[Footnote 106: Acts iv. 5, 6, 18-20.] What sincerity and what firmness ever showed themselves more strikingly than those that grew out of the faith of St. Paul? From such faith he had been originally farther removed than the other apostles; he had done far more than merely err like Peter or doubt like Thomas; he had hotly persecuted the first followers of Christ. {266} In his turn penetrated and subdued on the road to Damascus by the voice of Jesus, he devotes himself to Him life and soul; he recounts himself his miraculous conversion, [Footnote 107] and as little doubt can be entertained of the authenticity of his Epistles as of the sincerity that dictated them. [Footnote 107: 1 Corinthians xv. 8. 2 Corinthians xi. 32, 33; xii. 1-5. Galatians i. 1-4.] The history of all religions abounds in miracles; but in all religions except the Christian, the miracles recounted by their historians are evidently either contrivances of the founder to induce persuasion, or they spring from the play of the human imagination, ever disposed to delight in the marvellous, ever particularly prone to give way in the sphere of religion to its fantastic suggestions. In the Gospel miracles, on the contrary, we have nothing of the kind; no artifice in their Author; none of the marvellous machinery of poetry, nor any hasty credulity in the historians. {267} The miraculous agency of Christ is essentially simple, practical, and moral: He does not go in search of miracles; neither does He make any vain display of them: they are wrought when a pressing emergency or a natural occasion calls for them; and when they are demanded in faith and in trust, He then works them without ostentation and in right of his divine mission; whilst at the very moment He makes the doubt and the coldness with which He is received, the subject of complaint: "Woe unto thee, Chorazin! wo unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes." [Footnote 108] Jesus has full confidence in himself, in the miracles that He effects, in the doctrine that He inculcates. He feels no astonishment, but merely sorrow, that His work, the work of light and of salvation, pursued by Him in accordance with the will of God his Father, should not obtain a more rapid, a more general success. [Footnote 108: Matthew xi. 21.] {268}