The inability of the disciples to cast out an unclean spirit is noted. The peculiar dignity and reserve, and what I may call the propriety of our Saviour's conduct, his authoritative and yet simple and unaffected manner of doing his mighty works, are beyond imitation. There is no colouring, no amplification, no study of effect, no eagerness to strike wonder, no anxiety to be believed. The evangelists write as those who give a faithful narrative of a wonderful, but real course of action. Nor is it a slight corroboration of all these arguments, that the undesigned coincidences so admirably adduced by critics in proof of the general credibility of the gospel narrative, fall as frequently upon the miracles as on any other events."

The wonderful deeds, then, of the New Testament really occurred. To resist such accumulated evidence, borne by such witnesses, attested by all their contemporaries, admitted by their bitterest foes, corroborated by existing monuments and public usages, and strengthened by all the marks of truth in the accounts themselves--I say, to resist such evidence, not to speculative opinions, but to distinct matters of fact, is to overthrow the very foundations of truth, and to involve men in one bewildering maze of scepticism and absurdity.

And yet this is unblushingly attempted by modern infidels, not by going into an examination of our arguments, or by producing counter-evidence; but by general insinuations against the fallibility of human testimony, by asserting that miracles are contradictory to experience, and by alleging that the proof of remote history is weakened and extinguished by the lapse of

time.

But what has the general fallibility of human testimony to do with the strong, unshaken evidence of

6 See Mr. Blunt's Veracity; where the remark is first made, and illustrated with admirable judgment.

upright men to specific events which fell under their own notice? For we are now only considering miracles as to the facts on which they rest. What the

cause of them might be, that is, whether they are properly miraculous or not, we do not now inquire; we adduce testimony to the naked facts. Was the man sick of the palsy; did he carry away his bed? Here are two facts. Were the water-pots filled with water; did it become wine? Was Lazarus dead; did Lazarus live again after four days? Was Bartimeus blind; did he receive his sight? Was our Lord crucified; did he live again on the third day? These are the questions.

Now what can general insinuations against human testimony avail in a case like that before us, when every caution has been taken against this very fallibility, and the evidence of numerous unimpeached beholders, with the suffrages of a whole nation, excludes all possibility of mistake? As well might we enter a court of justice, and, when a jury of twelve men upon their oath, under the direction of a learned and impartial judge, have brought in a verdict, upon the testimony of numerous credible witnesses to a specific fact-insinuate some general truisms on the fallibility of human testimony.

It is further objected, that these wonderful works are contrary to experience. To what experience? To that of the objector merely? Then he will shut out all facts of which he is not himself the eyewitness; and the Indian who should refuse to believe on any testimony the fact of water being frozen, would be in the right. But does the objector mean the experience of others? Then he must come to testimony. Thus his objection does not apply. Opposite experience is not necessarily contradictory. In order to oppose experience to miraculous facts, the objector should contrast the testimony of those who professed to have seen miracles, and considered them divine;

VOL. I.

M

to the testimony of those who, under similar circumstances, saw like actions, and considered them not divine, but mere impostures."

Again, it is urged, that the transmission of remote facts is weakened till it becomes extinct. But we are not speaking of a loose, undefined transmission by oral testimony. We are speaking of written testimony, and where a series of separate and credible witnesses, in each age from the present, may be traced up, step by step, till we come to the apostolic. In this view, the Christian church is a society which never passes away, nor leaves a void in the transmission of testimony. The generations of it only change gradually and imperceptibly. The new age of Christians has been baptized into the faith of the great and striking facts of Christianity, and has received the distinct testimony of them, long before the old age has passed off. Twenty or thirty individuals joining hands, as it were, across the lines which divide the centuries, form an unbroken chain from the apostles' time to our own. The successive generations of witnesses imperceptibly passing away in the Christian society, are only like the successive changes in the matter of the same human frame, which possesses always one unchanged essence and form, though some of the particles which compose it are dissipated every moment, and renewed by those which take their place. A man is the same man, whatever imperceptible changes take place in the substance of his body, because his consciousness, his mind, his identity remains. Thus the Christian society continues still the same depository of truth. Consciousness is diffused, as it were, throughout the community. The passage from one generation of Christians to another is imperceptible. The society is always the same body, preserving the memory of certain events, and celebrating actions in commemo

7 See a fine remark to this purport in Bishop Van Mildert's Lect. on Infidelity, in loc.

age

ration of them. The church in her eighteenth and in her first century, only differs as a man at seventy years of differs from what he was at twenty. His consciousness, his memory of certain prominent facts, and his testimony to them, continue as fresh and decisive as ever.8

So utterly futile are the objections against the history of the gospel-objections, however, which being sown in the fertile soil of fallen nature, and favouring the pride and sensuality of the heart, require continually to be exposed. Let it be remembered, then, that if men attempt to shake our belief in the testimony to the miraculous facts of the gospel, they resist the common sentiments and most approved practice of mankind; nay, the very sentiments and practice by which they themselves are governed in similar cases. In short, all historical truth, all philosophy, all jurisprudence, all society, depends on the evidence borne by credible witnesses. A reliance on well-authenticated and well-circumstanced testimony is as much a law of our moral nature, as the belief of the ordinary rules by which the universe is governed, is of our intellectual."

But we proceed, in the next place, to consider

II. WHETHER THESE FACTS WERE, PROPERLY SPEAKING, MIRACULOUS.

That the facts took place is proved; it is admitted also that they were extraordinary. A few considerations will show that they were in the strictest sense miracles.

1. The facts then of the gospel were such plain and palpable suspensions of the order of nature as constitute miracles. They were not facts of the nature of which any doubt could be entertained whether they were in the ordinary course of things or not; but

8 Frayssinous.

9 Franks' Hulsean Lectures.

plainly contrary to that course; men's outward senses, their eyes and ears, might judge of them. Raising a body that had been dead four days; restoring instant and perfect sight to the blind; healing by a word, or at a distance, all the diseases incident to our nature; casting out unclean spirits; walking on the sea; calming in a moment the raging of a storm. These works were evidently miracles---suspensions of the laws of nature---bold, sensible, level to every man's comprehension.

2. They were done by Christ and his apostles professedly as divine acts, and were accompanied with that open and undisguised publicity which would have led to their detection had they been impositions. They were performed in the face of the world, or before a sufficient number of competent and intelligent witnesses. They were not fabricated among a few interested persons in a corner. They were done openly in the midst of the assembled multitudes, and before the most bitter adversaries. The man born blind, Lazarus, the paralytic, were seen by their families and neighbours and all the Jews. The few loaves and fishes were multiplied publicly, and partaken of by five thousand men. The entire Jewish nation, assembled at the feast of Pentecost, heard the apostles address them in new tongues. These things were done at noon-day, and were subjected to the examination of every beholder.

Lest, however, it should be said that a crowd are bad judges of a miraculous work, others were performed before individual competent witnesses, and then submitted to the public eye. Peter and James and John, and the father and the mother of the damsel (the persons best able to discern the truth of the restoration to life) were present at the raising of Jairus' daughter: whilst all the people weeping and wailing at her death, and the scoffers who derided our Lord's attempt to restore her, were so many witnesses