dies*. This goes on, till at length Joseph says to Mary, "Henceforward let us keep him within doors, for whosoever sets himself against him, perishes." His passionate readiness to avenge himself shows itself at the very earliest age. At five years old he has made a pool of water, and is moulding sparrows from the clay. Another child, the son of a scribe, displeased that he should do this on the Sabbath, opens the sluices of his pool and lets out the water. On this Jesus is indignant, gives him many injurious names, and causes him to wither and wholly dry up with his curset.

Such is the image which the authors of these books give us of the holy child Jesus;—and no wonder; for man is not only unable to realize the perfect, he is unable to conceive it. The idea is as much a gift, as the power to realize that idea. Even the miracles which are not of this revolting character are childish, tricks like the tricks of a conjuror, never solemn acts of power and love. Jesus enters the shop of a dyer, who has various cloths from various persons, to be dyed of divers colours. In the absence of the master, he throws them all into the dying vat together, and when the dyer returns and remonstrates, draws them out of the vat each dyed according to the colour which was enjoined‡. He and some other children make birds and animals of clay; while each is boasting the superiority of his work, Jesus says, “I will cause those which I have made to go;"--which they do, the animals leaping and the birds flying, and at his bidding returning, and eating and drinking from his hand §. While yet an infant at his mother's breast, he bids a palm-tree to stoop that she may pluck the fruits; it obeys, and only returns to its position at his command ||. Another time his

Evang. Infant., c. 49, p. 125. In the Evang. Thom., c. 14, p. 307, he only falls into a swoon, and something afterwards pleasing Jesus, (c. 15,) he raises him up again.

† Evang. Thom., c. 3, p. 282. This appears with variations in the Evang. Infant., c. 46, p. 122.

Evang. Infant., c. 37, p. 111.

§ Ibid., c. 36.

|| Ibid., p. 395.

mother sends him to the well for water; the pitcher breaks, and he brings the water in his cloak*. And as the miracles which he does, so those that are done in regard of him, are idle or monstrous; the ox and ass worshipping him, a newborn infant in the crib, may serve for an example†.

In all these, as will be observed, the idea of redemptive acts altogether falls out of sight; they are none of them the outward clothing of the inward facts of man's redemption. Of course it is not meant to be said that miracles of healing and of grace are altogether wanting in these books; that would evidently have been incompatible with any idea of a Redeemer; but only that they do not present to us any clear and consistent image of a Saviour full of grace and power, but an image rather continually defaced by lines of passion, and caprice, and anger. The most striking, perhaps, of the miracles related in regard of the child Jesus, is that of the falling down of the idols of Egypt at his presence in the land; for it has in it something of a deeper significance, as a symbol and prophecy of the overthrow of the idol worship of the world by him who was now coming into the world §. The lions and the leopards gathering harmlessly round him as he passed through the desert on the way to Egypt, is again not alien to the true spirit of the Gospel, and has its analogy in the words of St. Mark, that he "was with the wild beasts;" (i. 13;) words which certainly are not introduced merely to enhance the savageness of the wilderness where he spent those forty days of temptation, but are meant as an hint to us that in him, the new head of the race, the second Adam, the Paradisaical state was once more given back. (Gen. i. 28.) But with a very few such partial excep

Evang. Infant., p. 121.

For instance, Simon the Canaanite (Ibid., p. 117,) is healed, while yet a child, of the bite of a serpent. Yet even in miracles such as this, there is always something that will not let us forget that we are moving in another world from that in which the sacred evangelists place us.

Evang. Infant., c. 10-12, pp. 75-77; cf. 1 Sam. v. 3, 4.

tions as these, the apocryphal gospels are a barren and dreary waste of wonders without object or aim; and only instructive as making us strongly to feel, more strongly than but for these examples we might have felt, how needful it is that there should be other factors besides power for producing a true miracle; that wisdom and love must be there also; that where men conceive of power as its chiefest element, they give us only an hateful mockery of the divine. Had a Christ such as these gospels paint actually lived upon the earth, he had been no more than a potent and wayward magician, from whom all men would have shrunk with a natural instinct of distrust and fear,

