mensurate in importance with the dignity of the means by which it is to be attained. It is commonly objected to the probability of such an occurrence, that it is inconsistent with the attribute of divine wisdom to suppose that the Deity ever changes his plan or alters his purpose. To this it may be replied, first, he who declares that infinite wisdom necessarily dictates invariability of action also assumes that he possesses infinite wisdom himself; and secondly, a change in the mode of action does not necessarily imply a change of purpose. The emergency may have been foreseen, the extraordinary action by which it was to be met may have been predetermined, from the foundation of the world. If it be further urged, that it is a low and unworthy conception of the government of God to suppose that crises and emergencies arise in the world's affairs which he must meet by extraordinary means, we answer that this leads directly to the deep and dark questions of human free agency and the origin of evil, with which at present we have nothing to do. As before said, we are not reasoning with an atheist, and it is for you to show how much you will be aided in the explanation of these enigmas by rejecting the Christian religion. Absolute free will necessarily requires the permitted coexistence of moral evil, and it is certainly consistent with our notions of the divine benevolence to believe that the Deity may interpose to stay the progress of sin and suffering, while it is inconsistent with the limitations of human reason to pronounce authoritatively upon the wisdom of the means by which this purpose is effected. Such general considerations as these, we are well aware, are of little weight in determining this great question. But the answer to an objection involves a consideration of the same ideas as are contained in the objection itself; and if these are vague, abstract, and metaphysical, the reasoning on both sides must be darkened by their use. Practically, the objection to miracles consists altogether in a short-sighted reference to the assumed invariability of the laws of naThe improbability of a violation of law, of a break in the continuity of events, is gauged entirely by what would be the measure of one's own surprise, if, on the speck of earth which he calls his home, in his personal experience, which is but a dot in the history of the universe, there should suddenly be a wholly arbitrary and purposeless suspension of ture. the usual sequence of cause and effect, if the sun should cease to warm, the fire to burn him, or the water to slake his thirst, if he should lose his eyesight without a cause, and acquire it again without a remedy. A man's sanity would very properly be suspected who should now actually look for, or fear, such a meaningless subversion of the order of nature and Providence. His expectation would be akin to the folly of a child who hopes that without industry or thrift some lucky accident will suddenly make him very rich, or some blind chance throw down the huge obstacle which now stands between him and the accomplishment of his wishes. But the silly longings of that child are hardly less philosophical than the narrow self-conceit of the man who errs in the opposite extreme, and would fain weigh the great epochs in the history of a universe, the grand scheme of the Almighty's government of moral and physical events, in the paltry scales which serve to estimate his own infinitesimal experience. Events are strange or marvellous, not in themselves considered, but in relation to the means by which they are accomplished, or to the purpose that calls them forth. If men had talked a century ago of transporting themselves a hundred miles within the hour, or of sending a message in the twinkling of an eye to a place a thousand miles off, the bystanders would have supposed that they were quoting the Arabian Nights' Entertainments; but railroads and steam have accomplished the one, and the magnetic telegraph has effected the other. And men do not stupidly sit still and marvel that these things are so. The means are seen to be proportioned to the end; the purpose and the want have created or found the sufficient power. When estimating the possibility or probability of events which are to affect the destiny of all mankind, we are to be governed by the experience and the necessities not of the individual, but of the race; we must look to the annals of the world for guidance, and not to the history of one life; we must decipher even the record, inscribed on the rocks, of the mutations which this solid globe has undergone in the vast series of ages that elapsed before it was peopled with beings like ourselves. The history of God's providence is not the story of a day, nor can it be interpreted by the experience of an hour. If we would climb to the heights of this great argument, our view must be expanded in feeble imitation of his vision with whom a thousand years are but as one day. Perhaps it will be found, that these supposed breaks in the continuity of the inferior laws of nature are but the intercalations of a higher law, working for a nobler end; that what appear as special exertions of divine agency are but the ordinary mode in which infinite, wisdom works and governs; that the physical is subordinate throughout to the moral universe; and what man calls "miracles" are precisely what he may most reasonably and naturally expect from omnipotence and infinite benevolence combined. As man has not only a physical, but a moral nature, a great epoch in the moral history of the world is at least as probable as the outward creation of the race itself; the morning of the resurrection of our Lord is but the parallel of that great day "when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." In both cases, there was an interruption of the antecedent order of physical events for a spiritual end; for by the creation of man, this earth, till then, and for almost countless ages, the dwelling-place only of the brute, became tenanted for the first time by a living soul. And if we open the pages of the Stone Book, which