. writers that the miracles did produce conviction, and accept instead his assurance that they did not. Undoubtedly there was a preliminary difference in the Jew who continued unbelieving and the Jew who was brought to believe. The unbelieving Jew was too bigoted to allow the miracles to have their proper operation upon his mind. If the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes' (Matt. xi. 21). The believing Jew was more candid, and gave to the miracles the weight which belonged to them. Was this to be convinced on quite other considerations'? We are afraid that 'foregone conclusions and predisposing impressions have too much influence not on Pharisees only, but on philosophers also. Anti-Christian writers have usually been conspicuous for the effrontery of their assertions; but we can hardly recall a more signal specimen of hardihood than this denial by Professor Powell both that our Lord and His Apostles principally appealed to miracles, and that many converts were made by them. His daring is the more surprising that he has shown by his former publications that no one knows better that the fundamental position put forward, and proved again and again, by the advocates of Christianity, is the same which he now is satisfied to dismiss with a summary contradiction, without any at tempt, beyond what we have instanced, to grapple with the evidence. Such easy, such improbable assurance in a clergyman of the Church of England and a Professor in the University of Oxford, writing for the eye of his learned and enlightened brethren, might well impose upon many who have never investigated the subject for themselves; and it is for this reason we bestow upon his allegations an amount of attention which they do not intrinsically deserve. Not only are the passages we have adduced from the New Testament ample to show that Jesus and His Apostles did appeal to miracles as evidences of his divine mission, but they equally prove that the narratives of the writers were intended to be taken as statements of facts, and not as parables and figures of speech. Professor Powell expresses himself with such extreme vagueness, like a man afraid to state boldly his opinions, that it is often difficult to get at them. He frequently, as we have seen, refers to the New Testament history as if he accepted it in its usual sense, but from numerous other passages it is evident that he must in reality adopt some mode of interpretation by which he endeavours to evade the plain meaning of the inspired writers. It is mere trifling with such a subject to allege that there are confessedly figurative expressions and parables, and loose popular language in Scripture; that the words, This is My body,' are taken in a figurative sense, because the literal would involve absurdities; that we hold the motion of the earth round the sun, though the Scriptural language seems formed on a contrary notion, &c., &c. This is the sort of talk that forms the staple of Spinoza's Philo sophia Scripturæ Interpres,' and which if any simple reader should take as seriously meant, would lead to the conclusion that hardly any book could have any fixed and determinate meaning as stating facts, since there is hardly any book that does not contain some figurative expressions or popular language. In short, the prototype of this style of exegesis was that of my Lord Peter, in the Tale of a Tub,' in the interpretation of his father's will. Protestants do not reject the literal sense of the words, 'This is My body,' merely because now, after the latter triumphs of the Inductive Principle, that sense appears to them monstrous, but because it was, when the words were spoken, so manifestly monstrous, that the disciples would not have naturally understood the words in that sense, any more than they would have taken their Master for a literal tree, when He said that He was the true Vine. We contend that, in such cases, the literal is not the obvious or natural sense of the words. When Protestants deny that sunset' and 'sunrise' necessarily imply the real motion of the sun round the earth, they are defending not the language of Scripture alone, but the common speech of all men in all ages, who wish to speak intelligibly. When they interpret any narrative as an allegory or a parable, it is not simply because they do not like to take it otherwise, but be 6 * *If man were not allowed to be an egotist, and talk of the phenomena of nature as they affect would be proofs of ignorance. The sun's disk, the axis of the earth, the right ascension and declination of heavenly bodies, &c., are all terms of this kind. Longitude and latitude are names which arose either from a mistaken opinion of the earth's shape, or from an imperfect acquaintance with the state of the world. The ancients, in the time of Ptolemy, A.D. 140, knew more of the earth from east to west than from north to south; hence they called the first its length, the other its breadth. Eclipse comes from a false notion that the sun left its place in the heavens, excitiv Tv idpav (Herod.).' Bishop Copleston, Remains, p. 107. his