character and merits of the painting, as a work of art, in comparison with the high and peculiar excellence of Raphael, must enter into the case, as a part of the proof. But how many are the acute and painstaking men who are here disabled from estimating-from feeling, we might rather say, the force of this branch of the evidence! They can examine the documents, they can question the witnesses, they can scrutinize all the outward testimony, but they are destitute of the perceptions and feelings which are the necessary qualification of a critic of art! The analogy holds true in this particular, that in the question of the verity of the gospel histories, one great part of the evidence lies in a province beyond the reach of the faculty of understanding, in the sense in which Arnold uses the term. The whole mode of thought and feeling concerning God, and His Providence, and His character, concerning human sin and human need, has a decisive influence in determining the judg ment to give or refuse credit to the historical proof. Possibly God has so arranged it, that while this proof is sufficient to satisfy one whose spiritual eye is open to these realities, it is yet endued with no power to create conviction where such is not the fact. He who magnifies the presumption against supernatural interposition, not allowing for the moral emergency that calls for it, and hardly recognizing the Power from whom it must come, puts on a coat of mail which is proof against all the arguments for Revelation. He is shut up to unbelief by a logical necessity. The effect of the internal argument for the supernatural origin of the Gospel is directly dependent upon that habit of feeling, either rationalistic or the opposite, the operation of which we have described. The various particulars of this argument, at least the most important of them, are lost upon an unreligious nature. The painful consciousness of sin, for example, is the medium through which is discerned the correspondence of the gospel method of salvation with the necessities and yearnings of the soul. An experience of the disease opens the eye to the true nature and the value of the remedy. Such an impression of the evil of sin and of personal guilt, as men like Luther and Pascal have had, uncovers the deep things of the Gospel. In the gospel system alone is the

situation of the soul, which is slowly learned by the soul itself, understood and met. Another eye has looked through the heart before us, and anticipated the discovery, which we make imperfectly and by degrees, of its guilt and want. We might point out how the same self-knowledge will find in the spotless character of Christ a glory and impressiveness undiscernible by such as think not how great a thing it is to be free from sin. And so the tremendous power exerted by Christianity to reform the world-to move men to forsake their sins -will be estimated aright. It is no part of our present purpose to exhibit in detail the blinding effect of the rationalistic temper. Whoever carefully surveys the more recent literature of skepticism will not fail to see the source from which it springs. It was by ignoring the existence and character of God that Hume constructed a plausible argument against the possibility of proving a miracle. The moment that the truth concerning God and the motives of His government is taken into view, the fallacy of Hume's reasoning is laid bare. The first canon which Strauss lays at the foundation of his criticism is the impossibility that a miracle should occur. Any and every other hypothesis, he takes for granted, is sooner to be allowed. than the admission of a miraculous event. He assumes, from beginning to end, that "a relation is not historical, that the thing narrated could not have so occurred," when "it is irreconcilable with known, and elsewhere universally prevailing, laws." By this circumstance before all others, the unhistorical character of a narrative is ascertained.* So M. Renan at the outset of his late work, remarks: "Let the Gospels be in part legendary, that is evident, since they are full of miracles and the supernatural."+ Afterwards, though he does not with Strauss affirm the strict impossibility of a miracle, he lays down "this principle of historical criticism, that a supernatural relation cannot be accepted as such, that it always implies credulity or imposture, that the duty of the historian is to interpret it, and to seek what portion of truth and what portion of Renan's Life of Christ, p. 17.

* Strauss's Leben Jesu, B. I., S. 100.

error it may contain."* But how futile is the attempt to convince one that an event has occurred, which he professes to know is either impossible, or never to be believed! In other words, how futile to argue with one who begs the question in dispute !

The foregoing observations upon the reception that is given by skeptics at the present day to the proof of Christian miracles, brings us to the deeper and more general cause of unbelief, which is none other than the weakening or total destruction of faith in the supernatural. It is not the supernatural in the Scriptures alone, but the supernatural altogether, which in our day is the object of disbelief. At the root of the most respectable and formidable attack upon Christianity-that which emanates from the Tübingen school of historical critics—is an avowed Pantheism. The doctrine of a God to be distinguished from the World, and competent to produce events not provided for by natural causes, is cast away. The apotheosis of Nature

