sumed presence, as by others who have lamented their absence-by those alike who have seen in the presence of such, evidences of her sanctity, or in their absence, of her degeneracy and fall. It is not my belief that she has this gift of working miracles, nor yet that she was intended to have, and only through her own unfaithfulness has lost, it; nor that her Lord has abridged her of aught that would have made her strong and glorious in not endowing her with powers such as these. With reasons enough for humbling herself, yet I do not believe that among those reasons is to be accounted her inability to perform these works that should transcend nature. So many in our own day have arrived at a directly opposite conclusion, that it will be needful shortly to justify the opinion here expressed. And first, as a strong presumption against the intended continuance of these powers in the Church, may be taken the analogies derived from the earlier history of God's dealings with his people. We do not find the miracles sown broadcast over the whole Old Testament history, but they all cluster round a very few eminent persons, and have reference to certain great epochs and crises of the kingdom of God. Abraham, the father of the faithful,-David, the great theocratic king,Daniel, the "man greatly beloved," are alike entirely without them; that is, they do no miracles; such may be accomplished in behalf of them, but they themselves accomplish none. In fact there are but two great outbursts of these; the first, at the establishing of the kingdom under Moses and Joshua, on which occasion it is at once evident that they could not have been wanting; the second in the time of Elijah and Elisha; and then also there was utmost need, when it was a question whether the court religion which the apostate kings of Israel had set up, should not quite overbear the true worship of Jehovah, when the Levitical priesthood was abolished, and the faithful were but a scattered few among the ten tribes. Then, in that decisive epoch of the kingdom's history, the two great prophets, they too in a subordinate sense the beginners of a new period, arose, equipped with powers which should witness that he whose servants they were, was the God of Israel, however Israel might refuse to acknowledge him. There is here in all this an entire absence of prodigality in the use of miracles; they are ultimate resources, reserved for the great needs of God's kingdom, not its daily incidents; they are not cheap off-hand expedients, which may always be appealed to, but come only into play when nothing else would have supplied their room. How unlike this moderation to the wasteful expenditure of miracles in the church-history of the middle ages! There no perplexity can occur so trifling that a miracle will not be brought in to solve it: there is almost no saint, certainly no distin guished one, without his nimbus of miracles around his head; they are adorned with these in rivalry with one another, in rivalry with Christ himself; no acknowledgment like this, "John did no miracle," (John x. 41,) in any of the records of their lives finding place. We must add to this the declarations of Scripture, which I have already entered on at large, concerning the object of miracles, that they are for the confirming the word by signs following, for authenticating a message as being from heaven-that signs are for the unbelieving. (1 Cor. xiv. 22.) What do they then in a Christendom? It may indeed be answered, that in it are unbelievers still; yet not in the sense in which St. Paul uses the word, for he would designate not the positively unbelieving, not those that in heart and will are estranged from the truth, but the negatively, and that, because the truth has never yet sufficiently accredited itself to them. Signs are not for the positively unbelieving, since as we have seen, they will exercise no power over those who harden themselves against the truth; such will resist them as surely as they will resist every other witness of God's presence in the world; but for the unbelieving who are such by no fault of their own-for them to whom the truth is now coming for the first time. And if not even for them now,-as they exist, for instance, in a heathen land,-we may sufficiently account for this by the fact that the Church of Christ, with its immense and evident superiorities of all kinds over every thing with which it is brought in contact, and some portions of which superiority every man must recognize, is itself now the great witness and proof of the truth which it delivers. That truth, therefore, has no longer 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-is sufficient 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 wonderful-to 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 are 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 this world, 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 every where surrounds us, to presume that it was even so with the beginnings of the spiritual creation-the Christian Church. It is unquestionably so in the beginning 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 had 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 most marvellous thing of all. 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 glory, it retains; but these powers, which are not the gift-for Christ himself is the gift-but the signs of the gift, it foregoes. They were as the proclamation that the king was mounting his throne; yet the king 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 splendor, though as full, and indeed fuller, of light and heat, knows not those bright heralds of his rising. That it has had these wonders-that its first birth was, like that of its wondrous Founder, wonderful—of this the Church preserves a record and attestation in its 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 living representation of our Lord's life 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 dispensation under which we live-we have a right to consider as normal, in their chief features at least, for all future mira cles, if such were to continue in the Church. The details, the local coloring, may be different, and there were no need to be perplexed at such a difference appearing; yet the later must not be, in their inner spirit, totally unlike the earlier, or they 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 reverend 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 such as any of these, 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 come no more even into consideration." * * The results are singularly curious, which sometimes are come to through the following up to their first sources the biographies of eminent Romish saints. Tholuck has done so in regard of Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier; and to him (Verm. Schrift., pp. 50-57) I am mainly indebted for the materials of the following note.— There are few, perhaps, who 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 the 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 lass 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 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 higher moods, with a truest Christian in in medio fluctuum maris miraculosè immotâ, per se à terrà abductâ, docuit turbas audientes in littore. Huic omnis creatura quasi ad nutum videbatur parere, ac si in ipso esset status innocentiæ restitutus. Et ut cætera taceam: cæcos illuminavit; surdos, claudos, paralyticos, omnium infirmitatum generibus laborantes curavit, leprosos mundavit; dæmones effugavit; captivos eripuit ; naufragis succurrit, et quàm plures mortuos suscitavit. (GIESELER, Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte, v. 2, part 2, 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, that is in 1572, a life of his departed master and friend; which book appeared again in 1587, augmented with many additional circumstances communicated by persons who had lived in familiar intercourse with Ignatius while living, and who had most intimate opportunities of being acquainted with all the facts of his life (gravissimi viri et Ignatio valde familiares). Now it is sufficiently remarkable that neither in the first, nor yet in the second so greatly enlarged and corrected edition, does the slightest trace of a miracle appear. On the contrary, the biographer enters into a lengthened discussion of the reasons why it did not please God that any signal miracle should be wrought by this eminent servant of his :-Sed dicat aliquis, si hæc vera sunt, ut profectò 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 tantummodò 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, idcirco reliquos sanctitate superarunt. Non enim sanctitas cujusque signis, sed caritate æstimanda est. Two years before the appearance of the second edition of this work, that is, in 1585, Maffei, styled the Jesuit Livy, published at Rome his work, De Vitå et moribus S. Ignatii Loyolæ Libri tres; and neither in this is aught related of the great founder of the Order, which deserves the name of a miracle, however there may be here some nearer approach 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; and even of these, the list is introduced in a half apologetic tone, which shows that he has by no means thoroughly convinced himself of the historic accuracy of those things which he is about to relate: Non pauca de eodem admirabilia prædicantur, quorum aliqua nobis hoc loco exponere visum est. But with miracles infinitely 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, laying claim to an ordinary measure of credibility, which profess to vouch for these. And in addition to this, we have 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. Pragæ, : |