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, and suffices 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 wonderfulto be under laws different from, and higher than, those which regulate ulterior progress. Thus the powers evermore at work for the upholding the natural world would have been manifestly insufficient for its first creation; there were other which must have presided at its birth, but which now, having done their work, have fallen back, and left it to its ordinary development. The multitudinous races of animals which people the earth, and of plants which clothe it, needed infinitely more for their first production than suffices for their present upholding. It is only according to the analogies of that which thus everywhere surrounds us, to presume that it was even so with the beginnings of the spiritual creationthe Christian Church. It is unquestionably so with the beginnings of that new creation in any single heart. Then, in the regeneration, the strongest tendencies of the old nature are overborne; the impossible has become possible, in some measure easy; by a mighty wonder-stroke of grace the polarity in the man is shifted; the flesh, that was the positive pole, has become the negative, and the spirit, which was before the negative, is henceforth the positive. Shall we count it strange, then, that the coming in of a new order, not into a single heart, but into the entire world-a new order bursting forcibly through the bonds and hindrances of the old, should have been wonderful? It would have been inexplicable if it had been otherwise. The son of Joseph might have lived and died, and done no miracles: but the Virgin-born, the Son of the Most Highest, Himself the middle point of all wonder,-for Him to have done none, herein, indeed, had been the greatest marvel of all.

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But this new order, having not only declared but constituted itself, having asserted that it is not of any inevitable necessity bound by the heavy laws of the old, henceforth submits itself in outward things, and for the present time, to those laws. All its true glory, which is its inward, it retains; but these powers, which are not the gift-for Christ Himself is the gift-but the signs of the gift, it foregoes. Miracles,' says Fuller, are the swaddling clothes of the infant Churches;' and, we may add, not the garments of the full grown. They were as the proclamation that the king was mounting his throne; who, however, is not proclaimed every day, but only at his accession; when he sits acknowledged on his throne, the proclamation ceases. They were as the bright clouds which gather round, and announce the sun at his first appearing his mid-day splendour, though as full, and indeed fuller, of light and heat, knows not those bright heralds and harbingers of his rising. Or they may be likened to the temporary framework on which the arch is rounded, a framework taken down so soon as that is completed. That the Church has had these wonders,-that its first birth was, like that of its wondrous Founder, wonderful,—of this it preserves a record and attestation in the Scriptures of truth. The miracles recorded there live for the Church; they are as much present witnesses for Christ to us now as to them who actually saw them with their eyes. For they were done once, that they might be believed always; that we, having in the Gospels the lively representation of our Lord portrayed for us, might as surely believe that He was the ruler of nature, the healer of the body, the Lord of life and of death, as though we had actually ourselves seen Him allay a storm, or heal a leper, or raise one dead.

Moreover, a very large proportion of the later miracles presented to our belief bear inward marks of spuriousness. The miracles of Scripture, and among these, not so much the miracles of the Old Covenant as the miracles of Christ and his Apostles, being the miracles of that highest and latest

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dispensation under which we live,—we have a right to consider as normal, in their chief features at least, for all future miracles, if such were to continue in the Church. The details, the local colouring, might be different, and there would be no need to be perplexed at such a difference appearing; yet the later must not, in their inner spirit, be totally unlike the earlier, or they will carry the sentence of condemnation on their front. They must not, for instance, lead us back under the bondage of the senses, while those other were ever framed to release from that bondage. They must not be aimless and objectless, fantastic freaks of power, while those had every one of them a meaning and distinct ethical aim, were bridges by which Christ found access from men's bodies to their souls,―manifestations of his glory, that men might be drawn to the glory itself. They must not be ludicrous and grotesque, saintly jests, while those were evermore reverent and solemn and awful. And lastly, they must not be seals and witnesses to aught which the conscience, enlightened by the Word and Spirit of God,-whereunto is the ultimate appeal, and which stands above the miracle, and not beneath it,-protests against as untrue (the innumerable Romish miracles which attest transubstantiation), or as error largely mingling with the truth (the miracles which go to uphold the whole Romish system), those other having set their seal only to the absolutely true. Miracles with these marks upon them we are bound by all which we hold most sacred, by all which the Word of God has taught us, to reject and to refuse. It is for the reader, tolerably acquainted with the Church-history of the Middle Ages, to judge how many of its miracles will, if these tests be acknowledged and applied, at once fall away, and, failing to fulfil these primary conditions, will have no right even to be considered any further.1

1 The results are curious, which sometimes are come to through the following up to their first sources the biographies of eminent Romish saints. Tholuck has done this in regard of Ignatius Loyola and Francis

