lovers of, and cravers after, the marvellous, who had found any miracles there ;-the books themselves having been intended to record merely natural events? Were not this an escape from the whole difficulty? The divine, it is true, in these narratives would disappear; that, however, they did not desire to save; that they had already given up: but the human would be vindicated; the good faith, the honesty, the entire credibility of the Scripture historians, would remain unimpeached. And in Christ Himself there would be still that to which they could look up with reverence and love; they could still believe in Him as the truthful founder of a religion which they shrunk from the thought of renouncing altogether. No longer being, as the Church declared Him, the worker of wonders, clothed with power from on high, nor professing to be that which He was not, as the blasphemers affirmed, He would still abide for them, the highest pattern of goodness which the world hitherto had seen, as He went up and down the world, healing and blessing, though with only the same means at his command as were possessed by other men.

Their attempt was certainly a bold one. To suffer the sacred text to stand, and yet to find no miracles in it, did appear a hopeless task. For this, it must be always remembered, altogether distinguishes this system from later mythic theories, that it does accept the New Testament as entirely historic; it does appeal to the word of Scripture as the ground and proof of its assertions; its great assertion being that the Evangelists did not intend to relate miracles, but ordinary facts of everyday experience, works done by Jesus, now of friendship and humanity, now of medical skill, now, it might be, of chance and good fortune, or other actions which from one cause or other seemed to them of sufficient significance to be worth recording. Thus Christ, they say, did not heal an impotent man at Bethesda, but only detected an impostor; He did not change water into wine at Cana, but brought in a new supply of wine when that of the house was exhausted

;

He did not multiply the loaves, but, distributing his own and his disciples' little store, set an example of liberality, which was quickly followed by others who had like stores, and in this way there was sufficient for all; He did not cure blindness otherwise than any skilful oculist might do it ;-which indeed, they observe, is clear; for with his own lips He declared that He needed light for so delicate an operation-'I must work the works of Him that sent Me, while it is day; the night cometh, when no man can work' (John ix. 4); He did not walk on the sea, but on the shore; He did not tell Peter to find a stater in the fish's mouth, but to catch as many fish as would sell for that money; He did not raise Lazarus from the dead, but guessed from the description of his disease that he was only in a swoon, and happily found it as He had guessed.

This scheme, which many had already tried here and there, but which first appeared full blown and consistently carried through in the Commentary of Dr. Paulus, published in 1800, did not long survive in its first vigour. It perished under blows received from many and opposite quarters; for, not to speak of a reviving faith in the hearts of many, that God could do more than man could understand, even the children of this world directed against it the keenest shafts of their ridicule. Every philologist, nay, every man who believed that language had any laws, was its natural enemy, for it stood only by the violation of all these laws. Even the very advance of unbelief was fatal to it, for in it there was a slight lingering respect to the Word of God; moved by which respect it sought forcibly to bring that Word into harmony with its theory, as a better alternative than the renouncing of the authority of that Word altogether. But when men arose, who did not shrink from the other alternative, who had no desire to hold by that Word at all, then there was nothing to hinder them from at once coming back to the common-sense view of the subject, one which no art could long succeed in concealing, namely that the Evangelists did at any rate intend

to record supernatural events. Those to whom the Scriptures were no authority were, thus far at least, more likely to interpret them aright, that they were not under the temptation to twist and pervert them, so to bring them into apparent agreement with their own systems.

And

This scheme of interpretation, thus assailed from so many sides, and itself merely artificial, quickly succumbed. now, even in the land of its birth, it has entirely perished; on the one side a deeper faith, on the other a more rampant unbelief, have encroached on, and wholly swallowed up, the territory which it occupied for a while. It is indeed so little the form in which an assault on Revelation will ever again clothe itself, and may be so entirely regarded as one of the cast-off garments of unbelief, now despised and trodden under foot even of those who once glorified themselves in it, that I have not alluded, save very slightly and passingly, to it in the body of my book. Once or twice I have noticed its curiosities of interpretation, its substitutions, as they have been happily termed, of philological for historical wonders. The reader who is curious to see how Dr. Paulus and his compeers arrived at the desired result of exhausting the narrativ e of its miraculous element, will find specimens in the notes upon The feeding of the five thousand, and The stater in the fish's mouth.

