We have no desire to exaggerate the value of the miraculous elements in Christianity, but it does not appear to be true wisdom that would depreciate them or ignore them altogether. Miracles by many have been wrongly considered, and they have been often expounded by the advocates of Christianity in such a way as to create instead of removing difficulties connected with the faith. On the other hand, many who reject or refuse to consider them seem afflicted by a kind of mental semeiophobia which in its own way may be as dangerous an affliction as hydrophobia is. The proper way is to consider them in relation to the nature and purpose of the Revelation with which they are associated. The miracle may sometimes be found only in the form of the narrative, as a hieroglyph whose purpose we are too lazy to search for, whose meaning we are too stupid to elucidate. The theory that miracles are only figurative expressions of spiritual truth is not true, as it is generally expounded; but it has a truth in it which must never be overlooked. Every miracle is a parable, and every parable is a miracle. It is the spiritual reality revealed by both which gives them value, and not the wonder in them by which we are at first arrested. Yet without the wonder to arrest us we might never have received the revelation. “What did the apostle mean,” asks Robert Elsmere,[172] “by death to sin and self? what the precise idea attached by him to being risen with Christ? Are this death and resurrection necessarily dependent upon certain alleged historical events, or are they not primarily, and were there not, even in Paul’s mind, two aspects of a spiritual process perpetually re-enacted in the soul of man, and constituting the veritable revelation of God? Which is the stable and lasting witness of the Father? the spiritual history of the individual and of the world, or the envelope of miracle to which hitherto mankind has attached such importance?” The envelope certainly would be as worthless without the message which it carries as a husk from which the kernel has dropped. Would St. Paul, however, ever have conceived the spiritual truths referred to, if they had not been suggested by historical facts? Could he ever have conceived of a death to sin had the world never witnessed the death of the Holy Christ upon the cross? Could he ever have dreamed of rising again in the power of a new life if the tomb in the garden nigh Golgotha had never been found empty of its crucified occupant? Is he not just suggesting the significance of very exceptional historical events? He may be wrong in his interpretation, but there can be no mistake that the interpretation is founded upon the history, that it was the event which originated his theory, and not his theory that produced the story of the event. Christian theology, instead of giving this miraculous character to the tragic story of the life and death of Christ, has been called into existence by man’s endeavours to account