* Renan's Life of Christ, p. 45. The force of this prejudice against the supernatural is strikingly exhibited in the case of M. Renan. His book contains not a few hasty and erroneous statements; but two remarks are sufficient to show the weakness of the entire structure he has raised. I. He concedes that at least the narrative portions of the Fourth Gospel are from John; and although, misinterpreting the testimony of Papias in Eusebius, he has a groundless theory as to a change and growth which the First and Second Gospels are supposed to have undergone,—— Papias had the same Matthew and the same Mark that we have-he nevertheless concedes that the synoptical writers also present, to a large extent, the testimony given by the apostles. Having made these concessions, he cannot impeach, on any plausible hypothesis, the credibility of the testimony. To hold the testimony to be genuine, and yet false, is too much even for the credulity of his confréres, the skeptical critics of Germany. They see very clearly how unsafe it is for them to concede the genuineness of the documents. II. Renan describes Jesus as a person of the loftiest intellectual and moral character, and yet holds that he stooped to connive at a fraud in the case of Lazarus, and to allow himself to be falsely considered a miracle-worker by the people about him. That is, he makes Him out a Jesuit. To such weakness is this writer driven by his inability to recognize the supernatural. An Article by Renan, (we may add), which is conceived in a thor oughly Pantheistic spirit, appears in the Revue des Deux Mondes for October, 1863, under the title, "Les Sciences de la Nature et les Sciences Historiques." "Deux élémens," he says, "le temps et la tendance au progrès expliquent l' univers" p. 769. Renan, like Strauss, espouses a philosophy that leaves no room for the Supernatural.

or the World, of course, leaves no room for anything supernatural, and a miracle becomes an absurdity. Indeed, the tacit assumption that a miracle is impossible, which we find in so many quarters, can only flow from an Atheistic or Pantheistic view of the Universe. The Deist can consistently take no such position. He professes to believe in a living and personal God, however he may be disposed to set Him at a distance and to curtail His agency. He must therefore acknowledge the existence of a Power who is able at any moment to bring to pass an event over and beyond the capacity of natural causes. Nay, if his Deism be earnestly meant, he must himself believe in a miracle of the most stupendous character-in the creation of the world by the omnipotent agency of God. Holding thus to the miracle of creation as an historical event, he cannot, without a palpable inconsistency, deny that miracles are conceivable or longer possible. For no sincere Deist can suppose that the Creator has chained Himself up by physical laws of His own making, and thereby cut Himself off from new exertions of His power, even within the sphere where natural forces usually operate according to a fixed rule. One of the marked characteristics of our time, therefore, is the loose manner in which Deism is held even by those who profess it, as shown in their reluctance to take the consequences of their creed and their readiness to proceed in their treatment of the subject of miracles upon Pantheistic principles. The theories and arguments of Strauss and the Tübingen skeptics, which are the offshoot of their Pantheistic system, are appropriated, for example, by Theodore Parker, who professes to believe in the personality of God. But though entertaining this different belief, it is plain that he generally brings to the discussion of miracles the feeling and the postulates of a Pantheist. His Deism is so far from being thorough and consistent, that he not only, here and there, falls into the Pantheistic notion of sin, as a necessary stage of development and step in human progress, but also habitually regards a miracle as equivalent to an absurdity. Not a few ill-supported speculations of physical science, which have been lately brought be fore the public, have their real motive in a desperate reluc

The most unfounded con

To this we

tance to admit a supernatural cause. jectures are furnished in the room of argument, so earnest is the desire of some minds to create the belief that the worlds were not framed by the word of God, and that things which are seen were made of things which do appear. must refer the ambition of some philosophers to assert their descent from the inferior animals-a wild theory only to be compared with the old doctrine of transmigration. The disposition to remove God from any active connection with the world, or to place Him as far back as possible in the remote past, is the real motive of this attempt which can plead no evidence in its favor, to invalidate the distinction of species and discredit our own feeling of personal identity and separateness of being. There can be no doubt that a powerful tendency to Pantheistic modes of thought is rife at the present day. The popular literature, even in our country, is far more widely infected in this way than unobservant readers are aware. The laws of Nature are hypostatized,-spoken of as if they were a self-active being. And not unfrequently, the same tendency leads to the virtual, if not open, denial of the free and responsible nature of man. History is resolved by a class of writers into the movement of a great machine-into the evolution of phenomena with which the free-will neither of God nor of man has any connection.*

We are thus brought back, in our analysis of the controversy with the existing unbelief, to the postulates of Natural Religion. On these the Christian Apologist founds the presumption, or anterior probability, that a Revelation will be given. These, together with the intrinsic excellence of Christianity, he employs to rebut and remove the presumption, which, however philosophers may differ as to the exact source and strength of it, undoubtedly lies against the occurrence of a miracle.

* The tendencies to Naturalism, at work at the present day, are forcibly and comprehensively touched upon in Chapter I. of Bushnell's "Nature and the Supernatural" a work which, in its main parts, is equally profound and inspiring,