own senses, even the most scientific terms 6 cause the circumstances of the case make | tive attest the truth of whatever that it probable that it was so intended to be narrative contains-as, for instance, the understood by the author. On precisely incarnation of Christ, which,' says Bishop the same principle they refuse to put a Butler, being secret, cannot be alleged as figurative interpretation upon narratives a proof of a Divine mission, but requires which were palpably designed to be con- itself to be proved by visible miracles.' strued literally. Some persons,' says Is there anything unreasonable in this? Archbishop Whately, have, very rashly, When, in private conversation, Professor applied the title of Parable to portions of Powell has started objections to particuScripture which were understood, and evi- lar miracles in detail, his company, perdently meant to be understood, as neither ceiving him to be a clergyman, have namore nor less than literally true narratives of turally assumed him to be a Christian, and real events, but which these persons will not have therefore felt themselves justified in so believe. But this is an unwarrantable use taking for granted with him the general of language. Any tale which is not true authority of Revelation, and the prime in the sense in which it is known to be un- facts of a miraculous character on which derstood, is what we should call by a name it is based. When he shall repeat the very different from Parable.* Those who same experiment hereafter, he will probainterpret Scripture in this fashion do in bly experience a different result. fact impugn the veracity of the sacred In the same paragraph Professor Powell writers a supposition which no infidel thus endeavours to convict certain Chrishas been able to maintain for an hour tian apologists of reasoning in a circle : against Christian apologists. But objec-Some argue for belief in miracles, that tions such as these are (as Warburton said of the arguments of one of his opponents) 'like black lead, which any one can rub out, if he does not mind fouling his fingers.' เ 6 Having contended that the believers of the Gospel age did not believe in consequence of the miracles, but upon quite other considerations,' Professor Powell next maintains that it is the same at present with far the larger part of professing Christians. Miracles are admitted as a part of the Gospel, not as the antecedent or preliminary proof of it. The vast majority of ordinary believers, when they hear any objection started against the miracles of the New Testament, will, with one consent, regard it not as a critical difficulty weakening the evidences, but as a profanation in questioning what is asserted by inspired authority, that is they believe the miracles in consequence of the assumed inspiration, not as the proofs of it' (p. 436). This is a common sophism, and we take leave to add a somewhat shallow one. The case stands really thus. The majority of believers suppose that they have the word of Christ and his apostles for the inspiration of the New Testament; and the trustworthiness of that word they hold to be proved by indubitable miracles. There are, however, other miracles recorded in Scripture which they accept as miracles principally because they find them there. If they met such statements elsewhere they would not attach the same credit to them. But the miracles which attest the Divine authority of the narra * Lectures on some of the Scripture Parables, p. 2. creation is a miracle. But creation is solely the doctrine of Revelation; the argument, therefore, is simply one of faith' (p. 437). This has no force unless the persons alleging the argument conceded the minor premiss. As, however, they gene. rally do not, and as Professor Powell knows that they do not, we cannot see the coherence of the reasoning. A little further on he sums up the whole matter by asserting that the belief in miracles, whether in ancient or in modern times, has ALWAYS been a point not of evidence addressed to the intellect, but of religious faith impressed on the spirit' (p. 439). Every modern believer in miracles can answer for himself and say whether he accepts this account of the nature of his belief. Professor Powell indeed has spared us the trouble of exposing the monstrous assertion by flatly contradicting it himself. It has often been maintained, and has perhaps been the most commonly received view, that such external interposition is necessary for attesting the disclosure of divine communications' (p. 282). After this and other examples which we have exhibited of Professor Powell's consistency, no one will be surprised to be told that he has an Appendix on Documentary Evidence that falls very far below the average of papers in Mr. Holyoake's Reasoner. Take a sample. The text of the received books has been open to "recensions" even from early times. Various amendments have been from time to time made, as manuscript authority has been more accurately searched into,' &c. &c. The 'spirit of the age must be easily satisfied, if such paltry talk as this comes up to its requirements. Such cavils' we supposed had died with the country squire, of whom Dean Swift relates that, being told there were 30,000 various readings of the Greek Testament, exclaimed in triumph, 'Why then push round the punchbowl, and a fig for the parson! Professor Powell should read Bentley's Letters of Phileleutherus Lipsiensis, and he will learn the value of such objections as these.