day we find, that wherever the gospel comes, it prevails, to the beating down the strong holds of Satan, and the dislodging the prince of the power of darkness, driving him away with all his living wonders; which is a standing miracle, carrying with it the testimony of superiority. What is the uttermost power of natural agents or created beings, men of the greatest reach cannot discover; but that it is not equal to God's omnipotency is obvious to every one's understand. ing; so that the superior power is an easy, as well as sure guide to revelation, attested by miracles, where they are brought as credentials to an embassy from God. And thus, upon the same grounds of superiority of power, uncontested revelation will stand too. For the explaining of which, it may be necessary to premise, I. That no mission can be looked on to be divine, that delivers any thing derogating from the honor of the one, only true, invisible God, or inconsistent with natural religion and the rules of morality; because God having discovered to men the unity and majesty of his eternal Godhead, and the truths of natural religion and morality, by the light of reason, he cannot be supposed to back the contrary by revelation: for that would be to destroy the evidence and the use of reason, without which men cannot be able to distinguish divine revelation from diabolical imposture. 2. That it cannot be expected that God should send any one into the world on purpose to inform men of things indifferent, and of small moment, or that are knowable by the use of their natural faculties. This would be to lessen the dignity of his Majesty in favour of our sloth, and in prejudice to our reason. 3. The only case then wherein a mission of any one from heaven can be reconciled to the high and awful thoughts men ought to have of the Deity, must be the revelation of some supernatural truths relating to the glory of God, and some great concern of men. Supernatural operations attesting such a revelation may with reason be taken to be miracles, as carrying the marks of a superior and overruling power, as long as no revelation accompanied with marks of a greater power appears against it. Such supernatural signs may justly stand good, and be received for divine, i. e. wrought by a power superior to all, till a mission attested by operations of a greater force shall disprove them because it cannot be supposed God should suffer his prerogative to be so far usurped by any inferior being, as to permit any creature, depending on him, to set his seals, the marks of his divine authority, to a mission coming from him. For these supernatural signs being the only means God is conceived to have to satisfy men, as rational creatures, of the certainty of any thing he would reveal, as coming from himself, can never consent that it should be wrested out of his hands, to serve the ends and establish the authority of an inferior agent that rivals him. His power being known to have no equal, always will, and always may be safely depended on, to show its superiority in vindicating his authority, and maintaining every truth that he hath revealed. So that the marks of a superior power accompanying it, always have been, (19) 82 and always will be, a visible and sure guide to divine revelation; by which men may conduct themselves in their examining of revealed religions, and be satisfied which they ought to receive as coming from God; though they have by no means ability precisely to determine what is, or is not above the force of any created being; or what operations can be performed by none but a divine power, and require the immediate hand of the Almighty. And therefore we see it is by that our Saviour measures the great unbelief of the Jews, John xv. 24, saying, "If I had not done among them the works which no other man did, they had not had sin; but now have they both seen and hated both me and my Father;" declaring, that they could not but see the power and presence of God in those many miracles he did, which were greater than ever any other man had done. When God sent Moses to the children of Israel with a message, that now, according to his promise, he would redeem them by his hand out of Egypt, and furnished him with signs and credentials of his mission; it is very remarkable what God himself says of those signs, Exod. iv. 8: "And it shall come to pass, if they will not believe thee, nor hearken to the voice of the first sign (which was turning his rod into a serpent) that they will believe the voice of the latter sign;" (which was the making his hand leprous by putting it in his bosom ;) God further adds, v. 9, “And it shall come to pass, if they will not believe also these two signs, neither hearken unto thy voice, that thou shalt take of the water of the river and pour upon the dry land: and the water which thou takest out of the river shall become blood upon the dry land." Which of those operations was or was not above the force of all created beings, will, I suppose, be hard for any man, too hard for a poor brick-maker, to determine; and therefore the credit and certain reception of the mission, was annexed to neither of them, but the prevailing of their attestation was heightened by the increase of their number; two supernatural operations showing more power than one, and three more than two. God allowed that it was natural, that the marks of greater power should have a greater impression on the minds and belief of the spectators. Accordingly the Jews by this estimate judged of the miracles of our Saviour, John vii. 31, where we have this account: "And many of the people believed on him, and said, 'When Christ cometh will he do more miracles than these which this man hath done?" This, perhaps, as it is the plainest, so it is also the surest way to preserve the testimony of miracles in its due force to all sorts and degrees of people. For miracles being the basis on which divine mission is always established, and consequently that foundation on which the believers of any divine revelation must ultimately bottom their faith, this use of them would be lost, if not to all mankind, yet at least to the simple and illiterate, (which is the far greatest part,) if miracles be defined to be none but such divine operations as are in themselves beyond the power of all created beings, or at least operations contrary to the fixed and established laws of nature. For as to the latter of those, what are the fixed and established laws of nature, philosophers alone, if at least they, can pretend to determine. And if they are to be operations performable only by divine power, I doubt whether any man, learned or unlearned, can, in most cases, be able to say of any particular operation that can fall under his senses, that it is certainly a miracle. Before he can come to that certainty, he must know that no created being has a power to perform it. We know good and bad angels have abilities and excellencies exceedingly beyond all our poor performances or narrow comprehensions. But