which all appeal, asserts, from its first page to its last, that in some sense and in some modes God, who is everywhere, is present more particularly in certain places. The same notion has descended to, and become emphasised in, modern days. The majority of persons who go to church would certainly give as one of their reasons for doing so, that God is in a special manner there, and that his presence hallows the altar yet more. On what principle do they decline to go a step further, and to admit that it may have pleased him to place himself, in a still more special mode, and under certain conditions, in the sacrament, in that which Christ gave as the express sign of his abiding with the Church? Once let it be granted that he is in any degree and under any conditions localised, the size of the particle is naught, and he who framed the exquisite meshes of the fly's wing, or the microscopic fibres of the lichen, may choose the smallest spot in which to show his greatest and divinest power.

And if any say that the localisation of the Deity may be granted, but not the change of the substance of bread into the substance of flesh, with which in this case it is intimately and to many minds inseparably linked, it lies with them in contradicting this to define what substance is, since he who declares himself a believer in transubstantiation, fully admits with those who deny it, that the outward semblance, species, and accidents of bread and wine remain wholly unchanged.

Or

Or we may take the point of relics, whether of Christ or of the saints. When an eager controversialist laughed at Cardinal Newman because he did not at once refuse credence to the statement that a healing virtue still attaches to an oil supposed to flow from the bones of St. Walburga, his standing as a clergyman would scarce have permitted him categorically to deny the story in the Book of Kings that a dead man was raised to life so soon as his body touched the bones of Elisha, into whose sepulchre it had been lowered. If the new dispensation be, as all Christians maintain, superior to the old, a saint living under the graces and gifts of the Gospel might be expected to have more, not less, inherent virtue than a prophet of the former faith. If it be claimed for the holy coat at Trèves, for the sacred thorn at Paris, for fragments of the true cross, that miracles are wrought by their agency, objectors have scarce an obvious right still to believe the statement in the Acts of the Apostles that to the sick were borne handkerchiefs and aprons which had touched the body of Paul, that healing might and did result; or that other, how folk too weak to walk were carried into the streets, that the shadow of Peter passing by might fall upon and invigorate them. The question in each case would be one of evidence, whether the relic were indeed what is asserted, and assuredly for some miraculous fragments the evidence that they are what they profess to be is overwhelming. There is less room

for

for doubt than in the case of many an authentic historical relic, at which to cavil would be the very wantonness of scepticism. If, then, there be likelihood that any object associated with Jesus be indeed what is claimed, then from it might still flow the same virtue that healed the sick woman when she touched his garment's hem; for surely it would be the extremest materialism to maintain that a kerchief or a robe had efficacy only while warm from the living bodies of those who wore them.

Again, conversely, if miraculous agency be admitted at all, and evidence show that any have been healed by such and such relics, the miracles would go far to prove the authenticity of the relics by placing them in the same category with those sacred garments which once were the channels of healing. If, it may be asked, the bones of Elisha had a sanative or even a life-giving power, why not the bones of St. Walburga; if the hem of Christ's garment, why not the holy coat of Trèves; if the sacred spittle, why not the holy blood in the treasury at Reichenau, or that which was spilt on the sacred thorn? And if one of these relics, or a link said to be of Peter's chain, have done as much as is claimed for Peter's shadow, will not the admitted fact prove, or go far to prove, the asserted fact, at least to the same extent that the typical miracles are proved? I admit the enormous difficulty; it is not my present business to obtain credence for either, but to point

out

B

out that the rejection or admission of one class may involve the admission or rejection of the other.

The doubt may of course be pushed back yet further, to the point of asking whether there be such a thing as miraculous interposition at all. Though it is not easy to frame any satisfactory definition of miracle, that is fairly complete which is usually accepted-an interruption or reversion of the ordinary laws of nature, whether this take place by the suspension of those laws, or by the interposition of a law that is higher and overrides the lower. Indeed, a God who never wrought miracle would seem to many in the position of a God who had deliberately abdicated his functions, or rather to be no God at all. For such is the imperfection of human intellect that we can only think of the sovereign ruler of all under the figure of an earthly monarch, and it would seem to us that one who set the affairs of his government in motion, to retire to an inner chamber, whence indeed he could see all that happened, but never interfered nor communicated with his subjects, would be but a poor ruler, a roi fainéant without even the semblance of an authority he had ceased to wield. We may go further, and assert, without danger of serious contradiction, that whoever has ceased to believe in miracle has lost all true faith in a personal God. He may use, if he pleases, the name, but " a stream of tendency" or even an undefined "power which makes for righteousness

can

can but be called God in a sense alien to that which has been put on it, and on analogous names, since human consciousness first woke to the conception of a Being like to but greater than ourselves. Unless he were like us, he could not expect us to be like him, while the thought of one whose goodness is the explanation and model of human virtue is to many that which alone makes moral life possible. And if God be living and personal, and the Church a living body sanctioned, even framed by him, premisses taken for granted by the enormous majority of professing Christians, it is absurd to suppose that the organs, so to speak, of miracle became atrophied at some date not precisely fixed, and that the Being who once acted through organs and agents, has now ceased to act at all in any true manner. Once more we are not here asserting nor denying a personal God, the ruler of the world, but if there be such, he must act, and if he have not retired from governing must show that he governs. The difference between the maker of a machine which continues to ply its appointed task mechanically and even brutally, and the intelligent upholder of a living organism such as the Church is usually assumed to be, is the gift of miracles. And this the Catholic Church claims as her constant birthright, potentially wherever there are relics of her Master and his followers, or traces of their special presence and interest, actually in the daily mystery of the Mass, and indeed in all sacramental graces.

Two