manifestations by the presence and pressure of the alien principle of evil. Nature under this hostile principle is striving to develop its ideals of perfection, like a patch of grass in a field striving to grow under a stone. Lift up that stone, and you will find every root, stem, and blade flattened and blanched, dwarfed and distorted, but still endeavouring to preserve the ideal shape. Our Saviour's miracles lifted the curse from nature, let in heaven's sunshine upon its pale and crushed forms, and allowed them to develop themselves freely, and fulfil their purposes fully. They brought order out of confusion, light out of darkness, health out of disease, calm out of storm, abundance out of poverty, life out of death; and thus we perceive their true harmony with God's scheme of grace to man, with the purpose of the laws and covenants of the Old Testament, and the precepts and principles of the New. Thus we perceive their true harmony also with the purpose and design of God in the creation, and with the development of nature; which lies not in a downward course of disorder and degradation, but in an upward course of greater beauty and brighter glory. As the process of crystallization, by which the amorphous mineral mass is changed into the diamond or the ruby, testifies to no new law, to no broken order, but is a manifestation of the underlying harmony and beauty of matter, so the miracles of Christ are crystallizations, most lovely and most rare, of the world's chaos of disorder and sin. As the face of nature speaks of no interruption or violation of its laws, but simply manifests its real nature, when its winter sterility breaks out into the glory of April flowers,

so the miracles of Christ are the first pure and lovely flowers of the spring of grace, testifying to the power of the Sun of Righteousness that will go on to develop the true life of earth and the true life of man, and make the winter wilderness a summer garden of the Lord.

The miracles of Jesus, I have said, were the beginnings of a new and higher order of things. They inaugurated the new creation of redemption; and therefore, like the almighty acts of the first six days of the world, they cannot be repeated or imitated. But as acts of the new creation, we can go on working and developing in the nobler course they have indicated. As beginnings of a new order of things, we can act in harmony with the higher laws which they reveal. We cannot create, but we can work with the materials which have been prepared for us. We cannot begin, but we can carry on what has been begun. We cannot change water into wine or multiply loaves and fishes, but these miracles indicate that the Divine energy displayed in them is still working mightily although silently in us, both to will and to do of His good pleasure. They show to us the reality of His conquest over the limitations of the world; they prove that all the prophecies which describe the future palingenesis are possibilities; they supply the link that con nects the weakness of man with the strength of God. By the union of the Divine and human nature in Christ, He was enabled to perform His wonderful works; and by faith in Him, union with Him, we, too, can have the Godhead united with our humanity; and, through Christ strengthening us, do all things. It is a grand thought

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suggested by a modern writer, that all the results of our wonderful civilization have been the extensive carrying out of what Jesus wrought intensively. He wound up, as it were, in His miracles the spring of the machinery of the world's destiny; and all the progress of the world since has been the working down of this concentrated force. He multiplied bread in connection with the people following Him into the wilderness to hear His words, that through the cultivation of man's spirit by Christianity the waste. places of the earth might also be cultivated, and famine be unknown; that the earth might yield her increase, when all the people should praise the Lord. He healed the sick, that "in the reverence for man's body which the Gospel teaches—in the sympathy for all forms of suffering which flows out of it-in the sure advance of all worthier science which it implies and ensures-in and by aid of all this, these miraculous cures might unfold themselves into the whole art of Christian medicine, into all the alleviations and removals of pain and disease which are so rare in heathen and so frequent in Christian lands." He stilled the storm and walked upon the sea that, in the calm courage and skill which the religion of Jesus inspires, man's spirit might have the lordship of the winds and waves, and Christian nations might build their noble fleets and guide them over the trackless ocean, and spread the blessings of Christian civilization over the whole earth. Once, the Bible tells us, the Holy Land was plastic to man's will. All nature there was obedient to the people who were obedient to God. Its rain and dew, the setting of its sun, the flow of its waters, the

increase of its harvests, were all dependent upon the faith of Israel. And this state of things, the miracles of Jesus teach us, was not unique, but representative. The miracle without will still rise to meet faith--the miracle within. Nature still will manifest her sympathy with grace. All things will be possible to him that believeth. And it needs only that the people should be all righteous to give to man that dominion over the whole earth which Israel possessed over its ancient heritage.

CHAPTER XIV.

REJUVENESCENCE.

"Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle's."-PSALM ciii. 5.

VER since our first parents were banished from the

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Tree of Life, by whose blessed medicine they were kept in undecayed vigour, mankind have sought a substitute for it in ways of their own. In Greek mythology we read the story of Medea, who, by the magic of her incantations, restored the aged to the bloom of youthful beauty. In Eastern fables we are charmed with descriptions of the Vijara Nadi, the ageless river, which makes the old young again by only seeing it; and of the spring of immortality flowing in caverns below the earth, and guarded by the pundit Kabib, where the bodies of those who bathe in it shine as if anointed with oil, and are fragrant as with the scent of violets. The South Sea islander, seeing the sun sinking, dim and weary, in the western waves, and rising again from the eastern main fresh and bright, conceived the beautiful myth of "the