beings the Scripture histories record, and that they have nothing in common with the fanciful creations which the ancient world and our great-grandmothers' world were full of, except their uncommonness; and when mythical philosophers boldly assert or quietly take for granted that they were much the same, an unaccustomed thinker, confused by the confident representation, has no clear recollection of the Scriptural wonders in his mind to compare with the ghost stories, fairy legends, and witcheries of unscientific times. Once, however, he reads the stories of the Bible again, the uselessness of such explanations appears, and the myth vanishes before the actual personages, the human beings and earthly life that fill all the Bible anecdotes, as the fairies of twilight always disappeared from the beholder when he had an opportunity of seeing also a being of flesh and blood. It has been already noticed (Chapter II.) how sceptical thinkers have found that the myths which seek to assign the professed histories of Scripture to the exigencies of religious theory or to non-historical legend, signally fail to keep hold on the thoughts in the presence of the scenes of Scripture narrative. If the sacred stories be read amidst the topography of Palestine-in sight of its mountains and deserts, its wells and rocks, its cities walled up to heaven, its diversity of climate and vegetation-then Abraham and his journeyings, Moses and Aaron and the forty years of the wilderness, the life that fills the Book of Judges, above all, the days of the Gospels, arise into inevitable reality. Untravelled readers experience something of the same rectifying of mythical visions in reading graphic descriptions of the places associated with the Scripture histories. Persons who accustom themselves to realise and make familiar to their imagination all the minute details of those old pictures of intense human life do not need such rectifying. They, however the readers most accustomed to look, as it were, on the familiar countenance of Scripture story-appreciate most the filling up of the life-pictures which such books as Dean Stanley's furnish. To them such books summon up innumerable promptly-recognised features of reality, when they set in the light of local features of the country phrases of the narra tives whose value was unknown before for want of such illustration. Bushnel sets aside narrative for philosophical meaning in his attempt to explain the sufferings of Christ as the pains, not of sacrifice instead of man, but, of love's unavoidable anguish over the sins and sorrows of those He came to save. He confesses himself that his mythical kind of theory is altogether inoperative on human hearts, and that if the sufferings of Christ are to be made influential over men, they must be presented to them in the historical light of altarsacrifices. The history is congruous to something which mankind feel concerning themselves, and the nerve of spiritual consciousness will not awake to the touch of anything else. The logical scepticisms of Hume, and afterwards of Strauss and Comte, have had their practical effect in the same way as the attempts of the Pharisees and mythists. They lead the mind away from looking at the miracles of the New Testament themselves into thinking chiefly about the mental process by which we could deal with such things as miracles at all. The rulers of the Jews, who had not the advantage of being eighteen hundred years distant from Jesus and the apostles, could not escape believing human testimony as to their miracles, however much they wished it. Their language was, "We cannot deny it." Hume's question of the credibility of testimony in the case is simply a part of the wider sceptical question of the credibility of testimony by our own senses-the question of how we can know that we see or hear or feel any particular thing, or only have some inner imagination at work that we are seeing, hearing, or touching. Any unexpected sensation-the rough handling of a tender part of the body of the subjective reasoner, or the dropping of a glass of cold water on his head-will summon his faith to the outside immediately, and he will have no doubt of there being real things for his senses to deal with. So familiarity of the thoughts with the peculiarities of the Bible miracles brushes aside the difficulties about human testimony. What we must have seen to be miracles had we witnessed them, we can very well believe on the testimony which satisfies us for any historical fact. Suppose the testi Cure for scepticism the history. mony of predecessors not to be trustworthy; let us then stand in the place of our predecessors, and suppose that we ourselves saw the things testified to. If we saw a maimed body made complete again by a word, or two or three loaves of bread become enough for thousands of hungry persons, leaving numerous basketfuls of broken pieces, we might not be able to say how we felt sure that that was a work of divine power, but not the slightest doubt would be on our minds about its being such. If it will not do to make the testimony of history as to the miracles untrustworthy on moral grounds, since enemies to Christianity bore witness to its miracles as well as friends-nor upon defects in the historical transmission of the evidence, since that is equal to or better than what we accept for any ancient history, then the credibility of these miracles has hardly to do with human testimony at all, but with the question, Whether we could believe a miracle if we saw it? and of that in the case of Jesus' miracles in general there is no doubt. 