the Christian faith, the persecutor's sword, and the libeller's pen-followed in the same line. His book we know from the extracts in the answer of Eusebius, and the course of his principal arguments. From this answer it appears that, having recounted various miracles wrought, as he affirms, by Apollonius, he proceeds thus: "Yet do we not account him who has done such things, for a god, only for a man beloved of the gods: while the Christians on the contrary, on account of a few insignificant wonder-works, proclaim their Jesus for a god." He presently, it is true, shifts his arguments, and no longer al

* The existence of false cycles of miracles should no more cast a suspicion upon all, or cause to doubt those which present themselves with marks of the true, than the appearance of a parhelion forerunning the sun cause us to deny that he was travelling up from beneath the horizon, for which rather it is an evidence. The false money passes, not because there is nothing better and therefore all have consented to receive it, but because there is a good money, under color of which the false is accepted. Thus is it with the longing which has existed "at all times and in all ages after some power which is not circumscribed by the rules of ordinary visible experibut which is superior to these rules and can transgress them." The mythic narrations in which such longings find an apparently historic clothing and utterance, so far from being eyed with suspicion, should be most welcome to the Christian inquirer. The enemies of the faith will of course parade these shadows, in the hopes of making us believe that our substance is a shadow also; but they are worse than simple who are cozened by so palpable a fraud.

ence,

+ Origen (Con. Cels., 1. 3, c. 22) charges him with not believing them.

In the Lame way Arnobius (Adv. Gen., 1. 1, 48) brings in the beathen adver

lows the miracles, denying only the conclusions drawn from them; but rather denies that they have any credible attestation: in his blind hate, setting them in this respect beneath the miracles of Apollonius, which this "lover of truth,"* for under that name he writes, declares to be far more worthily attested.

This Apollonius, (of Tyana in Cappadocia,) whose historical existence there does not seem any reason to call in question, was probably born about the time of the birth of Christ, and lived as far as into the reign of Nerva, A.D. 97. Save two or three isolated notices of an earlier date, the only record which we have of him is a Life written by Philostratus, a rhetorician of the second century, professing to be founded on cotemporary documents, yet every where betraying its unhistoric character. It is in fact a philosophic romance, in which the revival and reaction of paganism in the second century is portrayed. Yet was not that Life written, I believe, with any directly hostile purpose against Christianity, but only to prove that they of the old faith had their mighty wonder-worker as well. It was composed, indeed, as seems to me perfectly clear, with an eye to the life of our Lord; the parallels are too remarkable to have been the effect of chance ;t in a certain sense also in emulation and rivalry; yet not in hostile opposition, not as implying this was the Saviour of men, and not that; nor yet, as some of Lucian's works, in a mocking irony of the things which are written concerning the Lord. This later use which has often been made of the book, must not be confounded with its original purpose, which was certainly differThe first, I believe, who so used it, was Charles Blount,§ one of the earlier English Deists. And passing over some other insignificant endeavors to make the book tell against revealed religion, endeavors in which the feeble hand, however inspired by hate, yet wanted strength

ent.

sary saying it is idle to make these claims (frustra tantùm arrogas Christo) on the score of the miracles, when so many others have done the like.

Philalethes.

† See, for instance, upon the raising of the widow's son, the parallel miracle which I have adduced from the life of Apollonius. The above is Baur's conclusion in his instructive little treatise, Apollonius von Tyana und Christus.

His Philopseudes, for instance, and his Vera Historia. Thus only the latter half of this judgment of Huet's (Dem. Evang., prop. 9, c. 147) seems to me to be true: Id spectâsse imprimis videtur Philostratus, ut invalescentem jam Christi fidem ac doctrinam deprimeret, opposito hoc omnis doctrinæ, sanctitatis, ac mirificæ virtutis fœneo simulacro. Itaque ad Christi exemplar hanc expressit effigiem, et pleraque ex Christi Jesu historia Apollonio accommodavit, ne quid Ethnici Christianis invidere possent. In his now exceedingly scarce translation, with notes, of The two first Books of Philostratus, London, 1680, with this significant motto from Seneca, Cùm omnia in incerto sint, fave tibi, et crede quod mavis.

and skill to launch the dart, we come to Wieland's Agathodamon, is which neither malice nor dexterity were wanting, and which, professing to explain upon natural grounds the miracles of Apollonius, yet unques tionably points throughout at one greater than the wonder-worker of Tyana, with a hardly suppressed de te fabula narratur running through the whole.*

The arguments drawn from these parallels, as far as they were adduced in good faith and in earnest, have, of course, perished with the perishing of polytheism from the minds of men, even the minds of those who have not submitted themselves to the faith of Christ. Other miracles can no longer be played off against his miracles; the choice remains between these or none.

