in the history of every human life-readily in your own, my reader, and yet to the Christian consciousness a minutely superintending Providence is perceptible in all. God in history, national or personal, is evident as the sun. Viewed as a method by which God has wrought His will in matter and in mind, who can object to it? The Christian can accept it and yet know that when the first floss of protoplasm varnished the deep sea floor the Virgin Mary was preparing. Man is clearly in process of evolution now. Homer had no knowledge of colour; the soldiers of Tacitus, unless he belied them, blubbered like children. Addison saw no scenery in Italy. Newton saw indigo when it was not. The tree of humanity bore a new fruit when in the eighteenth century the great composers made music only less immortal than the words to which it was conjoined. The perception and love of natural beauty is one of the latest flowers born in the nineteenth century, and "it doth not yet appear what we shall be." But what we say is that, while we hold evolution, considered as a method of the Divine working, to be not inconsistent with anything essential to the Divine attributes, yet we are not shut up to that or any other theory as yet propounded, and as Christians can prove its deficiency.

It may indeed be that to accomplish a specific purpose, even the Almighty may find but one method adequate, and that placing before Himself a great end, He is content that His method of procedure towards it should temporarily involve His character in obscurity and misunderstanding which only the glorious fulfilment of His aim can clear away. That may be, and may help us in the consideration of the evil in the world; but what is certain is, that the theory of evolution is pierced by the fact of the Incarnation. For just as evidently as man escapes from being welded on to his simian ancestry by virtue of his spiritual endowment, which removes the brute from him far as the dogstar is from the earth, so when Jesus Christ came in the flesh, while to outward appearance nothing more than an integer in the series, on the spiritual side He was exalted above His fellows higher than the heavens. Here was a stupendous chasm and gulf in the evolution of creation's tribes. It had its analogue when into a generation of apes the seed of man was cast, but this casting of a Divine seed into man himself is another and infinitely more marvellous leap and bound, which rends in sunder the theory of age-long formative, processes and influences, as the invariable law of Nature's working.

We see on the very sublimest scale a free and sovereign will breaking in upon an existing order and exhibiting to an adoring universe a new creation; breaking in, as we say, was done before, when man was made transcendantly superior to his earthly contemporaries, and now God incarnate infinitely higher than he.

The theory then of evolution failing to account for man and for Christ is therefore incomplete. It can however be accepted by Christians, not as vindicating a free and progressive career for nature's blind potentialities, apart from an energising Godhead, but, supplemented by revealed facts, as enabling us to indicate more clearly the points at which a sovereign will, always secretly working, suddenly uplifted itself, as Leviathan from the deep, making manifest the Maker and the Ruler formerly buried beneath the waves of sequence.

Creation's God rose from the waves when man was made, and still higher when Christ was born, and it was in the very hour when the murmurs of infant weakness were heard amid the adoring stillness of the manger, that Jehovah most manifestly sat upon His throne.

HENRY DEACON.

H

REVELATION AND ITS EVIDENCES.

No. II.

AVING in a former paper spoken at some length of the nature of the miracles of Scripture, and specially those of the Gospel, we cannot enter with any fulness into them as contrasted in that respect with those of Rome. But we must say a very few words.

In the first place, a hundred special cases might be cited of works plainly beyond human power or the spontaneous agencies of nature. Such were the cure of the man born blind, the cure of the paralytic, the raising of Jairus' daughter and Lazarus, the healing of the lame man by Peter and John (John ix.; xi.; Mark v.; Acts iii.). Whole classes of Roman wonders, readily produced by human means, are wholly absent from Scripture. Such are the whole series of alleged marvels in connection with relics, pictures, images. The appearances of the dead to the living as a sign is never related in Scripture. The one or two cases which appear to be such are otherwise accounted for. The appearance of Christ to His disciples, the great miracle in dependence on which they lived and laboured and died, was not the appearance of the dead to the living, but the appearance of a living man in all the completeness of human nature. Some narratives of miracle there are, no doubt, in Scripture where signs such as are alleged to have taken place at tombs and similar places, might have taken place without our being able to rank them in the catalogue of proper miracle. If, for example, of the multitudes of sick folks of every variety of sickness to which our poor nature is heir, who were brought upon one occasion to Christ for cure, some proportion, and these too generally of one class of malady, were healed, while the majority, and of some classes of sickness all those thus affected, were unhealed, in that case we should most justly refuse to acknowledge the cures wrought to have been miracle proper, and insist that we had no right to set them down as beyond the spontaneous agencies of nature working through the human imagination (Matt. iv. 24). When the fame of Christ as a worker of miracles was established in the minds of a considerable number of people, and when as a consequence many sick people were brought to Him, all possessed of the sense of His power, and seeing all around them equally possessed of the faith in Him, we should think it quite within the power of nature to effect a cure, which would probably have all the appearance of being perfect, upon some of those present. This, we believe, to be all that has been in similar cases claimed on the part of the Church of Rome. But the miracle of Christ on such occasions is wholly out of this category. We are told that every manner of disease existed among those brought to Him: we are told that great numbers thus affected were brought: but

