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surer proof than the utterance of sentiments such as these, that the true glory of the Church is hidden from our eyesno sadder sign that some of its outward trappings and ornaments have caught our fancy; and not the fact that it is allglorious within, an answer to the deepest needs of the spirit of man, which has taken possession of our hearts and minds. It is, indeed, little which we ourselves have known of the miracles of grace, when they seem to us poor and pale, and only the miracles of power have any attraction in our eyes.

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CHAPTER V.

THE ASSAULTS ON THE MIRACLES.

I. THE JEWISH.

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RIGID monotheistic religion like the Jewish left but one way of escape from the authority of miracles, which once were acknowledged to be such, and not mere collusions and sleights of hand. There remained nothing to say, but that which the adversaries of the Lord continually did say, namely, that these works were works of hell: This fellow doth not cast out devils but by Beelzebub, the prince of the devils'1 (Matt. xii. 24; cf. Mark iii. 22-27; Luke xi. 15-22). We have our Lord's own answer to the deep malignity of this assertion; his appeal, namely, to the whole tenor of his doctrine, and of the miracles wherewith He confirmed that doctrine-whether they were not altogether for the overturning of the kingdom of evil,-whether such a lending of power to Him on the part of Satan would not be wholly inconceivable, since it were merely and altogether suicidal. For though it might be quite intelligible that Satan should bait his hook with some good, array himself as an angel of light, and do for a while deeds that might appear as deeds of light, so better to carry through some mighty delusion

'Win men with honest trifles, to betray them
In deepest consequence,"

just as Darius was willing that a small detachment of his

1 They regarded Him as planum in signis (Tertullian, Adv. Marc. iii. 6; cf. Apoloy. xxi.). This charge is drest out with infinite blasphemous additions in the later Jewish books (see Eisenmenger, Entdeckt. Judenth. vol. i. p. 148, seq.).

army should perish, that so the mighty deceit which Zopyrus was practising against Babylon might succeed,'-yet the furthering upon his part of such an assault on his own kingdom as, if successful, must overturn it altogether, is quite unintelligible. That kingdom, thus in arms against itself, could not stand, but must have an end. He who came, as all his words and his deeds testified, to destroy the works of the devil,' could not have come armed with his power, and

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helped onward by his aid. It is not of a pact with the Evil One which this tells, but of Another mightier than that Evil One, who has entered with power into his stronghold, and who, having bound him, is now spoiling his goods. Our Lord does in fact repel the accusation, and derive authority to his miracles, not from the power which they display, however that may be the first thing that brings them into consideration, but from the ethical ends which they serve. He appeals to every man's conscience, whether the doctrine to which they bear witness, and which bears witness to them, be from above, or from beneath: and if from above, then the power with which He accomplished them could not have been lent Him from beneath, since the kingdom of lies would never so contradict itself, as seriously to help forward the establishment of the kingdom of truth.2

There is, indeed, at first sight a difficulty in the argument which our Saviour draws from the oneness of the kingdom of Satan-namely, that the very idea of this kingdom, as we present it to ourselves, is that of an anarchy, of blind rage and hate not merely against God, but every part of it warring against every other. And this is most deeply true, that hell is as much in arms against itself as against heaven; neither does our Lord deny that in respect of itself that kingdom is infinite contradiction and division: only He asserts that in relation to the kingdom of heaven it is at one: there is one life in it and one

1 Herodotus, iii. 155.

2 Eusebius (Dem. Evang. iii. 6) makes much of this argument.

soul in opposition to that. Just as a nation or kingdom may embrace within itself infinite parties, divisions, discords, jealousies, and heart-burnings; yet, if it is to subsist as a nation at all, it must not, as regards other nations, have lost its sense of unity; when it does so, of necessity it falls to pieces and perishes. To the Pharisees He says: "This kingdom of evil subsists; by your own 'confession it does so; it cannot therefore have denied the one condition of its existence, which is, that it should not lend its powers to the overthrowing of itself, that it should not side with its own foes; my words and works declare that I am its foe, it cannot therefore be siding with Me.'

This accusation brought against the miracles of Christ, that they were done by the power of an evil magic, the heathen also sometimes used; but evidently having borrowed this weapon from the armoury of the Jewish adversaries of the faith. And in their mouths, who had no such earnest idea of the kingdom of God upon one side and the kingdom of evil on the other, and of the fixed limits which divide the two, who had peopled the intermediate space with middle powers, some good, some evil, some mingled of both, the accusation was not at all so deeply malignant as in the mouth of a Jew. It was little more than a stone which they found conveniently at hand to fling, and with them is continually passing over into the charge that those works were wrought by trick-that they were conjuror's arts; the line between

1 See a curious passage, Origen, Con. Cels. i. 68; cf. i. 6; ii. 49; viii. 9; Augustine, De Cons. Evang. i. 9-11; Jerome, Brev. in Psal. lxxxi. in fine; Arnobius, Adv. Gen. i. 43, who mentions this as one of the calumnies of the heathen against the Lord: Magus fuit, clandestinis artibus omnia illa perfecit: Ægyptiorum ex adytis angelorum potentium nomina et remotas furatus est disciplinas; cf. 53. This charge of fetching his magical skill from Egypt, which Celsus repeats (Origen, Con. Cels. i. 28, 38; cf. Eusebius, Dem. Evang. iii. 6), betrays at once the Jewish origin of the accusation. It is evermore recurring in Jewish books. Egypt, say they, was the natural home of magic, so that if the magic of the world were divided into ten parts, Egypt would possess nine; and there, even as the Christian histories confess, Jesus resided two years (Eisenmenger, Entdeckt. Judenth. vol. i. pp. 149, 166).

the two charges is continually disappearing. The heathen, however, had a method more truly their own of evading the force of the Christian miracles, which is now to consider.

2. THE HEATHEN. (CELSUS, HIEROCLES, PORPHYRY.)

A religion like the Jewish, which, besides God and the Angels in direct and immediate subordination to Him, left no spirits conceivable but those in rebellion against Him, the absolutely and entirely evil, this, as has been observed already, left no choice, when once the miracle was adjudged not to be from God, but to ascribe it to Satan. There was nothing between; it was from heaven, or, if not from heaven, from hell. But it was otherwise in the heathen world, and with the 'gods many' of polytheism. So long as these lived in the minds of men, the argument from the miracles was easily evaded. For what did they prove at the uttermost with regard to their author? What but this, that a god, it might be one of the higher, or it might be one of the middle powers, the Saíμoves, the intermediate deities, was with him? What was there, men replied, in this circumstance, which justified the demand of an absolute obedience upon their parts? Wherefore should they yield exclusive allegiance to Him that wrought these works? The gods had spoken often by others also, had equipped them with powers equal to or greater than those claimed by his disciples for Jesus; yet no man therefore demanded for them that they should be recognized as absolute lords of the destinies of men. Esculapius performed wonderful cures ; Apollonius went about the world healing the sick, expelling demons, raising the dead; Aristeas disappeared from the earth in as marvellous a way as the Author of the Christian faith: yet no man built upon these wonders a superstructure such as that which the Christians built upon the wonders of Christ.'

1 The existence of false cycles of miracles should no more cast a suspicion upon all, or cause to doubt those which present themselves with

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