3. THE PANTHEISTIC. (SPINOZA.)

These two classes of assailants of the Scripture miracles, the Jewish and the heathen, allowed the miracles themselves to stand unquestioned as facts, but either challenged their source, or denied the consequences which were drawn from them by the Church. Not so the pantheistic deniers of the miracles, who assailed them not as being of the devil, not as insufficient proofs of Christ's absolute claims of lordship; but cut at their very root, denying that any miracle was possible, since it was contrary to the idea of God. For these opponents of the truth Spinoza may be said, in modern times, to bear the word; the view is so connected with his name, that it will be well to hear the objection as he has uttered it. That objection is indeed only the necessary consequence of his philosophical system. Now the first temptation on making acquaintance with that system is to contemplate it as a mere and sheer atheism; and such has ever been the ordinary charge against it; nor in studying his works is it always easy to persuade one's self that it is any thing higher, or that the various passages in which he himself assumes it as something different, are more than inconsequent statements, with which he seeks to blind the eyes of others, and to avert the odium of this charge of atheism from himself. And yet atheism it is not, nor is it even a material, how

* The work of Philostratus has been used with exactly an opposite aim by Christian apologists, namely, to bring out, by comparison with the best which heathenism could offer, the surpassing glory of Christ. Cudworth, in his Intellectual System, b. 4, 215, occupies himself at a considerable length with Apollonius. Here may probably have been the motive to Blount's book, which only followed two years after the publication of Cudworth's great work. Henry More, too, in his Mystery of Godliness b. 4, cc. 9-12, compares at large the miracles of Christ with those of Apollonius.

ever it may be a formal, pantheism. All justice requires it to be ac knowledged that he does not bring down and resolve God into nature,. but rather takes up and loses nature in God. It is only man whom he submits to a blind fate, and for whom he changes, as indeed for him he does, all ethics into physics. But the idea of freedom, as regards God, is saved; since, however, he affirms him immanent in nature and not transcending it, this is only because he has himself chosen these laws of nature as the one unchangeable manner of his working, and constituted them in his wisdom so elastic, that they shall prove under every circumstance and in every need, the adequate organs and servants of his will. He is not bound to nature otherwise than by that, his own will; the laws which limit him are of his own imposing; the necessity which binds him to them is not the necessity of any absolute fate, but of the highest fitness. Still, however, Spinoza does affirm such a necessity, and thus excludes the possibility of any revelation, whereof the very essence is that it is a new beginning, a new unfolding by God of himself to man, and especially excludes the miracle, which is itself at once the accompaniment, and itself a constituent part, of a revelation.

It would not be profitable to say here more than a few words on the especial charges which he brings against the miracle, as lowering, and unworthy of, the idea of God. They are but an application to a particular point of the same charges which he brings against all revelation, namely, that to conceive any such is a dishonoring, and a casting a slight upon, God's great original revelation of himself in nature and in man; an arguing that of such imperfection and incompleteness, as that it needed the author of the world's laws to interfere in aid of those laws, lest they should prove utterly inadequate to his purposes.* And thus, as regards the miracle in particular, he finds fault with it as a bringing in of disorder into that creation, of which the only idea worthy of God is that of an unchangeable order; it is a making God to contradict himself, for the law which was violated by the miracle is as much God's law as the miracle which violated it. The answer to this objection has been already anticipated; it has been already sought to be shown that the miracle is not a discord in nature, but the coming in of a higher harmony; not disorder, but instead of the order of earth, the

* Tract. Theol. Pol., c. 6: Nam cùm virtus et potentia naturæ sit ipsa Dei virtus et potentia, leges autem et regulæ naturæ ipsa Dei decreta, omnino credendum est, potentiam naturæ infinitam esse, ejusque leges adeo latas, ut ad omnia quæ et ab ipso divino intellectu concipiuntur, se extendant; alias enim quid aliud statuitur, quàm quod Deus naturam adeo impotentem creaverit, ejusque leges et regulas adeo steriles statuerit, ut sæpe de novo ei subvenire cogatur, si eam conservatam vult, et ut res ex voto succedant, quod sanè à ratione alienissimum esse existimo.

order of heaven; not the violation of law, but that which continually even in this natural world, is taking place, the comprehension of a lower law by a higher; in this case the comprehension of a lower natural, by a higher spiritual law; with only the modifications of the lower, necessarily consequent upon this.

Then, again, when he charges the miracle with resting on a false assumption of the position which man occupies in the universe, as flattering the notion that nature is to serve him, he not to bow to nature, it is most true that it does rest on this assumption. But this were only a charge which would tell against it, supposing that true, which so far from being truth, is indeed his first great falsehood of all, namely, the substitution of a God of nature, in place of a God of men. If God be indeed only or chiefly the God of nature, and not in a paramount sense the God of grace, the God of men, if nature be indeed the highest, and man only created as furniture for this planet, it were indeed absurd and inconceivable that the higher should serve, or give place to, or fall into the order of, the lower. But if, upon the other hand, man is the end and object of all, if he be indeed the vicegerent of the Highest, the image of God, if this world and all that belongs to it be but a workshop for the training of men, only having a worth and meaning when so considered, then that the lower should serve, and, where need was, give way to the highest, this were only beforehand to be expected.*

Here, as is so often the case, something much behind the miracle, something much earlier in our view of the relations between God and his creatures, has already determined whether we should accept or reject it, and this, long before we have arrived at the consideration of this specific matter.

4. THE SKEPTICAL. (HUME.)

While Spinoza rested his objection to the miracles on the ground that the everlasting laws of the universe left no room for such, and while the form therefore which the question in debate assumed in his hands was this, Are miracles (objectively) possible? Hume, a legitimate child and pupil of the empiric philosophy of Locke, started his objection in altogether a different shape, namely, in this, Are miracles (subjec tively) credible? He is in fact the skeptic, which,-taking the word in

* They are the truly wise, he says, (Tract. Theol. Pol., c. 6,) who aim not at this, ut natura iis, sed contra ut ipsi naturæ pareant, utpote qui certè sciunt, Deum naturam dirigere prout ejus leges universales, non autem prout humanæ naturæ particulares leges exigunt, adeoque Deum non solius humani generis, sed totius naturæ rationem habere