we are also told that it was not in some kinds of sickness, or with a proportion of those brought that healing was effected, but that every manner of disease, and every individual brought before Him, were healed. The power of the imagination has never wrought a wonder of such a nature, and thus we see that as regards the nature of the miracles of Scripture they stand upon a wholly different footing from the alleged miracles of Rome with which Mill compares them.

Having thus compared the alleged miracles of Rome with those of the New Testament as regards the parties by whom those miracles were respectively brought forth, and also as regards the nature of the works themselves, we will now compare them in regard of the parties to whom they were proposed for acceptance. We will lightly touch upon three particulars, which will show the utter want of resemblance, and the incontestible superiority of the evidence attaching to the miracles of the Gospel.

The miracles of Rome, Mill truly tells us, were never presented for acceptance to the "incredulous" (238). They never were. They were always presented before those who already fully believed in the system in proof of which they were said to be wrought and in the power of those by whom they were said to be wrought. The exact opposite to this, however, is the case with the miracles of the New Testament. They were wrought, as the rule, before the incredulous. Christ's miracles were of the most public kind, and of the spectators more than nine-tenths did not believe that great claim of His to be their Messiah, in attestation of which Christ performed His works. It was the performance of the works which drew to Christ such few comparatively of His countrymen as accepted His claim.

Again, the miracles of Rome, Mill tells us, were wrought before those who were already "trained in the persuasion that it is a duty to believe and a sin to doubt." What an immensity this implies! The spectators of the Romish wonders were people who thought it wrong to entertain a doubt but that the wonders they were summoned to see were both truly wrought and truly miraculous! Their acceptance then of them is of little value. But such a view attaches not at all to the miracles of the Gospel. Those before whom Christ and His apostles wrought their works never appear to have been taught any such doctrine, even as regards their accredited teachers. If they were taught anything of the works of Christ it would rather be that it would be a merit to doubt of His works. The acceptance then of Christ's works as truly miraculous is quite a different thing from the acceptance of the alleged Romish wonders by their spectators.

Once more, the spectators of Romish alleged miracles had no power to examine either into their nature or their reality. It was sin to doubt them. It was heresy to examine them. But with regard to Scripture miracles, while there was the full power to examine them, examination was never even deprecated. It would have been of no use to do so. The very deprecation of examination would only have provoked curiosity. But nothing of the kind was or could be attempted. The ever-present eye of the multitude, the searching unfriendly gaze of the learned and the powerful classes was ever upon the works of Christ and His disciples. Had there been anywhere a weak point it would have been discovered

and exposed, and Christianity would have been stifled in its birth as an imposture, which sought to rest the credit of a false Christ upon false miracles. If the miracles of the Bible from first to last, in Old and New Testament, are examined, it will be always found that they were wrought in precisely the opposite circumstances from those of Rome. Egypt witnessed their grand opening. It was when Israel was disobedient and incredulous that miracle was brought forth to them. Christ and His apostles wrought their great works in the hostile and incredulous lands of the Gentile and the Jew.

It seems a strange recommendation of the alleged miracles of Rome beyond those of Scripture, to say that they only met with a partial belief even in quarters where one would have looked for a cordial reception. And yet Mill seems to think this is a recommendation of their evidence, as Hume certainly did in regard of an alleged miracle recorded by Cardinal de Retz. He says of the miracles of Rome, and this with especial regard to those of them which have the highest amount of testimony, that they are "miracles which no one but a Roman Catholic, and by no means every Roman Catholic, believes." (238.) In our judgment this is a very grave discredit to those miracles. Certain we are that if a charge of this kind could be brought against the miracles of the New Testament it would be esteemed by very many minds a sufficient reason for refusing them all belief whatsoever. our own part, we must confess that a charge of this nature established against the Christian miracles would shake our own faith in them very considerably.

For

Suppose, for example, it could be said with truth of the miracles of Jesus Christ, and in particular of those said to have been wrought by Him in the most public manner, that no one outside the circle of His own disciples had ever believed them to have been really wrought, that without a single exception the inhabitants of Jerusalem, Bethany, Chorazin, Capernaum, and other places where Christ is said to have wrought in the most public manner many wonderful works, could either have said that they were ignorant that any works of the kind had ever been even attempted, or, that they had been attempted but never seemed to them worthy of any credence, and that no one except a little knot of followers around Christ attached to them the smallest importance, who does not see how very serious a discredit would hereby have accrued to the miracles of Christ ? But such a charge has never been made. It would have been made over and over again in the first centuries of Christianity, and re-echoed in every city of the Roman Empire, if it could. The Jewish opponents of Christianity would have said that their countrymen had known nothing, and believed nothing of those miracles which were vaunted so shamelessly in the Christian Scriptures. But they could not. The Jews did not accept Jesus of Nazareth for His miracles, but they allowed that He wrought miracles. The nation to this day continuing in their rejection of Christ's claims, does not pretend to dispute His works. The conviction of their nation in the lifetime of Christ on earth was too strong, and has come down by too unbroken a tradition to allow them now to attempt a denial. It cannot be said of the miracles of Christ that no one but His disciples believed them. Numbers who were not His disciples became His disciples because they believed them. The

nation of Israel accepted His miracles as true, while they, for other reasons which seemed to them sufficient, rejected His claims notwithstanding. The attitude of the unbelieving Jew towards the miracles of Jesus amounts in itself to proof of their truth.

Again, suppose that in the early Churches there had existed any party of importance, or any party whatever, however inconsiderable, who denied the truth of the miracles of Christ or those of His apostles, who does not see that here indeed would exist a very grave discredit to their reality and truth? People would most naturally and most reasonably say, "O, here were persons who by their profession of Christianity must have been favourably disposed to accept the alleged miracles; who, from their position, whether as acquainted with the alleged witnesses of the miracles, or from having been themselves in the position to know whether they were wrought or not, and yet these men did not themselves believe!" What would be the natural and inevitable inference? It would be either said that their knowledge of the witnesses of the miracles was such that they did not think them worthy of any credit, or that having been themselves witnesses of feats alleged to be miraculous, and having sufficient means to judge whether they were of this nature, and were performed, they could not give them their assent. We would at once conclude most unfavourably against the miracles. We would set them down either as downright impostures, or extraordinary but not supernatural feats magnified into miracle by credulity and predisposition. Of the witnesses who had attested miracles, but to whom credence was refused by their contemporary fellow Christians, we would say, doubtless there was very considerable ground for this refusal ! Those witnesses were probably known to be men who would not disdain such a thing as pious fraud for what they believed to be a good cause, or who were of such an ignorant and a credulous character that their testimony on any subject would be of little moment, and least of all of moment in the case of miracle which requires testimony of the very highest character. And so we would probably dismiss the whole question of early Christian miracle as incapable of being established with us of the nineteenth century, when it was rejected by Christian men who were either said to have witnessed that which was claimed as miracle, or who, knowing the character of the eye witnesses, did not think them worthy of belief. Such a thing as the refusal of belief to the miracles of the New Testament is not upon record. The miracles of Christ, the miracles of the apostles of Christ, were universally accepted by all parties in the professing Christian Church.

Now it so happens that we have in the circumstances of the early Christian Churches the very ones which would have given rise to denial to miracle upon the part of considerable numbers of their members, if such a denial had been possible. Those circumstances were very similar to, in their essence in fact identical with, those which produced a denial by some members of the Church of Rome of miracles alleged to have been wrought by other members of that Church. We refer here in particular to the miracles said to have been wrought in the eighteenth century, in France, at the tomb of the Abbé Paris, on behalf of the Jansenist party in the Gallican Church, which miracles were altogether rejected by the enemies of the Jansenists, the acute and powerful Jesuit body.