* They do little credit to a man who has been educated and holds a professorship in the learned University of Oxford. It is not, however, Christianity alone that must be given up on Professor Powell's principles. Natural religion is felt to be an outwork that must be destroyed before the fortress itself can be dealt with successfully. If this wonderful 'COSMOS' of the universe be merely the operation of a real LORD GOD ALMIGHTY, working all after the counsel of His own Will, there will be too strong a foundation laid for the Gospel miracles for the opponents of them to contemplate with complacency. This, therefore, must first be removed. It is a mistake,' accordingly we are told, to confound with the deductions of science those more sublime conceptions and elevated spiritual views of a Deity-a personal God-an Omnipotent Creator-a moral Governor-a Being of infinite perfections-holding relations with the spirit of man-the object of worship, trust, fear, and love; all which conceptions can originate only from some other source than physical philosophy' (pp. 248, 249). In any conception of the nature or attributes of God or man's relation to Him, we can only look to other sources of information and conviction of quite a different order from those which science can furnish. Those higher aspirations which so many and elevated minds own, can only be satisfied by disclosures belonging not to the province of natural philosophy, or any deductions from it. ... but to something beyond and properly belonging to the * Letter 1, § 32. There is no exaggeration in the description which Bishop Hare gives in The Clergy man's Thanks to Phileleutherus, of the unanswerable arguments of Bentley: You have, in the small compass of seven leaves, done the work of large volumes, and have set the whole question of various lections in so clear and full a light, that nothing more need be said in defence of the text on this account, nothing can be said against it. You have pulled up this panic by the very roots; and a man must be afraid of his own shadow who can herethe number of them any prejudice to the integrity or authority of the sacred books,' after be in pain about a various reading, or think เ jurisdiction of moral or spiritual convictions' (pp. 249, 250). To attempt to reason from law to volition, from order to active power, from universal reason to distinct personality, from design to self-existence, from intelligence to infinite perfection, is, in reality, to adopt grounds of argument and speculation entirely beyond those of strict philosophical inference, and it would be more consistent openly to avow the insufficiency of scientific views .... and, owing to the inadequacy of reason, to recur to faith' (p. 244). Such metaphysical and moral systems, to whatever extent they may be supposed established, refer to an order of truths almost wholly internal, ideal, and subjective' (p. 245). The source, therefore, of all religious knowledge is that SPIRITUAL FAITH which is so manifestly only another name for Taste and Imagination, that Professor Powell himself can, at times, hardly keep his countenance when declaring his respect for it and magnifying its powers. What remains then is a God or Mind, so called, but synonymous with the great principle of physical order' (p. 242), whose REALITY exists in the immutably connected order of objects examined' (p. 240), in whom thought and reason are as thought and reason are in a book, irrespectively of any question of its AUTHOR OR ORIGIN' (p. 238). These are the greater mysteries of a REVEREND Hierophant, who comes forward ostentatiously in the character of a Christian Priest, impressed on him with this commission- Be thou a faithful dispenser of the Word of God and of His Sacraments.' 6 And now we desire to dismiss from our minds for a while the painful recollection of the sacred character in which Professor Powell chooses to appear, and think of him merely as an assailant of the rational evidences of religion. In this character, what has he to bring before the public with which they are not already quite familiar? As far as we can see, nothing. I. His grand and palmary argument against miracles, which meets us at every turn, and returns again and again, as if it could acquire force by constant repetition, is the plea that modern discoveries in science, by showing everywhere the pervading influence of physical laws, prove the idea of a suspension of physical laws to be unphilosophical. We cannot, indeed, find any place in the book in which this plea is exhibited with anything like a logical coherence of premises and conclusion; still the author manifestly takes it for an argument, and