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Adam's sin,--fitly, therefore, removed by Him, the second Adam, who came to restore to him all which had been forfeited by the first.

The miracle, then, being this ethical act, and only to be received when it is so, and when it seals doctrines of holiness, the forgetting or failing to bring forward that the divine miracle must, of necessity, move in this sphere of redemption only, that the doctrine also is to try the miracle, as well as the miracle to seal the doctrine, is a most dangerous omission on the part of many who, in modern times, have written Evidences of Christianity,' and have found in the miracles wrought by its Founder, and in those mainly as acts of power, well-nigh the exclusive argument for its reception as a divine revelation. On the place which these works should take in the array of proofs for the things which we believe, there will be occasion, by and by, to speak. For the present it may be sufficient to observe, that if men are taught to believe in Christ upon no other grounds than because He attested his claims by works of wonder, and that therefore they are bound to do so, how shall they consistently refuse belief to any other, who may come hereafter attesting his claims by the same? We have here a paving of the way of Antichrist; for as we know that he will have his 'signs and wonders' (2 Thess. ii. 9), so, if this argument is good, he will have right on the score of these to claim the faith and allegiance of men. But no; the miracle must witness for itself, and the doctrine. must witness for itself, and then, and then only, the first is capable of witnessing for the second; and those books of Christian Evidences are maimed and imperfect, fraught with the most perilous consequences, which reverence in the miracle little else but its power, and see in that alone what gives either to it its attesting worth, or to the doctrine its authority as adequately attested truth.

1 Gerhard (Loc. Theoll. loc. xxiii. 11): Miracula sunt doctrinæ tessera ac sigilla; quemadmodum igitur sigillum a literis avulsum nihil probat, ita quoque miracula sine doctrinâ nihil valent.

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CHAPTER IV.

THE EVANGELICAL, COMPARED WITH OTHER
CYCLES OF MIRACLES.

I. THE MIRACLES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.

THE miracles of our Lord and those of the Old Testament afford many interesting points of comparison, a comparison equally instructive, whether we trace the points of likeness, or of unlikeness, which exist between them. Thus, to note first a remarkable difference, we find oftentimes the holy men of the older Covenant bringing, if one may venture so to speak, hardly, and with difficulty, the wonder-work to pass; it is not born without pangs; there is sometimes a momentary pause, a seeming uncertainty about the issue; while the miracles of Christ are always accomplished with the highest ease; He speaks, and it is done. Thus Moses must plead and struggle with God, Heal her now, O God, I beseech Thee,' before the plague of leprosy is removed from his sister, and not even so can he instantly win the boon (Num. xii. 13-15); but Christ heals a leper by his touch (Matt. viii. 3), or ten with even less than this, merely by the power of his will and at a distance' (Luke xvii. 14). Elijah must pray long, and his servant go up seven times, before tokens of the rain appear (1 Kin. xviii. 42-44); he stretches himself thrice on the child and cries unto the Lord, and painfully wins back its life (1 Kin. xvii. 21, 22); and Elisha, with yet more of effort

1 Cyril of Alexandria (Cramer's Cat. in Luc. v. 12) has observed and dra wn out the contrast.

and only after partial failure (2 Kin. iv. 31-35), restores the child of the Shunammite to life. Christ, on the other hand, shows Himself the Lord of the living and the dead, raising the dead with as much ease as He performs the commonest transactions of life. In the miracles wrought by men, glorious acts of faith as they are, for they are ever wrought in reliance on the strength and faithfulness of God, who will follow up and seal his servant's word, it is yet possible for human impatience and human unbelief to break out. Thus Moses, God's instrument though he be for the work of power, speaks hastily and acts unbelievingly (Num. xx. 11). It is needless to say of the Son, that his confidence ever remains the same, that his Father hears Him always; no admixture of the slightest human infirmity mars the completeness of his work.

Where the miracles are similar in kind, Christ's are larger, freer, and more glorious. Elisha feeds a hundred men with twenty loaves (2 Kin. iv. 42-44), but He five thousand with five. Others have continually their instrument of power to which the wonder-working energy is linked. Thus Moses has his rod, his staff of wonder, to divide the Red Sea, and to accomplish his other mighty acts; without which he is nothing (Exod. vii. 19; viii. 5, 16; ix. 23; x. 13; xiv. 16, &c.); his tree to heal the bitter waters (Exod. xv. 25); Elijah divides the river with his mantle (2 Kin. ii. 8); Elisha heals the spring with a cruse of salt (2 Kin. ii. 20). But Christ accomplishes his miracles simply by the agency of his word (Matt. xii. 13), or by a touch (Matt. viii. 3; xx. 34); or if He takes anything as a channel of his healing power, it is from Himself He takes it (Mark vii. 33; viii. 23);2 or should

1 Tertullian (Adv. Marc. iv. 35): Aliter Dominus per semet ipsum operatur, sive per Filium; aliter per prophetas famulos suos; maxime documenta virtutis et potestatis ; quæ ut clariora et validiora, qua propria, distare a vicariis fas est.

