ous examples of his might, but also as glorious manifestations of his holy love.

It is worth while to follow this a little in detail. The evils what are they, which hinder man from reaching the true end and aim of his creation, and from which he needs a redemption? It may briefly be answered that they are sin in its moral and in its physical manifestations. If we regard its moral manifestations, the darkness of the understanding, the wild discords of the spiritual life, none were such fearful examples of its tyranny as the demoniacs; they were special objects, therefore, of the miraculous power of the Lord. Then if we ask ourselves what are the physical manifestations of sin; they are sicknesses of all kinds, fevers, palsies, leprosies, blindness, each of these death beginning, a partial death—and finally, the death absolute of the body. This region therefore is fitly another, as it is the widest region, of his redemptive grace. In the conquering and removing of these evils, he eminently bodied forth the idea of himself as the Redeemer of men. But besides these, sin has its manifestations more purely physical; it reveals itself and its consequences in the tumults and strife of the elements among themselves, as in the rebellion of nature against man; for the destinies of the natural world were linked to the destinies of man, and when he fell, he drew after him his whole inheritance, which became subject to the same vanity as himself. Therefore do we behold the Lord, him in whom the lost was recovered, walking on the stormy waves, or quelling the menace of the sea with his word; incorporating in these acts the deliverance of man from the rebel powers of nature, which had risen up against him, and instead of being his willing servants, were oftentimes now his tyrants and his destroyers. These also were redemptive acts. Even the two or three of his works which seem not to range themselves so readily under any of these heads, yet are not indeed exceptions. For instance, the multiplying of the bread easily shows itself as such. The original curse of sin was the curse of barrenness,-the earth yielding hard-won and scanty returns to the sweat and labor of man; but here this curse is removed, and in its stead the primeval abundance for a moment re-appears. All scantness and scarceness, such as this lack of bread in the wilderness, such as that failing of the wine at the marriage-feast, belonged not to man as his portion at the first; for all the earth was appointed to serve him, and to pour the fulness of its treasure into his lap. That he ever should hunger or thirst, that he should have need of any thing, was a consequence of Adam's fall-fitly, therefore, removed by him, the second Adam, who came to give back all which had been forfeited by the first.

But the miracle being, then, 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 socalled "Evidences of Christianity," and have found in the miracles wrought by its Founder, and in those mainly as acts of power, 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 observe, that if men are taught that they should believe in Christ upon no other grounds than because he attested his claims by works of wonder, and that simply on this score they shall do so, how shall they consistently refuse belief to any other, who shall come 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, 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 the first is capable of witnessing for the second;* and those books of Christian evidences are utterly 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 an adequately attested thing.

* Gerhard (Loc. Theoll., loc. 23, c. 11): Miracula sunt doctrinæ tesseræ ac sigilla; quemadmodùm igitur sigillum à literis avulsum nihil probat, ita quoque miracula sine doctrinâ nihil valent.

CHAPTER IV.

THE EVANGELICAL, COMPARED WITH OTHER CYCLES OF MIRACLES.

THE miracles of our Lord and those of the Old Testament afford many interesting points of comparison, and of 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 old covenant bringing, if one may venture so to speak, hardly and with difficulty the wonder-work to the birth; 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," ere 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 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 performed the commonest transactions of life.-In the miracles wrought by men

* Cyril of Alexandria, (CRAMER'S Catena in Luc. v. 12,) has observed and drawn out the contrast.

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 organ 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 heareth him always; that no admixture of even the slightest human infirmity mars the completeness of his work.

Where the miracles are similiar in kind, his are larger and freer and more glorious. Elisha feeds a hundred men with twenty loaves, (2 Kin. iv. 42—44,) but he five thousand with five. They have continually their instrument of power to which the wonder-working power is linked. 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 waters 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, or by a touch, (Matt. xx. 34;) or if he takes any thing as a channel of his healing power, it is from himself he takes it, (Mark vii. 33; viii. 23;*) or should he, as once he does, use any foreign medium, (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 a free choice and not of any necessity. And, which is but another side of the same truth, while their miracles and those 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 as in his own power: "I will, be thou clean," (Matt. viii. 3;) "Thou deaf and dumb spirit, I

* In the East the Mahometans had probably a sense of the fitness of this, namely, that Christ should find all in himself, when they made his healing virtue to have resided in his breath, (THOLUCK's Blüthensamml. aus d. Morgenl. Myst., p. 62,) to which also they were led as being the purest and least material effluence of the body. (Cf. John xx. 22.) So Agbarus in the apocryphal letter which bears his name, magnifies Christ's healings, in that they were done, avev papμákov kaì Boravov. Arnobius, too, (Adv. Gent., 1, c. 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.

charge thee come out of him;" (Mark ix. 25;) “Young man, I say unto thee, Arise." (Luke vii. 14.) Even 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 which he had not indwelling in him, but indeed is only testifying thus to the unbroken oneness of his life with his Father's,* (John xi. 41, 42;) just as on another occasion 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 great and exclusive thoughts of him, and should not class him with any other, even the greatest and holiest of the children of men.

These likenesses and unlikenesses seem 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 rather as were his own in fee.t

And 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 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,

* Cf. AMBROSE, De Fide, 1. 3, c. 4.

† Tertullian, (Adv. Marc., 1. 3, passim,) brings this out in a very interesting man ner; and Eusebius, (Dem. Evang., 1. 3, c. 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 any thing, confirming the truth of either, though now the assailants of Revelation will have it that these coincidences are only calculated to cast suspicion upon both.