The first three lectures having, as it were, cleared the ground, and having demonstrated, as we believe, successfully the untenable nature of the systems that have been placed in competition with Christianity, the two next lectures, which form the second group, deal with the chief difficulties arising from the supposed conflict between science and the Holy Scriptures. The first of these two lectures, that on Science and Revelation, enters into the subject generally, by showing how, on scientific considerations, a revelation was to be expected, and how, consequently, the evidences of Christianity have a strong claim upon the attention of every right-thinking man. The second of these two lectures is confined to a special but prerogative case, in which science and religion are supposed to be more particularly in opposition to each other,--viz., the case of miracles. Here it is necessary, not only to investigate generally the nature of the miraculous evidence to Christianity, but fairly to face the antecedent question, whether miracles, however defined, are not in themselves impossible. In facing that question, however, attention is rightly called to the nature of the weapons that are used in the conflict, and especially to the fact, so often overlooked, that all the assaults on the miraculous that can in any degree be deemed worthy of consideration, are carried on only with metaphysical weapons. The whole question really turns upon the belief in a personal God: if it be conceded that this belief is just and reasonable, then, as the writer of the lecture rightly observes, the presumed impossibility in reference to miracles at once melts away. The very idea of a free-creating God carries with it the possibility of new manifestations of the Divine will, whether in history or nature. The sustaining power of God, which we recognise in the form of law and orderly progress, changes whensoever it shall have seemed good to His holy will for it to pass into the creative; His immanent workings are then seen in the realm of the transcendental, and the result is that which Pantheism, Naturalism, and all similar systems must, if consistent, regard as impossible, a new movement from the Divine centre, an epiphany of a creative and overruling will, a wonder, a miracle. When Spinosa said that God and nature are one from eternity to eternity, he was quite consistent in adding that there is no transcendental beginning, and that miracles are impossible; but for any one who believes in a personal God, or who believes nature to be what it is,--not a system eternally fixed, but a system passing through a development characterised by design,--to deny the possibility of miraculous interpositions, reason and consistency must certainly, in this particular, be suspended or sacrificed.