for a strong argument, and we When, however, Christian apologists speak of the violations of the course of nature, it would perhaps have been more clear to say, 'The now-existing course of nature,' or The ordinary course of nature as now observed by us; for if by have no doubt that it exercises a potent in- | if a fact at all, a miraculous fact. And to fluence upon his own mind and upon the deny-as some unbelievers thoughtlessly minds of many others. But that influence, at times deny-that we can in any case we humbly conceive, is rather a strong dis- confidently discriminate between miracutaste to miracles than any reasonable objec-lous and ordinary events, is really to deny tion to them. A distaste of that kind against that we can, in any case, know what the the recognition of any phenomena inconsist- ordinary course of nature is. ent with the ordinary track of our thoughts. and experiences is very common, and is one of those natural propensities which a truly philosophical mind will watch against with peculiar vigilance. When men have, as they imagine, reduced a certain domain of thought to exact order, they are impa-the course of nature' be understood that tient of the springing up of contrary appearances that, like the goblins in Faust,' will not dance in time to the measure which regulates the rest. It will surprise many philosophers to be told (and yet it is certainly true) that the prejudice which prevents them from attending to the miraculous claims of Revelation is closely akin to that which made the orthodox Florentines refuse to look through Galileo's telescope, and led Voltaire to maintain that the shells upon the Apennines were thrown there by pilgrims on their way to Rome. What the discoveries of modern science have really done for us is, to ascertain more clearly than ever what is the regular ordinary course of nature; and this is so far from being inconsistent with a reasonable belief of miracles that it is, on the contrary, most useful for confirming that belief. If there were no fixed ordinary course of nature, there would be no standard for determining a miracle, which is, in the very notion of it, a deviation from that ordinary course. And Mr. Locke has remarked, with his usual good sense, that, though the common experience and the ordinary course of things have justly a mighty influence on the minds of men, to make them give or refuse credit to anything proposed to their belief, yet there is one case wherein the strangeness of the fact lessens not the assent to a fair testimony given it. For, where such supernatural events are suitable to ends aimed at by Him who has the power to change the course of nature, there, under such circumstances, they may be the fitter to produce belief, by how much the more they are beyond or contrary to ordinary observation. This is the proper case of miracles, which, well attested, do not only find credit themselves, but give it also to other truths which need such confirmation. (Essay, B. iv. c. 16, § 13.) In proportion as we can be sure that we are acquainted with the ordinary course of nature, in that same proportion we can be sure that what varies from it is, a which is conformable to the Divine appointment, then, to speak of anything occurring that is preter-natural, would be a contradiction. Some persons who admit the possible and the actual occurrence of miracles are accustomed to speak as if they thought (though perhaps that is not really their meaning) that the course of nature' is something that goes on of itself; but that God has the power, which He sometimes exercises, of interrupting it; eyen as man who has constructed some such engine as a mill, for instance, which he has the power of stopping when he sees cause, though he leaves it usually to work of itself; for they forget that there is an external agency which keeps it in motion, and of which the millwright has availed himself. But any one who believes in a universal divine government and divine foreknowledge, must believe that whatever has at any time happened must be in accordance with a pre-arranged system, though it may be a portion of that system that differs widely from those other portions which come under our habitual daily experience. It will then be a departure from the ordinary course of nature; and there may have been such an arrangement originally made, that such an extraordinary event shall, when it occurs, serve as a sign, in attestation of the Divine will on some point. This may be easily illustrated even in works of human agency. Suppose, for instance, a clock so constructed as to strike only at the hour of noon. A child might suppose, from an observation of several hours, that it was the nature of the clock to move silently; and when he heard it strike, he might account this a departure from its nature, though it would be in fact as much a part of the maker's original design as any of the movements, his object having been to announce the hour of noon and no other. But a similar misapprehension of the nature of the machine would be much more likely to prevail if a clock could