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hand is withered and dried up (1 Kin. xiii. 4), not a withered hand restored. Not but that these works also are for the most part what our Lord's are altogether and with no single exception, namely, works of evident grace and mercy. I affirm this of all our Lord's miracles; for that single one, which seems an exception, the cursing of the barren figtree, has no right really to be considered such. Indeed it is difficult to see how our blessed Lord could more strikingly have shown his purpose of preserving throughout for his miracles their character of beneficence, or have witnessed for Himself that He was come not to destroy men's lives but to save them, than in this circumstance,-that when He needed in this very love to declare, not in word only but in act, what would be the consequences of an obstinate unfruitfulness and resistance to his grace, and thus to make manifest the severer side of his ministry, He should have chosen for the showing out of this, not one among all the sinners who were about Him, but displayed his power upon a tree, which, itself incapable of feeling, might yet effectually serve as a sign and warning to men. He will allow no single exception to the rule of grace and love.1

1 Lord Bacon (Meditationes Sacra) on the words, Bene omnia fecit (Mark vii. 37), in which he sees rightly an allusion to Gen. i. 31, goes on to say: Verus plausus: Deus cum universa crearet, vidit quod singula et omnia erant bona nimis. Deus Verbum in miraculis quæ edidit (omne autem miraculum est nova creatio, et non ex lege primæ creationis) nil facere voluit, quod non gratiam et beneficentiam omnino spiraret. Moses edidit miracula, et profligavit Ægyptios pestibus multis: Elias edidit, et occlusit cælum ne plueret super terram; et rursus eduxit de cælo ignem Dei super duces et cohortes: Elizæus edidit, et evocavit ursas e deserto, quæ laniarent impuberes; Petrus Ananiam sacrilegum hypocritam morte, Paulus Elymam magum cæcitate, percussit: sed nihil hujusmodi fecit Jesus. Descendit super eum Spiritus in formâ columbæ, de quo dixit, Nescitis cujus Spiritûs sitis. Spiritus Jesu, spiritus columbinus: fuerunt illi servi Dei tanquam boves Dei triturantes granum, et conculcantes paleam; sed Jesus agnus Dei sine irâ et judiciis. Omnia ejus miracula circa corpus humanum, et doctrina ejus circa animam humanam. Indiget corpus hominis alimento, defensione ab externis, et curâ. multitudinem piscium in retibus congregavit, ut uberiorem victum hominibus præberet: ille alimentum aquæ in dignius alimentum vini ad exhilarandum cor hominis convertit: ille ficum quod officio suo ad quod

ille

When He blesses, it is men; but when He smites, it is an unfeeling tree.1

It is also noticeable that the region in which the miracles of the Old Testament chiefly move, is that of external nature; they are the cleaving of the sea (Exod. xiv. 21), or of a river (Josh. iii. 14; 2 Kin. ii. 8, 14), yawnings of the earth (Num. xvi. 31), fire falling down from heaven (1 Kin. xviii. 38; 2 Kin. i. 10, 12), furnaces which have lost their power to consume (Dan. iii.), wild-beasts which have laid aside their inborn fierceness in whole (Dan. vi. 18, 22), or in part (1 Kin. xiii. 24, 28), and the like. Not of course that they are exclusively these; but this nature is the haunt and main region of the miracle in the Old Testament, as in the New it is mainly the sphere of man's life in which it moves. And consistently with this, the earlier miracles, done as the greater number of them were, in the presence of the giant powers of heathendom, have oftentimes a colossal character. Those powers of the world are strong, but the God of Israel will show Himself to be stronger than them all. Thus it is with the miracles of Egypt, the miracles of Babylon: they are miracles eminently of strength;2 for under the influence of

destinatum fuit, ad cibum hominis videlicet, non fungeretur, arefieri jussit ille penuriam panum et piscium ad alendum exercitum populi dilatavit: ille ventos, quod navigantibus minarentur, corripuit. Nullum miraculum judicii, omnia beneficentiæ, et circa corpus humanum.

1 From this point of view we should explain our Saviour's rebuke to the sons of Zebedee, when they wanted to call down fire from heaven on a village of the Samaritans, as Elias did' (Luke ix. 54); to repeat, that is, an Old-Testament miracle. 'Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of,' is not, as it is often explained, 'Ye are mistaking a spirit of bitter zeal for a spirit of love to Me;'-but the rebuke is gentler, Ye are mistaking and confounding the different standing-points of the Old and New Covenant, taking your stand upon the Old, that of an avenging righteousness, when you should take it upon the New, that of a forgiving love.'

