But we are not called upon to account for the source of each and all the miracles related in the Bible as worked not only by Jesus, but by prophets before him and apostles after him, or of those said to have been performed by saints in virtue of power transmitted to them. It suffices that the causes giving rise to belief in these fictions are made clear in acquainting ourselves with those crude notions of past time about the universe which rendered any idea of the unbroken rule of law impossible. As knowledge of the supreme and unchecked sweep of the order of nature advances, belief in miracle dies out, for when the law of a thing is found, we refuse to look for a cause beyond nature, while so long as any department of the universe remains unexplored and unexplained, there the belief is found lingering. For example, in our own time, until weather changes were shown to be within the realm of law, men, in their craving for a cause, looked upon "plagues of rain" and severe droughts as the direct act of an Almighty Being, as the marks of his anger against a

people's sin; indeed, prayers are still offered by some persons for their removal! An amusing illustration is given in Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson1 of the confusion which the ignorant make between cause and effect in the case of the islanders of St. Kilda, who invented all sorts of superstitions to account for their being seized with colds in the head whenever a ship arrived, until it occurred to a "Rev. Mr. Christian of Docking" to find the cause in the fact that a vessel could enter the harbour only when a strong north-east wind was blowing! And in another part of Scotland the servants on a farm suffered every spring from fever and ague, which were viewed as the judgment of God upon their sins, until with proper drainage of the land the disorder disappeared.

Forgetting that other remarkable men besides Jesus, and that evil spirits likewise, have been credited with superhuman power, miracles were once regarded as proving that Jesus was a divine person, indeed, the deity himself, and

1 Croker's edit. (1860), p. 191.

that the Christian religion was revealed from heaven; but the number of thoughtful and devout persons who feel that belief in them is not only now impossible, but rather a vexation and a hindrance to the advancement of religion, is increasing.

i. To believe that Jesus performed miracles does not make his teaching more beautiful and more true; the duties he enjoins, the love he would diffuse as the ground of these duties abide, whether he did or did not make the blind to see and bring the dead to life. Such belief, moreover, must ever remain outside us as facts or fictions do; they cannot help us to follow the example of Jesus, and to test for ourselves the truth of what he says.

2. Belief in miracle is a drag on the progress of mankind, because it makes them shrink from interfering with or appearing to thwart the hand. of God. Arguing that the evil is permitted by him and sent to warn or to punish them, it is thought impious to remove it. Whereas, as man learns that the ills he has thus regarded

as heaven-sent are curable and to be prevented, being the result of neglect and ignorance, he sets to work with a will to banish them by obeying the law for breach of which he and his have suffered and smarted so keenly and so long.

3. It is a false and shallow notion that the surrender of belief in miracle involves the lessening or loss of our sense of the wonderful. There may be those in whom this sense is dead or sleeping, but a fearless following of the evidence before them by the truly wise, while it leaves behind the legends and pseudomysteries which men in the "times of their ignorance" invented, will bring them to the threshold of those abiding mysteries of the universe the continued revelation of whose unbroken order becomes the inspiration of their

own.

VIII.

Jesus asserts his Messiahship.

RETURNING to the relations between Jesus and the Pharisees, now becoming so strained, we find these men basely accusing him of casting out demons by the aid of Beelzebul, the "prince of the demons;" to which he retorted with an overwhelming argument; “Every kingdom or city or house divided against itself cannot stand; and if I through Satan, whose agents work misery upon men, perform deeds of mercy, how can Satan's kingdom stand? But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, then is the kingdom of God already come unto you."1 By such a charge they had blasphemed God; they were in danger, he told them, of losing forgiveness both in this world and in the next.2 Baffled and bitter, they sought to confound him before the people by asking him for a "sign" whereby he might prove himself a true prophet and thus command claim Matt. xii. 24, 28. 2 Matt. v. 31.7