and skill to launch the dart, we come to Wieland's Agathodæmon, in which neither malice nòr dexterity were wanting, and which, professing to explain upon natural grounds the miracles of Apollonius, yet unquestionably points throughout at one greater than the wonder-worker of Tyana, with a hardly suppressed de te fabula narratur running through the whole.*

The arguments drawn from these parallels, as far as they were adduced in good faith and in earnest, have, of course, perished with the perishing of polytheism from the minds of men, even the minds of those who have not submitted themselves to the faith of Christ. Other miracles can no longer be played off against his miracles; the choice remains between these or none.

3. THE PANTHEISTIC. (SPINOZA.)

These two classes of assailants of the Scripture miracles, the Jewish and the heathen, allowed the miracles themselves to stand unquestioned as facts, but either challenged their source, or denied the consequences which were drawn from them by the Church. Not so the pantheistic deniers of the miracles, who assailed them not as being of the devil, not as insufficient proofs of Christ's absolute claims of lordship; but cut at their very root, denying that any miracle was possible, since it was contrary to the idea of God. For these opponents of the truth Spinoza may be said, in modern times, to bear the word; the view is so connected with his name, that it will be well to hear the objection as he has uttered it. That objection is indeed only the necessary consequence of his philosophical system. Now the first temptation on making acquaintance with that system is to contemplate it as a mere and sheer atheism; and such has ever been the ordinary charge against it; nor in studying his works is it always easy to persuade one's self that it is any thing higher, or that the various passages in which he himself assumes it as something different, are more than inconsequent statements, with which he seeks to blind the eyes of others, and to avert the odium of this charge of atheism from himself. And yet atheism it is not, nor is it even a material, how

*The work of Philostratus has been used with exactly an opposite aim by Christian apologists, namely, to bring out, by comparison with the best which heathenism could offer, the surpassing glory of Christ. Cudworth, in his Intellectual System, b. 4, c. 15, occupies himself at a considerable length with Apollonius. Here may probably have been the motive to Blount's book, which only followed two years after the publication of Cudworth's great work. Henry More, too, in his Mystery of Godliness, b. 4, cc. 9-12, compares at large the miracles of Christ with those of Apollonius.

ever it may be a formal, pantheism. All justice requires it to be acknowledged that he does not bring down and resolve God into nature, but rather takes up and loses nature in God. It is only man whom he submits to a blind fate, and for whom he changes, as indeed for him he does, all ethics into physics. But the idea of freedom, as regards God, is saved; since, however, he affirms him immanent in nature and not transcending it, this is only because he has himself chosen these laws of nature as the one unchangeable manner of his working, and constituted them in his wisdom so elastic, that they shall prove under every circumstance and in every need, the adequate organs and servants of his will. He is not bound to nature otherwise than by that, his own will; the laws which limit him are of his own imposing; the necessity which binds him to them is not the necessity of any absolute fate, but of the highest fitness. Still, however, Spinoza does affirm such a necessity, and thus excludes the possibility of any revelation, whereof the very essence is that it is a new beginning, a new unfolding by God of himself to man, and especially excludes the miracle, which is itself at once the accompaniment, and itself a constituent part, of a revelation.

It would not be profitable to say here more than a few words on the especial charges which he brings against the miracle, as lowering, and unworthy of, the idea of God. They are but an application to a particular point of the same charges which he brings against all revelation, namely, that to conceive any such is a dishonoring, and a casting a slight upon, God's great original revelation of himself in nature and in man; an arguing that of such imperfection and incompleteness, as that it needed the author of the world's laws to interfere in aid of those laws, lest they should prove utterly inadequate to his purposes.* And thus, as regards the miracle in particular, he finds fault with it as a bringing in of disorder into that creation, of which the only idea worthy of God is that of an unchangeable order; it is a making God to contradict himself, for the law which was violated by the miracle is as much God's law as the miracle which violated it. The answer to this objection has been already anticipated; it has been already sought to be shown that the miracle is not a discord in nature, but the coming in of a higher harmony; not disorder, but instead of the order of earth, the

* Tract. Theol. Pol., c. 6: Nam cùm virtus et potentia naturæ sit ipsa Dei virtus et potentia, leges autem et regulæ naturæ ipsa Dei decreta, omnino credendum est, potentiam naturæ infinitam esse, ejusque leges adeo latas, ut ad omnia quæ et ab ipso divino intellectu concipiuntur, se extendant; alias enim quid aliud statuitur, quàm quod Deus naturam adeo impotentem creaverit, ejusque leges et regulas adeo steriles statuerit, ut sæpe de novo ei subvenire cogatur, si eam conservatam vult, et ut res ex voto succedant, quod sanè à ratione alienissimum esse existimo.

order of heaven; not the violation of law, but that which continually, even in this natural world, is taking place, the comprehension of a lower law by a higher; in this case the comprehension of a lower natural, by a higher spiritual law; with only the modifications of the lower, necessarily consequent upon this.

Then, again, when he charges the miracle with resting on a false assumption of the position which man occupies in the universe, as flattering the notion that nature is to serve him, he not to bow to nature, it is most true that it does rest on this assumption. But this were only a charge which would tell against it, supposing that true, which so far from being truth, is indeed his first great falsehood of all, namely, the substitution of a God of nature, in place of a God of men. If God be indeed only or chiefly the God of nature, and not in a paramount sense the God of grace, the God of men, if nature be indeed the highest, and man only created as furniture for this planet, it were indeed absurd and inconceivable that the higher should serve, or give place to, or fall into the order of, the lower. But if, upon the other hand, man is the end and object of all, if he be indeed the vicegerent of the Highest, the image of God, if this world and all that belongs to it be but a workshop for the training of men, only having a worth and meaning when so considered, then that the lower should serve, and, where need was, give way to the highest, this were only beforehand to be expected.*

Here, as is so often the case, something much behind the miracle, something much earlier in our view of the relations between God and his creatures, has already determined whether we should accept or reject it, and this, long before we have arrived at the consideration of this specific matter.