a certain class of reasoners are so much more willing to believe than the Bible, we find there an ineffaceable and undoubted record of a multitude of cases, in which preceding laws of nature, that had been unbroken for many ages, were interrupted by special exertions of divine power. Mighty revolutions have often swept the face of this planet, hurrying nearly all former orders of life into ruin, and each time the desert was peopled anew with animated tribes wholly unlike their predecessors. Geology is but the history chronicled in stone of many miracles, performed before man was, and extending far back into a past eternity. There is not an animal or a plant on this earth, which, as a race, is not older than man; and those with whom we now reason certainly will not deny that a distinct and special exertion of power was needed for the creation of each one. They, who maintain so stoutly the unchangeableness at any rate of the present laws of nature, under which every living thing now produces seed after its own kind, and only for that kind, will not allow that worms were created from earth, and reptiles were born from fishes, and men from brutes, all by the continuous operation of natural laws. Trusting only to their own eyes, judging only from their own experience, and from the repeated declarations of naturalists and philosophers for some hundreds of years, that persistence of type is one of the great laws of nature, extending in an unbroken chain of cause and effect through all history, they will eagerly declare the appearance of each new race on the globe to be an indubitable miracle. - If we extend our views, then, as far as possible, into the history of God's government of the universe, we find everywhere undeniable evidence of repeated miracles. Huge strata of earth-bound rock, the solid framework of the globe itself, in characters which the schoolboy now may read, testify to the unceasing guardianship, the frequent intervention to renew, repair, and improve, of Him who created the heavens and the earth, and laid the corner-stone thereof. The world was never an orphan, never left to the dominion of chance, or what is little better to the blind and unbroken operation of what are called natural laws. A Father's care watched over it, a Father's hand peopled it again and again with tribes of living things, not by inflexible ordinances, nor by vicarious government through secondary means, but even as an earthly parent careth for his children. To him who denies the possibility of such divine intervention, or, in other words, who rejects the doctrine of a Providence, may be addressed the awful question that was put to Job out of the whirlwind: "Where wast thou, when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding?" How stands the antecedent probability, then, of the occurrence of miracles in the divine government of the human race? Is the creation of a reptile, an insect, a worm, a fit occasion for the special exercise of almighty power, and not the redemption of all mankind from sin? Did omnipotence become weary only after God had created man in his own image, the noblest of his creatures, when unintelligent tribes or a desert earth through countless ages had been visited with frequently recurring tokens of oversight and protection, of a care that never slept? Let it not be said, that the world is still far behind the glorious stage of progress which the establishment of our religion seemed to promise for it, if that religion had been divine. Christianity has no more been a failure than the primitive creation of the race. Sin, indeed, has continued to stalk the earth, and human misery to track its footsteps, since the expulsion from Eden, and even since the resurrection of Jesus Christ. But if we compare pagan Babylon, and Athens, and Rome, in their imperial magnificence, and their moral squalor and wretchedness, with the present condition of the civilized and Christian world, with schools in every hamlet, with institutions of beneficence in every city, and with churches on a thousand hills, and still more with the glorious promise of the future, we may well say that the founding of our religion, viewed not only in the purity of its doctrine and its ethics, but in the extent and grandeur of its external results, was a work as worthy of Omnipotence as the first establishment of man upon the earth. The religion itself, with its doctrine of redemption and peace, its inculcation of love to God and man, and its revelation of a life beyond the grave, is worthy of "that splendid apparatus of prophecy and miracles" by which it was heralded and accompanied. When properly considered, the Sermon on the Mount appears as godlike as the act of raising Lazarus from the dead. We accept the evidence of the Christian miracles, then, because they harmonize throughout with what we know of the history of divine Providence as manifested in the universe. The book of nature and the book of revelation, the written word and the law stamped on the heart, are not at variance with each other, but contain essentially the same doctrine; one goes beyond, but does not contradict, the other; it is the complement, but not the substitute, of its predecessor. It is a vain and foolish doctrine, then, that the miracles are useful only as evidences of Christianity, and may therefore safely be put aside if we have testimony enough without them. It is not so. Christianity is itself at miracle, the greatest of all miracles, a special revelation from heaven, the authentic record of the latest visible appearance of God on the earth, a direct interposition in the former order of events for the noblest of all ends. If it be not so, then is our faith vain, and these teachings also are vain. If our religion does not come from above, if it is not specially attested by the broad seal of Heaven, then it is of no authority and no worth. It is no religion at all; for there is no conceivable distinction between a philosophical system of man's device, and a religion properly so called, but this, that the latter comes directly from God, while the former is |