7. The practical cure for scepticism has been familiarity -familiar with the history of God's love, as the want of that familiarity ity with allows doubt to be insinuated. The case is analogous to the progress and the cure of family distrust. Only in absence from his father's house can distrust of his father's affection be with great facility sown in the mind of a son. Return to daily communion with his father heals his failing faith; his fancied conclusions are dissipated day by day if he allow the presence of his parent to exercise unresisted the influence on his thoughts which it will have. His own sight and hearing and touch of his father rebuke his understanding for having doubted; in the Hebrew phrase, he "believes with his heart." So, as has been pointed out above (Chapter II.), the recognition of reality is accompanied by the recognition of congruity when the thinker is brought face to face with the things of the Bible. They are in so close harmony with man's consciouslyfelt nature that he takes hold of them as of the same spiritual life with himself. They are such facts as were needed to suit him as the facts of God's love for him. They are suitable and indispensable to human religion. He can recognise and believe in them as he believes in bread to be his food or water to be the relief of his thirst. His conscious nature knows them as things fitted to be its own portion. The miraculous healings and comfortings and deliverances are so much the very manner of things which he feels that he needs, that, though miracles, they are not wonders to him; and though they may be extraordinary things for human testimony to have to add to its common testimony of ordinary facts, they do not look at all extraordinary things for human nature to receive from Him who brought them; but they are the very things to be recognised as His proper gifts, considering who He said He was. They are true in character to the connection in which we read them, as certain conduct would be true to the relationship of a parent. The argument was a good one: "Never man spake like this man.” "Come, see a man that told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?" "Did not our hearts burn within us when He talked to us by the way, and when He opened to us the Scriptures ?" observa 8. What, then, has reason to do in matters of faith, if it is to Task of deal almost entirely with the recorded facts of God's love, and tion. confine itself to drawing inferences from them in lines pointed out by God's Word, because it is not to be trusted with the venture of investigating in other lines? The work prescribed to our reason is appropriate to its capability, and amply sufficient also, as it is an unceasing one. First, it has to judge of the evidence upon which the history of God's love is to be believed; secondly, its longer, its endless work is to familiarise the mind and the heart, the thoughts and the affections, with the facts recorded. 9. First, God has set the proving work of human reason at First, To recognise the beginning of every man's belief of His revelations. The matter of liberty and the duty of private judgment are placed by Him at faith. the door, to give entrance to all real faith into the soul. The first appeal which the Most High has always made to mankind has been to their own understanding, to consider what was laid before them, and convince themselves of it; God accepting the habitual human question, "What sign showest Thou?" Abraham, when he was about to receive for himself and his family the offered covenant with Jehovah, asked for evidence which should convince his own reason that it was Jehovah that was speaking to him; and the evidence was immediately given. When Moses was sent by the Lord to His chosen people, the prophet asked, and his request was freely granted, signs which would convince the Hebrews that Jehovah had sent him. In the same way did our Lord seek acceptance for His revelations for His "works' sake." Jehovah's ready compliance with Gideon's request for a double evidence is a marked instance. It has only been false teachers who have sought to lord it over reason, and demanded faith without evidence, and made perdition the penalty of refusing the bold assumption of authority. In the cases in which God himself spoke directly to man a doctrine or a duty, reason needed only evidence that it was God who spoke. Faith, then, man's conscious connection of subordination with God, received the religious truth, seeking nothing more than the authority, "Thus said the Lord," or, "Verily I say unto you." When truth has to be received at the mouth of human messengers of revelation, reason has a farther commission, to watch against the danger of mistaken faith. It has not only to examine the facts which accredit the professed agent of revelation, but also to compare his message with truth previously revealed by God, to “try the spirits whether they be of God." If truth thus revealed pass in the learner's mind through the state of knowledge to that of faith, reason has a farther work—that of recognising its agreement with the attributes and condition of human kind. For if much of religious truth must be, as it were, objective at first, new to man, outside his common thoughts, beyond his power to discover, all religious truth which becomes faith must be discovered to be subjective also-that is, it must be recognised as being in thorough harmony with the believer's consciously-felt nature. And any individual, as he increases in his faith-his continual emotional thinking of, his perpetual beholding of, revealed truth-must experience this fact, that his growing feeling of it is fed as well from within as from without; his own consciousness, as well as the |