4. THE SKEPTICAL. (HUME.)

While Spinoza rested his objection to the miracles on the ground that the everlasting laws of the universe left no room for such, and while the form therefore which the question in debate assumed in his hands was this, Are miracles (objectively) possible? Hume, a legitimate child and pupil of the empiric philosophy of Locke, started his objection in altogether a different shape, namely, in this, Are miracles (subjec tively) credible? He is in fact the skeptic, which,-taking the word in

* They are the truly wise, he says, (Tract. Theol. Pol., c. 6,) who aim not at this, ut natura iis, sed contra ut ipsi naturæ pareant, utpote qui certè sciunt, Deum naturam dirigere prout ejus leges universales, non autem prout humanæ naturæ particulares leges exigunt, adeoque Deum non solius humani generis, sed totius naturæ rationem habere.

its more accurate sense, not as a denier of the truths of Christianity, but a doubter of the possibility of arriving at any absolute truth,-the other is as far as possible from being. To this question his answer is in the negative; or rather, in the true spirit of the philosophy which leaves every thing in uncertainty, It is always more probable that a miracle is false than true; it can therefore in no case prove any thing else, since it is itself incapable of proof,-which thus he proceeds to show. In every case, he observes, of conflicting evidence, we weigh the evidence for and against the alleged facts, and give our faith to that side upon which the evidence preponderates, with an amount of confidence proportioned, not to the whole amount of evidence in its favor, but to the difference which remains after subtracting the evidence against it. Thus, if the evidence on the side of A might be set as= 20, and that on the side of B as = 15, then our faith in A would remain 20 15 = 5; we give our faith upon the side on which a balance of probabilities remains. But every miracle is a case of conflicting evidence. In its favor is the evidence of the attesting witnesses; against it the testimony of all experience which has gone before, and which witnesses for an unbroken order of nature. When we come to balance these against one another, the only case in which the evidence for the miracle could be admitted as prevailing, would be that in which the falseness or error of the attesting witnesses would be a greater miracle than the miracle which they affirm. But no such case can occur. The evidence against a miracle having taken place is as complete as can be conceived; even were the evidence in its favor as complete, it would only be proof against proof, and absolute suspension of judgment would be the wise man's part. But further, the evidence in favor of the miracles never makes claim to any such completeness. It is always more likely that the attesting witnesses were deceived, or were willing to deceive, than that the miracle took place. For, however many they may be, they are always but a few compared with the multitudes who attest a fact which excludes their fact, namely, the uninterrupted succession of a natural order in the world, and those few submitted to divers warping influences, from which the others, nature's witnesses, are altogether free. Therefore there is no case in which the evidence for any one miracle is able to outweigh the à priori evidence which is against all miracles. Such is the conclusion at which he ar rives. The argument, it will be seen, is skeptical throughout. Hume does not, like Spinoza, absolutely deny the miracle, only that we can ever be convinced of one. Of two propositions or assertions that may be true which has the least evidence to support it; but according to the necessary constitution of our being, we must give our adherence to that

which presents itself to us with the largest amount of evidence in its favor.

Here again, as on a former occasion, so long as we abide in the region of nature, miraculous and improbable, miraculous and incredible, may be allowed to remain convertible terms. But once lift up the whole discussion into a higher region, once acknowledge aught higher than nature, a kingdom of God, and men the intended denizens of it, and the whole argument loses its strength and the force of its conclusions. Against the argument from experience which tells against the miracle, is to be set, not, as Hume asserts, the evidence of the witnesses, which it is quite true can in no case itself be complete and of itself sufficient, but this, plus the anterior probability that God, calling men to live above nature and sense, would in this manner reveal himself as the Lord paramount of nature, the breaker through and slighter of the apparitions of sense; plus also the testimony which the particular miracle by its nature, its fitness, the glory of its circumstances, its intimate coherence as a redemptive act with the personality of the doer, in Coleridge's words, "its exact accordance with the ideal of a true miracle is the reason," gives to the conscience that it is a divine work. The moral probabilities Hume has altogether overlooked and left out of account, and when they are admitted,-dynamic in the midst of his merely mechanic forces, they disturb and indeed utterly overbear and destroy them. His argument is as that fabled giant, unconquerable so long as it is permitted to rest upon the earth out of which it sprung; but easily destroyed when once it is lifted into a higher world. It is not, as Hume would fain have us to believe, solely an intellectual question; but it is in fact the moral condition of men which will ultimately determine whether they will believe the Scripture miracles or not;—this, and not the exact balance of argument on the one side or the other, which will cause this scale or that to kick the beam.

He who already counts it likely that God will interfere for the higher welfare of men,-who believes that there is a nobler world-order than that in which we live and move, and that it would be the blessing of blessings for that nobler to intrude into and to make itself felt in the region of this lower, who has found that here in this world we are bound by heavy laws of nature, of sin, of death, which no powers that we now possess can break, yet which must be broken if we are truly to livehe will not find it hard to believe the great miracle, the coming of the Son of God in the flesh, and his declaration as the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead; because all the deepest desires and longings of his heart have yearned after such a deliverer, however little he may have been able even to dream of so glorious a