to define what is the utmost extent of power that any of them has, is a bold undertaking of a man in the dark, that pronounces without seeing, and sets bounds in his narrow cell to things at an infinite distance from his model and comprehension. Such definitions therefore of miracles, however specious in discourse and theory, fail us when we come to use, and an application of them in particular cases. These thoughts concerning miracles, were occasioned by my reading Mr. Fleetwood's Essay on Miracles, and the letter written to him on that subject. The one of them defining a miracle to be an extraordinary operation performable by God alone; and the other writing of miracles without any definition of a miracle at all. THE END. THE LIVES, ACTS, AND MARTYRDOMS OF THE HOLY APOSTLES OF OUR SAVIOUR. TO WHICH ARE ADDED, LIVES OF THE TWO EVANGELISTS, ST. MARK AND ST. LUKE. AS ALSO, A BRIEF ENUMERATION AND ACCOUNT OF THE APOSTLES AND THEIR SUCCESSORS FOR THE FIRST THREE HUNDRED YEARS, IN THE FIVE GREAT APOSTOLICAL CHURCHES. BY WILLIAM CAVE, D. D. WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. BY THE REV. HENRY STEBBING, M. A. NEW-YORK: THOMAS GEORGE, JR., SPRUCE STREET. INTRODUCTORY ESSAY the moral truths of history; and where this is properly taken advantage of when the mind, intent on the object of inquiry, gathers around it whatever can emit even the smallest ray of light, and history is examined as a body instinct with spirits which have their immortality within it, and will come forth and manifest themselves at the call of thought rightly spending its preparatory vigils; then the most important eras of our existence, those in which we have been perceptibly carried towards the great beacon-light of humanity, will enable us to observe those changes in their origin which have had the most beneficial influence on our state and nature, and to converse with the just men who, now made perfect, had then to struggle with temptations and difficulties like our own. THERE are certain eras in the history of mankind which require to be contemplated by many and various lights. This is especially the case with those which have derived their importance from giving birth to new moral systems, or from bringing into more conspicuous action the spiritual energies of our race. Political revolutions naturally form remarkable points in the annals of nations, because attended with events to which the tenacity of human sympathy would of itself give a durable importance: but in those changes which have reached the souls of men, a power is found to be at work, the dimmest discovery of which never fails to act with an elevating force on the mind of the discoverer. It is a noble property of the human conscience to be able to recognize the Almighty in creation; but this is so generally the But glancing over the wide circle of human hisendowment of man, that he is expected, even in tory, with the distinct purpose of discovering the his lowest condition, to act according to the light periods at which mankind were most forcibly aphe may thence derive; whereas, to behold God in pealed to, and influenced, in their spiritual capaci the secret workings of his providence, in the pre- ty, it is impossible for us not to find our attention parations and dispensings of his Spirit, is in the at once arrested by the singular splendor which power only of those whom he has singularly favor- marks the birth and growth of Christianity. If ed with wisdom and the love of meditation. But we may find a type in creation, of that second great in many of those events which compose the bulk demonstration of divine love, we see the light of history, he effects his designs by the operation which at first existed only in its own limitless foun of agents which seem to partake almost as little tains, and but a few scintillations of which before of his living spirit as the matter which composes shone upon the world, then poured into a glorious the machinery of the universe: and thus, in the orb to shed constant beauty and fertility over the study of history, a large portion of it may be read universe; for the slightest examination of history without demanding or eliciting any extraordinary shows, that what was before but uncertainly known proof of mental vigor; while, on the other hand, in morals, thenceforward became fixed in princievery passage which describes the new position ples; and that the truths which had been made into which mankind is put, by an enlargement of palatable by their mixture with error, then became light and knowledge, demands, and when fairly sufficiently attractive of themselves to secure the contemplated, produces another and a higher state attention of the world. In the subsequent conof mind. While however this is the fruit of that flicts between truth and error, a change is pernobler class of historical truths, they also require ceptible both in the modes of attack and defence, a more copious illustration than others, to be and in the instruments employed for carrying on brought within the scope and operation of our un- the struggle. Error dared not deny the unity of derstanding. The higher we ascend in the regions God-truth feared not to assert it as the foundaof speculation, the firmer should be our supports; tion of all holiness: instead of marshalling the a rule the neglect of which has exemplified almost shadowy ranks of mythological powers, and lookmore than any thing else, the pride and folly of ing for the soul of a deity under each broad shield human reason; for, however otherwise it may ap- of the abstract virtues, error itself acknowledged pear to superficial minds, it is mainly owing to our the pure and mighty attributes of Jehovah, only negligence or indifference that there is not found venturing to speak of the variety of his decrees; in the very loftiest ranges of human thought, in and truth, instead of appealing to tradition, or the those which it is supposed by the world exist only innate notions of the soul, referred at once to rules for wild hypothesis, firm footing for reason, and which had received the sanction of Eternity. True bright and visible temples of truth,-islands and it is, that the soil was not uniformly impregnated continents lying beyond the vast ocean of uncer- with the divine fire which glowed in Christianity; tainty, which are not the less real because but but the external change was sufficiently great and rarely visited, nor the less beautiful because their general to show that the world confessed the acstarry galaxies have not yet been submitted to our tion of a new element; and from the commencecalculations. The same remark holds good also in ment of its operation to the present hour, the efrespect to the less speculative part of such inqui- fects have been evidently on the increase. ries. There is both a greater degree of evidence required, and a greater degree given, for unfolding The examination of an era like this is equally interesting and important. It is one of the plain |