be so constructed as to strike to vary from what analogy leads us to expect as likely in such cases. But the Scripture miracles were not wrought principally for such purposes. They were wrought to meet a conjuncture to which known analogises furnish no parallel, namely, to confirm a revelation rendered necessary by the fall of mankind into an unnatural state. Now, as Bishop Butler has justly remarked, nothing short of the history of a world placed in similar circumstances to our own, can afford basis for an argument from analogy against miracles so circumstanced. only at the end of a year, or at the end of a century, supposing the maker to have kept his design from being generally known. If, at the end of the year, he despatched with a message from himself certain messengers whom he had acquainted with the construction of the machine, and whom he had authorized to announce the striking, as an attestation of their coming from him, this would be a decisive proof of the genuineness of their message. Now this, we conceive, is an illustration of the view which an intelligent believer may fairly take of miraculous evidence, namely, that the Christian miracles are not, strictly speak- II. But then we are told that, in all such ing, 'violations of the laws of nature,' but reasoning, we assume the existence of an departures from the now-existing ordinary omnipotent Being able to change the ordicourse of nature, in conformity with an nary course of nature, and that such an arrangement originally contrived so as to assumption is not warranted by the phecause these to be signs evidencing a divine nomena of nature, since these will only mission. And to pronounce that no such justify the assumption of a cause precisely occurrence ever did or can take place, on adequate to the effects. Put thus, as thus the ground that it has not come under our it generally is urged, there is something own experience, and that the strongest very ludicrous in this objection, which evidence for it is to be at once rejected seems to grant the existence of a God posunheard, is manifestly a most rash and un-sessed of intelligence and power capable of philosophical procedure. If we could sup pose a butterfly, which is born in the spring and lives but three or four months, to be endowed with a certain portion of rationality, he might lay it down as a law of nature that the trees should be green and the fields enamelled with flowers. And if some animal of a superior order assured him that formerly the trees were bare. of foliage and the fields covered with snow, he might deride this as against all experience and all analogy, and a physical impossibility. And in this he would not be more unphilosophical than some who are called philosophers. Analogy, of which Professor Powell talks so much, is a guide to us in proportion as the circumstances of the cases supposed are similar. If the miracles of our religion had been said to have been wrought (as the legendary miracles are represented to have been) primarily for the sake of particular persons, to give them help in pressure of difficulty or danger, or testimony to their personal innocence or sanctity, there would arise a really strong argument from analogy against them. Because conjunctures which seem to demand such interpositions are continually occurring every day; wherein, nevertheless, we see the ordinary providence of God hold on its regular course without swerving to save the innocent or punish the guilty. Such pretended miracles, therefore, admit of comparison with innumerable known parallel cases; and on comparison are seen producing and maintaining the physical universe, and yet to express a doubt whether He has skill and energy enough to change the position of the meanest part of it! In reality, however, it must be regarded as a more decent form of denial that the phenomena of nature prove the existence of a Deity at all. Let us take the argument on that ground, and Professor Powell would still gain no standing-point for his view of miracles. Whatever the phenomena of nature do or do not prove, at least they do not disprove the existence of Deity. The heavens do not declare that there is no God, nor does the firmament deny that it is His handy work. To exclude, therefore, in such a state of things, the possibility of miracles is, while granting that, for aught we know, the Author of nature can work them, to decline to entertain any evidence that He has worked them; to refuse Him the opportunity of clearing up the doubts of His creatures and manifesting His own existence; to decide, in fact, the great question practically on the side of atheism. Nothing but a strict demonstration on the side of atheism can justify us in the summary rejection à priori of miracles as unworthy of a philosopher's belief. The question whether there is or is not in existence a Cause adequate to their production is a question of fact, and to exclude summarily the evidence which proves the existence of such a Cause by proving the effect, must be considered by all really impartial judges a proceeding in the last |