* We find the false Christs, who were so plentiful about the time of our Lord's coming, professing and promising to do exactly the same works as those wrought of yore, to repeat even on a larger scale these Old-Testament miracles. Thus that Egyptian' whom the Roman tribune supposed that he saw in Paul (Acts xxi. 38), and of whom Josephus gives us a fuller account (Antt. xx. 8, 6), led a tumultuous crowd to the

the great nature-worships of those lands, all religion had assumed a colossal grandeur. Compared with our Lord's works wrought in the days of his flesh, those were the whirlwind and the fire, and his as the still small voice which followed. In that old time God was teaching his people, He was teaching also the nations with whom his people were brought wonderfully into contact, that He who had entered into covenant with one among all the nations, was not one God among many, the God of the hills, or the God of the plains. (1 Kin. xx. 23), but that the God of Israel was the Lord of the whole earth.

But Israel at the time of the Incarnation had thoroughly learned that lesson, much else as it had still to learn: and the whole civilized world had practically outgrown polytheism, however as the popular superstition it may have lingered still. And thus the works of our Lord, though they bear not on their front the imposing character which did those of old, yet contain higher and deeper truths. They are eminently miracles of the Incarnation, of the Son of God who had taken our flesh, and who, having taken, would heal it. They have predominantly a relation to man's body and his spirit. Miracles of nature assume now altogether a subordinate place: they still survive, even as we could ill afford wholly to have lost them; for this region of nature must still be claimed as part of Christ's dominion, though not its chiefest or its noblest province. But man, and not nature, is now the main subject of these mighty powers; and thus it comes to pass that, with less of outward pomp, less to startle and amaze, the new have a far deeper inward significance than the old.1

Mount of Olives, promising to show them from thence how, as a second and a greater Joshua, he would cause the walls, not of Jericho, but of Jerusalem, to fall to the ground at his bidding. See Vitringa, De Signis a Messiá edendis, in his Obss. Sac. vol. i. p. 482.

1 Julian the Apostate had indeed so little an eye for the glory of such works as these, that in one place he says (Cyril, Adv. Jul. vi.), Jesus did nothing wonderful, 'unless any should esteem that to have healed some lame and blind, and exorcised some demoniacs in villages like Bethsaida and Bethany, were very wonderful works.'

2. THE MIRACLES OF THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. The apocryphal gospels, abject productions as, whether contemplated in a literary or moral point of view, they must be allowed to be, are yet instructive in this respect, that they show us what manner of gospels were the result, when men drew from their own fancy, and devised Christs of their own, instead of resting upon the basis of historic truth, and delivering to the world faithful records of Him who indeed had lived and died among them. Here, as ever, the glory of the true comes out into strongest light by its comparison with the false. But in nothing, perhaps, are these apocryphal gospels more worthy of note, than in the difference between the main features of their miracles and of those of the canonical Gospels. Thus in the canonical, the miracle is indeed essential, but, at the same time, ever subordinated to the doctrine which it confirms,—a link in the great chain of God's manifestation of Himself to men; its ethical significance never falls into the background, but the wonder-work of grace and power has, in every case where this can find room, nearer or remoter reference to the moral condition of the person or persons in whose behalf it is wrought. The miracles ever lead us off from themselves to their Author; they appear as emanations from the glory of the Son of God; but it is in Him we rest, and not in them; they are but the halo round Him, and have their worth from Him, not contrariwise He from them. They are held, too, together by his strong and central personality, which does not leave them a conglomerate of marvellous anecdotes accidentally heaped together, but parts of a great organic whole, of which every part is in vital coherence with all other. But it is altogether otherwise in these apocryphal narratives. To say that the miracles occupy in them the foremost place would very inadequately express the facts of the case. They are everything. Some of these so-called histories are nothing else but a string of these;

which yet (and this too is singularly characteristic) stand wholly disconnected from the ministry of Christ. Not one of them belongs to the period after his Baptism, but they are all miracles of the Infancy,-in other words, of that time whereof the canonical history relates no miracle, and not merely does not relate any, but is at pains to tell us that during it no miracle was wrought, the miracle in Cana of ́ Galilee being his first (John ii. 11).

It follows of necessity that they are never seals of a word and doctrine which has gone before; they are never signs,' but at the best wonders and portents. Any high purpose and aim is clearly absent from them altogether. It is never felt that the writer is writing out of any higher motive than to excite and feed a childish love of the marvellous, never that he could say, 'These are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life through his name' (John xx. 31). Indeed, so far from having a religious, they are often wanting in a moral, element. The Lord Jesus appears in them as a wayward, capricious, passionate child; to be feared indeed, seeing that He is furnished with such formidable powers of avenging every wrong or accidental injury which He meets; and so bearing Himself, that the request which the parents of some other children are represented as making, that He may be kept within the house, for He brings harm and mischief wherever He comes, is perfectly justified by the facts.

It may be well to cite a few examples in proof, however harshly some of them may jar on the Christian ear. Thus some children refuse to play with Him, hiding themselves from Him; He pursues and turns them into kids.1 Another child by accident runs against Him and throws Him down; whereupon He, being exasperated,' exclaims, As thou hast

Evang. Infant. 40, in Thilo's Codex Apocryphus, p. 115; to whose admirable edition of the apocryphal gospels the references in this section are made throughout.

2 Πικρανθείς.

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