3. THE LATER, OR ECCLESIASTICAL, MIRACLES.

It would plainly lead much too far from the subject in hand to enter into any detailed examination of the authority upon which the later, or, as they may be conveniently termed, the ecclesiastical miracles, come to us. Yet a few words must of necessity find place concerning the permanent miraculous gifts which have been claimed for the Church as her rightful heritage, equally by some who have gloried in their presumed presence, as by others who have lamented their absence by those alike who have seen in the presence of such, evidences of her sanctity, or in their absence, of her degeneracy and fall. It is not my belief that she has this gift of working miracles, nor yet that she was intended to have, and only through her own unfaithfulness has lost, it; nor that her Lord has abridged her of aught that would have made her strong and glorious in not endowing her with powers such as these. With reasons enough for humbling herself, yet I do not believe that among those reasons is to be accounted her inability to perform these works that should transcend nature. So many in our own day have arrived at a directly opposite conclusion, that it will be needful shortly to justify the opinion here exprest.

And first, as a strong presumption against the intended

continuance of these powers in the Church, may be taken the analogies derived from the earlier history of God's dealings with his people. We do not find the miracles sown broadcast over the whole Old Testament history, but they all cluster round a very few eminent persons, and have reference to certain great epochs and crises of the kingdom of God. Abraham, the father of the faithful,-David, the great theocratic king,—-Daniel, the "man greatly beloved," are alike entirely without them; that is, they do no miracles; such may be accomplished in behalf of them, but they themselves accomplish none. In fact there are but two great outbursts of these; the first, at the establishing of the kingdom under Moses and Joshua, on which occasion it is at once evident that they could not have been wanting; the second in the time of Elijah and Elisha; and then also there was utmost need, when it was a question whether the court religion which the apostate kings of Israel had set up, should not quite overbear the true worship of Jehovah, when the Levitical priesthood was abolished, and the faithful were but a scattered few among the ten tribes. Then, in that decisive epoch of the kingdom's history, the two great prophets, they too in a subordinate sense the beginners of a new period, arose, equipped with powers which should witness that he whose servants they were, was the God of Israel, however Israel might refuse to acknowledge him. There is here in all this an entire absence of prodigality in the use of miracles; they are ultimate resources, reserved for the great needs of God's kingdom, not its daily incidents; they are not cheap off-hand expedients, which may always be appealed to, but come only into play when nothing else would have supplied their room. How unlike this moderation to the wasteful expenditure of miracles in the church-history of the middle ages! There no perplexity can occur so trifling that a miracle will not be brought in to solve it; there is almost no saint, certainly no distinguished one, without his nimbus of miracles around

his head; they are adorned with these in rivalry with one another, in rivalry with Christ himself; no acknowledgment like this, "John did no miracle," (John x. 41,) in any of the records of their lives finding place.

We must add to this the declarations of Scripture, which I have already entered on at large, concerning the object of miracles, that they are for the confirming the word by signs following, for authenticating a message as being from heaven— that signs are for the unbelieving. (1 Cor. xiv. 22.) What do they then in a Christendom? It may indeed be answered, that in it are unbelievers still; yet not in the sense in which St. Paul uses the word, for he would designate not the positively unbelieving, not those that in heart and will are estranged from the truth, but the negatively, and that, because the truth has never yet sufficiently accredited itself to them. Signs are not for the positively unbelieving, since as we have seen, they will exercise no power over those who harden themselves against the truth; such will resist them as surely as they will resist every other witness of God's presence in the world; but for the unbelieving who are such by no fault of their own--for them to whom the truth is now coming for the first time. And if not even for them now,-as they exist, for instance, in a heathen land,-we may sufficiently account for this by the fact, that the Church of Christ, with its immense and evident superiorities of all kinds over everything with which it is brought in contact, and some portions of which superiority every man must recognize, is itself now the great witness and proof of the truth which it delivers. That truth, therefore, has no longer need to vindicate itself by an appeal to something else; but the position which it has won in the very forefront of the world is itself its vindication now-is sufficient to give it a first claim on every man's attention.

And then further, all that we might ourselves beforehand presume from the analogy of external things leads us to the same conclusions. We find all beginning to be wonderful