7. THE HISTORICO-CRITICAL. (WOOLSTON, STRAUSS.)

The latest assault upon the miracles may not unfitly be termed the historico-critical. It declares that the records of them are so full of contradictions, psychological and other improbabilities, discrepancies between the account of one Evangelist and another, that upon close handling they crumble to pieces, and are unable to maintain their ground as history. Among the English deists of the last century, Woolston especially addressed himself in this way to the undermining the historic credit of these narratives. He was brought to this evil work in a singular way, and abides a mournful example of the

extremes to which spite and mortified vanity may carry a weak man, though, as all testimonies concur in acknowledging, at one time of estimable conversation, and favourably known for his temperate life, his charity to the poor, and other evidences of an inward piety. Born in 1669, and educated at Cambridge, where he became a fellow of Sidney, be first attracted unfavourable notice by a certain crackbrained enthusiasm for the allegorical interpretation of Scripture, which he carried to all lengths. Whether he owed this bias to the works of Philo and Origen, or only strengthened and nourished an already existing predilection by the study of their writings, is not exactly clear; but it became a sort of 'fixed idea' in his mind. At first, although just offence was taken at more than one publication of his, in which his allegorical system was carried out at the expense apparently of the historic truth of the Scripture, yet, as it was not considered that he meant any mischief, as it was not likely that he would exert any very wide influence, he was suffered to follow his own way, unvisited by any serious censures from the higher authorities of the Church. Meeting, however, with opposition in many quarters, and unable to carry the clergy with him, he broke out at last in unmeasured invectives against them, and in a virulent pamphlet' styled them 'slaves of the letter,' 'Baal-priests,' 'blind leaders of the blind,' and the like, and was on account of this pamphlet deprived of his fellowship (1721).

From this time it seemed as if an absolute fury possessed him. Not merely the Church, but Christianity itself, was the object of his attack. Whether his allegorical system of interpretation had indeed ended, as it was very likely to end, in depriving him of all faith in God's Word, and he professed to retain his veneration for its spiritual meaning, only that he might, under shelter of that, more securely advance to the

1 In his Letter to the Rev. Dr. Bennett upon this question, Whether the Quakers do not the nearest of any other sect resemble the primitive Christians in principle and practices. By Aristobulus. London, 1720.

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assault of its historical foundations, or whether he did still retain this in truth, it was now at any rate only subordinate and subservient to his purpose of revenge. To these he was ready to offer up every other consideration. When, then, in that great controversy which was raging in the early part of the last century, the defenders of revealed religion entrenched themselves behind the miracles, as defences from which they could never be driven, as irrefragable proofs of the divine origin of Christianity, Woolston undertook, by the engines of his allegorical interpretation, to dislodge them from these also, and with this view published his notorious Letters on the Miracles.1 It is his manner in these to take certain miracles

1 These six Letters, first published as separate pamphlets between 1727-29, had an immense circulation, and were read with the greatest avidity. Voltaire, who was in England just at the time of their publication, says that thirty thousand copies were sold, and that large packets were forwarded to the American colonies. In the copy I am using, the different letters range from the third to the sixth edition, and this almost immediately after their first publication. Swift, in his lines on his own death, written 1731, quite consents with Voltaire's account of the immense popularity which they enjoyed; and makes Lintot, the bookseller,

say,

'Here's Woolston's tracts, the twelfth edition,

"Tis read by every politician :

The country members when in town

To all their boroughs send them down:

You never met a thing so smart;

The courtiers have them all by heart;' &c.

Their circulation was so great, and their mischief so wide, that above sixty answers were published within a very short period. Gibson, then Bishop of London, addressed five pastoral letters to his diocese against them; and other chief divines of England, as Sherlock, Pearce, Smallbrooke, found it needful to answer them. Of the replies which I have seen, Smallbrooke's (Bishop of St. David's) Vindication of our Saviour's Miracles, 1729, is the most learned and the best. But one cannot help being painfully struck upon this and other occasions with the poverty and feebleness of the anti-deistical literature of England in that day of need; the low grounds which it occupies; the little enthusiasm which the cause awakened in its defenders. The paltry shifts with which Woolston sought to evade the consequences of his blasphemy,-and there is an infinite meanness in the way in which he professes, while blaspheming against the works of Christ, to be only assailing them in the letter that he may vindicate them in the spirit,-failed to protect him