2 In the East the Mahometans had probably a sense of this fitness that Christ should find all in Himself, when they made his healing virtue to have resided in his breath (Tholuck, Blüthensamml. aus d. Morgenl. Myst.

He, as once He does, use any foreign medium in part (John ix. 6), yet by other miracles of like kind, in which He has recourse to no such extraneous helps, He declares plainly that this was of free choice, and not of necessity. And, which is but another side of the same truth, while the miracles of Moses, or of the Apostles, are ever done in the name of, and with the attribution of the glory to, another, 'Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord, which He will show you' (Exod. xiv. 13), 'In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk' (Acts iii. 6), ‘Eneas, Jesus Christ maketh thee whole' (Acts ix. 34. cf. Mark xvi. 17; Luke x. 17; John xiv. 10); his are ever wrought in his own name and by a power immanent and inherent in Himself: 'I will, be thou clean' (Matt. viii. 3); Thou deaf and dumb spirit, I charge thee come out of him' (Mark ix. 25); 'Young man, I say unto thee, Arise' (Luke vii. 14). Where He prays, being about to perform one of his mighty works, his disciples shall learn even from his prayer itself that herein He is not asking for a power not indwelling in Him, but indeed only testifying thus to the unbroken oneness of his life with his Father's (John xi. 41, 42);2 just as on another occa sion He will not suffer his disciples to suppose that it is for any but for their sakes that the testimony from heaven is borne unto Him (John xii. 30). Thus needful was it for them, thus needful for all, that they should have high and exclusive thoughts of Him, and should not class Him with any other, even the greatest and holiest of the children of

men.

p. 62); to which also they were led as being the purest and least material effluence of the body (cf. John xx. 22). So Abgarus, in the apocryphal letter which bears his name, magnifies Christ's healings, in that they were done avev pappákwv kai Boravův. Arnobius too (Adv. Gent. i. 43, 44, 48, 52) lays great stress upon the point, that all which He did was done sine ullis adminiculis rerum; he is comparing, it is true, our Lord's miracles with the lying wonders of the yonres, not with the only relatively inferior of the Old Testament.

1 See Pearson, On the Creed, Art. 2; Gerhard, Loc. Theoll. loc. iv. 5, 59. 2 Cf. Ambrose, De Fïde, iii. 4.

These likenesses and unlikenesses are equally such as beforehand we should have naturally expected. We should have expected the mighty works of either covenant to be like, since the old and new form parts of one organic whole; and it is ever God's law that the lower should contain the germs and prophetic intimations of the higher. We should expect them to be unlike, since the very idea of God's kingdom is that of progress, of a gradually fuller communication and larger revelation of Himself to men, so that He who in times past spake unto the fathers by the prophets, did at length speak unto us by his Son; and it was only meet that' this Son should be clothed with mightier powers than theirs, and powers which He held not from another, but such as were evidently his own in fee.'

This, too, explains a difference in the character of the ' miracles of the two Covenants, and how it comes to pass that those of the Old wear oftentimes a far severer aspect than those of the New. They are miracles, indeed, of God's grace, but yet also miracles of the Law, of that Law which worketh wrath, which will teach, at all costs, the lesson of the awful holiness of God, his hatred of the sinner's sin,-a lesson which men had all need thoroughly to learn, lest they should mistake and abuse the new lesson which a Saviour taught, of God's love at the same time toward the sinner himself. Miracles of the Law, they preserve a character that accords with the Law; being oftentimes fearful outbreaks of God's anger against the unrighteousness of men; such for instance are the signs and wonders in Egypt, many of those in the desert (Num. xvi. 31; Lev. x. 2), and some which the later prophets wrought (2 Kin. i. 10-12; ii. 23-25); leprosies are inflicted (Num. xii. 10; 2 Chr. xxvi. 19), not removed; a sound

1 Tertullian (Adv. Marc. iii. passim) urges this well. Eusebius (Dem. Evang. iii. 2) traces in the same way the parallelisms between the life of Moses and of Christ. They supposed that in so doing they were, if anything, confirming the truth of each, though now the assailants of Revelation will have it that these coincidences are only calculated to cast suspicion upon both.

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