Resurrection was not taken as an event in itself, but as one of a series, past, present, and future, as belonging to the doctrine of a living and exalted Christ, present in the Church by His Spirit, and speedily coming to judge the world. St. Paul himself, as time went on, had to modify his views of a speedy second advent. Other Christians have come to change their conception as to the visible body of Christ in heaven. But the belief that Christ was not overcome by death, and that His Spirit has ever been and still is working in the world does not seem to have been dependent on the conception of a cloud-raised body and an expected parousia, and possibly it may not require that of an empty tomb. This being the case, it seems well that, for the laity at leastand some of us would desire for the clergy too— no particular historical interpretation of doctrine, as based on the creed, should be regarded as obligatory.

It would seem therefore that there is no clearly assignable reason why a religion with little or no miraculous element need be a poor sort of thing. Belief in miracles is not necessary to a recognition of divine omnipotence, nor to a reverent wonder in the contemplation of divine power as shown in Nature; nor is it needed for the acknowledgment of something more excellent and divine than the natural order of things as we see it; nor yet is it essential to keep up the continuity of religious life through the succeeding ages of the Church. We have noticed also that some non-Christian

religions are very vigorous without laying much stress on the miraculous, and if we had pursued that line of thought we should have noticed that religion in general is not to be regarded as powerful or as effete in any people in proportion to the place which miracles occupy in their theory of life. Yet, in spite of all this, we may some of us have a haunting notion that there is something at the bottom of the strictures made on a nerveless rational religion; further, we may suspect that if we personally had more belief in miracles, our religion would be a more potent factor in our lives. Let us examine this suspicion and see what it is worth.

It can hardly be supposed that a belief that miracles had once happened and would never happen again could ever be much encouragement to anybody. But perhaps a genuine belief in miracles as having once happened almost always carries with it the supposition that others might occur in the future or at least some great and unexpected events such as might once have been thought miraculous. Now the expectation of great results is in itself likely to bring them about. We see this in the history of many great movements, especially religious movements. The Salvation Army, for example, at least in the days of Catherine Booth, seems to have often attained to apparently impossible results in reclaiming hardened evil-doers, breaking old chains of dissolute habits, and rousing masses of men and women to enthusiasm about things to which they had

been totally indifferent. Doubtless the mind that is always questioning and criticizing-the type of mind quite necessary for the progress of science and history-is, as a rule, unlikely to expect very unusual results, and is therefore unlikely to obtain them. But the fault is in the person thinking, not in his thoughts about miracles or anything else. Those who, through caution in thought, tend to become over-cautious in action need to be aware of their propensity and to endeavour to correct it. They may do this without violence to their useful function of questioning.

The subject may be put in another light. The religious view of life-the mystic view, some would say, but all personal religion is more or less mystic-is of the whole world of sense and experience as resting upon one that is supersensual and divine-the real world from which that of experience derives what measure of reality it may be said to have for us. All goodness, beauty, and truth are of God, who is the hidden life of all things, and is realized by man in so far as man endeavours to reach through the material to the eternal. If we could see things aright, we should discern a divine element even in the things of ordinary life, but our spiritual sense is weak through worldly cares and self-centred distractions. Miracle seems to many religious people a kind of outcropping of the divine substratum in the material world. The divine is always there, but is not easily apprehended. Without miracle, then, we might seem to be further removed from

the recognition of God in Nature and in human life, and everything would become sordid and commonplace. But in fact we want, instead of the levelling down of everything to the material standard, a levelling up of all things to the divine. If our minds had the full consciousness of God which has been given to great saints at various times-which is manifest in chosen spirits even now, and which to all of us may be in some measure attainable-every slight event of our lives and every sight that we might see would testify to us of the divine wisdom and goodness as powerfully as any wonder recorded or imagined in the world's history.

These last suggestions may seem vague and high-flown, but they may help towards a more adequate view of the subject, which we must each strive to attain for ourselves. In reading about the necessity of miracles, the words often recur to my mind: "Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe," implying: "If you do believe by seeing signs and wonders, your belief will be of little avail." And one is sometimes inclined, legitimately I think, though with a conscious transference, to apply to the sceptically-minded but inwardly devout thinker of the present day the words of the great beatitude: "Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed."

Let me repeat, in conclusion, that I do not suppose we have yet come anywhere near to the bottom of the question of miracles and belief in

the miraculous. My object has been not to disparage the judgment and intellect of those who cling to that belief, but rather to combat the notion that, from a religious point of view, there is a great gulf fixed between those who do and those who do not hold to the miraculous accompaniments of Christian origins. The faith of a Christian is belief in God as revealed in Christ, and, though that faith has hitherto generally gone along with certain opinions as to the life and work of Christ, we have no right to suppose it non-existent where opinions of a different kind prevail. The secularist and the religious views of life are poles apart. The distance between miraculous and non-miraculous Christianity is small in comparison. If Christians of our day are often found lacking in zeal and earnestness, the fault is not in their believing too little, but in their want of a firm grip on what they actually do believe. If only we were a little more charitable to our neighbours and more loyal to the truth as far as we can discern it, both faith and reason would have more scope among us.

If our faith enabled us to expect to see mountains removed in our own actual experience, by the divine power working in and through us, it would matter little whether our reason accepted or rejected the evidence given for any particular manifestations of that power in the far-away past. True, we should expect to find some such manifestations in the past, as all history and all experience are fundamentally united in one great series,