Such and so great are the issues of that question of “miracle” with which we are fond of dallying, with a smile here and a shrug there, and a special sneer for that story of the swine that ran violently down a steep place, because we know so much about the dim thoughts of the brute creation--living under our eyes, indeed, but curiously out of our ken. Grant the possibility of miracles, that is, of the voluntary action of a Personal God, and who will venture to assign limits of less or more? How long halt we betwixt two opinions?--to the law and to the testimony. Let us boldly accept the alternative which Hume proposes, however superciliously. Let it be, that, “no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.” Even so. We believe that Christ rose again the third day and ascended into heaven; or we credit the far more miraculous hypothesis that “there is no God”; or, anyway, the God of revelation, in His adorable Personality, has ceased to be for us. There is no middle way. Natural law, as we understand it, has nothing to do with these issues; not that the Supreme abrogates His laws, but that our knowledge of “natural law” is so agonisingly limited and superficial, that we are incompetent to decide whether a break in the narrow circle, within which our knowledge is hemmed, is or is not an opening into a wider circle, where what appears to us as an extraordinary exception does but exemplify the general rule. We would not undervalue the solid fruits of Biblical criticism, even the most adverse. This should be a great gain in the spiritual life--that, henceforth, a miracle is accredited, not merely by the fact that it is recorded in the sacred history, but by its essential fitness with the Divine Character; just as, if we may reverently compare human things with divine, we say of a friend, “Oh, he would never do that!” or, “That is just like him.” Tried by this test, how unostentatious, simple, meekly serviceable are the miracles of Christ; how utterly divine it is “To have all power, and be as having none!” The mind which is saturated with the Gospel story in all its sweet reasonableness, which has absorbed the more confused and broken rays wherein the Light of the World is manifested in Old Testament story, will perhaps be the least tempted to the disloyalty of “honest doubt;”--for disloyalty to the most close and sacred of all relationships it is, though we must freely concede that such doubt is the infirmity of noble minds. Believing that faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God, that the man is established in the Christian faith according as the child has been instructed, the question of questions for us is, how to secure that the children shall be well grounded in the Scriptures by their parents, and shall pursue the study with intelligence, reverence, and delight. FOOTNOTES: