of the evil spirits, and knowing, too, the nature of the works ascribed to Christ, unhesitatingly confessed of the latter that they were of a nature and a kind beyond any other power but the power of Almighty God (John iii. 2). He did not say this merely of one miracle, but he pronounced it of all the miracles which Christ had up to this period wrought publicly at Jerusalem, at the great festival of the Passover (John ii. 23). Had he supposed them no other in kind than those popularly thought to lie within the power of evil spirits, they would certainly have had no force with him. It was the absolutely distinctive nature of those works which forced this timid time-server at first forth to a living Jesus in the darkness of the night, and afterwards gave him nerve to own a dead Christ as his Master. This distinctive nature of the works of Christ he owned at his first secret interview with Jesus: "Rabbi," he said to Him, 66 know that Thou art a Teacher come from God; for no man can do these miracles that Thou doest, except God be with him (John iii. 2). Such was the deliberate verdict of a learned man, into the composition of whose character very little boldness and very little enthusiasm seem to have entered. This judgment of the erudite councillor is eminently useful to our purpose, inasmuch as it is his judgment on the miracles of Christ as compared with other works which were yet in his opinion also supernatural. Fully acquainted with all these, he yet gives the acknowledgment to the works of Christ that they exceeded them in their character, and exceeded them in this very respect, that, whereas it was possible for the former to have been performed by some power superior to that of man, while inferior to that of God, no power whatsoever could by him be supposed capable of performing the works of Christ except the power of the supreme God.

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Such as was the judgment of the learned Nicodemus was the judgment of the unlearned and ignorant man who was led to believe in Jesus of Nazareth from Christ's work of healing upon. himself (John ix. 32). He was probably as well, possibly almost better, able to judge comparatively of a matter of the kind than Nicodemus. Extravagant stories of supernatural power are often listened to with cold ear by men of education, neglected by them, and forgotten. It is among the lower strata of society that such chiefly circulate, and in their circulation very often assume characteristics greatly in excess of the original tale. In the blind man before us, we have just the sort of person who would have heard and drunk in all the supernatural stories current among a people possessed of a very large amount of credulity and superstition. Whatever Satan and Beelzebub, and their hosts of inferior spirits might be supposed capable of working upon the bodies or the minds of unhappy men, or on the lower creation, would be listened to greedily by a man from whom was shut out the great source of knowledge derived from sight, and who was therefore thrown exclusively upon information derived through the ear. With all his knowledge of

supernatural story, he came without hesitation to the same verdict upon the one miracle, with which he was intimately acquainted, that Nicodemus came to on all the miracles of Christ witnessed by him. He expresses his judgment in the unrestrained language natural to illiterate men, and particularly natural to him at a time when all his nature was exuberant with delight on the opening to him of the glorious sense of sight. "Since the world began," he said to his hostile and suspicious examiners," it was not heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was born blind. If this man were not of God, He could do nothing." Such was this man's judgment; the judgment of the illiterate and the superstitious of the people. Stretching backward beyond all the knowledge of the supernatural of his time, he daringly asserts that, from the very foundation of the world, no work had ever been wrought such as had been wrought upon him. It lay, in his estimation, beyond what any man, unaided by any power less than God's, could by any possibility effect. He certainly did not believe that his cure could be worked by a lying spirit, as well as by the Spirit of God. It was altogether of a different kind and nature. Between light and darkness there could not be, to his mind, a more decided line of demarcation than between the mighty work just wrought upon him by one, of whom he knew no more than that His name was "Jesus," and the whole collection of mighty works ascribed to the power of evil spirits. The friends of Christ, literate and illiterate, just as we saw of the enemies of Christ, were of a wholly different mind from that ascribed to them by Mr. Mill. They never dreamed of supposing that, between the alleged miracles of Christ and the alleged miracles of lying spirits, there was any parallel whatsoever. They occupied different positions altogether in the world of the supernatural. Both were above earth. Both were looked up to and wondered at by men below. But the works of Christ lay upwards among the stars; the works of evil spirits were but lying amid the clouds that move in the atmosphere above, but of our earth. Such as was the judgment of the declared enemies and declared friends of Christ and the Gospel, was also the popular judgment : the opinion of the great mass of the people, who, during the lifetime of Christ, seem not to have been able to make up their minds whether to believe or to reject His claims. To these men preeminently the miracles ascribed to Christ were the grand attraction. His doctrine they avowedly did not comprehend. He spoke to them in parables which He did not explain. They listened to Him gladly and eagerly, but it was certainly not from an overpowering sense of the truth and loveliness of His teaching; for that teaching did not lead them to faith in Him. Neither was it the character and conduct of Christ apart from miracle which was His grand attraction in their eyes. An ascetic character, such as was that of His forerunner, John Baptist, would have overpowered them more. It was the miracles of Christ which drew the rapt attention

to Him of that fickle people, who would one day throw Him down from a precipice and on another raise Him to the dizzy height of monarchy. Witnessing those miracles, and well aware of the power usually ascribed among them to Satanic agency, it never once occurred to them to doubt that the source of the miraculous power of Christ was in God Himself.

As an example of this we refer to the cure of the palsied man, as related in Matt. ix. Here, as everywhere throughout His life, we see the eagerness with which His enemies laid hold of anything that could be turned against Him, and the fidelity which the writers of the Gospel show in narrating every charge, open or secret, made against their Master. The first address of Christ to the sick man, "Son, thy sins be forgiven thee," is at once responded to in the thoughts of the scribes present by the accusation of blasphemy.' Their idea was that Christ was here guilty of the very highest religious crime, that of taking upon Him a power which belonged only to God. Christ reads out for the bystanders the thoughts of their hearts; and then proceeds, in sight of all present, to work His cure. The knowledge on the part of the assembled people that their religious teachers thought Him on that very occasion guilty of grievous sin against God, did not for a moment cause them to doubt the source of the power which they saw displayed before their eyes. No idea crossed them, even for a moment, that any evil spirit was here putting forth his agency: "When the multitudes saw it, they marvelled, and glorified God, which had given such power unto men."

We have thus seen the view universally taken among all classes of the Jewish people of the alleged miraculous power of Christ in regard of the principal works ascribed to Him. They never hesitated as to their source. Whatever power they supposed to belong to Satanic influence, they never imagined that the ordinary class of miracles ascribed to Christ belonged to the range of diabolical skill. Even in the only class of works which, so far as we know, was ever by Christ's bitterest enemies attempted to be ascribed to the Devil, namely, the ejection of evil spirits, there was something in the working of Christ which, in the eyes of the common beholders, gave to His works an undoubted superiority, even here. Whatever were the power supposed by them to belong to Satan in this particular field, whatever had been the effects produced by any class of devilexpellers, working from what source we please, in the alleged works of Christ wrought upon demoniacs the beholders recognised a power which they had never before seen put in exercise. Thus in the expulsion of the devil from the dumb man, when, besides the expulsion of the spirit, the dumbness of the man was cured, we read that, "the multitude marvelled, saying, It was never so seen in Israel" (Matt. ix. 33). We are not, of course, here saying anything as to the truth or falsehood of those works of Christ which the Gospels relate to us. We are merely speaking o

the ideas formed as to their origin and source by the Jewish beholders. Mr. Mill informs us that it was the belief of the age that miracles could be worked by a lying spirit as well as by the Spirit of God. Not disputing his theory to a certain extent, we have examined facts in order to find out whether it was true to that extent which would make it of the smallest value to Mr. Mill in his inferences from it. It is not enough for this purpose to say that, according to popular belief, evil spirits could work miracles. We must also inquire, to what extent it was popularly believed that evil spirits could work them? If it was indeed believed that evil spirits could do the same, or equal miracles to those which God was believed to work, and that the miracles now in question, viz., those of Christ, were not in their nature different from those which evil spirits were thought capable of working, then indeed Mill would have good ground for his idea that no one would think it worth his while to deny the miracles of Christ, since no one thought them, even if true, capable of proving His doctrine true, or Himself a Messenger from God. But here Mill's groundwork altogether fails him. It was never believed among the Jews that evil spirits were capable of doing wonders equal to those of God. A theistic people never dreamed of paralleling the power of God with that of Satan. The Manichæanism of the Gnostics was not accepted by a nation which had learned its ideas of God and creation from the Books of Moses, commented upon by the Psalms and Isaiah. HENRY CONSTABLE.

THE CHURCH.

"By revelation He made known unto me the mystery. . . which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed unto His holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit; that the Gentiles should be fellow-heirs, and of the same body, and partakers of His promise in Christ by the Gospel."-Eph. iii. 3-6.

"Christ. . . loved the Church that He might present it to Himself, We are members of His body."-Eph. v. 25, 27, 30.

"The Church which is His body."-Eph. i. 22, 23.

"He is the head of the body, the Church."-Col. i. 18.

"The Church of the first-born, which are written in heaven."-Heb. xii. 23.

T is impossible to read the New Testament with attention, without perceiving that it contains pictures of a visible and an invisible, a nominal and a real Church. Things are said of the nominal which are inapplicable to the real, and of the real which cannot be affirmed of the nominal. Unless this distinction be kept in mind, a clear idea of the Church of Christ, which is His body, cannot be realised; but it is of the utmost moment, both for doctrine and practice, that we should realise this idea; and the means

of doing so are not far to seek, if we cast aside our hierarchical and denominational notions, and take the word of inspiration as our sole guide.

Hierarchy is mentioned in Scripture, and so are the divisions into formal communities under different names, but they are mentioned only to be condemned. Allusions to the foreseen growth of the first are found in such cautions as this: "But be not ye called Rabbi, for One is your Teacher, and all ye are brethren. And call no man your father upon earth, for One is your Father which is in heaven. Neither be ye called masters, for One is your Master, even Christ" (Matt. xxiii. 8-10). And the second is severely rebuked in the following language: "Now, I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment. For it hath been declared unto me of you, my brethren, by them which are of the house of Chloe, that there are contentions among you. Now this I mean, that each one of you saith, I am of Paul, and I of Apollos, and I of Cephas, and I of Christ. Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you?

Or were ye baptized into the name of Paul ?" (1 Cor. i. 10-13). And then, after showing the folly of the world's wisdom in relation to God's plan of salvation, and pointing out how God hath chosen what the world calls foolish, and weak, and base, and despised things, he adds that there is to be no glorying except in the Lord, and that he determined neither to recognise any of their contentions and divisions, nor to adopt the excellency of speech which the world admires, resolving to know nothing among them save Jesus Christ, even the Crucified One, whose cross was such a stumbling-block to the Jew and such folly to the Greek. After this he returns to his complaint, affectionately but earnestly addressing them in this manner: "And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat, for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet are ye now able. For ye are yet carnal; for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and division, are ye not carnal, and walk as men? For while one saith, I am of Paul, and another, I am of Apollos, are ye not carnal ? Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man? I have planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth, but God that giveth the increase " (1 Cor. iii. 1-7). Alas! these hierarchical assumptions, "lording it over God's heritage," reached, as ecclesiastical history proves, the full and fearful development shown in vision to the Apostle John. "I saw," says he, a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with