even after his conversion, it might be thought that no one would be more likely to prove a fanatic, or a rash enthusiast, yet, instead of this, ever the man of loving moderation, who was willing, in the noblest sense, to be all things to all men if so be that he could win souls to Christ,--Paul the ardent, the excitable, the vision-seeing, and who, it might be thought, would have delighted in the miraculous, the wonder-making, yet, on the contrary, ever preferring the moral and spiritual, however sober, to the marvellous, however tempting to the religious imagination :-so truthful was he, so loving, so just in the midst of excitements that might have affected the strongest unsupported reason. He could speak with tongues more than they all; he magnified the miraculous gifts with which God had endowed the Church, even where he turns from them and says, "yet show I unto you a more excellent way." Then follows that picture of Charity before alluded to, that

heavenly limning, by which alone, if men had eyes to see, and hearts to feel, might be tested the inspiration of the human soul that conceived it, and the divinity of the Scriptures in which it is contained.

We do not underrate physical miracles, when we say they are less wonderful than such a character. What influence on earth, what school on earth, Oriental, Occidental, Greek, Roman, Jewish, could have "developed" the Apostle Paul as he appears in this his own strange transition age? We might rest the evidence of Christianity, as it has been most ably and convincingly rested, on the utter impossibility of explaining this mystery in the human in any other way than by the supernatural and divine.

The Straussian men should be met on their own ground. Given the ideal to account for it,--this is the problem. We have the ideal Christ, the ideal Paul, the ideal Christian Church with its superhuman doctrines. They are before us in history, they are now with us

in books, they are seen and felt in the world. There is no known earthly development to which they can be assigned. Why then

should we hesitate to admit the divine and the unearthly as manifested in some corresponding actual? The former without the latter is only the greater wonder. It has the doubly miraculous, its own exceeding strangeness, and the utter inexplicability of its human origin.

CHAPTER XIX.

APPLICATION OF THE ARGUMENT

THE BIBLE A WORLD-BOOK-
Such an Exhi-

Summation of the Argument from the Natural bition of the Human could not have been without the Superhuman - The Jewish as compared with the Greek and Roman History — The Bible Catholicism in its Adaptation to individual States of individual Souls - Moses nearer to us, notwithstanding his Orientalism, than the Greek and Roman Legislators —The Bible Hebrew as compared with the Greek and Latin The Remarkable Intelligibility of the Bible Hebrew in the Letter Surpassing, in this respect, the other Shemitic tongues, though aided in its Interpretation by them-Two Reasons of this-The Breath of the Lord inspiring it A Second Reason, the intense Humanity of its Images.

THE Scriptures furnish an inexhaustible mine of illustration for the purposes of our argument; but the rapid sketches that have been given are sufficient to satisfy any thoughtful mind, that in the book itself, in its" its "peculiar people" so remarkably connected with the whole destiny of the race, in its history so strange yet so truthful, in its doctrines so unearthly yet given through

language so intensely human, in its wonderful position in the very heart of human culture, in its sudden power when newly brought to bear upon the mind and conscience of an age, and in the lasting tenacity of its influence upon the world's best and highest thinking, there is, indeed, a mystery which can be solved by no explanation short of the supernatural and the divine. Thus, then, we say in conclusion, take the whole Bible, leave out its supernatural—that is, its supernatural in outward act-fix the mind upon its earthly history, its unique consistency, its ancient Bovλn or Oracular Messianic purpose so early proclaimed and so steadily maintained throughout, let the thought dwell upon its inherent truthfulness, its strong human probabilities, in a word, its great naturalness, and we have before us that position which for philosophic wonder, if we may use the term, the wonder of the thought or reason, surpasses any sense-confounding marvel of the outward supernatural itself.