Very interesting is it to observe how the men who in some sort fell in with the prevailing tendencies of their age (for, indeed, who escapes them?), yet did ever, in their Xavier; and to him (Verm. Schrift. pp. 50-57) I am mainly indebted for the materials of the following note.-Few, perhaps, have been surrounded with such a halo of wonders as the two great pillars of the order of the Jesuits, Loyola and Xavier. Upwards of two hundred miracles of Loyola were laid before the Pope, when his canonization was in question,―miracles beside which those of our Lord shrink into insignificance. If Christ by his word and look rebuked and expelled demons, Ignatius did the same by a letter. If Christ walked once upon the sea, Ignatius many times in the air. If Christ, by his shining countenance and glistening garments, once amazed his disciples, Ignatius did it frequently, and, entering into dark chambers, could, by his presence, light them up as with candles. If sacred history tells of three persons whom Christ raised from the dead, the number which Xavier raised exceeds all count. In like manner the miracles of his great namesake of Assisi rivalled, when they did not leave behind, those of Christ. The author of the Liber Conformitatum, writing of him less than a century after his death, brings out these conformities of the Master and the servant : Hic sicut Jesus aquam in vinum convertit, panes multiplicavit, et de naviculâ in medio fluctuum maris miraculose immotâ, per se a terrâ abductâ, docuit turbas audientes in littore. Huic omnis creatura quasi ad nutum videbatur parere, ac si in ipso esset status innocentiæ restitutus. Et ut cetera taceam: cæcos illuminavit; surdos, claudos, paralyticos, omnium infirmitatum generibus laborantes curavit, leprosos mundavit; dæmones effugavit; captivos eripuit; naufragis succurrit, et quam plures mortuos suscitavit (Gieseler, Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte, vol. ii. part II. p. 355). But to return to Ignatius, and the historic evidence of his miracles. Ribadeneira, from early youth his scholar and companion, published, fifteen years after his death, in 1572, a life of his departed master and friend; which book appeared again in 1587, augmented with much additional matter communicated by persons who, having lived in familiar intercourse with Ignatius, must have been well acquainted with all the facts of his life (gravissimi viri et Ignatio valde familiares). Notably enough, neither in the first, nor yet in the second so greatly enlarged edition, does the slightest trace of a miracle appear. So far from this, the biographer discusses at length the reasons why it did not please God that miracles should be wrought by this eminent servant of his Sed dicat aliquis, si hæc vera sunt, ut profecto sunt, quid causæ est, quam ob rem illius sanctitas minus est testata miraculis, et, ut multorum Sanctorum vita, signis declarata, virtutumque operationibus insignita? Cui ego; Quis cognovit sensum Domini, aut quis conciliarius ejus fuit? Ille enim est qui facit mirabilia magna solus, propterea illius tantummodo infinitâ virtute fieri possunt, quæcumque aut naturæ vim aut modum excedunt. Et ut solus ille hæc potest efficere, ita ille solus novit, quo loco, quo tempore miracula et quorum precibus facienda sint. Sed tamen neque omnes sancti viri miraculis excelluerunt ; neque qui illorum aut magnitudine præstiterunt, aut copiâ,

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higher moods, with truest Christian insight, witness against those very tendencies by which they, with the rest of their contemporaries, were more or less borne away. Thus was it with regard to the over-valuing of miracles, the esteeming of them as the only evidences of an exalted sanctity. Against this what an unbroken testimony in all ages of the Church was borne; not, indeed, sufficient to arrest the progress of an error into which the sense-bound generations of men only too naturally fall, yet witnessing that the Church herself was ever conscious that the holy life was in the sight of God of higher price than the wonderful works--that love is the greatest miracle of all-that to overcome the world, this is the greatest manifestation of the power of Christ in his servants.1 idcirco reliquos sanctitate superarunt. Non enim sanctitas cujusque signis, sed caritate æstimanda est. Two years before the appearance of this second edition, in 1585, Maffei, styled the Jesuit Livy, published at Rome his work, De Vitá et Moribus S. Ignatii Loyola Libri tres; and neither in this is aught related of the great founder of the Order, which deserves the name of a miracle, although here are some nearer approaches to such than in the earlier biography-remarkable intimations, as of the death or recovery of friends, glimpses of their beatified state, ecstatic visions in which Christ appeared to him; but even these introduced in a half-apologetic tone, the historian evidently declining to pledge himself to their truth: Non pauca de eodem admirabilia prædicantur, quorum aliqua nobis hoc loco exponere visum est.

But with miracles far more astounding and more numerous the Romish church has surrounded his great scholar, Francis Xavier. Miracles were as his daily food; to raise the dead was as common as to heal the sick. Even the very boys who served him as catechists received and exercised a similar power of working wonders. Now there are, I believe, no historic documents whatever, of a contemporary date, which profess to vouch for these. We have further a series of letters written by this great apostle to the heathen, out of the midst of his work in the far East (S. Francisci Xaverii Epistolarum Libri tres; Praga, 1750); letters showing him to have been one of the discreetest, as he was one of the most fervent, preachers of Christ that ever lived, and full of admirable hints for the missionary; but of miracles wrought by himself, of miracles which the missionary may expect in aid of his work, there occurs not a single word.

1 Thus compare Augustine's admirable treatment of the subject, Enarr. in Ps. cxxx., beginning with the words: Ergo sunt homines, quos delectat miraculum facere, et ab eis qui profecerunt in Ecclesiâ miraculum exigunt, et ipsi qui quasi profecisse sibi videntur, talia volunt facere, et putant se ad Deum non pertinere, si non fecerint.